Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine Page 8

  “There is more, Damie,” father continued, “we are descendants of that race. Like so many others in our family the past ten thousand years, I inherited the duty of becoming caretaker for the time traveler once he finally awakens from his long sleep.

  “That is to occur, Damie, only six months from now. For seventy-three years I have waited to perform that duty.” Father sighed and anguish filled his eyes. “But the Almighty has not granted me time enough.”

  He drew a breath and grasped my hand.

  “That duty, Damie, must now fall to you. As it will be your duty to pass that task onto someone else. A son, perhaps.”

  Duty? A son? I knew nothing of this duty, and I did not have a son. I wasn’t even married anymore. Karen and I had been divorced ten years already.

  “At least,” father continued, gasping momentarily, “I saw him, Damie. The time traveler. I met him. I was only six years old.” He chuckled to himself, marveling, and it caused a brief coughing fit. “Seventy-three years ago.

  “He had just awakened,” he went on, gazing forward, lost in recollection. “Your grandfather took me downstairs into the vault which only the day before had been a place forbidden to me. But that morning, in the dim light of that dark, secret room, I finally saw it, Damie–the tomb. And it was open, Damie. The lid was up.

  “Finally, I gazed upon the time traveler himself. He was a shadow hunched over on your great-grandmother’s old rocking chair next to the tomb. One of her shawls was draped over him. At long last, he looked up at me with kind blue eyes that sparkled even in the dim light. His hair was a thick wave, and his jaw was square and handsome. And his skin, Damie, it was bronze. Bronze! He looked no more than thirty-five–and he was built like some Greek warrior from the old epics, Hector or Achilles.

  “This is my son, the next caretaker, grandpa introduced me, and I crept forward and stood before him. The time traveler’s smile was gentle, kind. He put his hand upon my shoulder and asked my name. I noted a foreign edge to his voice, an utterly strange accent. Kosta, I told him. The time traveler patted my head. I am Romal, he said. I think you and I shall become friends.

  “But he did not stay with us long enough so that we might truly become friends–only a week. He had last awakened in 1858, in Macedonia, and had stayed awake only three days back then.” Father sighed, deep in memory. “I saw him every day that week,” he finally went on. “We talked about the present times and the times he had seen.” Then father again sighed. “I remember how sad it was on the day when he reentered the vessel, and was sucked up into the purplish gel. Then, the stone lid lowered, shutting him off from us for a lifetime, not to be awakened again for another seventy-three years.”

  Father swallowed and seemed close to tears. After a breath, he continued: “As he went back into the vessel, I remember him smiling and and telling me that when he next awoke and would see me again, I would be an old man. He hoped that I could tell him that I had led a good and happy life.”

  I tried without much success to imagine a man sleeping in the stone tomb in that secret, dark room in the basement of the old house.

  “So you must promise me, Damie,” father whispered with some urgency, “that you will be here when the vessel opens six months from now, on the first of May. He will be weak after his long sleep and will need your help. He will also need you to guide his way in this age.”

  Doubtless, in the throes of his impending death, father had become delusional. That this odd fantasy must have settled in his mind to help him make sense of his eccentric father’s incredible waste of money in transporting the massive, gray stone across the ocean all the way from Macedonia and then tending to it so secretively in the long years ever since. I speculated that father had snuck down there one afternoon as a six year old and, in the darkness, fell into a dream in which he had met an imaginary time traveler upon his imaginary exit from the tomb.

  “I promise, father,” I said, deciding to humor a dying man his last wish. “I will be here.”

  Having revealed the secret at long last, father closed his eyes and fell fast asleep.

  While father slept, I sat on a chair at the foot of his bed recalling that Saturday afternoon many years ago when Connie and I had entered the forbidden chamber after mother and father had left for the day to visit her sick cousin in Rochester. It had been Connie’s bold idea to defy the ancient family decree and sneak downstairs to have a look at the stone tomb, or whatever it was, that had been locked up all these years in that secret room. We had, in truth, always been drawn to it like children are always drawn to forbidden things.

  “How can we get inside?” I had chided Connie after she proposed the mission. She was seventeen, five years my senior, and a constant source of annoyance.

  There was a heavy combination lock looped through the steel bolt of the room’s thick metal door. No hammer would break it open, and, anyway, to do that would surely doom us, sure to bring our father’s wrath down upon our heads.

  “I watched him opening the lock,” Connie said. “I was downstairs last week when Daddy went inside. I pretended to help mother with laundry but all the while I snuck up and secretly watched him him opening the lock. Somehow, he did not notice me and by sheer luck, I was able to figure out the combination: 44 to the right, 17 to the left, and 25 to the right again. And after two more complete turns—the lock opens.”

  “How do you know you got it right?” I snickered.

  “Because it worked, Damie” she answered defiantly. “I opened it.”

  “You’ve been inside the room?”

  Constance shook her head. Long, ravenous hair, sashayed momentarily across her shoulders while her dark, brown eyes bore upon me. Though I would never admit it to anyone, I was proud to have such a darkly beautiful sister. “No,” she said. “I only opened the door and peeked inside. I did not go in. I–I decided to be nice and wait for you so that we could both go inside together.”

  That was bull, and we both knew it. She had not gone further than opening the door a few inches and peering inside that dark, secret room out of pure fear. The room held a stone coffin, or so the family story went. Father’s eldest brother, Dominic, who was a boy of nine back then, had seen it loaded onto the steamship for the trip across the ocean to America. Why had grandfather gone through all the trouble and expense of transporting such a hideous thing half way around the world to America, and then, after he had deposited it in the basement of his home, never spoken of it again?

  Even more mysterious than that, of course, was what possibly might be in it.

  Our cousin, Mikal, had whispered to us during some holiday gathering a couple years ago that the stone tomb was not such a great thing after all, though not explaining how he had come to form such an opinion.

  “A big, cold rock,” he had boasted indifferently, then added with a laugh: “Like a giant oyster shell.”

  But Mikal’s description had not diminished the tomb’s mystery. In fact, it served only to heighten our interest in determining what had compelled our grandfather, who was remembered as a deep and serious man, to bring the stone tomb all the way to America if it was nothing more than a big, cold rock. Nor did it answer why there had been such a concerted effort to keep anyone except himself, and later, our father, from its custody and care. Last but not least, Mikal’s story did not answer the seminal question as to what the big, stone tomb might contain.

  So Constance and I snuck downstairs that gloomy October afternoon like pirates after some forbidden and cursed treasure. And I remember how she hesitated for a time at the door.

  “Open it,” I hissed, daring her. “Open it.”

  She rolled the combination, and as the thick lock fell open, we looked at each other like expectant children on Christmas morning.

  “The door,” I whispered. “Open it.”

  She unclasped the bolt and, with a breath, pushed open the door. It squeaked and revealed nothing but darkness.

  “The flashlight,” she said, nodding to the on
e in my hand. I turned it on and gave it to her.

  Connie swallowed as she took it and looked inside the dark room.

  “C’mon,” she said and stepped inside.

  After we were both fully within the dark chamber, Constance swiveled the narrow beam of the flashlight around until it finally settled upon the stone tomb.

  “It is ugly,” Constance commented, and in that, she was right. It had a wet, rough surface and did look like a gigantic oyster, just as cousin Mikal had claimed.

  The room was small, and was made even smaller by the foreboding bulk of its stone inhabitant. Suddenly, Constance stepped toward it.

  “Careful,” I whispered, and held back. In fact, I reached behind and felt for the cold, steel door.

  Constance took four or five furtive steps toward the tomb and then just stood there. Finally, as if on impulse, she stuck out her right hand and touched its rough, gray shell. I let out something like a laugh. She let her fingertips linger there for a time. All I could do was stare, wide-eyed.

  “What’s it feel like?” I finally gasped.

  After a few seconds, she pulled back her hand.

  “There’s, there’s something inside,” she said. “I–I can feel it; something alive in there.”

  Constance turned to me, and in the darkness I could see a look of distress and wonder in her eyes. At last, she was able to move, and suddenly walked past me.

  “C’mon,” she said.

  I scrambled out of there right on her heels. The door creaked as she closed it shut with a thud and fastened the bolt. Then, she quickly secured the lock.

  Upstairs, a few minutes later, Constance tried to explain what she had felt. A presence, a being. A soul. “I could feel it breathing,” she whispered. “It’s thoughts.”

  “I want to touch it,” I pleaded.

  “No,” she said, “Daddy’s right. We must keep away from it. It was right for them, grandpa and Dad, to keep it locked up from us. Safe.”

  I shrugged, not really wanting to sneak down there again and touch that dreadful stone thing.

  Never again did I dare try to do it.

  Father woke me from this memory with the raspy statement:

  “He kept a journal.” When I looked up, he added: “The time traveler.”

  He explained that a small safe had been cut into the rough concrete wall behind the stone vessel. In it was the time traveler’s journal, written on something called a stylus, a magical gadget which recorded sound waves–speech, and then played whatever was said in printed words on a dull screen made up of a kind of crystal sand. Another command preserved the words for posterity.

  The stylus responded to direction by speech. You told it what to do. “Just say, ‘Next entry’,” father said, and sucked some air into his lungs–he was clearly growing tired now–“and it takes you there.”

  “Voice recognition software,” I told him. “We have that. In our computers.”

  “The stylus,” father continued, his voice a dry rasp, “contains a record of the time traveler’s experiences each time he has awakened.”

  Father made me write down the combination to the safe containing the stylus on a piece of paper. Then, as I was stuffing it into my shirt pocket, he said, “Don’t you need the combination to the lock on the door?”

  I frowned, not quite sure what he meant.

  “Or did Constance give it to you?”

  I could never remember it after the afternoon we snuck down there. Nor did I care to know.

  “You know about that?”

  “She told me,” he said, “the time I caught her down there.”

  I suspected immediately that there was more to that story and that it had something to do with Connie’s mysterious disappearance.

  “After that,” he said, “I got a new lock.”

  He gave me the combination and then his eyes closed. I gave a start but soon realized that he wasn’t dead but only sleeping. His breathing, however, was barely perceptible.

  I went out and asked the nurse to check him. I was worried that perhaps he had slipped into a coma. She hurried back to his room with me and started to check him over. At one point, she opened his eyes and shined a small penlight in them. He squirmed momentarily, groaned.

  “He’s alright,” she said. “Sleeping.”

  “Do you think it would be alright for me to leave him for the night?” I asked. “Get a good night’s sleep?”

  She gave me a kind smile and said that was a good idea. There was nothing I could do here. You never knew with a stroke victim. They could last a day or a year or ten. Of course, if anything happened, she’d call. I gave her my number and left.

  An hour later, the nurse called to tell me that my father had passed away in his sleep.

  II

  The Stylus

  The next morning, I woke early and went down to Costanza’s Funeral Home to make arrangements for my father’s burial. I decided against a viewing, since I knew of no living friends or relatives. I selected a modest casket, ordered a large basket of flowers, and placed a short obituary. His priest, Father Tobias, from the local Greek Orthodox cathedral, agreed to do the funeral mass even though the old man hadn’t been to church in years.

  It was almost eleven by the time I emerged from the stuffy funeral home into a low, dull November sun. The leaves had long fallen from the trees and were scuttled about by the wind. I craved apples at that time of year and had to stop at a local grocery to buy a half dozen on my way out to my father’s house, the old homestead, built ninety years ago by my grandfather, out in the middle of nowhere.

  After pulling into the long gravel driveway and coming to a stop in front of the sprawling, silent white-frame house, I remained in the car for a time trying to get my mind around the idea of a human being living in suspended animation within the stone tomb. It was unsettling to realize that for a hundred years, the stone sarcophagus had been the driving force in the lives of my father and his father and, I supposed, before that his father’s father, and apparently, a long line of fathers before them. How far back into the family history it went (my father had said ten thousand years!), I had no idea. And, now, that legacy had fallen onto my lap. If, of course, all of it was true and not some delusion of eccentric men.

  Feeling the weight of those long years, and the long night before, I got out of the car with a yawn and entered the old house like a somnambulist. The last time I had been there, only last week just before I left for San Antonio (how long ago that now seemed), father had been very much alive. He had been walking up the stairs from the basement, after spending some time in the secret room, no doubt, tending to that damned stone coffin. During that visit, he had dropped another odd hint of something we had to talk about soon, something that I needed to know. But for some reason, he never got around to it then, and instead waited until the last moments of his life last night to tell me.

  After pausing on the landing for a time, I took a deep breath before heading down the narrow cellar stairs. I had to duck under the dark, wet ceiling as I blindly negotiated the path to the door of the secret chamber. Lifting the lock into the palm of my hand, I paused for another long moment before, finally, twirling the numbers of the combination. After the lock fell open, after yet another breath, I pulled open the heavy metal door. It squeaked like it had that afternoon all those long years ago when Connie and I had secretly invaded the room.

  It took some time for my eyes to adjust to the darkness. Finally, the outline of the stone tomb came into focus. It was a brooding presence, and I gasped and had to step back a moment. It was every bit as big and dark and wet and ugly as I had remembered it the last time I had seen it as a twelve year old boy.

  After a time, I roused courage to approach it. Up close, I was struck that it no longer seemed inanimate, a mere rock. Rather I sensed something technical about it, machine-like.

  Finally, I reached out the forefinger of my right hand and touched the rough, wet surface of the tomb. And, like Connie, I felt life
within it. Or something.

  “Wow!” I whispered. In that moment, I realized that my father and grandfather had not been mere crackpots caring for a lifeless, worthless rock.

  After perhaps a minute, I pulled my hand away. I reached up for the string of the light fixture dangling down from a rafter and gave a tug. Surprisingly the old bulb still worked, flooding the room with a pale yellow light. I looked at the concrete wall behind the tomb and saw the outline of a small, corroded square. It was, of course, the safe father had mentioned.

  I squeezed into the narrow space between the tomb and the wall. At the safe, I pulled out the sheet on which I had scribbled the combination and twirled the numbers on the dial father had made me write down. The small, rusty metal door squeaked open. Inside, I saw a small rectangular device, the stylus.

  After removing it, I turned it over in my hands, and was reminded of the old toy, an Etch-e-Sketch. It was about the same size, with gray stone borders inscribed with odd runes instead of red plastic, around a dull, gray screen.

  “Last entry,” I told it, trying to remember how father said it worked.

  Solid black words formed in the sand: squiggles in a language I could not read. I frowned for some time at the incomprehensible text on the screen. After a moment, I commanded: “English.”

  The sand rearranged like fluid and the words changed from the unknown markings to English:

  I have awakened into Year 10,645 Standard, which the current inhabitants have designated, AD 1931. It seems like an interim time between great turmoil. Only 14 years ago, a great War ended. It involved the major powers at great loss of life due to technological advances since I last awoke. But the end of that War does not seem to have resolved the political discord preceding it. And to make matters worse, the economy of the world is in depression.

  Nikilas brought his son, Kosta, the next caretaker, down with him to meet me. The boy is pleasant and bright, and follows me around like a puppy.