“Josephine, you know Mother is going to punish you if you damage any of the furniture with your stupid trick.”
She gave him a hurt look, but continued on with her game in silence. Isaac had been harsher than he’d meant to be, but he just couldn’t take her disruptions in addition to everything else he was dealing with.
After a few moments she knocked the candle again and it spilled outright across the table.
“Jo!”
“It was an accident!” She had jumped up and was trying to mop up the wax with her sleeve, succeeding only in spreading it further.
“You’re just making it worse! Go do that somewhere else!” Isaac felt some remorse at her wounded expression, but he knew that if he wasn’t firm with her, she’d never leave him alone.
“Fine.” She gathered up the lit candle in one hand and the fallen candlestick in the other and stalked out of the room.
Isaac sighed once she was gone. He hated to be cruel to his sister, but she was liable to burn down the house with her little diversion, and he didn’t want to be responsible for it, especially not at that moment.
After he’d finished picking the wax from the tabletop, Isaac gave up on the record and turned the knob to switch the player off. He just couldn’t concentrate today. He decided to go upstairs and splash some cool water on his face. Hopefully the shock of it would wake him up from the fog he’d been rambling around in.
Reaching the bathroom, he perched his hands on the edge of the countertop and paused to peer in the mirror above the sink basin. He looked haggard. He’d been plagued by more and more unsettling dreams since his last encounter with the presence, each leaving Isaac feeling a disturbing mix of fear and confusion and guilt. He hadn’t been sleeping well as a result.
He turned the knob and filled the bottom of the basin with an inch of cold water. He unbuttoned his sleeves and rolled them up over his elbows. Bending over the sink, he scooped the water into his hands and splashed it gently on his face. As he’d hoped, the chilly water stung his cheeks and sent shivers down his back.
Isaac looked up, refreshed. The color had come back to his face and his blue eyes sparkled as droplets fell back to the basin from his eyelashes. He still felt anxious, but at least his mind didn’t feel as cloudy as it had.
He pulled the drain plug and turned to the towel hung by the door. Isaac gently dried the moisture from his face then hung the towel up on the rack and rolled his sleeves back down. He was securing the buttons at his wrist as he headed for the door when he noticed something in his peripheral vision.
It was the woman. Isaac jumped back with a gasp and nearly smashed into the wall. She was standing by the sink with a similar expression of shock on her face. But her dismay was soon replaced with determination.
Isaac watched as she dug into a pocket in her snug denim trousers and withdrew a small swatch of paper. Her image was already beginning to fade as she unfolded the sheet and held it up to him. There was writing scrawled across the page, but as her image rapidly grew fainter, Isaac had time to read only one word before she vanished completely: “FIRE.”
As suddenly as she had appeared, she was gone. Fire. The word echoed over and over in his mind as he paced to his study. Fire. What was she telling him? Was it some kind of warning? Or was she sharing something about her own experience?
He stood at the window pondering her meaning when he noticed something. An acrid smell stung the back of his nose and he thought he heard a faint yelling in the distance. Then it dawned on him. Smoke. Fire.
Isaac raced down the back stairs to the kitchen. Was this what the presence had been warning him about? Was the house on fire?
He skipped the last three steps and bounded into the kitchen. Everything looked in its place except for the fact that it was deserted – usually one of the servants would be preparing dinner by now. He stepped further into the room to see if he could find anything amiss, and that’s when he saw where everyone had disappeared to.
Beyond the window, smoke was rolling across the lawn towards the house. It spewed from the barn, which was engulfed in massive flames. A group of servants were standing in a line from the water pump to the barn door, passing buckets which they were frantically pitching onto the burning building. Isaac could see that it was no use. The structure shuddered visibly from the intensity of the blaze.
Isaac dashed out the back door and up the hill towards the barn, pumping his legs faster than they’d ever taken him. The escaped horses reared wildly in the commotion and whinnied over the shouts of the servants. Isaac was shocked at the heat from the inferno; he could feel it from 30 yards away.
He had difficulty seeing through the smoke, but he soon found his mother clutching the housekeeper, Henrietta, and sobbing violently. Isaac gripped her shoulders and tried to get her attention. “Mother, what’s going on? How did this start?”
She just bawled harder, crumpling to the ground in a heap of desolation. It hit Isaac that things might be much worse than they first seemed.
He turned to Henrietta. “Where’s father? Where’s Jo?”
The distraught housekeeper shook her head vigorously, tears in her eyes. She sobbed out a reply. “We heard Miss Josephine calling for help from inside. Your father went in after her.”
No. “When? When?!” Isaac’s throat burned from the smoke. He could see that part of the barn had collapsed already and the rest was due to go at any moment. His body threatened to faint as the blood rushed from his head with one monumental realization.
This was all his fault. He had sent Jo away with those candles, told her to get out of the house. Where else would she have gone? The hayloft was her favorite place. She must have climbed up there after Isaac had yelled at her, and of course it would go up in flames the first time she knocked over that candle, littered as it was with dry straw. She was only a child – she would never think twice about the danger. And now his father was trapped inside with her.
Isaac couldn’t believe his own foolishness. The people he loved most in this world were facing a fiery death and it was entirely his fault. He’d been too distracted to see what was right in front of his face, to recognize what the presence had been trying to warn him of the whole time. He had not only ignored those warnings, but had actually prompted his sister to accidentally set the fire that might kill her. Isaac felt acid rising in his throat, but he choked it back down. He needed to think.
Henrietta continued to cry and tear at her own hair as his mother shuddered on the ground. He couldn’t just stand there and watch his family die. He had to try to save them.
His heart pounding, he hastened toward the open barn door where the soot-covered servants were still splashing water, trying to clear a path for Isaac’s father and sister to escape. The heat intensified as he neared and sweat soaked his brow. Isaac knew that it was now or never. He dashed through the doorway into the blaze.
The fire inside wasn’t as widespread as he’d expected, but he started choking immediately and squinted his eyes against the smoke to get a better view. His father and sister were nowhere to be found. He stretched out his arm to try to feel his way toward the hayloft, but he could barely see his own hand. He tried calling out to them and could not even hear his own voice over the roar of the blaze.
Isaac shook from head to toe as he stepped deeper into the barn. He heard a crackling and suddenly a large flaming beam from the ceiling crashed down behind him, blocking his only exit. He had no choice but to go forward.
He crept cautiously towards the back of the barn, crouching to see through the thick smoke. Isaac called out again and he thought he might have heard a faint coughing. He headed in the direction of the sound, gasping against the suffocating heat.
Isaac almost stumbled over a pile of smoldering wood, then he thought he heard the coughing again. Isaac looked closer and realized what he was seeing. The hayloft had collapsed and he was standing beside the rubble. Was Josephine still here?
He tore at the heap of wooden boards,
straining as the lack of oxygen burned his lungs. The walls shuddered around him and he could hear the building roar as the supports gave way. The ceiling around him began to collapse.
Isaac caught a glimpse of blond hair under the debris and he knew he’d found his sister. But it was too late. In a moment she’d be gone, and Isaac was going with her. He’d never experienced such an aching despair, such an overwhelming sense of hopelessness. There was nothing he could do now.
Isaac sunk to his knees, his sight growing dim and his head swimming as his body gave in to the stifling effects of the smoke. He collapsed onto his side, his hand reaching out for Jo as tears streamed from his face. He mouthed a silent apology to his sister and his mind wandered one last time to the mysterious woman and her fateful warning.
And then his consciousness faded into oblivion.
20. FISSURE
8:32 AM. Alessa sighed and dropped her eyes from the bedside clock, carefully surveying her room once again. She didn’t know what she was looking for exactly – some sort of sign. But so far, everything appeared to be exactly the same as it always had.
Alessa had been playing at this for almost 12 hours now, to no avail. After seeing Isaac in the bathroom while getting ready for bed the night before, she’d had difficulty sleeping and had woken up every few hours expecting… she wasn’t sure what. Something to be different. Maybe to wake up in a different room, in some building that wasn’t Isaac’s house, since if his family didn’t die, maybe the university never acquired it? Isn’t that how changing the past was supposed to work?
She wasn’t sure if Isaac had gotten the message, but she thought he might have. After the frustration of their last encounter and her pathetic attempt at charades, Alessa had made sure that the next time she and Isaac met, she’d be prepared. But she wasn’t quite sure how she would know if she’d been successful.
She’d been diligently carrying that scrap of paper in her pocket for days, and was still keeping it close at hand, just in case. Alessa plucked it from the nightstand and unfolded the well-worn creases to scan the message once more. “FAMILY IS IN DANGER – BARN FIRE.” She’d emphasized the last word with red pen and underlining. Alessa hoped that the message was clear and concise enough that he would be able to read and remember it even if they only had a few seconds to connect.
As it was, the encounter had been much shorter than usual and Alessa was glad she had thought to keep the message short. She was fairly certain that she had wrangled the paper from her pocket in time, but she wasn’t positive. Isaac had started fading almost as soon as she’d unfolded her message, so she hadn’t been able to get any confirmation from him.
Alessa flopped her head back to her pillow and stared up at the ceiling. How was this time travel business supposed to work, anyway? If she somehow got a message to Isaac in his own time and he did something different as a result, shouldn’t that mean that something in the future would change to reflect Isaac’s actions? At the very least, shouldn’t the newspaper article about his death no longer exist?
Alessa’s mind was spinning. The whole concept of manipulating time was more than she could wrap her head around at the moment. There were just too many possibilities and no way to predict how changing one thing – like whether Isaac’s family lived or died – might affect everything else.
Alessa had read on the internet that some physicists claimed that all of time was happening at once, that every possible choice and every possible outcome had already happened and was still happening at every moment. As a result, any change in the “past” would not affect the “present” since, according to this theory, everything was happening simultaneously already. The idea was baffling, and Alessa just couldn’t process it.
She wondered if perhaps she was making a mistake by trying to affect events that had already happened. Assuming that changing the past did affect the future, presumably, the results could be catastrophic. Though in this particular case, Alessa couldn’t imagine how Isaac’s family surviving might negatively affect anything. She tried to think through the different scenarios in her mind.
One scenario in particular caused her a moment of panic. If the Masons lived, they would likely have continued passing the estate down through subsequent generations, which meant that it might never have been sold to the university. That meant Alessa would never have lived on the property, and would therefore have never crossed paths with Isaac. So if her plan worked and she all of a sudden woke up one day in a different place, she might not even remember things ever having been the way they are now. Did that mean that if her plan succeeded, she might never even know?
Alessa shook off the thought. She hadn’t considered the possibility of losing all memory of Isaac before, and she wasn’t keen on the idea. He had become such an integral part of her life in recent months that she couldn’t imagine losing him, having never even known of his existence. The idea of continuing on the path she was on before Isaac first appeared – of struggling to recover after losing her parents with nothing but schoolwork to distract her – was just too bleak.
But perhaps that wouldn’t be how it happened. Just because Isaac’s family survived didn’t necessarily mean that the house would never become university property. Even if it took decades after Isaac’s family’s lives ran their courses, there were myriad ways that the house might somehow eventually land in the university’s hands. And if the reason Alessa could see Isaac was, as Janie hypothesized, due to the natural physical properties of the house – as opposed to his becoming a ghost after dying under tragic circumstances – then maybe Alessa would have seen him anyway. In fact, maybe this was how things were meant to happen all along. Maybe Alessa was always meant to save Isaac’s family.
Alessa decided to put all this conjecturing out of her head. It was too early in the morning to be trying to unravel the mysteries of time. Plus, she had an ethics assignment to do before her late morning class.
After a short trip to the bathroom to freshen up, Alessa was settling in at her desk and flipping open her ethics reading when Janie poked her head in.
“Morning, Less.” Her cropped hair was bedraggled and she had noticeable bags under her eyes.
“Hey, Janie.” Alessa noted the exhaustion etched into Janie’s face. “You feeling okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine, thanks,” Janie yawned.
Alessa wondered what could have kept Janie up. She’d been half asleep watching a movie on her laptop in bed last night when Alessa had burst into her room to tell her about giving Isaac the warning.
“So, any more developments with the Isaac thing?” Janie asked casually.
Alessa shook her head. “No, nothing yet.”
Janie nodded thoughtfully, then added, “Do you think it worked?”
“I’m not sure… I don’t know how I would even know. I keep trying to figure out how things might be different now if Isaac lived, but it’s all so confusing.”
“Yeah, I was thinking about that…” Janie hesitated for a moment. “Alessa, are you sure you’re doing the right thing?”
Alessa grimaced as a small knot formed in her stomach. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, if it didn’t work this time… maybe you should just let it go.”
Alessa swallowed. “Why?”
Alessa had already buried the doubts that had been nagging at her all morning, and she hoped Janie wasn’t about to bring up the same concerns; she wasn’t eager to think about it again.
“I don’t know, Less. It just seems like maybe you’re messing with something you shouldn’t. Who knows how saving Isaac might change things? Maybe things already happened the way they were supposed to…”
Alessa understood where Janie was coming from, but at the same time, she felt betrayed. Janie was the one who had suggested the whole idea of a time warp and using it to contact Isaac to begin with. Why the sudden about-face?
“Less? Come on, don’t make that face. I know how badly you want to help him. I’m just… scared.”
Against her better judgment, Alessa felt a sudden flush of anger well up inside her. “Janie, if you’re so scared, why did you suggest the idea to begin with?”
She knew it wasn’t fair to be irritated with Janie, but some part of her felt like Janie had given her a shiny new toy and then promptly taken it away. If it wasn’t for Janie’s suggestion, Alessa probably wouldn’t even have considered the possibility that her encounters with Isaac weren’t with a ghost but with his past self. Janie had gotten Alessa’s hopes up that maybe she might be able to do something about his fate, and now she was dashing those hopes to the ground. Alessa knew she was being childish – Janie was probably right about the consequences of meddling with time – but she wasn’t ready to give in yet.
“I wouldn’t even have thought of trying to warn him if you hadn’t said it first,” Alessa added.
Janie’s face blanched and she recoiled, sputtering a retort. “Well, I wish I hadn’t said anything. It was a dumb idea. I’m sorry.”
For some reason Janie’s apology made Alessa’s aggravation boil over. “You know, Janie, I don’t think you do know how much I want to help Isaac, because if you did, you would be supporting me instead of trying to hold me back.”
Any remaining traces of color drained from Janie’s face. “Alessa… I –”
Alessa held her hand up. “Just save it, Janie. My mind is made up, and nothing you say is going to change it. I’m going to warn Isaac, and I don’t care about the consequences. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t try.”
Janie looked like she was about to argue, but she let it go. “Okay, fine. I have to go to the library now, but we can talk later. Just… don’t do anything rash,” she pleaded.
Alessa just gave Janie a stony glare. She could see the hurt on Janie’s face and felt a pang of remorse, but she just couldn’t seem to let the anger go.
Janie turned and left, closing the door cautiously behind her, and Alessa dropped into her desk chair. She was shaking with rage from head to toe.
Alessa knew she was being irrational, but she wasn’t in the mood to be sensible. Janie’s concerns were perfectly reasonable – the same thoughts had occurred to Alessa herself – but Alessa had invested too much in the possibility of saving Isaac. She wasn’t willing to let it go without a fight.
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