Timebound

by Rysa Walker

  He set the medallion back on the counter and I picked it up for a closer look. It was amazingly lightweight for its size. I could barely feel it in the palm of my hand. Curious, I brushed the glowing center with the fingers of my other hand and felt a sudden, intense pulse of energy. Small beams of light shot up at random angles from the circle and the room seemed to fade into the background. I could hear Dad and Katherine talking, but their conversation sounded like something on a radio or TV playing in a distant part of the house.

  The kitchen was replaced by a swirl of images, sounds, and scents flashing through my head in rapid succession: the wind blowing through a field of wheat, large white buildings that hummed softly and seemed to be perched near the ocean, a dark hole that might have been a cave, the sound of someone—a child?—sobbing.

  Then I was back in the wheat field and it was so real that I could smell the grain and see small insects and specks of dust suspended in the air. I saw my hands, reaching toward a young man’s face—dark, intense eyes staring down at me through long lashes, black hair brushing my fingers as I traced the contours of his tanned, muscular neck. I could feel a strong grip at my waist, pulling me toward his body, warm breath against my face, his lips nearly touching mine—

  “Kate?” Dad’s voice cut through the fog surrounding my brain as he grabbed the hand holding the medallion. “Katie? Are you okay?” I took a deep breath and put the medallion down, clutching the counter to keep my balance.

  “Um… yeah.” I could feel the blush rise to my cheeks. I was pretty sure that this was exactly how I would feel the first time Dad saw me kissing someone—which was very nearly what had happened, or so it seemed. “Just dizzy… a bit.”

  Katherine pushed the medallion toward the back of the countertop. Her face was pale, and she shook her head once, almost imperceptibly, when I caught her eye. “I would imagine she just needs her breakfast, Harry.” She took my arm and led me toward the breakfast nook.

  It was a good thing, too. I was feeling very shaky on my feet. I’d never had any sort of hallucination, and the sounds and images had seemed so real, like I was actually experiencing them firsthand.

  Dad insisted that I stay seated while he brought me a bagel and some juice. He had just returned to the table and was starting another “Do you remember…” story, when a tall, red-haired man of indeterminate age appeared in the doorway.

  “Good morning, Katherine.”

  “Connor!” said Katherine. “I was just about to ring you to say our new housemates have arrived. This gentleman is Harry Keller. And this is my granddaughter, Kate.”

  “Connor Dunne. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” He shook Dad’s hand briskly and then turned to me. “And Kate—I’m glad you’re here. We have a lot to do.”

  “You need help with unpacking?” I asked.

  Connor cast a quizzical glance at me and then looked back at my grandmother.

  “Connor,” she said. “Relax. We’ll have plenty of time to discuss arranging the library once Kate and Harry have settled in. Have a bagel and enjoy the morning sunshine. You’ll be happy to know they actually had the pumpernickel this time.”

  She turned to Dad. “Connor has worked with me for the past two years and I simply couldn’t manage without him. He was helping me digitize the collection, but we were only about halfway through when…” She paused, as though searching for the right word. “When we decided to move.”

  “Do you have a lot of books?” I asked.

  Dad snorted as he slathered some cream cheese on his bagel. “Katherine’s collection puts Amazon to shame.”

  Katherine laughed and shook her head. “I don’t have nearly as many books as that—but I do have a lot of volumes that you won’t find there or much of anywhere else.”

  “What kind of books?” I asked. “Come to think of it, I don’t really know what you do…”

  “I’m a historian, like your mother.” She paused. “You’re surprised that Deborah would go into the same field that I did, aren’t you?” I was surprised, but I didn’t think that would be a very polite thing to say. “Deborah fought it, but I’m afraid it’s genetic. She had no choice. She studies contemporary history, however. Most of my research deals with more distant eras…”

  Connor chuckled softly, although I really didn’t get the joke, and then grabbed a couple of bagels from the box and headed for one of the two staircases in the foyer. Clearly, he was a man of few words and a big appetite.

  “And I’m a researcher more than a teacher,” Katherine continued. “I haven’t taught since your grandfather died.”

  “Grandfather and Prudence?” I regretted the words immediately—it had to be hard talking about the death of a child, even many years later.

  But if it bothered Katherine, she didn’t let on. “Yes, of course. And Prudence.”

  After breakfast we were given the grand tour, with Daphne padding up the stairs behind us. It was a very large house, with one curved staircase going up to the right and another, the one that Connor had followed, going up to the left.

  “The living quarters are on this side. You each have a small suite of rooms—we can redecorate if they don’t suit you.” We walked down the hallway a bit and she pointed me toward a suite that was about the same size as our entire cottage at Briar Hill. Then she disappeared down the corridor, chatting with Dad.

  I stepped into the main room in the suite, which was painted a very pale blue. The canopy bed in the center was white wrought iron, with scrollwork and a blue and white gingham quilt. It looked much more comfortable than Dad’s sofa bed. I sat on the edge of the mattress and looked around. There was a private bath and dressing area to the right of the bed and a sitting area to the left with a sofa, a desk, and two tall windows that looked out over the back gardens. It was beautiful and spacious, but I was also glad that I wouldn’t be leaving my small nook in the townhome behind entirely. I liked my glow-in-the-dark stars, my clutter, and my skylight, and I wasn’t sure that this room would ever feel like it was mine in quite the same way.

  “So… will it do?” I jumped slightly, startled to find Katherine at the door. My expression was apparently answer enough, because she didn’t pause. “I sent your father up to the attic to check something for me. Hopefully, he’ll get distracted by the chaos there and we’ll have a few minutes to talk. We have more work to do in the next few months than you can possibly imagine, my dear.” She sat down on the edge of the bed, placing a ziplock bag that contained a small brown book between us. “So much depends on you and your abilities and we haven’t even begun to test them. I just thought we had more time.”

  “My abilities? Is this related to the medallion?”

  Katherine nodded. “It is. And to your so-called panic attacks. I’m sorry you had to go through that alone—I know it was scary.”

  I made a small sick face. “It was awful. I felt like something was wrong—really wrong. But I didn’t—don’t—know what it was. Every inch of me just… I don’t know… screamed that something was out of place, out of kilter. And it’s not like it ended. It’s more that it faded. Whatever was wrong was still not… fixed, but I became accustomed to it, maybe? That’s not right, either.” I shook my head. “I can’t explain it.”

  Katherine took my hand. “The first time was on May 2nd of last year, correct? And the second began on the afternoon of January 15th?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Yes. Dad told you the dates?” I was surprised to know that he even remembered the exact days.

  “He didn’t have to. I felt it, too. But I had an advantage in that I understood immediately that I was experiencing a temporal aberration.”

  I could feel my eyebrow beginning to arch upward, but I tried to keep my expression neutral. It was so nice to have someone believe they weren’t panic attacks, but what on earth did Katherine mean by a temporal aberration?

  “And unlike you,” Katherine said, “I had the medallion. You must have been frightened half to death.” Her blue eyes softened.
“You look like her, you know.”

  “Like my mom?”

  “Well, yes, a bit—but more like Prudence. They aren’t identical twins. Your eyes are your father’s, however. There’s no mistaking that green.” Katherine’s thin hand reached out to tuck in one of the stray dark curls that always seem to escape any hair band or clip.

  “Deborah’s hair is a much tamer version—you have Pru’s wild head of curls. I could never get the tangles out…”

  After a long moment, she smiled and shook her head, back in the present now. “I’m wasting time.” She lowered her voice and spoke quickly. “Kate, it is going to happen again. I’m not sure when there will be another temporal shift, but I suspect that it will be soon. I don’t want to scare you, but you’re the only one who has the ability to set this right. And you must set this right. Otherwise everything—and I do mean everything—is lost.”

  Katherine pressed the book into my hand as she stood to leave. “Read this. It will give you more questions than answers, but I think it’s the quickest way to convince you that this is all very real.”

  She reached the door and then looked back, a stern expression on her face. “And you absolutely must not hold the medallion again until you are ready. It was careless of me to leave it on the counter like that, but I had no idea that you would be able to trigger it.” She shook her head briskly. “You very nearly left us, young lady, and I’m afraid that you would not have found your way back.”

  Dad and I made it to class with only a few minutes to spare. He’d chatted on the way there about a telescope that was mounted in Katherine’s attic, left by the previous owners. It was too bright in the DC area now for the thing to be of much use, but back when the house was built, he said, that wouldn’t have been the case. I nodded in the right places but barely heard his words.

  I had a hard time focusing in class that day. Too many things were racing through my head for trigonometry or English lit to be of much interest. One minute I would remind myself that Katherine did have a brain tumor and her comments could be the result of too much pressure on the hippocampus or whatever. Then I’d remember the sensation of touching the medallion—the roaring sound, the scent of the field, and the warmth of his skin beneath my hand—and I would know beyond all doubt that my grandmother was telling the truth, which led to the question of how on earth she expected me to fix things. And then, two minutes later, I was back to doubting the whole experience.

  When the final bell rang, I stopped by Dad’s office to give him a quick hug and then walked the half mile to the Metro station at a rapid clip, hoping that I’d make it to karate class on time for a change. I sank into an empty seat on the train and automatically put my backpack next to me to discourage unwanted company, just as Mom taught me to do when riding alone. The car was pretty empty, anyway—just a girl filing her nails and listening to her iPod and a middle-aged man with a legal file full of papers.

  The trip rarely took longer than fifteen minutes this time of day, and I usually just put on my headphones and zoned out, watching the graffiti on the buildings for the first mile or so until the train submerged below ground. Some of the artwork has been there for years, with new layers piled on top of the older, faded images. Occasionally a building owner would paint over a wall, but the artists were soon back, drawn to the fresh blank canvas. Only a half dozen or so buildings remained blank for long. Some, like the tire warehouse, had built tall fences topped with razor wire around the wall that faced the tracks. The Cyrist temple we passed was also clean—a dazzling, pristine white like all of their buildings, which were repainted regularly by church members and, rumor had it, guarded by large and aggressive Dobermans.

  Today, however, I was too distracted to pay much attention to the urban artscape. I carefully removed the book Katherine had given me from its ziplock bag. The cover had clearly seen better days, having been patched at least once with binding tape like the older books at the school library. It looked like a diary of some sort, and this was confirmed when I opened it and saw the handwritten pages inside.

  The paper was in remarkably good shape compared to the cover. It wasn’t yellowed in the slightest. My first thought was that newer pages had been bound inside the old cover for some reason, but as I ran my fingers across the lined paper and took a closer look, that seemed unlikely. The pages were a bit too thick, for one thing—even thicker than cardstock. The weight of the book suggested that it should contain at least a hundred pages, but I did a quick count and there were only about forty individual sheets.

  I tentatively bent a corner down and was surprised to see the odd paper pop back up, unwrinkled. I tried to tear a small piece from the edge, to no avail. A few quick experiments later, I had determined that you couldn’t write on the paper with ballpoint pen, pencil, or marker. Water beaded right off, even though the surface didn’t feel laminated. Chewing gum stuck momentarily, but it peeled up quickly and didn’t leave any residue. Within a few minutes, I had decided that the stuff was just plain indestructible—except for fire, perhaps, but I couldn’t try that on the Metro.

  I then began to examine the writing on the pages, and I noticed that only the first quarter of the diary had been used. Each of the written pages, except for the first, appeared to begin in midsentence. There didn’t seem to be any continuity at all from one page to the next. It was most definitely an odd little book. The only thing that looked normal about the diary appeared inside the cover, in very faded ink.

  Katherine Shaw

  Chicago, 1890

  The train was nearing my stop. I slipped the book back into the plastic bag and then paused, sensing that I was being watched. That probably wasn’t too surprising given that I had been trying to systematically mutilate a book—strange conduct, even by subway standards.

  I glanced up and saw two young men, now seated at the very end of the subway car, three rows away. I didn’t recall anyone getting on at the last stop, and although I had to admit that I had been a bit preoccupied, I couldn’t shake the feeling that they had just appeared out of nowhere. They were facing me, so I could see them clearly. One of the two was a bit overweight, about my age, with dark blond hair and sallow skin that looked like he rarely ventured outdoors. The emblem on his rather worn T-shirt reminded me of an album cover, but I couldn’t place the band. His eyes darted down to his lap and he began writing on a small pad as soon as I looked in their direction.

  The other guy was tall, several years older, and very handsome, with longish black hair. I felt a slow flush spread to my cheeks as I recognized the dark eyes that I had seen when I touched the medallion. My hands tingled slightly as I remembered the warmth of his skin beneath them, the feeling of his hand at my waist, and the warmth that had rushed through my body at his touch. I couldn’t imagine how he had stepped out of my hallucination and into the Metro, but I was absolutely certain that this was the same guy.

  He looked a bit older now than when I’d seen him earlier, and his expression was an odd mix of sadness, fear, and the same longing that I remembered from my vision. He gripped the seat cushion and didn’t look away, even when the other guy elbowed him sharply. I was the one who finally broke our locked gaze.

  The train began to slow almost immediately after I glanced away, and I quickly looked up again. The doors hadn’t opened yet, and only a second had passed, but both of them were gone. I walked toward the bench where they had been seated and put out my hand, half expecting to encounter a solid form—or lose a finger—but the space was empty. I was almost convinced that I had simply imagined them, but two indentations in the orange vinyl subway cushion were gradually smoothing out, just as they always did when a rider left. I brushed my fingers along the edge of the cushion that the tall young man had clutched so tightly and found that it was still warm from his hand.

  3

  I arrived at karate class a few minutes late and slid into my usual place beside Charlayne. For the next hour we practiced our routines, and the physical activity pushed the
events of the past few days from my mind—almost. I was usually able to take Charlayne, probably because I’d had an additional year of classes, but I was flipped twice that afternoon and soon would have a nice, colorful bruise on my right thigh from a rather wicked clip by Charlayne’s foot.

  We kept on task until class ended. As we headed out the door, Charlayne turned toward me. “So? What’s up? You haven’t answered any of my texts…”

  I still wasn’t sure how much I really could explain without Charlayne thinking I had totally lost my mind. So I opted for a lame shared joke. “Let me explain… No, there is too much. Let me sum up.”

  Charlayne rolled her eyes. I could quote The Princess Bride pretty much start to finish. “Okay then, sum up, Inigo Montoya. What happened?”

  I knew Charlayne well enough to be certain that she’d get the full story out of me eventually. If she thought I was keeping even a hint of a secret, she wouldn’t rest until she’d convinced me to cough up every juicy detail.

  “Okay, here goes. My grandmother is dying, she’s leaving me a big house, a lot of money and my dad and I are going to move in with her for the year. I’ve inherited a special ability from her that she needs to teach me how to use in order to save the world as we know it. Or something like that. And I very nearly shared a kiss with what I think may be a ghost who disappeared into thin air on the Metro.”

  “You nearly kissed someone on the subway? Was he cute?” Leave it to Charlayne to zero in on the kiss. Having three older brothers meant that there was a constant stream of guys at her house, and she kept several of them dangling on a string at all times. It was her goal in life to ensure that I lived up to my personal romantic potential, but so far her matchmaking efforts had been unmitigated disasters.

  “Yes, he was cute,” I answered. “And I didn’t almost kiss him on the subway. It was in my grandmother’s kitchen—or in a wheat field somewhere. Both, I think.”