Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  “Not today,” she said. “Give him at least a breath between bad news.”

  Brady touched the thin paper, the flowing script. The government had given him one-quarter of the wealth he had lost going into the war, one-tenth of the money he spent photographing history. And too late. The check was too late. A month earlier, the War Department, which owned the title to the wet plates, sold them all to the Anthonys for an undisclosed sum. They had clear, legal title, and Edward Anthony had told Brady that they would never, ever sell.

  He got up with a sigh and brushed aside the half-open bedroom door. “Tell me what?” he asked.

  Levin looked up—guiltily, Brady thought. Julia hid something behind her back. “Nothing, Uncle,” Levin said. “It can wait.”

  “You brought something and I want to know what it is.” Brady’s voice was harsh. It had been too harsh lately. The flashbacks on his travels, the strain of keeping silent—of not telling Julia the fantastical events—and the reversal after reversal in his own life were taking their toll.

  Julia brought her hand out from behind her back. She clutched a stereoscope. The small device shook as she handed it to Brady.

  He put the lenses up to his eyes, feeling the frame clink against his glasses. The three dimensional view inside was familiar: The war parade he had taken over ten years ago, as the soldiers rode down Pennsylvania Avenue. Brady removed the thick card from the viewer. The two portraits stood side by side, as he expected. He even expected the flowery script on the side, stating that the stereoscopic portrait was available through the Anthonys’ warehouse. What he didn’t expect wad the attribution at the bottom, claiming that the photography had been done by the Anthonys themselves.

  He clenched his fists and turned around, letting the device fall to the wooden floor. The stereoscope clinked as it rolled, and Brady stifled an urge to kick it across the room.

  “We can go to Congressman Garfield,” Levin said, “and maybe he’ll help us.”

  Brady stared at the portrait. He could take the Anthonys to court. They did own the rights to the wet plates, but they should have given him proper attribution. It seemed a trivial thing to fight over. He had no money, and what influence he had would be better spent getting the plates back than fighting for a bit of name recognition. “No,” Brady said. “You can go to the newspapers, if you like, Levin, but we won’t get James to act for us. He’s done his best already. This is our fight. And we’ll keep at it, until the bitter end if we have to.”

  Julia clenched her hands together and stared at him. It seemed as if the lines around her mouth had grown deeper. He remembered the first time he danced with her, the diamonds around her neck glittering in the candlelight. They had sold those diamonds in 1864 to fund the Petersburg expedition—the expedition in which half of his equipment was destroyed by Confederate shells. You are going to be a great man, she had told him. The problem was, he had never asked her what she meant by great. Perhaps she thought of her wealthy father as a great man. Perhaps she stayed with Brady out of wifely loyalty.

  She came over to him and put her arm around him. “I love you Mathew,” she said. He hugged her close, so close that he worried he would hurt her. None of his work, none of his efforts would have been possible—especially in the lean years—if she hadn’t believed in him.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered into her shoulder.

  She slipped out of his embrace and held him so that she could look into his eyes. “We’ll keep fighting, Mathew. And in the end, we’ll win.”

  1877

  And the assignments kept coming. Brady began to look forward to the whirling, even though he often ended up in hell. His body was stronger there; his eyesight keener. He could forget, for a short time, the drabness of Washington, the emptiness of his life. On the battlefields, he worked—and he could still believe that his work had meaning.

  One dark, gray day, he left his studio and found himself hiding at the edge of a forest. His wagon, without a horse, leaned against a spindly tree. The air was thick and humid. Brady’s black suit clung to his skin, already damp. Through the bushes he could see soldiers carrying large rifles, surrounding a church. Speaking a language he thought he understood—Spanish?—they herded children together. Then, in twos and threes, the soldiers marched the children inside.

  The scene was eerily quiet. Brady went behind the wagon, grabbed his tripod, and set up the camera. He stepped carefully on the forest bed; the scuffling noise of his heavy leather shoes seemed to resound like gunshots. He took portrait after portrait, concentrating on the soldiers’ faces, the children’s looks of resignation. He wondered why the soldiers were imprisoning the children, and what they planned to do to the town he could see just over the horizon. And a small trickle of relief ran through him that here, at least, the children would be spared.

  Once the children were inside, the soldiers closed the heavy doors and barred them. Someone had already boarded up the windows. Brady put another plate into his camera to take a final portrait of the closed church before following the army to their nasty work at the village. He looked down, checking the plates the woman had given him, when he heard a whoosh. A sharp, tingling scent rose in his nostrils, followed by the smell of smoke. Automatically he opened the lens—just as a soldier threw a burning torch at the church itself.

  Brady screamed and ran out of the bushes. The soldiers saw him—and one leveled a rifle at him. The bullets ratt-a-tatted at him, the sound faster and more vicious than the repeating rifles from the war. Brady felt his body jerk and fall, felt himself roll over, bouncing with each bullet’s impact. He wanted to crawl to the church, to save the children, but he couldn’t move. He couldn’t do anything. The world was growing darker—and he saw a kind of light—and his mother? waiting for him—

  And then the whirling began. It seemed slower, and he wasn’t sure he wanted it to start. It pulled him away from the light, away from the mother he hadn’t seen since he left the farm at 16, away from the church and the burning children (he thought he could hear their screams now—loud, terrified, piercing—) and back to the silence of his studio.

  He wound up in one of his straight-backed chairs. He tried to stand up, and fell, his glasses jostling the edge of his nose. Footsteps on the stairs ran toward him, then hands lifted him. Levin.

  “Uncle? Are you all right?”

  “Shot,” Brady whispered. “The children. All dead. Must get the children.”

  He pushed Levin aside and groped for something, anything to hold on to. “I have to get back!” he yelled. “Someone has to rescue those children!”

  Levin grabbed his shoulders, forced Brady back to the chair. “The war is over, Uncle,” Levin said. “It’s over. You’re home. You’re safe.”

  Brady looked up at Levin and felt the shakes begin. She wouldn’t send him back. She wouldn’t let him save those children. She knew all along that the church would burn and she wanted him to photograph it, to record it, not to save it. He put his hands over his face. He had seen enough atrocities to last him three lifetimes.

  “It’s all right,” Levin said. “It’s all right, Uncle.”

  It wasn’t all right. Levin was becoming an expert at this, at talking Brady home. And to his credit, he never said anything to Julia. “Thank you,” Brady said. His words were thin, rushed, as if the bullet holes still riddled his body and sucked the air from it.

  He patted Levin on the shoulder, then walked away—walked—to the end of the studio, his room, his home. Perhaps the crazy woman didn’t exist. Perhaps what Levin saw was truth. Perhaps Brady’s mind was going, after all.

  “Thank you,” he repeated, and walked down the stairs, comforted by the aches in his bones, the blurry edge to his vision. He was home, and he would stay—

  Until she called him again. Until he had his next chance to be young, and working, and doing something worthwhile.

  1882

  Brady sat in front of the window, gazing into the street. Below, carriages rumbled past, throw
ing up mud and chunks of ice. People hurried across the sidewalk, heads bowed against the sleet. The rippled glass was cold against his fingers, but he didn’t care. He could hear Levin in the studio, talking with a prospective client. Levin had handled all of the business this past week. Brady had hardly been able to move.

  The death of Henry Anthony shouldn’t have hit him so hard. The Anthony Brothers had been the closest thing Brady had to enemies in the years since the war. Yet, they had been friends once, and companions in the early days of the art. All of photography was dying: Morse was gone. Henry Anthony dead. And three of Brady’s assistants, men he had trained to succeed him, dead in the opening of the West.

  Levin opened the door and peeked in. “Uncle, a visitor,” he said.

  Brady was about to wave Levin away when another man stepped inside. The man was tall, gaunt, wearing a neatly pressed black suit. He looked official. “Mr. Brady?”

  Brady nodded but did not rise.

  “I’m John C. Taylor. I’m a soldier, sir, and a student of your work. I would like to talk with you, if I could.”

  Brady pushed back the needlepoint chair beside him. Taylor sat down, hat in his hands.

  “Mr. Brady, I wanted to let you know what I’ve been doing. Since the end of the war, I’ve tried to acquire your work. I have secured, through various channels, over 7,000 negatives of your best pictures.”

  Brady felt the haze that surrounded him lift somewhat. “And you would like to display them?”

  “No, sir, actually, I’ve been trying to preserve them. The plates the government bought from you years ago have been sitting in a warehouse. A number were destroyed due to incautious handling. I’ve been trying to get them placed somewhere else. I have an offer from the Navy Department—I have connections there—and I wanted your approval.”

  Brady laughed. The sound bubbled from inside of him, but he felt no joy. He had wanted the portraits for so long and finally, here was someone asking for his approval. “No one has asked me what I wanted before.”

  Taylor leaned back. He glanced once at Levin, as if Brady’s odd reaction had made Taylor wary.

  “My uncle has gone through quite an odyssey to hold on to his plates,” Levin said softly. “He has lost a lot over the years.”

  “From the beginning,” Brady said. “No one will ever know what I went through in securing the negatives. The whole world can never appreciate it. It changed the course of my life. Some of those negatives nearly cost me that life. And then the work was taken from me. Do you understand, Mr. Taylor?”

  Taylor nodded. “I’ve been tracking these photographs for a long time, sir. I remembered them from the illustrated papers, and I decided that they needed to be preserved, so that my children’s children would see the devastation, would learn the follies we committed because we couldn’t reason with each other.”

  Bray smiled. A man who did understand. Finally. “The government bought my portraits of Webster, Calhoun, and Clay. I got paid a lot of money for those paintings that were made from my photographs. Not my work, mind you. Paintings of my work. Page would have been so happy.”

  “Sir?”

  Brady shook his head. Page had left his side long ago. “But no one wants to see the war work. No one wants to see what you and I preserved. I don’t want the Navy to bury the negatives. I want them to display the work, reproduce it or make it into a book that someone can see.”

  “First things first, Mr. Brady,” Taylor said. “The Navy has the negatives I’ve acquired, but we need to remove the others from the War Department before they’re destroyed. And then you, or your nephew, or someone else can go in there and put together a showing.”

  Brady reached over and gripped Taylor’s hands. They were firm and strong—a young man’s hands on an older man’s body. “If you can do that,” Brady said, “You will have made all that I’ve done worthwhile.”

  1882

  Julia huddled on the settee, a blanket over her slight frame. She had grown gaunt, her eyes big saucers on the planes of her face. Her hands shook as she took the letter from Brady. He had hesitated about giving it to her, but he knew that she would ask and she would worry. It would be better for her frail heart to know than to constantly fret. She leaned toward the lamp. Brady watched her eyes move as she read.

  He already knew the words by heart. The letter was from General A. W. Greeley, in the War Department. He was in charge of the government’s collection of Brady’s work. After the opening amenities, he had written:

  The government has stated positively that their negatives must not be exploited for commercial purposes. They are the historical treasures of a whole people and the government has justly refused to establish a dangerous system of “special privilege” by granting permission for publication to individuals. As the property of the people, the government negatives are held in sacred trust . . .

  Where no one could see them, and not even Brady himself could use them. He wondered what Taylor thought—Taylor, who would have received the letter in Connecticut by now.

  Julia looked up, her eyes dotted with tears. “What do they think, that you’re going to steal the plates from them like they stole them from you?”

  “I don’t know,” Brady said. “Perhaps they really don’t understand what they have.”

  “They understand,” Julia said, her voice harsh. “And it frightens them.”

  1883

  In his dreams, he heard the sounds of people working. Twice he had arrived at the door to his gallery, and twice it had been locked. Behind the thin material, he heard voices—“Here, Andre. No, no. Keep the same years on the same wall space”—and the sounds of shuffling feet. This time, he knocked and the door opened a crack.

  Ceiling lights flooded the room. It was wide and bright—brighter than he imagined a room could be. His work covered all the walls but one. People, dressed in pants and loose shirts like the woman who hired him, carried framed portraits from one spot to the next, all under the direction of a slim man who stood next to Brady’s wagon.

  The man looked at Brady. “What do you want?”

  “I just wanted to see—”

  The man turned to one of the others walking through. “Get rid of him, will you? We only have a few hours, and we still have one wall to fill.”

  A woman stopped next to Brady and put her hand on his arm. Her fingers were cool. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We’re preparing an exhibit.”

  “But I’m the artist,” Brady said.

  “He says—”

  “I know what he says,” the man said. He squinted at Brady, then glanced at a portrait that hung near the wagon. “And so he is. You should be finishing the exhibit, Mr. Brady, no gawking around the studio.”

  “I didn’t know I had something to finish.”

  The man sighed. “The show opens tomorrow morning, and you still have one wall to fill. What are you doing here?”

  “I don’t know,” Brady said. The woman took his arm and led him out the door.

  “We’ll see you tomorrow night,” she said. And then she smiled. “I like your work.”

  And then he woke up, shivering and shaking in the dark beside Julia. Her even breathing was a comfort. He drew himself into a huddle and rested his knees against his chest. One wall to fill by tomorrow? He wished he understood what the dreams meant. It had taken him nearly twenty years to fill all the other walls. And then he thought that perhaps dream time worked differently than real time. Perhaps dream time moved in an instant the way he did when the woman whirled him away to another place.

  It was just a dream, he told himself, and by the time he fell back to sleep, he really believed it.

  1884

  By the time the wagon appeared beside him, Brady was shaking. This place was silent, completely silent. Houses stood in neat rows on barren, brown, treeless land. Their white formations rested like sentries against the mountains that stood in the distance. A faint smell, almost acrid, covered everything. The air was warm, but not mu
ggy, and beads of sweat rose on his arms like drops of blood.

  Brady had arrived behind one of the houses. Inside, a family sat around the table—a man, a woman, and two children. They all appeared to be eating—the woman had a spoon raised to her mouth—but no one moved. In the entire time he had been there, no one had moved.

  He went into his wagon, removed the camera and tripod, then knocked on the door. The family didn’t acknowledge him. He pushed the door open and stepped inside, setting up the camera near a gleaming countertop. Then he walked over to the family. The children were laughing, gazing at each other. Their chests didn’t rise and fall, their eyes didn’t move. The man had his hand around a cup full of congealed liquid. He was watching the children, a faint smile on his face. The woman was looking down, at the bowl filled with a soggy mush. The hand holding the spoon—empty except for a white stain in the center—had frozen near her mouth. Brady touched her. Her skin was cold, rigid.

  They were dead.

  Brady backed away, nearly knocking over the tripod. He grabbed the camera, felt its firmness in his hands. For some reason, these specters frightened him worse than all the others. He couldn’t tell what killed them or how they died. It had become increasingly difficult, at the many varied places he had been, but he could at least guess. Here, he saw nothing—and the bodies didn’t even feel real.

  He climbed under the dark curtain, finding a kind of protection from his own equipment. Perhaps, near his own stuff, whatever had killed them would avoid him. He took the photograph, and then carried his equipment to the next house, where a frozen woman sat on a sofa, looking at a piece of paper. In each house, he took the still lifes, almost wishing for the blood, the fires, the signs of destruction.

  1885

  Brady folded the newspaper and set it down. He didn’t wish to disturb Julia, who was sleeping soundly on the bed. She seemed to get so little rest. Her face had become translucent, the shadows under her eyes so deep that they looked like bruises.

  He couldn’t share the article with her. A year ago, she might have laughed. But now, tears would stream down her cheeks and she would want him to hold her. And when she woke up, he would hold her, because they had so little time left.