Demon's Well

by E. R. Mason

  Crews were already fighting the fires. As Skyla and Jax picked their way through the carnage in the direction from which they had come, everyone else was hurrying along in the opposite direction. It was very difficult to make out one building from another. The entire area was devastated on both sides of what little street remained.

  Jax pointed out the spot he believed was where they had lost Remy. A crew was already working flames still erupting twenty feet in the air. There was no way to get near the structure. As they stood and stared, someone in a uniform wearing a helmet with CD emblazoned on it stopped and spoke. “What are you folks hoping for?” he asked sympathetically.

  Skyla responded. “Our friend was in that building. He didn’t get out in time.”

  The man pulled a notepad and fragment of a pencil from his back pocket. “Name?” he asked.

  “Remy Summerfield,” replied Skyla. “He was dressed in dungarees and a grey sweatshirt. He’s 19 years old, brown hair and a little bit heavy.”

  “I’ll record it,” said the man. “They will be on the look-out for him. Is there any contact information?”

  “No, sir. We’ll just keep checking back. Is there anywhere we can still get a room?” asked Skyla.

  “Those will be hard to come by with all the new refugees. If you have money you can probably get a room at the Barrington. Otherwise ask for the nearest shelter. They’ll help you.”

  Skyla turned to Jax. He was staring with a look of death at the burning ruins. “Let’s go, Jax. Let’s find some place to try to get it together.”

  Jax suddenly pushed away from her. He took a few quick steps to the side, bent over and threw up into a pile of brick and rubble. Skyla caught up and grabbed his arm. She pulled him away and headed for a place in the street where it was easier to walk. As they wound their way through the devastation, Jax did not try to look back. He marched awkwardly along like the living dead.

  One or two miles of walking put the worst of it behind. Large parts of the city remained untouched. But even though the area had been missed by the bombing, crowds of wounded people were gathering here and there or continuing in exodus farther into the city. Far in the distance, Skyla spotted a large sign that read, “The Barrington.”

  By the time they reached the hotel, the lobby was packed. As many people seemed to be leaving as were entering. Skyla reached the desk fully expecting the clerk to say no vacancy, but to her surprise there was a luxury room available. The stressed out clerk balked when Skyla did not have cash to offer but quickly changed his mind when she asked him to place a large number of gold coins in the hotel safe until she could convert them. He smiled, handed them a key to a safe deposit box and mumbled something about the elevators not working. As Skyla took the room key, she noticed a newspaper the clerk had been reading. Most of the date at the top of the page was smudged but she could still make out the year: 1944.

  In the second floor room, Jax collapsed on the bed, and covered his red eyes with one arm. Skyla sat beside him and placed a hand on his chest.

  “We’ve got to hold it together,” said Skyla softly.

  He raised his arm and looked at her. “I’m sorry, Sky. I didn’t have a father, but I had a brother. That’s what he was to me.”

  “I understand. There’s no getting over a thing like this, not for a long time. I cared about him too. But we both need to put off our mourning until later. There’s a lot to do now. We’re here. That Nazi ship was from World War II and that’s where we are now. We’ve finally jumped all the way back to the beginning. There won’t be any more jumps. We can destroy that thing now.”

  Jax pushed himself up into a sting position. “How can we do anything at all? How do we even get to Demon House, never mind what might be going on there?”

  “Can you guess what time we’ve ended up in?”

  “Are you kidding? It’s kind of hard to miss. I’d say we’re smack in the middle of the Battle of Britain.”

  “I saw a paper last night that said 1944. That means no more throw backs. We can set up and take our time neutralizing that ship.”

  “With what, Sky? We’ll have trouble just getting what we need just to drop down into that well never mind everything else that’s happening.”

  “We can get what we need. I have an ace in the hole. I’m going in the shower and wash the dirt out of my hair unless you need to go first.” Skyla pushed herself up and raised one eyebrow at him.

  “I could use just a minute in there.”

  Jax emerged from the bathroom and nodded an all-clear. Without speaking, Skyla brushed past and headed in, shutting the door behind her.

  Later, when the pair had recovered some semblance of control, they went to the hotel desk, sipped free tea and took care of finances. The remainder of the morning was devoted to finding a vehicle to buy or rent, an undertaking which was said to often be unachievable. Acquiring anything with inflated tires was apparently too much to hope for. They walked more city streets than they could count, nearly asked too many questions of untrustworthy strangers and just as Skyla was about to give up, she spotted “For Sale,” written in the windshield dust on a beat up Dodge model VC pickup parked between two decrepit buildings. The owner was an old grey-hair, cockney with a beard and well-worn garage coveralls. After a dozen repeated questions trying to understand him, he finally waved off negotiations, took the money gleefully, and seemed intent on the bar across the street.

  With transportation secured, Jax was dropped off at a military surplus shop to find climbing equipment while Skyla made a quick trip to pick up other necessities. When she returned, Jax climbed into the truck to find something unexpected on the seat between them. It was a silver metallic container the size of a small suitcase. Skyla gave him a warning glance and unlatched it. Inside, a capsule-shaped device so polished its surface was mirror-like was tightly packed in foam. She carefully lifted it out and inspected it. In the center, a small readout screen above an abbreviated keypad kept refreshing its data every few seconds. Skyla gently placed the device back in its holder.

  “What is it?” asked Jax.

  “Here’s the deal,” she said. “It’s called a Z-particle generator. We place it within 10 feet of that ship’s internal core, and then we have 30 minutes to be out of the way before it goes off. It will not make a sound. It will instantaneously delete any matter for 50 feet in every direction. That’s how I have it set up. I can change that if I need to. It will leave a perfectly smooth round hole in that area. In this case, a new section of cavern will be created. There will be nothing left of the device or the ship. Neither will ever have existed.”

  “What sets it off?”

  “Type 3-2-1 into the keypad and run.”

  “How do you know it won’t go off accidentally on these torn up roads?”

  “It gives off a rapid, nasty-sounding tone when it gets near a temporal signature then a steady tone when it’s armed. You won’t want to hang around.”

  “And I should not ask where this thing came from.”

  “Not now.”

  “You said it’s 1944. How could you possibly have come up with a device like that?”

  “Okay, if you must know, it was home delivery.”

  “Oh, please!”

  “My people have a special office for situations like these. It’s been in existence for many decades. I called in with my phone yesterday and even though they do not know me, I have a password that lets them know I’m from the future working on a time anomaly and that they need to provide me with anything I need. It is just as important that they not know the future, so my contact with them has to be very limited. But they’re the ones who provided this. So, home delivery.”

  “Why’d you wait till now?”

  “It was too dangerous to carry something like this with us. We might have been separated from it during a throw back. Now that we’re all the way back to the beginning of the time anomaly, there’s no danger of that. Plus, I wasn’t exactly sure of what we needed until now.”


  “You really think you can get us close enough to place that thing?”

  “I have a plan. It’s a good one.”

  “May I hear it?”

  “If Demon House is occupied, we’re going to do something to cause an emergency evacuation, something so frightening whoever is there will run for cover. We can open the storm doors with bolt cutters and be down in the well in 15 minutes flat. I’ve timed the whole thing in my head. Once the generator is placed, we’ll climb out and it won’t matter if we’re discovered or not. When the generator goes off, no one at Demon House will be harmed, and we will be thrown back to our own time leaving any one there wondering what happened.”

  “You are one devious woman, you know that?”

  “Why, thank you. Let’s get going.”

  “Where to next?”

  “We head for Demon House but we’ve got to be careful. We need to stay out of sight and take a look. We need to see what’s happening there. We’ll park in the woods again so we can hike to edge of the forest and get a good look. Are you ready?”

  “To drive around on bumpy roads with a bomb on the seat next to me? I don’t know. Let me check my schedule.”

  The trip to Demon House turned out to be more of a challenge than either of them had expected. Three different streets were bombed out and impassable. On many other streets, crews and machines were busy clearing debris, causing long wait times. When they finally gained the open road, Jax felt just as disheartened. The beautiful countryside that led to Demon House was now an unkempt barren wasteland. From time to time there were giant craters in the fields along the road, compliments of errant German bombs.

  Jax’s glanced at Skyla. She was appraising the world with equal disdain. “Sky, I want to understand more about this. Tell me this: Say we had been driving at 50 miles per hour and a time wave hit. We’re transported back to a time when we did not have the car. Are we thrown through the air at 50 miles an hour before we smash into the ground?”

  Skyla replied matter-of-factly. “Inertia does not time travel. Each moment you are driving the car, you are in a new position with respect to the Earth. You would be transported back in time to exactly the same spot you were when the time wave hit you. If you were sitting in a car and it is no longer there, you would drop to the ground on your butt, but you would not be speeding along at fifty miles per hour. Got it?”

  “So if I was flying in an airplane at 10,000 feet, I would fall to my death?”

  “Yes.”

  “Wow!”

  “Yes, this is serious business. Dangerous business. We’ve been taking chances you didn’t even know about. We’ve been lucky so far.”

  “This is so important you’d risk your life and mine.”

  “Actually our lives were already at risk. Everyone’s life is at risk as long as a corruption in time exists.”

  “So you’re saying a person is always transported back in time to the same spot in space they were originally at?”

  “It’s complicated. No one understands it completely. You’re not actually transported back to the same spot in space. If I remember my early tutoring days, Earth moves in orbit around the sun at something like 66,000 miles per hour. So the Earth is constantly turning and moving in orbit. The solar system is also moving with the galaxy. The galaxy is moving through the cosmos. If you were truly thrown back to the original point in space, you’d probably be off the Earth completely and left hanging in the vacuum of space somewhere.”

  “So time itself has some special properties of its own then?”

  “Wow! I’m impressed. That’s well put. Great philosophers have been considering the characteristics of time and space for centuries.”

  As they turned off the main road, Demon House came into view far in the distance. There was yet another surprise. The place was surrounded by fence and razor wire with soldiers patrolling the grounds. Demon House had become a military installation.

  Skyla parked in the woods as planned. She grabbed the Z-particle device, climbed out, and handed it over to Jax. Together they quietly made their way to the forest edge where they could see Demon House through the high chain link security fence. Demon House now had an array of antenna systems installed around the grounds with one or two on the highest roof.

  “This is the best place I can think of to hide the generator,” said Skyla.

  “And why are we hiding it here?”

  “So that either of us can retrieve it when the time is right.”

  “You’re thinking it will be here waiting here for us no matter what happens.”

  “When we’re ready to move on Demon House, it will be close by for either of us.”

  “Why do you keep saying either of us?”

  “It means if something happens to one of us, the other one must get this done.”

  “Nothing’s going to happen to either of us, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “We need to round up enough stones and bushes to hide it here. If you’d start that, I’m going to circle around the fence line and do a quick check on the outside cellar entrance, okay?”

  “You sure you don’t want me to do that instead?”

  “No. On the outside chance I’m spotted or caught I can talk my way out of it much better than you can.”

  “That I’d like to hear.”

  Skyla crouched down and trotted off as though the matter was settled. Jax shook his head and began looking for the best spot to hide the device.

  When her surveillance was complete, and the Z-particle generator well hidden they headed back to the truck and hit the road. The ride back to the hotel quickly became a planning session.

  Jax had more questions than answers. “So when we place that bomb in the vehicle, exactly what happens to us?”

  “Don’t call it a bomb, okay? If anyone ever accidentally overheard us it might attract the wrong kind of attention. We’re at war remember.”

  “Right. But if we are able to plant the thing, I’ve got to know what happens.”

  “Every person that was infected by that ship’s temporal radiation will be thrown forward to the farthest point in the future they had reached before the time jumps began. There they will continue on into a normal future. The radiation in them will have become inert and harmless.”

  “Are you saying it will be like nothing ever happened?”

  “No. They will remember everything, but in most cases they’ll think it was a dream or something. They’ll shrug it all off eventually. Any injuries they incurred while trapped outside their timeline will still be there, adding to their confusion. Any changes they caused in the timeline will also still be in effect.”

  “And the skeletons in the basement of Demon House?”

  Skyla dared a glance at Jax. “I’m sorry, Jax. Destroying that ship will not resurrect those who died.”

  “So if the victims all remember everything that happened to them, they could have two sets of memories like you’ve been saying.”

  “Yes, but we don’t know how many victims besides us there are. None of those people down in the cavern made it. Maybe there are no other victims, or if there are, maybe the changes they caused are minor. They may only end up with feelings of déjà vu or something like that.”

  “But still, some could die or be mentally injured by this big reset we’re going to do, right?”

  “There’s no choice. We have to do it. We just have to hope the corruption that’s been done so far isn’t too extensive.”

  Thoughts of coming events made for a somber ride the rest of the way back. In the hotel room, Skyla escaped again to the shower. She emerged in a white, cotton hotel robe and motioned to Jax that the shower was his. Jax closed the bathroom door and tried to wash away his disquiet in the steamy hot water. He emerged wrapped in a towel to find Skyla sitting on the bed reading a newspaper that had been left outside the door. Jax headed for his clothes on the bed.

  Skyla interrupted. “This paper says it’s March 27, 1944.” She wa
tched for his reaction.

  “Swell,” replied Jax.

  “The war will end soon. Hitler must have been really desperate during this time. That’s why they launched that ship without really knowing what they were doing. It means we must be in the right time and place.”

  Jax could only think of Remy. “Tell me something, Sky. How did I get pulled into this? Was it just by accident or something?”

  “Just the opposite. It was the Diamond Maze game.”

  “The Diamond Maze game? It was because I was one of only seven people to beat it?”

  “You were the only person to beat it.”

  “But the winners list . . .”

  “All falsified names. You were the only one to win. The other names were put there by my people so you wouldn’t go crazy telling too many others how you were the only one to beat it.”

  “The Diamond Maze game?”

  “It was designed to locate just the right person for this mission. The game was created to test many things about the person playing it. It matched you to the profile needed for this particular job. Once we had your name, I enrolled in your school to link up with you.”

  “So everything you’ve told me has been a lie.”

  “Everything I told you was a lie, and everything I told you was the truth, depending on your point of view.”

  “Every time I learn something more about you, my brain ends up doing back flips. Why did you allow Remy to come along then?”

  “Trying to leave him behind would have been difficult. I needed you. Coming between the two of you would have been a bad way to start.”

  “Well if your people are so advanced, why didn’t they just charge into Demon House and find and destroy that thing?”

  “You’ve seen how difficult it is. That would only have resulted in a dozen people thrown around in time, changing history, repeatedly jumping farther back, an impossible mess to fix. We know from experience the best way is with two people well-matched for the job. And wherever the mission takes place, it is best to have someone from that area who knows all the ins and outs of that society.”