THE POWER OF THREE (3 page)

She returned to the living room with a steaming cup of coffee. She set it on the little side table near Jane and, twisting the lid on the vial, poured the contents into the dark steaming liquid.

“Drink it,” she commanded, holding out the cup to Jane.

“Fuck you, Barbara. I won’t make this easy for you, you murderer, you black-hearted demon.”

In the end she drank it and she dreamed.

#

She had seen her death. What she couldn’t live with was her grandson’s death.

She stumbled from the time machine, white in the face, panting. They took her to the medic, who said her heart was racing and her blood pressure was wildly erratic and elevated. They rushed her to the hospital without the chance to question her about the trip into the future.

John came to the private room where she had been sent after an emergency doctor put her on a nitroglycerin patch and monitors.

“John!” She reached out her hands to him.

He came to her side, obviously in a state of panic. “What happened? Did something happen when you traveled back in time?”

“I didn’t go back. I went forward. John, they sent me into the future. It wasn’t far, maybe five or ten years, probably closer to ten. Things were changed and you’d already married Barb. She wanted a divorce and you threatened to leave her without money. She killed you! John, she
killed
you!”

He sat down hard in the vinyl-covered hospital chair near her bed. He stared at her, his lips trembling. “She wouldn’t do that. She loves me.”

“She doesn’t love you, not in ten years from now, and she probably doesn’t love you now. She’s a horrible
woman,
I knew that from the beginning. Now I know it for sure. She came to poison me after she was rid of you. We must prevent this. It cannot happen! I don’t care about me, honey, I’ve already lived a life and ten years from now I’m in much more pain, my circumstances greatly diminished. It’s
you
who cannot die. It’s you I must save.”

“I just won’t marry her. If you say that’s what you saw then I believe you. You’ve always been truthful and straight with me, Me-ma. I would do anything for you.”

Jane remembered how she could not prevent Carol from a pre-ordained death at the hands of strangers. How was she now to prevent her grandson’s death in a pre-ordained future? Even if he said today he would not marry Barb, experience with time travel assured her that he would change his mind. He
would
marry her. She would use him and try to divorce him and, threatened with penury, she would kill him.

Unless…

“What, Me-ma, what is it?”

She pressed his hands and let them go. She would lie to him. She would lie, cheat, steal, and kill if she had to, in order to change the future. “It’s nothing. I have to think. I’m very tired. They’ve shot me with something to relax me.”

When she opened her eyes a half hour later, her grandson was gone. She crawled from bed after taking out the IV drip and disconnecting the heart monitor. She had her clothes on and was in the elevator before the nurses even came to check why the monitors were going off.

#

She still had the gun her mobster husband had given her and she still knew how to use it. She put the small caliber pistol into her purse and caught a bus to Barb’s apartment. John had told her where she lived. It was a new high rise, much too expensive and lavish for the likes of old women. Only young, upwardly mobile, elegant people lived here, Jane realized. She wondered if the whole building was inhabited by black-hearted demons or if it only harbored one.

Barb was home, it being late afternoon. She was surprised to see her boyfriend’s grandmother at her door.

“May I come in?” Jane asked, shouldering past the woman into the hall. She strode down it to an open living area facing a wall of windows overlooking the city. It was a splendid view and nothing like the squalid view from her place.

She turned then. Barb stood looking perplexed and not a little put out. “What’s this all about?” she asked.

“It’s about prevention, my dear. It’s about saving someone I love more than I love myself.” With that Jane withdrew the pistol and shot the woman in the heart.

#

Being a ward of the state and sentenced to her last remaining years in prison didn’t bother Jane in the least. She was let out of the time travel program, of course, for she was a murderer—confessed and convicted.

She sat across a bare table from John smiling at him. A guard stood near the door pretending not to listen.

“How are you doing?” she asked. She wanted to lean across the table and take his hands, but they wouldn’t let her touch him.

“John F. Kennedy died yesterday,” he said. “An assassin, a lone gunman, they say.” He looked older with a touch of grey at his temples. He seemed to have lost his young effervescence, his energy.

“They brought him back, did they?”
And still he died as he was meant to,
she thought.

“Who?
Oh, the machine. Yes, I suppose they did. Not that it made a big whooping difference in the course of the world. They thought it would. The same with some other people they saved.”

She didn’t care how they’d tampered with history or who they had kept alive. All she cared about was what she had done, and it was a good thing.

“So, what about you?
Are you still involved with the program?”

He shook his head. “After…well, after what happened with you and Barb…”

“I understand. I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry about ruining your chances in the program, not the killing of Barb.”

His eyes darkened. “I loved her, Me-ma.
Di
you ever take that into consideration?”

“That’s exactly what I considered,” she said. “Trust me, John, it had to be done.”

He shook his head and then shook his shoulders and upper body as if to rid himself of a bad vision. “Well, I have to go. I’m having lunch with someone.” He stood, the chair scraping the floor.

“Is it a woman?
A nice woman?”

“I think she is. Of course, that’s what I thought about Barbara, too.”

This time his gaze failed to meet her eyes and she knew why. There was blame in them. She mentally shrugged. It was all for the best no matter what he thought. She could live in her prison cell with the thought he loved her a little less. She just couldn’t have lived with the thought he would die before his time.

#

The years flowed on and the world changed but a little. Jane only got one cup of coffee in the mornings, but she had grown used to that. She hardly saw her grandson anymore. He was busy, that’s what she told herself.

She read books from the prison library and watched old movies on the TV in her cell. She wasn’t treated badly, due to her age, and she saw a doctor once a month whether she wanted to or not.

When she reached her eighty-eighth year, John came to see her on her birthday.

She found him in the room with a woman standing at his side where he sat at the little bare table. “Me-ma, I want you to meet my wife, Kerry.”

Jane looked at the woman and…instantly…knew what she wished she didn’t. Kerry looked nothing like Barb. This woman was brunette and petite, with brown eyes and a high forehead. But she had exactly the same devil in her.

Jane dropped into the chair across from her grandson. She hung her head and sighed.

“What is it, Me-ma? Cheer
up,
I’ve brought you a birthday present.”

The future had changed again, but not in any way that mattered. Given that she had discarded
Barb,
her grandson had found his killer in another woman and married her. They might not divorce. He might not die of poison.

But Kerry would kill him just as thoroughly as Barb would have done.

She saw the gay birthday wrapping and the ribbon as it was pushed over to her. Guards would have already
unwrapped
it and done an inspection. As she untied the gift, one tear fell and spotted the colorful paper. Jane was so glad she was old and rapidly approaching her Maker. She couldn’t do one single thing with this world. No one could save another. No one could change what would be.

It was the worst thing she’d ever learned in her long life. She withdrew a small e-reader from a box, looked up and said, “Thank you, John.”

“It’s filled with a thousand
books,
you’ll never go without something to read.”

Just what I need, she thought. Maybe she would read “The Time Machine” by H. G. Wells and laugh at how wrong he’d gotten it.

Back in her cell, the e-reader lying in her lap, the screen dark and empty, she felt her heart give a lurch. She sucked in her breath. Her heart lurched again, this time sending such a sharp pain through her chest that it was as if a scream had been hidden inside the organ, only now breaking free.

She felt life leaving her, her world closing in, the cell growing darker and smaller, the walls coming toward her. She blinked. Her last thought was:
I hope
no one tries to bring me back. I curse time travel! L
et my future die with me.

#

John came through her apartment door, slipping the key into his pocket.

“Hello, Me-ma! What do you remember? They let me back into the program. Kerry’s father is on the committee. Isn’t that lucky for us? I got them to let me go back in time. Now, it wasn’t easy, I can tell you that. They balked until I told them you might be able to tell them something about the glitch they were having in time travel. Finally they let me go.”

He plopped into the second easy chair and grinned at her. “I had the prison treat you for your heart condition. They have some marvelous medicines now, you know. You never had the heart attack.”

She blinked at him, recalling her own sad death. She shuddered.

“Then once you were well enough, I went back and made Barb leave the state weeks before you could kill her. You must admit I am a clever boy! And look, here we are and I have you back. I knew it would all work out. You never killed anyone and never had a heart episode.”

Jane sat in the easy chair with her coffee. She lifted the brew to her old lips and took a careful sip. Her hands were shaking. She remembered all right; she remembered too much.

Surely there was something she could do about this.

“Where do you and Kerry live now, dear?”

Before he thought about why she asked, he had told her the address.

She noted it to memory and hoped she still owned the little pistol. She would definitely need the pistol.

THE END

             
WALLS OF THE DEAD

             
by

             
Billie Sue
Mosiman

             
Copyright Billie Sue
Mosiman
2012

             
What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the
spectre
which had haunted my midnight pillow.

             
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

             
The house was alive, always had been, from the first foundation stone to the shingles on the rooftop.

             
On the doorstep the realtor handed over the keys to 2242
Maycroft
Street to Linda Broderick. The realtor smiled knowing the commission she was receiving would pay off her new outdoor swimming pool. Though the house had been empty and for sale for a long time--two years--the price was still high for the area and the small town of Hayden, Alabama.