The Book That Proves Time Travel Happens

by Henry Clark

  “So you do manage to learn things in that mausoleum.” Frankie nodded approvingly. “You two know the area. Which way do we go?”

  I looked around. There were no recognizable landmarks, not even a road. The ground was rocky and hard-packed; there were no hoofprints to follow. The only sign of horses was a faint aroma.

  “Beats me,” I said apologetically.

  Tom flipped his quarter in the air.

  “No,” I said.

  “Yes,” he replied, picking up a stick and drawing a broken yin line in the dirt. “The I-Ching is talking to us. We should listen to it.”

  “Those guys could come back at any moment,” I said, looking around for the best places to hide.

  “Make it quick,” Frankie said to Tom.

  He flipped his coin five more times and wound up with a hexagram that looked like this:

  “‘Hexagram twenty,’” Tom read from the index of the I-Ching book. “Page seventy-one… the hexagram is called Observing and Contemplating.”

  HEXAGRAM 20

  OBSERVING AND CONTEMPLATING.

  SPOT THE DIFFERENCES. UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU SEE. PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU’RE DOING. YOU CAN REPLACE AN AA BATTERY WITH A CHAPSTICK, BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN THE RADIO WILL PLAY.

  “More ancient wisdom,” I muttered sarcastically.

  “It’s two dashes, followed by two dots, followed by three dots, followed by a final three dots. It spells miss!” Tom spoke without pausing. “We’re missing something! We’re observing, but we’re not contemplating! We have to look around more!”

  “How did you figure out the Morse so quickly?” I asked, sensing another mystery.

  “Did I? Isn’t it obvious?”

  “No.”

  “Well… I don’t know. It just came to me.”

  “Maybe you have more than one talent,” Frankie suggested. “Some people do. Maybe you hear phones before they ring, and maybe you see patterns more quickly than the rest of us.”

  Tom grinned as he tucked the I-Ching book into his newly acquired archival bag and sealed it shut.

  “I don’t know what it is we could have missed,” I said. “There’s no way of knowing which way those jerks went.” I sniffed. “They… Wait!” Suddenly it dawned on me. “Road apples!”

  “They rode what?” asked Tom.

  “Road apples. It’s what my father calls horse manure. You can smell it! It’s fresh! Look around and find it!”

  Frankie located it about ten feet from where we were standing. It had been well hidden by the overgrown grass.

  “One big road apple in a line with two smaller ones. The horse went in the direction of the two smaller ones,” I said, feeling like I had finally contributed something.

  “How do you know this, Kemosabe?” asked Tom.

  “When I was six, I was crazy about the pony rides at Zane Grey Park. I guess they made an impression.”

  “And here I was, thinking you had nothing to offer,” said Frankie.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  She didn’t reply and took off in the direction I had indicated. We followed her, and about a hundred yards later there was some soft ground that had picked up fresh hoofprints, proving I was right. Another hundred feet and we found the parallel wagon ruts of what, in that time and place, passed for a road. We jogged along it for what might have been half a mile and finally came to a house.

  “That’s… familiar,” said Tom.

  “Yeah,” I agreed, studying the white two-story building with its steeply pitched roof. “It’s the central part of the old Willets place. I guess they eventually added wings on both sides, and solar panels, but that house is still standing back in our time.”

  “So, if that’s the Willets place, this has to be Davison Road we’re on,” reasoned Tom.

  In our time, Davison Road had some of Freedom Falls’ oldest homes on it.

  “That guy Bert said something about runners hiding out at the Coopers’,” I said. “That’s where Killbreath and his boys were going, but before they got there, there was somebody who’d pay good money for a trombone. I don’t know of any Cooper family on Davison Road. Maybe they moved away. I have no idea where their house might be.”

  “Maybe it’s not a family named Cooper,” said Tom. “Maybe it’s a business. A cooper is somebody who makes barrels.”

  “The Barrelhouse!” I said, and Tom nodded. “It’s a restaurant on Davison,” I explained to Frankie, “where the road loops down to the river. Or it will be on Davison, someday. It’s a big rambling brick place that looks like it’s been there for ages. It might have been a cooper-maker—”

  “Cooperage,” Tom corrected me.

  “—cooperage, way back when. If this is the Willets place, and we stay on Davison, it should take us about fifteen minutes to get there.”

  “Good,” said Frankie, and started walking.

  “So,” said Tom, catching up to her. “Why Fourteenth Street?”

  Frankie pursed her lips and looked up at the sky, like she didn’t really want to discuss it. But she said, “There are lots of bookstores on Fourteenth Street. At least there were in 1852. There’s a book I have to get.”

  “You mean,” I said, not believing it, “we stole the Time Trombone so you could go shopping?”

  She stopped and whirled on me with her hands on her hips.

  “We didn’t steal the Shagbolt! It belongs to me as much as it does to any member of my family! We’re using it so I can replace a rare first edition from my father’s book collection, so he doesn’t think I’m irresponsible. If he thinks I’m irresponsible, he’ll never let me become Keeper of the Shagbolt. I was going to try to convince him before we get to Louisville next week, when I turn thirteen. There was a Keeper in the eighteenth century who was fourteen, and I’m sure I’m much more mature than he was! I mean, his nickname was Barefoot Besnik! The problem is, my father still blames me for what happened to his First Folio. If he finds out I’ve lost another one of his books, he’ll never trust me!”

  “His first what?” I asked.

  “Folio!” said Tom, like she had mentioned the Holy Grail. “A First Folio is a first edition of Shakespeare’s plays. That book’s, like, four hundred years old! It would be really valuable!”

  “Your father has a First Folio?”

  “Had. My father collects old books. He’s got a trailer full of them.”

  “What happened to his First Folio?” asked Tom.

  “The pigs got it.”

  “Pigs!”

  “The carnival has racing pigs. They’re cute, about the size of a football. When I was six, I thought it would be fun if they had a tunnel to run through. So I set the First Folio up like a tent, and they ran through it. Then Iago turned around and ate it.”

  “Iago is a pig?”

  “A total glutton. There was nothing left. And it had been signed by Shakespeare!”

  “That’s impossible,” Tom assured her. “The First Folio was published after Shakespeare’s death.”

  “You really haven’t been paying attention, have you?” Frankie gave Tom a pitying look.

  “Oh!” Tom’s eyes went wide. “Right! You have a time machine.”

  “Shakespeare actually thanked my father for the loan of the book. He said he couldn’t have written the plays without it.”

  “So now we know who really wrote Shakespeare’s plays,” Tom said, awestruck.

  “Apparently nobody,” I said. “And now you’ve lost some other book of your father’s?”

  Frankie sighed, and resumed walking. “A mint-condition first edition of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, published in two volumes on March 20, 1852. Actually, I only need volume two.”

  “What happened to it?” I asked. “Did a dancing monkey poop on it?”

  “Our carnival doesn’t have dancing monkeys. I was reading it as part of my lessons, and two nights ago somebody snuck into my room and took it.”

  “Really?” I said, trying to keep
the disbelief out of my voice. “Are you sure your dog didn’t eat it?”

  “I don’t have a dog! Something woke me around midnight, and there was this tall, thin woman dressed all in black, like a ninja—even her head was wrapped; all I could see was her eyes—and she was taking the book off my desk. Just volume two.”

  “Maybe she’d already read volume one,” said Tom.

  “Did you scream?” I asked Frankie.

  “I would have, but she turned to me and raised a finger to her lips. That, and the dagger on her belt, made me think I’d be smart to keep my mouth shut. She unbolted my door and let herself out. I lay awake for hours after that. It was very upsetting.”

  “So a ninja snuck in through a window just to steal the second half of a book? That makes no sense!” There was something wrong with her story. I thought maybe she was covering up some new stupid thing she’d done, and my idea about a pooping monkey might be closer to the truth.

  “And I so want to be the Shagbolt’s Keeper!”

  “Does it have a current Keeper?” asked Tom.

  “If it does,” I said, “they’re not very good at it.”

  “There hasn’t been a Keeper for the past three years!” Frankie was indignant. “Ever since my cousin Donka married an outsider, left the carnival, and bought a house in Pasadena. My father thinks the world has changed enough that we no longer need the Shagbolt with us at all times, but he’s wrong! There should always be a Keeper of the Shagbolt, who practices with it and is ready to play it at a moment’s notice whenever danger threatens.”

  “What kind of danger are we talking about?” asked Tom, glancing around. The trees loomed close to the road. Anything could be lurking behind them.

  “Back in 1940, my great-grandfather was Keeper of the Shagbolt,” said Frankie, and there was no doubting the pride in her voice. “The Camlos were camped out in the Ardennes forest in Belgium, and Nazi troops came crashing through the trees and surrounded them. My family would have been killed, or thrown into a concentration camp, but Great-Granddad played eight notes on the Shagbolt, and everybody—forty-three Camlos and eighteen others related by marriage—got whisked away to a safe place five thousand years earlier. They had all agreed to think about the Salisbury Plain in England on the day of the summer solstice, and that’s where they went. They stayed for a few weeks and made friends with the local people, and after they left, the locals built a stone monument where their camp had been.”

  “Stonehenge!” said Tom.

  “Actually, the locals, in their language, called it the Blocks o’ Fun Adventure Park. But yes. Stonehenge.”

  “Every one of those Camlos had a psychic talent?” I asked.

  “You’re not allowed to marry into my family unless you do,” said Frankie, and her eyes narrowed. Then she shook her head as if something had upset her. The sound of wagon wheels crunching on gravel came from the bend behind us.

  “Off the road!” Frankie snapped, and pushed us into the bushes.

  A farm wagon laden with hay trundled into view, going in the direction we were headed. It was pulled by two muscular gray workhorses and driven by a drowsy-looking farmer. When it was almost past, Frankie launched herself from our hiding place, caught the tailgate, and chinned herself into the hay. Tom and I broke cover the moment we realized what she was doing, grabbed the tailgate, and joined her.

  We worked our way into the hay, then stuck out our heads along the wagon’s left side, where, sooner or later, the cooperage would come into view. The side-view mirror had yet to be invented, so the wagon’s driver had no way of knowing we were there.

  “We probably could’ve gotten there faster on foot,” said Frankie quietly. “But the way we look, and the way we’re dressed, we’re much better off if we stay hidden. Keep your eye out for any place where Killbreath might have sold the Shagbolt.”

  We passed a tiny house with a ramshackle chimney, and it reminded me of something that had been bugging me.

  “Uncle Tom’s Cabin?” I said. “The slavery book?”

  “What about it?”

  “My social studies teacher says it’s a bad book. He says it shows the slaves as either happy-go-lucky idiots who are always dancing around, or as stupidly loyal to the monsters who think they own them. Why would you be reading that?”

  “Uncle Tom’s Cabin convinced a lot of people that slavery should end,” Tom said before Frankie could open her mouth. “It’s an important piece of history.”

  “That’s probably why my father put it on my reading list,” said Frankie.

  Tom pointed at the house we were passing. It was an elegant two-story job with a white picket fence and a neatly lettered sign saying MUSIC LESSONS.

  “There might be somebody there who’d buy a trombone,” he said.

  “Remember this spot,” said Frankie. “We’ll double back if we don’t see any place more likely.”

  We passed three girls in long dresses who were leaning against a rail fence near the roadside as if they were watching a parade. Their faces were hidden in the depths of their bonnets. One of them started to wave, but the one next to her slapped her hand down. The wagon swayed as it rounded a bend, and they were gone.

  “WHOA THERE!” bellowed a gruff and alarmingly familiar voice. We pulled our heads back into the hay and rearranged the strands so we could still look out and see what was going on.

  The slave catcher who had originally lassoed Tom—we had later heard Killbreath call him Zack—had stepped out from behind a tree as the wagon approached, and leveled a shotgun at the driver. The wagon came to an abrupt stop.

  “What is this?” demanded the driver.

  “Jus’ hold it right there, Mr. Collins. Stay where you are!” said Zack, dropping the shotgun into the crook of one arm and, with the other, snatching up a pitchfork from where it leaned against the tree.

  He strode to the side of the wagon and drove the fork into the hay like he was harpooning a whale.

  CHAPTER 10

  Runners

  Collins slipped from his perch atop the wagon, raised a cloud of dust as his boots hit the road, and approached Zack angrily.

  “What the Sam Hill do you think you’re doing? You’ve no right!”

  Zack thrust the fork in again, about a foot back from the location of his first poke.

  “Got every right, Mr. Collins,” said Zack amiably. “I’s a bonny-fide slave catcher, thanks to that ol’ 1850 Compromise. It’s the oldest trick in the book, hidin’ in a wagonload o’ hay!”

  I realized something had felt familiar, even as we were jumping on the wagon. It was the oldest trick in the book. I had seen it many times on TV. Zack lunged at the hay a third time. At the rate he was going, in a few more lunges, one of us was going to be losing an eye, or possibly gaining a nostril. All three of us wiggled deeper.

  “I object,” growled Collins, catching the fork in mid-thrust and forcing Zack back toward the roadside.

  “On what grounds?”

  “I don’t like my hay all fluffed up and airy. It’ll make the cows burp. Nothin’ I hate more than the sound of burping cows. Unless it’s the self-serving drivel of a slave catcher!”

  Zack yanked the fork from Collins’s grip and sidled away far enough so he could raise the shotgun. Collins looked down the twin muzzles, put up his hands, and stepped back.

  “Sorry ’bout that,” snarled Zack. “But I got a job to do!”

  He speared the hay again, close to the middle.

  “Might be they’s people hidin’ in here and you know nothin’ ’bout it,” Zack said generously. “Might be.”

  He poked the fork in yet again, and this time a voice that wasn’t Frankie’s or Tom’s or mine went, “Oww!”

  Zack looked triumphant. He started to pull out the fork, but before he could, it was yanked from his hand and disappeared into the hay. He brought his shotgun to his shoulder and aimed at the spot where it had vanished.

  “All right, you!” he barked, but before he could continue,
the fork’s handle shot out and hit him in the eye. He staggered back, and Collins grabbed the shotgun and tried to wrestle it away from him.

  As a test of strength, it was pretty even. The men were in a tug-of-war over the gun, and circled around each other down the length of the wagon and then butted up against the side of one of the horses. The horse barely moved, although its tail flicked as though a fly might be bothering it. Collins and Zack rotated around each other one more time and came even with the horse’s head, the shotgun pointed skyward and trembling next to the animal’s ear.

  I was pretty sure I knew what was about to happen, and it wasn’t going to be good. I grabbed Frankie’s hand and felt around for Tom’s, hoping we’d have time to jump before—

  The gun went off.

  Zack and Collins were knocked to the ground as the terrified horse reared, whinnying. The second horse reared, too, and then both animals were galloping full speed down the road, the driverless wagon careening madly behind them like a runaway locomotive. I tumbled over Frankie and crashed into Tom, and then the two of us slid back into her, like we were playing Twister in an actual twister.

  The wagon lurched violently, half the hay fell out, and we broke the surface of the remaining hay like three swimmers coming up for air. I tried a backstroke to get to the front, but I was tossed to one side instead. My stomach pitched one way, I pitched the other, and I tried not to get seasick, but it wasn’t easy.

  Once I righted myself, I realized that we were going too fast to jump. If the horses collided with anything bigger than a sapling, body parts would fly through the air, and not all of them would belong to the horses.

  “We have to stop this!” I shouted over the deafening clatter of spinning wheels and thundering hooves. We were clutching the wagon’s sides—Frankie and me on the right, Tom on the left—trying to keep the vicious swaying from knocking us back down.

  “How?” Frankie screamed back at me.