Out of Time

by Deborah Truscott

  He glanced at me, then shook his head. “No. Tis far simpler to believe you rave and claw your hair.”

  “You were going to say time,” I almost whispered. “You almost said — “

  “All right, a warp, a rip in time, then, like a rabbit hole in a field.” He waved a hand vaguely, with elaborate casualness. “Which clearly cannot be. Besides, it begs the question.”

  “Which one?”

  “How did I get here? After all, if neither of us is mad, we need a workable theory, a logical, sensible explanation — one that we can actually believe — for how I got here in the first place.”

  “You didn’t get here,” I snapped at him. “You’ve always been here!”

  “Ah,” he smiled. “So I’m the madman after all.”

  “Of course you are!” I exclaimed, relieved he finally understood. “You’re nuts and I’m sane. This is the twenty-first century and you need a doctor.”

  “Today is the twentieth of October,” the Colonel countered calmly. “Seventeen hundred and seventy-seven.”

  “October?” I repeated, a thought just then occurring to me. “Then tell me, Colonel, how have autumn leaves turned green again?”

  Chapter 7

  The question rocked him hard, like a well-placed blow. He spun around, head tipped back, scanning the trees, hundreds and hundreds of them all around him, and all of them green, green, green. October could be warm, even warmer than this relatively cool June day, but by October twentieth — even in the mildest of autumns — Pennsylvania’s trees would be brilliant.

  “If you rode out of Philadelphia on an October morning, the leaves would be gold and scarlet.” I spelled it out. “They would be falling from the trees, carpeting the grass.”

  He whipped his head around, eyes wide, face chalky with shock, and stared at me. And then he started down the drive.

  “Wait!” I called. “Where are you going?”

  “To get my horse,” he said.

  I ran after him. “Wait a minute, Colonel Upton—”

  But he didn’t wait. He reached the decline where the drive sloped down rather steeply and kept on striding. His intent, I guessed, was to follow the Pike to the spot where he figured he left his horse — long ago, if you accepted his delusion, before the hedge and the shed ever existed, when a low stone wall ran along the embankment above the road.

  A road that was probably dirt or maybe gravel. A road that certainly was not paved with asphalt and marked with painted lines.

  I caught up with the Colonel at the foot of the drive just as three cars came streaking by, heading toward Philadelphia. The Colonel grabbed my arm and snatched me back from the road. When he dropped his hand I saw that it was shaking.

  “My God,” he muttered hoarsely. “My God. More horrifying than the trees!”

  I raised my eyes to his ashen face. Synapse snapped relentlessly to synapse with lightning speed, one after the other, until something in my mind unlocked. It was as if I had been struggling with a particularly tricky algebra problem that finally (and for no particular reason) made sense to me.

  Suddenly, I understood — and immediately, I wished I didn’t.

  “Colonel,” I began, reaching a hand toward his sleeve. But he didn’t hear me. An instant later he was charging down the pike and I was sprinting after him.

  “Here,” he said. “I dismounted here. That house,” he pointed. “I remember that house across the road.”

  Two more cars passed within inches of his outstretched hand, one of them sounding a horn. Skippack Pike, which had been fairly dormant all morning, chose this moment to wake up.

  I tugged at the Colonel’s arm. “This isn’t safe.” I raised my voice against the sound of oncoming vehicles. “You can’t stand out in the road like this.”

  “I remember the damned house. It was here! It’s still here!”

  “Yes, I know. It’s even older than my house, which was built in—”

  A truck roared past in a deafening explosion of wind and noise.

  “—Seventeen-fourteen,” I finished.

  Another car sped past, another horn. I wondered what we looked like, a woman in a torn dress, a man in peculiar riding clothes (with a sword at his hip), arguing suicidally on the side of the road. “This is dangerous,” I said again, and this time he let me pull him back toward the drive.

  “Do you believe me now?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer. Halfway up the drive he paused and passed his sleeve across his forehead. I could hear the shallow panting of his breath.

  “Do you?” I asked again.

  He dropped his arm. “I can’t believe you,” he said quietly. “I cannot. For that would bring to question my own sanity, and I assure you, Mrs. Finlay, I am quite sane. I cannot explain what I saw … there, on the road … but I am sane.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Do you? Do you now?” he asked, looking frankly skeptical. “Yet mere moments ago you thought I raved.”

  “I know.”

  “So now, all at once and for no particular reason, you accept that I am sane.”

  “There is a reason,” I said. “I’m just not sure I can explain it. Even to myself.”

  “Try,” he said.

  I hesitated, trying to frame a response. I was right, I realized now, when I deduced that if the Colonel were mad he would have to discount what he couldn’t explain. He’d have to do that to preserve his delusional logic. The kitchen appliances, the cars in the garage — they were easy to pass off as stage props, a trick, a manifestation of my madness. But when I pointed out the color of the leaves, he was shocked — horrified — into speechlessness.

  He hadn’t noticed the leaves before because subconsciously he couldn’t. The implications were far too terrible. But even more logical to me was his reaction. He didn’t shrug off or explain away the leaves or the cars blasting down the pike. It was completely beyond denial, beyond explanation, beyond even the mad scientist scenario that anyone could stage the seasons or animate such traffic, and he knew it. He knew it the way any sane person would know. He reacted the way any sane person would react.

  Because he was sane. Standing with him as the cars whipped down the pike, I saw his reaction and it was completely rational, perfectly normal, given the circumstances — and utterly sane.

  “Mrs. Finlay?”

  I glanced up at him, biting my lip thoughtfully.

  “Why change your mind, Mrs. Finlay?” he persisted. “I have nothing upon me, nothing to prove…” Almost absently he patted the slim pockets of his breeches. A moment later he was contemplating some coins in the palm of his right hand.

  “A half crown and three shillings.” He smiled ruefully and offered them to me.

  I shook my head. I didn’t need to see them. Coins could be gotten from any collector, clothes from a costumer, swords from an antiques dealer.

  “There would be more in my waistcoat, I’m sure,” he said, pocketing the coins. “And some papers in my coat, I imagine.” He creased his brow, thinking.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I told him, remembering the quill pen and sealing wax I bought for Sammy once in Williamsburg. It was all so relatively easy, especially if the documents didn’t need to look old. With a little practice and some talent, anyone could scribble an elegant, old-fashioned script, making lowercase s’s look like f’s. You could even buy ink mixed with iron or lampblack, and paper made of rag — if you knew the right kinds of shops, the right specialists and experts.

  The truth was, there was nothing the man could offer me that constituted proof. Nothing, but himself.

  “I believe you,” I said finally. “It doesn’t matter why.”

  He watched me, waiting for me to go on. I couldn’t. I shook my head again and the Colonel flicked his eyes away. For a long moment he studied the trees that lined the drive. “If we each believe the other sane…” he ventured cautiously, his eyes still upon the trees, “then we, ah—”

  “Each believe who and what the
other is,” I finished bravely.

  “Which presents a problem,” he said, returning his gaze to me.

  I bowed my head and pressed my fingers to my temples.

  “We have to wonder how I got here, don’t we?” he pressed on.

  Eyes closed, I nodded.

  “How?”

  I dropped my hands and raised my face. “How what?”

  Exasperated, the Colonel rolled his eyes. “How did I get here? Lord, woman, which one of us is going to say it?”

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I said darkly. “This is some sort of sanity contest. Whoever says it first, loses. Right?”

  “Says what first?”

  “That thing about the trap door. There! I said it! But you really said it first, you know, before we went out on the Pike—”

  “I said rabbit hole, damn it! I said something about, about … oh, I don’t know … a hole in time, if I recall.”

  “A rip in time. Actually, what you said was—”

  “It’s the same thing! You try my patience, madam!”

  “What if it’s true?”

  “It is true! You try me sorely. There! I said it. I admit I said it! You are the most exasperating woman I’ve ever—”

  “No. I mean about the … rip. What if the rip is really true?”

  He was silent.

  “If it’s true,” I went on quietly, “it changes everything anyone ever knew about the universe.”

  No one (aside from us, apparently) would ever think of such a thing.

  “It occurred to me…” I ventured.

  “Yes?” he prompted.

  “That it would be less horrible, somehow, if we were both…”

  He waited.

  “If both of us were simply…”

  He tapped his foot impatiently.

  “Delusional,” I finished.

  “Unsteady,” he elaborated.

  “Crazy.”

  “Mad.”

  “Nuts.”

  “Nuts,” he repeated, as if savoring the word. “Yes, indeed it would be,” he agreed thoughtfully. “But regrettably, I don’t think we are.”

  “Too bad,” I murmured faintly.

  “Indeed, it is too bad. Because if we’re sane, and this is … real,” he went on, “then I’m trapped.”

  Trapped? Dismayed, I looked at him. “Oh, God,” I said. “Oh, God. We should have thought of it right off.”

  I broke away from him and ran to the garage where I grabbed my flashlight from the glove compartment of the Accord. I flicked it on and off, checking the beam, and then ran toward the garden.

  The Colonel caught up with me before I reached it and grabbed my arm. “We should have thought of what?” he asked.

  “The shed,” I told him. “You go back the way you came.”

  I saw the color drain from his face. “Damn,” he said, and took off across the lawn with me at his heels. We hit the shed door at a dead run, flung it open, and charged to the far end. I switched the flashlight on and swept the beam around, illuminating cobwebs, dust and dark corners, boxes on the floor and clutter on the shelves, even the small trunk the Colonel tripped over moments before I discovered him. We beat the walls frantically with our hands, got down on our knees and felt around the floor, ran our fingers along beams and boards, not sure what we were searching for but searching anyway. We paid close attention to the side wall that rested above the Pike, exploring every inch of it, the flashlight beam held close to its face. For several long minutes the only noise was the sound of our hands and feet and breath. Then I sneezed and the Colonel grabbed my arm.

  We were on our knees at that point, examining the floorboards, and his touch startled me.

  “What?” I hissed.

  “You’ve got to get out of here.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Suddenly he stood and jerked me to my feet. “I just realized it,” he said, pushing me in the direction of the door. “You can’t be in here—”

  I tried to push his hands away. “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “Don’t argue with me,” he ordered, lifting me bodily over the threshold. “Get out and stay out.”

  I stared.

  “If you find the portal, you may very well fall through it.”

  The portal, he called it. A laundry shoot through the centuries, from one time to another. My spine prickled. In the warmth of the afternoon, goosebumps raced up my arms. The Colonel disappeared back into the shed and I sat down on the stone step in front of the door, and waited.

  Chapter 8

  I don’t know how long I sat there. I think I must have been hypnotized by the buzz of summer insects until a particularly noisy car rushed down Skippack Pike, the sound of its engine penetrating the hedge. It was then that I noticed the shadows lengthening across the lawn.

  After a while the Colonel came out of the shed, pushed by me (since I was sitting in the doorway) and disappeared around the side. I heard him thumping on the wall of the shed, the one he fell through (if our interpretation of events was correct), and then there was a long period of silence. Finally, I glimpsed his boots beside me and looked up to see him leaning his shoulder wearily against the wall by the door.

  “Nothing,” he said, answering my unspoken question.

  “I guess that’s obvious. You’re still here.”

  He collapsed on the ground beside me, elbows resting on bent knees, head in his hands. He was a mess, streaked with dirt and dust, and I knew I didn’t look any better. I lifted my hands and saw they were black with grime.

  “We need to clean up,” I said, but neither of us moved, and the shadows continued their march across the lawn.

  Finally I stood and touched his shoulder. He raised his face, etched with fatigue and barely suppressed horror.

  “Come on,” I said, and held out my hand.

  He shook his head.

  I knew he wanted to stay close to the elusive trap door, but I had an awful feeling that we weren’t going to find it. Maybe it only opened one way. Maybe it shifted around randomly. Maybe, it didn’t exist at all. But it had, it had. I believed that it had.

  “I don’t understand it,” he said, as if reading my thoughts. “I went over every square inch. It has to be there. I don’t know why it won’t let me back through.”

  I tipped my head toward the house, a silent plea. For a moment he hesitated, then he rose, knees creaking slightly, and crossed the lawn. I followed. At the garden he turned into the gravel path, and stopped.

  “Snapdragons,” he said.

  I walked with him down the path pointing out coral bells, coreopsis and columbine with eerie calm as if he were an ordinary weekend guest, and for a moment the abyss of time between us dropped away. At the center of the garden where one path intersected the other, I turned left. “Iris, “ I said serenely, continuing the inventory. “Saxtile. I love saxtile. And larkspur, which has seeded itself.”

  We entered the house via the kitchen door. I led him silently through the dining room with its bright, west-facing windows and out toward the front of the house into the hall, up the main stairs that took us to the large, cheerful landing in the oldest part of the house. He turned and looked out one of two east-facing windows, which gave a view of the garden we just walked through, the large side lawn, the shed at its far edge, and the hedge that shielded the property from the road.

  I crossed the landing and opened a door to a simply furnished room that overlooked the road. “This is my uncle’s room. I think you’ll find it comfortable.”

  He turned away from the window but remained out on the landing, making no move to enter the room. I think it was only just now occurring to him that he would have to sleep somewhere.

  “And this is the bath.” I opened another door that faced the landing and entered an immaculate, sunny room that had once been a small bedroom. I looked out at the Colonel, and waited.

  Almost reluctantly, he entered the room. There were two bathrooms in the house, both on the
second floor, both created out of small bedrooms. This one, like the one I used at the other end of the house, featured a claw-footed tub, a pedestal sink with a mahogany framed mirror above it, and a toilet with an overhead tank and a chain you pulled to flush. The room was big enough to accommodate a chest of drawers containing towels and toiletries and a small boudoir chair upholstered in blue chintz. A braided rug in blue graced the polished wood floor and there were starched, white curtains at the window. A potted geranium sat on the deep sill.

  “More wonders of your century,” he commented. I resisted the urge to tell him that most of the wonders in this room might very well date to the nineteenth century.

  “Taps,” he added, indicating the faucets. “And drains. I would guess you have a cistern in the attic to provide a gravity-fed flow of water. But someone must haul the water up there. Or pump it.” He looked at me. “How do you do that, without servants?”

  I said something about electric pumps, water mains and sewer lines. Then I flipped a switch, and four wall-mounted lamps sprang to life, startling him. He couldn’t know they were antiques.

  “If you would like to bathe,” I said, “I’ll find you some soap and towels.”

  The Colonel pried his eyes from the lights and looked down at his boots and breeches, and then at the cuffs of his shirt. Meanwhile I rummaged through the chest of drawers, pulling out towels, shampoo and soap, an unopened package of Old Spice deodorant, a new toothbrush and a half empty tube of Crest. A man’s vintage ivory-handled brush and matching comb lay on a tray on top of the dresser along with a container of dried, cracked shaving soap, a stiff, wooden-handled soap brush, and an old safety razor. A lovely old shaving mirror stood off to one side. Uncle Bennett had never made the leap to disposable razors, let alone electric ones — but even so, he was light years ahead of the Colonel, whose idea of men’s toiletries was probably limited to a straight razor, some lemon scented soap, and a toothbrush made of bone and bristle.

  The Colonel came up behind me and cautiously inspected my findings.

  “I’ll lay out clean clothes on your bed.”

  “Thank you,” he told me gravely. He clasped his hands and raised them, touching his extended index fingers to his nose. “I suppose you were serious about the servants,” he said.