by Turner, Ivan
“You can’t read this?” Saritala asked me. I had forgotten she was there.
“No,” I said sadly.
“I can help you.”
I looked up at her.
“Had lunch?” she asked me.
I shook my head. “I don’t have any money.”
“Okay,” she said. “My home has food.”
Saritala was fascinated with me, as I quickly became fascinated with her. Throughout the afternoon and the evening that fascination turned into an infatuation. I had not felt anything like it since Jennie and I found my hand straying often to the pills in my pocket. I thought to take one many times, but was harried by this feeling of guilt. Would I do for a woman I had just met what I would not do for Rupert?
She started translating the book for me that afternoon and I recognized Rupert’s own story as he had told it to me centuries before. But his story was not the only one there, and it was certainly not the longest. The Forty Leaps contained forty different stories of forty different leapers.
I spent several months with Saritala. She taught me some of the local language, but never asked me who I was or where I came from. It was a society of trust and moreso, a culture of curiosity. Saritala explained to me that my use of English, a dead language if there ever was one, had made her feel as if she had made a great anthropological discovery. She was studying me. But she was only interested in who I was at that moment, not who I had been. She rarely asked me about my history.
We discussed Forty Leaping in depth and I expressed to her that I believed it was history rather than myth. As a scholar, she argued against the possibility. After all, the concept of moving through time was so ridiculous that she was amazed a man of my obvious intelligence could find any truth in such nonsense. Though I wanted to, I could never find the right way to tell her that the last and longest of the forty stories in The Forty Leaps was text taken directly from my journal.
I looked often at my journal but had stopped making entries. It seemed unimportant, my story seeming to have ended. Again and again, I looked at the pills in my pocket, but despite my surety that this was it, I could not bear to take them. For a time, I was sure that I was in love with Saritala. She too seemed to love me. We certainly acted like it. We lived together and spent time romantically. She was still curious about me, curious about the things I thought sentimental. I later found some work and earned some money so that she would not have to support me. I had no skills, but people of that era were very open and willing to help others. In my time there, I was very encouraged by the evolution of man. In the end, though, I knew that I was in fact searching for something. And Saritala was not that something. So my search was not yet over.
I decided that I had to go. I didn’t know where my life would take me but I knew that it had to be somewhere else. I opened my journal for the last time and completed one last entry. This was for Saritala. I did love her. It was true and it was real. But it was not enough to hold me. Maybe Rupert was right all along. Maybe I couldn’t allow myself to be tied to one time frame anymore. Maybe there was more Phinneas Scot in me than I thought. Regardless, I found the words to tell Saritala just who and what I was. I wanted her to understand that, in another time, I would have done anything to stay with her, but that time was no longer. I was a different man and I had to be on the move. Whether or not she would believe me, I would never know. I finished the entry, left the journal for her so that she would know, not only that Forty Leaping is a piece of history rather than a piece of myth, but that it is a piece of my history, and a piece of my future.
Epilogue
She spent long minutes staring out at the empty street with the tears dribbling down her cheeks. It had only been a summer. Two stupid months and she knew beyond all certainty that the one man she could truly love had just walked out of her life forever. She hated him so much yet she would do anything to see him walking back up the street. She hoped and prayed and clenched her teeth until her skin turned a dark reddish brown from the exertion. But he did not reappear. She wondered if he was sobbing as well.
Finally closing the door, she stepped back into the dark and empty house. It took a long time for her to get her breathing under control and get her legs working again. What should she do today, she wondered? It was a regular day, just like every other day before he had come back. Except now there was an emptiness. She moved into the dining room to clean up the plates from their breakfast.
And there he was, sitting in his chair, just staring at her.
She was not wont to dramatic reactions, but she visibly started. She controlled herself well enough to avoid saying anything stupid, but the look on her face was unmistakable.
He looked a little different. Just a little. He had aged. She wasn’t sure how long. A few years at most. There was a bit of grey hair at his temples. But he was shaved and well fed. In fact, he may have put on a few pounds. The worry lines in his face were deeper. In their time apart, be it only a few minutes, he had lived through things that were far worse than what she had experienced in the ruins of New York. This was not that man to whom she had just said goodbye. But it was.
She glanced back toward the door, fighting back the urge to run and see if the car had returned. “He still has a long search ahead of him,” said this stranger. “I’ve finished searching. I’ve found that the distant future holds so many paths, including a path to the distant past.”
He let it sink in to her for a few moments. He watched her as she sorted it all out in her head. He had seen her at the end of her life and he had eventually understood where his journey would end. The pieces had always been there for him to sort out. It just took some time. And time was something he had eventually mastered.
“Oh, Mathew!” she cried, rushing forward and grabbing him. Despite his complete confidence in the outcome, he burst out into tears of joy and relief. To have her in his arms again was the most intoxicating thing he had ever felt. His heart began to beat so fast. He could feel the adrenaline as it pumped vigorously into his bloodstream.
Let the adrenaline be damned.
Finally, they parted, and she looked up at him quizzically. “But… is it over for you? Are you here to stay?”
He nodded. “I can be. I want to be. If you’ll have me.”
“If I’ll have you?” she blurted. “What are you, an idiot? Of course I’ll have you.”
He smiled again. Tomorrow he would call his brothers. He pulled a battered phial out of his pocket. Inside, six small pills that had been carried through the centuries and yet hadn’t even been invented yet rattled against each other. He dumped one into his hand and said with a smile, “I’m going to need a glass of water right away.”
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Author’s Note
I hope you’ve enjoyed reading Forty Leap. It seems as if it took me forever to write this when really it all came together fairly quickly once I really gave it my attention. The original draft was about a third of the size and was missing most of the characters included in this complete manuscript. I spent a good deal of time working on those characters so that they should seem real to you, the reader. Each one of them has his or her own story to tell, just as Mathew Cristian told his.
If you have any comments or criticisms about Forty Leap, please email them to me at [email protected]. Feel free to leave completely honest reviews on the web. I am always especially interested in feedback from the readers.
In addition to writing, I have a great interest in tabletop gaming. I’ve written a fantasy miniatures battle game called Clash of Swords. With the help of some friends, I’ve been play testing for several months now and I think we’ve just about got the kinks worked out of it. If you like miniatures combat, take a peek at Clash of Swords by visiting www.face2facegames.net.
Thank you.
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Other Books By Ivan Turner
The Book of Revelations: When a successful psychiatrist discovers a way to see into people’s memories of their past lives, he be
comes judge, jury, and executioner of their deeds in those lives. Seeking the advice of very respected clergymen around the nation, he meets Rabbi Max Guetterman and discovers that the rabbi’s identity in his most recent past life was that of Adolf Hitler. This discovery sparks a series of events that pushes the limits of society, tests the bounds of the rabbi’s faith, and puts him and his family in mortal danger. Because when the Jury is after you, there really is no escape.
Included in The Book of Revelations is a short story called Life Broker. Life Broker details a meeting between a recently deceased man and the broker for his new life. Mr. Davis will have to bargain with what he has yet to have in order to insure that the life he has yet to lead will be better than the one he has just led.
Zombies!: A bacterial infection has cause the dead to reanimate and hunger for live flesh. Your standard zombie fare? I don't think so. It seems that zombie sightings are generally followed by a rapid apocalypse. In Zombies!, the police and the government get a handle on the situation almost immediately, avoiding the inevitable. So, while the plague spreads slowly, and new zombies are sighted regularly, life goes on for the citizens of New York City, the United States, and the world.
Follow a diverse array of characters as they deal with their daily lives against the backdrop of the zombie infection. Read the first episode of this serialized tale, Shawn of the Dead for free. It's available on all of the best reading devices including Kindle, Nook, ibooks, Kobo, Sony, and through smashwords.com.