The Traveler: A Time Travel Thriller

by Fredric Shernoff

  “What’s up, man?” he said, smiling.

  “Hey, I was wondering about a couple of old guys who worked here back in the day. Not sure if they’re still around here. Nate and Will? Ring any bells?”

  He laughed. “I don’t know any Nate but you’ve gotta be talking about Will Essex, am I right?”

  I hadn’t expected him to respond in the affirmative. “Yeah, sure that’s who I meant. You know him?”

  “He worked here still when I came to this place about…what was it? Four years ago, give or take. He retired a year after I started. Real ball buster but a good guy, you know?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I do. Any idea what he does these days?”

  He shook his head. “Sure, he comes in every once in a while. Still lives local. Spends a lot of his time at the diner, or visiting family.”

  “He got married?” I asked.

  “Nah,” he said. “But he’s got siblings and they’ve all got kids. He used to show pictures and stuff. Real sentimental old fart, though he wouldn’t want you to know that. How is it you know him anyway?”

  I thought it over. “My…dad came in and talked with him and Nate once, many years ago. He told me about the conversation and for some reason it occurred to me tonight and I wanted to see if he turned out okay.”

  “Hmm. Yeah, well, he’s okay. He’s happy, I think, which is, you know, great. I heard people say that he used to not be so thrilled with life.“

  “Yeah that’s what I…what my dad thought. I’m glad he’s doing well. Thanks.”

  “Yeah, sure, no problem, man. You want to buy anything?”

  I purchased a soda and a small pack of barbecue chips, paying with the credit card I’d removed from the big desk. I imagine Visa’s fraud prevention department would have a tough time proving wrongdoing in this particular situation. I was starting to get sleepy and knew I shouldn’t push the night much later. I didn’t want to get pulled over for swerving around. The fewer the complications, the better.

  I returned to the car and pulled out the iPhone. I wanted to know about Suzy. No. More than that. I had to know about Suzy. I sat in the parking lot of the gas station researching anything I could find about her. I learned she became a girls’ lacrosse coach at the high school. That much was easy to find since her name was linked to at least thirty articles about sports results. What troubled me was that she seemed to have remained single, just like Helena. I have a good friend with the unusual name of Deacon who once told me, “when you see a girl and she’s beautiful and she’s awesome to hang with and she’s alone, there’s one word you need to remember: issues.”

  Deke’s pearl of wisdom occurred to me as I sat in “my” car and used the Internet to unravel my mysteries. Was I responsible for what had caused Suzy’s issues, if they existed, or Helena’s? Impossible to say. Though I knew what Helena’s life should have been, she still seemed happier alone than she was with me. When it came to Suzy, there was no control group for the experiment. I didn’t know what Suzy had become in the proper universe. I also didn’t know to what extent whatever it was keeping her single stemmed from our brief relationship and its fallout.

  I switched to a new browser page and filled the screen with the white pages search engine. I was typing in my query when the other Daniel’s smartphone rang. It was Helena. I answered quickly, putting the phone on speaker so I could keep up my web search.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi, Daniel?” she questioned, her voice sounding slightly shaky. “It’s Helena. We met earlier?”

  “Yes, hi! What’s up?”

  A pause. “Are you free to come hang out?”

  I felt a pang of excitement but then I got the sense that something was wrong. It was very late at night and this wasn’t Helena’s personality, at least not the Helena I knew. “Sure…are you okay?”

  Another strange pause. Suzy’s address popped up on the screen and I copied it into a note on the phone. “Yes, yes, I’m fine,” Helena said. “I just really want to see you.”

  “Okay, I’ll leave right now.”

  We said goodbye and I put the phone back in my pocket. Something wasn’t sitting well with me. As I left the gas station behind, the phone rang again.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey, it’s me,” said a voice. “Sorry about earlier today.” Yoga girl.

  “Yeah, that’s okay. Listen, I—”

  “Hey, can we talk?”

  “Later,” I said. “I really gotta go. Go make yourself at home.”

  There was a silence, before she agreed and we hung up. I turned my attention back to the road and my thoughts of this new Helena and what she could possibly want with me in the middle of the night. With little traffic at that late hour, the drive back down to her apartment didn’t take long.

  Chapter 20

  1

  I parked the car and walked up the long concrete path to Helena’s garden apartment. I didn’t know what to expect. I didn’t understand how or why Helena was so eager to get together. She hadn’t been that forward when we had met in the real timeline. Even though my secret knowledge helped me score major points in our earlier conversation, it just didn’t make any sense that she would be calling a stranger to come over in the middle of the night.

  I knocked on her apartment door. No answer. I knocked again and still heard only silence. I started to think that I had the wrong apartment. I tested the doorknob and to my surprise found that it turned in my hand. I slowly opened the door and entered. The lights in the apartment were off, but the moonlight filtering through the sliding glass door at the rear of the room gave me enough visibility to maneuver. I saw a side table next to the couch and noticed a photo of Helena’s parents. I had the right place.

  I walked past the couch and felt the hair on my arms stand on end. In my world Helena and I had brought her sofa into our new home. It was this same piece of furniture that I had been sitting on when my first travel took place. I stared at the couch for a while, my mind suddenly overwhelmed by everything that had happened.

  “Daniel?” Helena’s voice called. “I’m in the bedroom, come on in.”

  I didn’t know whether it was the tone of her voice or the fact that she was inviting a man she had just met to her bedroom in the dark, but I knew immediately that something was very wrong. My pulse raced as I walked into Helena’s room.

  “Are you okay? I don’t—” I stopped suddenly. In the dim light from outside, I could see the silhouette of two people, the taller one standing behind the other.

  “Hello, Daniel,” said the taller shape. I recognized my own voice immediately. I stepped closer. There could be no doubt that it was a Daniel doppelgänger standing behind Helena, with his left arm secure across her chest. A large knife gleamed in his right hand.

  “Who are you?” I asked. “Are you…are you from this timeline?”

  Helena’s eyes bulged with fright and confusion. I didn’t know what the other Daniel had told her but she was clearly still absorbing the whole scene. The man holding her smiled. His face was scruffy and his hair was long and tangled.

  “You don’t remember me?” he asked. “I’m hurt. I really thought we’d shared a moment out at Dirks that one night.”

  Everything clicked into place. This wasn’t the version of me who belonged in the world we now inhabited. This was the Daniel I had met the last time I had screwed up the universe. This was the man whose life I had ruined by beating Jeff Berger to death in front of him…and I had told him about our ability to travel. Fucking told him all about it!

  “Dan. Come on, man. Let’s sit down and talk. Let Helena go.”

  “You mean your wife?” he laughed. “Nah, I don’t think so.”

  I didn’t see any reaction on Helena’s face to the mention that she and I were married. She didn’t believe any of this. Probably thought we were twin brothers and at least one of us was totally insane. Her expression continued to only register complete fear.

  How had he known about her? About our marria
ge? Suddenly I remembered. I had told him that too. What else had I confided in this twisted reflection of myself?

  “It wasn’t enough for you to have your one good life was it?” He asked, no sign of the phony street accent remaining in his voice. “You destroyed mine and raced off to go back to yours. But you couldn’t stop yourself. You had to get involved again. You had to bring pretty little Suzy into your madness.”

  I knew I hadn’t mentioned Suzy—I hadn’t met her when he and I talked. “How do you know about that?” I asked. I hoped my voice was cool, calm and collected. I didn’t know how to get Helena free other than the hope that I could talk my broken version down.

  “I followed you, you arrogant ass.” He grinned again. “I knew you’d go back to 1993 to fix things. Took some practice but I eventually landed in ’91. Then I just had to wait for you. I knew the second that you arrived. It came to me in a dream.” He looked off for a minute, as if he was remembering the experience. “Of course, you came a little bit early and set up a sweet little summer fantasy for yourself.”

  “You waited for two years?” My astonishment briefly cut through my fright. “How?”

  “I’m a fucking survivor, Danny boy. You made me that way. And listen, I took your advice, boss man. Took all that time to clean myself up. Got better. But, hey, I’m two years older than you now so I guess I’m the one in charge, bitch.” He paused for effect, drawing out the terrible silence. “And now you know how it feels to be powerless, Dan. Just like the rest of us when you ran around and tweaked our lives. You built yourself your happy new life with good ol’ Suze, a life you didn’t fucking deserve, but I put an end to that didn’t I…Justin?”

  “You…you were the one who called the camp? The one who called Suzy?” I felt dizzy. I felt scared. My cavalier attitude and confidence that I could escape from any trap had fallen apart. I’d created an enemy who could follow me anywhere…any when.

  “Didn’t like when I burst your little bubble, did you?” he said. “But the damage was already done. Whatever you did back then screwed things up again and when I tried to go home…well, here I am, in a world that belongs to a Daniel Wells who puts even your shiny fucking life to shame.”

  Oh, no, I thought. “Dan, where’s the version of us who belongs here?”

  “Dead and gone, Danny boy. And now his life is mine… once I clean up a few loose ends, that is.”

  I had never been so scared in my life. I tried to think of anything that could save Helena. Anything that could save me. “You can’t just kill people!” I said. “I know you better than anyone. You couldn’t just kill people.”

  “Maybe,” he said, “but you, her, everyone in this world…you aren’t real people. Just pretend. Like a really fucking good video game. I’m the only one who’s real.”

  I wasn’t sure if he believed it or not. There was something frantic about him. Something more than just craziness in his eyes. On some level, despite the dark path he had passed down, he was scared, trying to survive…trying to keep it together. I thought I had a chance if I kept working on him. “Look, you don’t have to clean up anything,” I said, my voice taking on an undesirable shakiness. “His life is yours. Just like you said. Helena’s got her own life. Just let her go. I’ll go back to the past, fix things and return to my own life. You can stay here.”

  “‘You can stay here,’” he parroted. “Well, thank you very much, asshole. But you forget one thing. You and I both have no idea if this world will continue to exist once you fix things…assuming you are capable of fixing anything without shitting the bed again. The only way I can be sure that this world keeps on spinning with me in it is to make sure I’m the only Daniel Wells left standing.”

  “But…why Helena? Let her go!” I yelled.

  He smiled again. “Why Helena? Well, she was just the bait to get you here.” He took a deep breath, and his face took on the look I had seen when he used his street speak in the other universe. He was psyching himself up to play a role that he felt he had to play. “I’m sorry Dan,” he said with what seemed like genuine sadness. “You know how it goes…no witnesses.”

  I saw his right arm begin to move and I rushed forward. I wasn’t nearly fast enough. He slit Helena’s throat with one quick movement and pushed her into me. I stumbled back against the bed, feeling her warm blood spill all over me. Tears clouding my eyes, I ran at him. I think he had expected no retaliation after what he had just done. Unprepared, he fell backward and the knife tumbled from his hand. I tried to pull myself on top of him, just as I had done to Jeff Berger when all this had started. The other Daniel anticipated this, and scrambled in a crab walk away from me. He regained his footing and ran from the apartment. I chased him from the building but he was surprisingly fast. When I reached the doorway and looked outside, he was gone. Vanished. Could he have gone into the past? I would never have been able to travel under conditions like those.

  I returned to Helena. There was nothing I could do. No time to say anything. She was dead. Knowing that she wasn’t technically my Helena didn’t help. She was the same wonderful person and she had been murdered because of me. I pulled her into my chest, her blood soaking through my clothes, and I screamed.

  Chapter 21

  1

  Though I was reeling from Helena’s murder, for the first time in a long time I had some sense of what I had to do. And did I maybe use some of my enemy’s logic to distance myself from the death? To pretend that Helena wasn’t real? I’m afraid that maybe I did.

  The other Daniel’s survival after I left his version of the present had not assured him that this new world would survive if I went back and fixed the past. He was not going to let me live. That meant if I returned to the past he would follow me. Somehow he could hone in on me. He said I had appeared to him in a dream and I had no reason to doubt him. I didn’t think there was any way I could escape him, and I had to if I was going to delete the world in which I was now trapped and return home.

  The conclusion was simple. It was him or me. Only one Daniel Wells could survive; that much he was right about. I just had to make sure it was me. Of course, that was where my sense of direction ended. I didn’t know how to find him, and the idea that he could pop up anywhere scared the hell out of me. If his ability to sense my location could work both ways, I didn’t have any inkling as to how. Until I could find out where he was, I had to stay in this new reality. I didn’t think he would try to attack me in the past because he liked this new world too much and wouldn’t want to do anything to make it go away. In this universe I was a target, which was okay if I could use it to my advantage. I couldn’t go back to the house, and I couldn’t go to see my parents. I didn’t think they had anything to fear from the other Daniel, at least as long as I didn’t involve them. He’d want them as part of his stolen, successful life, though I have no idea how he expected to pull that off.

  That left Suzy. I still wanted to see her, and there was a chance that my alternate version would go looking for her. She hadn’t believed me about all the time traveling shit back in 1993, but I could see how in Daniel’s twisted mind she was something of a witness who could spoil his fantasy.

  I had the note with Suzy’s address on the phone, and after swinging by there other Daniel’s house and swiftly removing a new change of clothes I drove to her house as fast as I could. It was a small place in Willow Grove. I didn’t see any suspicious vehicles along the street. I wondered if Daniel would need a car. All bets were off for someone who could pass in and out of the present at will. It didn’t matter. All my scattered thoughts just meant that my mind was trying and failing to rationalize everything I’d experienced. I had seen my wife die and the strong mental block I had erected months earlier that said “time travel worlds are not the real world and they don’t matter all that much” only went so far to dull the pain. Hearing the other Daniel use that same logic as rationale for killing had thrown everything off-balance.

  I parked the car and ran to the door. I rang the
doorbell and, after a second’s hesitation, followed it up with a quick knock. A few seconds later I heard the sound of locks and latches and then Suzy opened the door. She looked young for a woman in her early forties. She had straightened her hair at some point and in many ways she looked even sexier than she had during our summertime romance a solid twenty years earlier.

  She was wearing pajamas and her hair was messy but there was no fog of sleep in her eyes. Her mouth hung agape as she stared at me. “Oh my God. Justin? How? What?”

  “It’s Daniel,” I said quietly. This was all too much.

  “Oh. Right.” Her forehead scrunched and I saw the light wrinkles that had just started to set in. “How…how can you be here? We all thought you were dead.” She cocked her head to the side as she studied me. “God, you look…the same.”

  “To me our last date was yesterday,” I rambled. “It’s like I told you back then, I’m a time traveler. I didn’t mean to come back here but it happened. I’m sorry to come here so late…I’m so sorry about everything, but there’s so much I need to tell you.”

  She hesitated, and then stepped aside. Her initial fright had subsided quickly and seemed to have been replaced with curiosity. I guess some part of her had believed me over all those years. “Come in,” she said. She stepped back and I entered her house. Somehow, without warning, the floodgates opened. I burst into tears and fell into Suzy’s arms. She held me with a stiff embrace that gradually softened. When I regained a little composure she walked me into her living room and helped me sit down in a chair with a clear view of the front door. I fully expected the door to burst open at any moment and to see my clone standing there, knife in hand.

  Suzy got me a cup of tea and sat down with one for herself. “So you weren’t lying to me, and you weren’t crazy.”

  “No and no, as far as I can tell,” I said with a small smile. It was all I could muster. Everything that had happened that night weighed on me, making it hard to think. “Do you remember the calls that came in at the end of the summer we spent together? The ones that ruined everything?”