by Eric Black
But then something happened in 1874 that William could not explain. Wilson became very ill and one day as William came by to check on him, Wilson did not answer when William knocked on his door. Concerned, William entered the room and there found Woodrow Wilson dead in his room.
William was confused. The future President of the United States had just died. Did I cause this by coming back here? he questioned himself. Not sure of what do to, William returned to the 22nd Century.
The week after William turned eighteen, he was watching the news and saw a story on a new technology that was being developed that would allow the human subconscious be altered, allowing memories to be changed. This was very controversial and the news reporter told the audience that the technology would be used for victims of extremely violent crimes to help them deal with what had happened by erasing those memories from their mind.
William turned off the television. He had a plan.
He traveled to the future, to a time when the technology described on the news had been tested fully and put into place. In the future, that technology had evolved as the developers realized the subconscious would reject the erasing of memories if there were no new memories to take their place. The later versions of the technology allowed new memories to be inserted.
William stole the technology and traveled back to 1874. He used the technology on Woodrow Wilson’s family, replacing memories of their son with memories of himself.
In 1874, William, as Woodrow Wilson, entered Princeton University and followed history to the White House. Along the way, however, he also met Jack. He had also killed Jack. Or so he thought.
“Why, Willie,” Jack said amused, “one would think that you had seen a ghost.”
William, who was now of course Woodrow Wilson, smiled weakly. “Perhaps I have. Why are you here? Are you here to kill me?”
Jack laughed. “Willie, if I wanted to kill you, I could have done so many, many times. No, I’m not here to kill you. Although my feelings are still a bit sore from when you tried to kill me. You almost did, in fact. But you forget I can move where I please and your home century has fantastic medical technology.”
Wilson looked at Jack carefully. “So why are you here?”
Jack smiled widely. “My old friend, why don’t we start with coffee?”
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
Washington, D.C. – November 1921
“So, I noticed you’re not the President,” Jack taunted.
Anger rose in Wilson but he restrained it. Jack noticed. The underlying anger turned Jack’s taunting smile into a genuine smile. “Touchy, aren’t we?”
“What do you want with me?” Wilson asked.
Jack looked closely at Wilson, knowing his momentarily pause would gather Wilson’s attention. When he had it, he responded. “I want to help you.”
The comment surprised Wilson. “You want to help me?” He paused for a moment and looked at Jack. Then, he squinted his eyes in mistrust. “No thanks. I remember the last time you wanted to help me. I almost ended up dead. You did, too,” he said looking hard at Jack. “Unfortunately, the thought of your death was premature.”
Jack laughed as if he had anticipated the response. “Others have found I’m difficult to kill. You have the distinction of living to tell about it. You have joined very elite company,” Jack said referring to Dr. Bagster Phillips.
If Wilson was aware of whom Jack was referring, he ignored it and pressed on. “And you will find that I am as well. Nor am I a man who gives blind trust to one such as you.”
Jack scoffed. “A man such as me? You mean is a monster such as me. And make no mistake about it, I am a monster. But at some point in my life, I was merely a man. And that man lives within me still. So part of me is not such a bad guy and can be trusted.”
Wilson inhaled deeply. “Shall we continue this circle of bantering? Or would you like me to humor you and ask how you would like to help me?”
“I thought you would never ask. The couple you just visited…”
“The President and her husband? Well, her husband; she was not there.”
“Exactly who I mean. Do you know them well?”
“I know them well enough. I have made it my business to know the woman who replaced me as the President of the United States.”
Jack smiled. “And there it is: the issue that faces us both.”
Wilson looked up at Jack. “What do you mean that faces us both?”
Jack grew serious. “They do not belong here.”
“Any more than we do?” Wilson questioned.
“You don’t understand. You and I chose to be here. We developed the technology – well, you stole my design – but regardless, we made a conscious decision to move throughout time. I’m not certain they made that same decision. Libby Williams should have been the President of the United States during the 21st Century, not the 20th.”
“That much I know. They are time travelers from the future just as we are. But that doesn’t explain your comment.”
“Do you not find it strange that President Williams invites you into the White House? Does she invite other university presidents? No, she does not. So why, if she had traveled here with the intent of taking your place in history would she invite you in? She should be distancing herself as far from you as possible. It’s almost as though she feels guilty because she knows history is changed but she doesn’t know what to do about it.”
Wilson was intrigued by Jack’s story. “So you are suggesting that they came back against their will or at the very least were unaware of what was happening? If that’s true, we need to find out how they traveled and do something about it. It’s not too late for us to return everything to the way it should have been.”
Jack looked at Wilson. “You still don’t get it do you? I’m not here to try to get you back the White House. I’m here because something much deeper has happened. Something that will affect everything in the future, including me. Have you noticed anything missing from the newspapers this month?”
The month was November. “I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
“That pretty much sums up your academic career, don’t you think? Two days ago, there would have been a large public meeting in Germany in the Munich Hofbräuhaus. This meeting was to have been held by the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler was to be a key speaker.”
“I didn’t hear anything about that.”
“Of course you didn’t. That’s my point. You didn’t hear about it because it didn’t happen. But it should have. It’s a well-documented meeting in the history books. It didn’t happen because Hitler wasn’t there.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s dead.”
Wilson was visibly confused. “What do you mean dead? Did you…”
“Of course I didn’t. I may be sadistic and narcissistic but I’m no idiot. I know better than to change history.”
“So how do you know he’s dead?”
“I watched him die. And your friend, the First Gentleman, was the one who killed him.”
Wilson didn’t speak for several moments as he considered everything Jack had just told him. “They changed history. That’s why President Williams is now in the White House,” he finally said.
“They changed history,” Jack agreed. “And I have been to the future since they arrived. The United States no longer has a seat at the grown up table. Everything I worked for is now in jeopardy. They changed everything. My concern is that now something could change going forward that would stop me from discovering time travel. That would affect you as well.”
“Why do you think that would happen?”
“I’m not convinced that history is done being changed. I say that because I’m still here but a part of me feels uneasy. I should feel grounded but I do not. I feel as though I’m not entirely living out my own life.”
“I know what you mean. I’ve felt it also. So what can we do?”
“If time is not done changing, then that means every
thing that has happened is not final. If that’s the case, we can still change everything back to the way it was.”
Wilson looked at Jack. Jack’s story was good. Very convincing. He wasn’t sure he wanted to trust Jack. Not after last time.
“You don’t have a good reason to trust me,” Jack pointed out, reading Wilson’s thoughts.
“Do you blame me?” Wilson asked.
“I do not,” Jack said smiling. “But whether you trust me or not, I need you and you need me. That should provide enough even ground for us to move forward.”
Wilson considered Jack’s rationale a moment longer and then nodded his head. “Okay. What do we need to do?”
After the meeting, Jack sat alone in his room. Wilson and he had laid everything out. They had compared ideas and created the best solution for returning history to its rightful path.
But then a small thought entered Jack’s mind. The thought excited him but terrified him at the same time. Once a thought such as that entered his mind, he knew the thought would not rest until it was carried out.
His subconscious was very strong. For the most part he could control it but there were times when deep, dark thoughts that were rooted there boiled up and consumed his mind like raging fire. The thought was small, only a splinter at this point but it was there; and it had only just begun to fester.
Vincent was not the only one who had killed someone famous. Jack had done it several times. Now, he was about to add another to his list. His nagging thought was that he wanted to kill President Libby Williams.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
Washington, D.C. – November 1921
“Welcome home, dear,” Vincent said to Libby, taking her coat.
She embraced him and looked in his eyes. “Did you miss me?” she asked with a playful smile.
“I did,” he answered, smiling back.
“Why don’t you show me how much you missed me?”
“Why Madam President, are you suggesting we keep your cabinet waiting?”
“My cabinet meeting doesn’t start for another hour. Why don’t you take me to the Lincoln Bedroom?”
Vincent raised his eyebrows. “Very well. You are Commander in Chief. You order and I follow.”
Afterwards, Libby lay with her head on Vincent’s chest. Vincent looked down at her. “I really did miss you.”
“I could tell,” she smiled returning his gaze. They lay in silence for a few moments, enjoying each other’s company; then Libby asked, “Anything exciting happen while I was gone?”
“Yesterday, Woodrow Wilson came by.”
“He did? What did he want? Was his wife with him?”
“No, he mentioned that his wife was off visiting family. He’s staying at their home here in town. He just came by to talk about some policies he felt we should look at that might affect secondary education.”
“He came all the way here for that? That’s strange. I would think a meeting with some of the guys on Capitol Hill would have served him better. Unless it’s major legislation, I don’t generally get personally involved in early negotiations. Higher education is important but that’s why I have a Secretary of Education.”
Vincent thought briefly on the battle over public education a few years prior. The Department of Education had originally been created in 1867 but was demoted to a minor Office in the Department of Interior. The Department of Education under the direction of the cabinet-level position of Education Secretary would not have become a law until Jimmy Carter signed the Department of Education Organization Act in 1979. Libby pushed for the law and it passed sixty years early.
“Did anything else happen?” Libby asked, interrupting Vincent’s thoughts.
“Yes. While Wilson was here, he saw a man on the South Lawn. The agents investigated but they didn’t find anyone. They did an entire sweep.”
Libby looked alarmed. “You’re sure they did a full sweep? The last thing we need is some guy hiding in the White House.”
Vincent reassured her. “They did a full sweep. They used portable heat sensors to sweep every room for someone hiding. Plus, they checked the identification of everyone on the grounds. I don’t know, maybe there was someone standing outside of the gate and Wilson just thought they were inside.”
“Does anyone else know about this?”
“You mean any of the cabinet? No.”
“Good. I’d really like to spend the meeting talking about items that matter rather than hashing out a possible security breach. Speaking of the meeting, I’d better get going.”
Libby kissed Vincent and then left the room to brush up before her meeting. The meeting was scheduled to start in twenty minutes and Vincent knew her aides would be getting nervous that she was not yet present.
After Libby left, Vincent straightened the bed in the Lincoln Bedroom and finished dressing himself. He walked to the private kitchen area of the White House residence. He could have ordered anything he wanted from the staff but sometimes it was just nice to cook his own food.
Libby had arrived before he had a chance to eat breakfast and he was starving. He cooked two eggs sunny-side-up and made some toast to go with them. With his plate ready, he moved to the couch where he could read the newspaper.
He sat there for about an hour, getting up twice – first to put his empty plate in the sink and refill his coffee and a second trip to fill his coffee a final time. He finished reading the paper and as he did, he realized that he had lost track of time. He looked at his watch and saw that it was going on ten o’clock in the morning. He wondered how Libby’s cabinet meeting was going. It generally only lasted about an hour but sometimes drug on.
Vincent decided he would see how the morning in the White House was going for the staff and took the stairs down to the ground floor. He had just passed the Map Room when he noticed an agent walking hurriedly towards him. The agent’s face told him something was wrong.
“What is it?” Vincent asked.
“The President, sir.”
Panic began to creep into the back of Vincent’s mind. “What about her?”
“She is missing, sir.”
Vincent felt the panic move to a confused hysteria. “What do you mean missing?”
“She disappeared, sir.”
“People just don’t disappear,” Vincent corrected the agent.
“I know, sir. But she did,” the agent answered, obviously struggling to believe it himself.
“All right. Tell me what happened.”
“The cabinet meeting had just ended. The President walked into the hallway and as she did, a man appeared behind her.”
“He appeared?”
“He just appeared. There were no doors, no way he could have entered the hallway. He grabbed the President. Then, they both disappeared.”
Vincent was scared and confused. “You checked everything? You’re sure there was no way they could have ducked into a doorway?”
“No, sir,” the agent answered soberly. “She just disappeared.”
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Baltimore, Maryland – November 1921
Jack didn’t realize what he had done until it was too late.
His second life came through the discovery of time travel. With that came a life of murder under the inauspicious name of Jack the Ripper. Now that new persona had been stripped away. His slaughter of Libby Williams now changed everything.
Years prior he had been in a similar situation. He had nearly been killed by his associate Jasper before escaping to 1880s London. He arrived with only the clothes on his back, similar to the situation he was in now. He had stolen his way back into a life of luxury and entitlement and had lived a good life for nearly a decade before chance brought Scotland Yard to his doorstep.
Now was different, however. He found himself strangely unfamiliar with what to do next. Somehow he had lost the ability to move through time and worse, the basic carnal instinct that had driven him for years now escaped him.
He had somehow rediscover
ed his conscious.
Jack escaped to a suburb of Baltimore but didn’t know where to go next. The year was 1921 which was not his home year. He could go back to South Carolina but two decades later, nothing would be the same and his home may or may not be there.
He moved throughout different rural areas for a period of a week, waiting for the manhunt for the murderer of the President of the United States to become not so heightened (the man he had set up was cleared and so the hunt ensued). Jack moved during the night and slept in old sheds and barns during the day. While he was doing this, he unknowingly moved steadily southwest back towards Washington, D.C.
Jack thought on Woodrow Wilson (whose house he was now traveling towards even though he didn’t realize it) as he walked. Jack knew that if he had lost the ability to time travel then there was a good chance that Wilson would have lost that ability as well.
There were only a few other people in the world who could do what they did. He supposed it was possible that there were people who could travel through time that he had not yet come across but he doubted it. Someone from the future could always learn the technology and travel back and forth but generally when they did he was drawn to them. He couldn’t explain why he was, he just knew that he was. That was how he first met Wilson. And how he had been able to confirm that Vincent was indeed the man in the trench who had killed Hitler.
Jack had killed most of the people who were time travelers. Most of the people were harmless enough but he didn’t want to take any chances that those people might change something in history that would change everything for him. What was ironic was that he had just done that to himself.
As Jack was walking, he became aware of the direction he was traveling and he couldn’t help but feel as if something was drawing towards Washington, D.C. He tried to test this theory by turning north and as he did, he found himself running into trouble. He was beaten briefly by a couple of thugs until it was broken up by the police. He ran and found more police in the area. He turned east and west and had the same result. It was like there was something stopping him from going any direction but southwest.