Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  The man who had first come to my aid was a shaman—a healer and wise man. Since I had been declared a goddess, I was allowed to help him gather roots and bark, or a scorpion when needed, and other items he used to make his healing salves and potions.

  I showed him my bottle of aspirin and animated how they should be taken with water. But he took one out of the palm of my hand and chewed it up. He wrinkled his face at the sour taste and decided water was indeed needed to wash it down. As we gestured and talked, we traded words. He would touch his nose and say “achin,” and I would touch my nose and say “nose,” and so forth.

  As best he could, he explained to me that he was also a shape shifter. He could change himself into another form, from a man to an animal, and could also move himself from one place to another in a wink.

  He never demonstrated this art to me. I was skeptical!

  He showed an interest in my class ring. His face lit up with delight when I slipped the ring off one day and offered it to him in the palm of my hand. He insisted he must make me a gift in return, as it was the tradition of his people.

  The chosen item was his turquoise necklace which had beads that had been cut into unusual shapes and was very valuable to him—definitely more so than my ring was to me. He lifted the necklace over his head and gently placed it in my palm, pushing my fingers closed over it. After he left, I slipped the beads into my pocket.

  The next morning, long before the sun had risen, I awoke to a sound of the people rushing around and low urgent whispers. They were preparing to move in a hurry and were grabbing what they could carry in their arms.

  “Que?” What? I asked.

  “Chindi.” I was told in low, frightened tones.

  “Chindi?” Not a familiar word.

  The shaman rushed into my room and using sign language pointed at himself, then to his eyes. “I will see . . .”

  He touched me on my shoulder with his index finger then turned his hand sideways and stretched his arm out pointing behind me. “You in the time to come.”

  He was gone in a blink, and a gray cat ran out the doorway. I didn’t see the shaman after that, and I didn’t have time to think of what he’d been trying to say to me.

  Some of the people had left already, going farther north. Others were still gathering possessions when, with a whoop, what could only be described as devils began pouring into the settlement.

  My God, I thought. Chindi . . . devil . . . Aztec!

  I could hardly believe my eyes. Where had they come from? The Aztec nation was extinct, like as the people of the Sinagua area. What had I stumbled upon?

  Had I found myself back in time?

  Or was I just dreaming?

  The women who tried to fight back had their brains bashed out against the rocks. The children died, too. The men, whether or not they fought back, were overpowered and tied together, wrist to wrist.

  I hid!

  I was cowering inside my room when I remembered my ancient history studies that said that the Aztecs held in reverence a jaguar god. Quickly, I dug my leopard spotted poncho from my backpack, slipped it on, and pulled the hood over my head.

  With flashlight in hand, and summoning what bit of bravery I could muster, I spread my arms out to make myself appear as large and threatening as possible, ran out into the center of the compound, and shouted, “Stop right there!”

  I stomped my feet and flapped my arms and sang “Yellow Submarine” as loud as I could—all the time waving my lit flashlight.

  It had some effect.

  The Aztec warriors stood frozen in their tracks as they stared at me, the jaguar woman.

  “Be gone, devils!” I shouted in a language none of them understood. A jaguar goddess speaking words from heaven, and whose flashlight batteries had just burned out!

  I was hoping they would turn tail and run, but being from a fierce nation, once the initial fright wore off, they quickly realized I was a jaguar god impostor. The leader of the warriors came closer to me with suspicion, not wanting to make any hasty decisions. He reached out and touched my poncho and jerked back as if it had burned his hand.

  Once he found he was still alive after touching the plastic, he reached out again, wrapped his big hand around the back of my neck and pushed me toward the living quarters. He wrenched the flashlight out of my hand and flung it into the scrub. As he jammed my face up against the wall and drew back his war club, my hands shot out and landed in two of the handprints. That was the last thing I remembered until I woke to a group of tourists standing around me.

  “Give her some air,” someone said as they held my head and fanned me with their hand.

  “Stand back, I think she must have fainted. Must be this heat.”

  “She wasn’t here a second ago. Where did she come from?”

  “Did you see? She just popped up out of nowhere!” The aches in my body told me I hadn’t been dreaming. Somehow I’d been in the past. Well, I was back in the present now, and with a group of concerned sunburned tourists looking down at me.

  A park ranger brought water from a nearby refreshment stand and gently removed my poncho.

  “Why is she wearing that hot plastic thing out here in the desert?” I heard someone whisper.

  “My backpack! Where is my backpack?” I began feeling around, but to no avail. Everyone began searching, but my backpack was nowhere to be found.

  Any gear I had was left in the past when the settlement was overrun by Aztecs.

  “Are you sure you had a backpack?” The ranger asked. “Are you sure you are okay? Are you driving? Do you need a ride back to Sedona?”

  “Sedona? Yes, I do need a ride.” A tall man helped me to my feet. After a few minutes, I was fine, no dizziness.

  Some of the walls of the ruin were still standing after what certainly had been more than a thousand years, but many had crumbled into dust. The people I had come to know had disappeared, leaving no trace of having been here except for the walls . . . some of which might stand forever because they’d been built by the hands of their goddess.

  I walked away from the tourists over to the farthest wall and glanced at the handprints imbedded in the hard clay. Sure enough, there was the imprint of my class ring. I looked at my hand to find that my ring had disappeared, too.

  The shaman. I’d given it to him.

  Through the many years it has been a mystery discussed by archaeologists as to what must have caused that unusual imprint in the walls. In the end, the historians decided that the ring must have belonged to the chief of the tribe. I knew there were no chiefs in that little band of people, and only I knew the imprint was from my ring.

  There, among the pictographs, was my picture hewn out in the flat rock and outlined in faded black. Those childlike lines were a drawing of me.

  Tears rolled down my dirty face as I remembered what had happened to my little group of friends. Their abrupt disappearance was due to the Aztecs trekking long miles up from Mexico hunting slave labor to help build their magnificent city or to be offered in a blood-bath. My friends who had escaped to the north were lost to time; even I could not say where they had gone or if they had survived.

  I had to make my own arrangements to get back home.

  Back in Columbus I went straightaway to the travel agency. I wanted to get a few things straight with that strange little man who obviously sent me to the past instead of taking my photograph. As best I could remember, the little old agent looked a lot like the shaman of the Sinagua.

  An accidental tourist?

  I walked past the door three times before I realized the storefront had changed. There was no sign waving in the breeze. There were no glass beads hanging across the doorway; they had been replaced with a modern glass and chrome door. The floor beyond was clean and devoid of sand.

  I pushed through to the office.

  There were two desks cluttered with telephones and computers, with a woman seated behind each desk.

  “Can I help you take a trip?” one of th
em asked.

  I shook my head. “Where is the little old man? I saw him here . . .” When exactly had I seen him? Days ago? Centuries? “A little man with weathered skin.”

  “Little old man?” She smirked and looked at the other agent, who smiled behind her hand.

  “Yes,” I insisted. “There was a little old man here who sent me to Sedona, oh, maybe two weeks ago. Wasn’t there a little old man? No!”

  I just answered my own question.

  There was no little old wrinkled man working there, never had been, never would be. He’d found himself forward in time, and then just as likely had found his way back home . . . or somewhere, somewhen else.

  I walked back to my apartment. Upon searching through the pockets of the clothes I’d worn when I was transported to ancient Arizona, I jerked my hand as I came across something raspy. I turned the pocket inside out, and to my amazement onto the floor fell a necklace made of tiny turquoise beads cut into odd little shapes.

  THE SILVER MIRROR

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

  January 3.

  This affair of White and Wotherspoon’s accounts proves to be a gigantic task. There are twenty thick ledgers to be examined and checked. Who would be a junior partner? However, it is the first big bit of business which has been left entirely in my hands. I must justify it. But it has to be finished so that the lawyers may have the result in time for the trial. Johnson said this morning that I should have to get the last figure out before the twentieth of the month. Good Lord! Well, have at it, and if human brain and nerve can stand the strain, I’ll win out at the other side. It means office-work from ten to five, and then a second sitting from about eight to one in the morning. There’s drama in an accountant’s life. When I find myself in the still early hours, while all the world sleeps, hunting through column after column for those missing figures which will turn a respected alderman into a felon, I understand that it is not such a prosaic profession after all.

  On Monday I came on the first trace of defalcation. No heavy game hunter ever got a finer thrill when first he caught sight of the trail of his quarry. But I look at the twenty ledgers and think of the jungle through which I have to follow him before I get my kill. Hard work—but rare sport, too, in a way! I saw the fat fellow once at a City dinner, his red face glowing above a white napkin. He looked at the little pale man at the end of the table. He would have been pale too if he could have seen the task that would be mine.

  January 6.

  What perfect nonsense it is for doctors to prescribe rest when rest is out of the question! Asses! They might as well shout to a man who has a pack of wolves at his heels that what he wants is absolute quiet. My figures must be out by a certain date; unless they are so, I shall lose the chance of my lifetime, so how on earth am I to rest? I’ll take a week or so after the trial.

  Perhaps I was myself a fool to go to the doctor at all. But I get nervous and highly-strung when I sit alone at my work at night. It’s not a pain—only a sort of fullness of the head with an occasional mist over the eyes. I thought perhaps some bromide, or chloral, or something of the kind might do me good. But stop work? It’s absurd to ask such a thing. It’s like a long distance race. You feel queer at first and your heart thumps and your lungs pant, but if you have only the pluck to keep on, you get your second wind. I’ll stick to my work and wait for my second wind. If it never comes—all the same, I’ll stick to my work. Two ledgers are done, and I am well on in the third. The rascal has covered his tracks well, but I pick them up for all that.

  January 9.

  I had not meant to go to the doctor again. And yet I have had to. “Straining my nerves, risking a complete breakdown, even endangering my sanity.” That’s a nice sentence to have fired off at one. Well, I’ll stand the strain and I’ll take the risk, and so long as I can sit in my chair and move a pen I’ll follow the old sinner’s slot.

  By the way, I may as well set down here the queer experience which drove me this second time to the doctor. I’ll keep an exact record of my symptoms and sensations, because they are interesting in themselves—“a curious psycho-physiological study,” says the doctor—and also because I am perfectly certain that when I am through with them they will all seem blurred and unreal, like some queer dream betwixt sleeping and waking. So now, while they are fresh, I will just make a note of them, if only as a change of thought after the endless figures.

  There’s an old silver-framed mirror in my room. It was given me by a friend who had a taste for antiquities, and he, as I happen to know, picked it up at a sale and had no notion where it came from. It’s a large thing—three feet across and two feet high—and it leans at the back of a side-table on my left as I write. The frame is flat, about three inches across, and very old; far too old for hall-marks or other methods of determining its age. The glass part projects, with a bevelled edge, and has the magnificent reflecting power which is only, as it seems to me, to be found in very old mirrors. There’s a feeling of perspective when you look into it such as no modern glass can ever give.

  The mirror is so situated that as I sit at the table I can usually see nothing in it but the reflection of the red window curtains. But a queer thing happened last night. I had been working for some hours, very much against the grain, with continual bouts of that mistiness of which I had complained. Again and again I had to stop and clear my eyes. Well, on one of these occasions I chanced to look at the mirror. It had the oddest appearance. The red curtains which should have been reflected in it were no longer there, but the glass seemed to be clouded and steamy, not on the surface, which glittered like steel, but deep down in the very grain of it. This opacity, when I stared hard at it, appeared to slowly rotate this way and that, until it was a thick white cloud swirling in heavy wreaths. So real and solid was it, and so reasonable was I, that I remember turning, with the idea that the curtains were on fire. But everything was deadly still in the room—no sound save the ticking of the clock, no movement save the slow gyration of that strange woolly cloud deep in the heart of the old mirror.

  Then, as I looked, the mist, or smoke, or cloud, or whatever one may call it, seemed to coalesce and solidify at two points quite close together, and I was aware, with a tlyill of interest rather than of fear, that these were two eyes looking out into the room. A vague outline of a head I could see—a woman’s by the hair, but this was very shadowy. Only the eyes were quite distinct; such eyes—dark, luminous, filled with some passionate emotion, fury or horror, I could not say which. Never have I seen eyes which were so full of intense, vivid life. They were not fixed upon me, but stared out into the room.

  Then as I sat erect, passed my hand over my brow, and made a strong conscious effort to pull myself together, the dim head faded into the general opacity, the mirror slowly cleared, and there were the red curtains once again.

  A sceptic would say, no doubt, that I had dropped asleep over my figures, and that my experience was a dream. As a matter of fact, I was never more vividly awake in my life. I was able to argue about it even as I looked at it, and to tell myself that it was a subjective impression—a chimera of the nerves—begotten by worry and insomnia. But why this particular shape? And who is the woman, and what is the dreadful emotion which I read in those wonderful brown eyes? They come between me and my work. For the first time I have done less than the daily tally which I had marked out. Perhaps that is why I have had no abnormal sensations to-night. To-morrow I must wake up, come what may.

  January 11.

  All well, and good progress with my work. I wind the net, coil after coil, round that bulky body. But the last smile may remain with him if my own nerves break over it. The mirror would seem to be a sort of barometer which marks my brain pressure. Each night I have observed that it had clouded before I reached the end of my task.

  Dr. Sinclair (who is, it seems, a bit of a psychologist) was so interested in my account that he came round this evening to have a look at the minor. I had observed that something was scribbled in
crabbed old characters upon the metal work at the back. He examined this with a lens, but could make nothing of it. “Sane. X. Pal.” was his final reading of it, but that did not bring us any further. He advised me to put it away into another room; but, after all, whatever I may see in it is, by his own account, only a symptom. It is in the cause that the danger lies. The twenty ledgers—not the silver mirror—should be packed away if I could only do it. I’m at the eighth now, so I progress.

  January 13.

  Perhaps it would have been wiser after all if I had packed away the mirror. I had an extraordinary experience with it last night.

  And yet I find it so interesting, so fascinating, that even now I will keep it in its place. What on earth is the meaning of it all?

  I suppose it was about one in the morning, and I was closing my books preparatory to staggering off to bed, when I saw her there in front of me. The stage of mistiness and development must have passed unobserved, and there she was in all her beauty and passion and distress, as clear-cut as if she were really in the flesh before me. The figure was small, but very distinct—so much so that every feature, and every detail of dress, are stamped in my memory. She is seated on the extreme left of the mirror. A sort of shadowy figure crouches down beside her—I can dimly discern that it is a man—and then behind them is cloud, in which I see figures—figures which move. It is not a mere picture upon which I look. It is a scene in life, an actual episode. She crouches and quivers. The man beside her cowers down. The vague figures make abrupt movements and gestures. All my fears were swallowed up in my interest. It was maddening to see so much and not to see more.

  But I can at least describe the woman to the smallest point. She is very beautiful and quite young—not more than five-and-twenty, I should judge. Her hair is of a very rich brown, with a warm chestnut shade fining into gold at the edges. A little flat-pointed cap comes to an angle in front and is made of lace edged with pearls. The forehead is high, too high perhaps for perfect beauty; but one would not have it otherwise, as it gives a touch of power and strength to what would otherwise be a softly feminine face. The brows are most delicately curved over heavy eyelids, and then come those wonderful eyes—so large, so dark, so full of overmastering emotion, of rage and horror, contending with a pride of self-control which holds her from sheer frenzy! The cheeks are pale, the lips white with agony, the chin and throat most exquisitely rounded. The figure sits and leans forward in the chair, straining and rigid, cataleptic with horror. The dress is black velvet, a jewel gleams like a flame in the breast, and a golden crucifix smoulders in the shadow of a fold. This is the lady whose image still lives in the old silver mirror. What dire deed could it be which has left its impress there, so that now, in another age, if the spirit of a man be but worn down to it, he may be conscious of its presence?