Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine (11 page)

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 one 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.

Once I was awake and alert, Nikilas brought me upstairs and introduced me to his wife, Maria, as a friend from the old country (which was somewhat true). She is a simple but competent woman who smiled continuously at me and did not dare question her husband’s bringing me into their home. She went back to her chores somewhere else in the house and left us to talk in the kitchen.

I spent the next hours learning about the long trip across the Great Ocean to America during the Sleep, and how much the world had changed since my last awakening. And how it has changed! Much technological advancement has occurred, more than in any other epoch since Atlantis was doomed.

My frown deepened as I continued the odd narrative.
Atlantis
? I had always regarded reports of that ancient, mythical land with a mixture of skepticism and curiosity. Ultimately, I doubted that such an advanced civilization had ever existed except as the fancy of the philosopher, Plato, and countless other authors down the ages whose reports and hypotheses had been spawned by his major work on the subject known as
Timeas
.