Allergic To Time

by Crystal Gables

  A warm breeze of some sort swept against us all, blowing out from a duct. It felt like a heater. That damn lair was always so hot, like an old person’s home. The crazy amount of electricity he must have used, just to keep an underground dungeon warm.

  “So are you gonna tell us?” Rob asked. “About your mum?”

  I let out a tiny little laugh, mostly because I was disbelief about the words I was about to utter. “My mum.” I said, leaning my head back against the flat concrete, which was cool in comparison to the heat of the air. “My father killed her.”

  Silence.

  “What?” Martin asked.

  I nodded, feeling the stifling warm breeze in my face, and becoming dimly aware of something buzzing in the background. “Yep. At least, I am pretty sure that is what happened.”

  Before the other two could ask any further questions, the distant buzzing noise became much louder. The sound gradually intensified until the vibration of it filled the entire room, shaking the walls of the cage we were all trapped in.

  “What the hell is that?” Martin asked.

  “Oh my god,” Robert mumbled. “Bloody hell. Not again.” I felt him scrabbling around, trying to stand up.

  “WHAT?” I yelled, over the buzzing, which was growing louder by the second. But by that stage it was so loud I couldn’t hear his response, if there even was one.

  A sudden bolt of blue light flashed, briefly illuminated the room, and I saw it — for a split second, before it was gone, before the light went away - I saw the entire room disappear before my eyes.

  The next thing I remembered was being outside in the glaring white sun, heat beating down on the steaming hot asphalt below me as I fell to my knees, gasping for air, unable to breathe.

  PART TWO

  (3 Months/3 Days Later)

  Chapter Eighteen.

  I woke up to a bright blue light, in a darkened hospital room

  Around me I heard the sounds of hospital machinery: a beeping noise, a buzzing noise. There was something whirling. I reached my hand up: there was a mask over my face. I tried to pull it off, as I started to panic - I managed to get it an inch away from my mouth, but it was still attached to me. I let it go and it fixed back around my nose and mouth. Even with the mask back on I was struggling for air, each laboured breath a fight for oxygen.

  A billion thoughts hit me at once. I struggled to turn my head around in the bed, to get a better look at the room. Even the effort of lifting my body up with my elbows was too much — my lungs were ragged, unable to carry out any task beyond what which was absolutely necessary. I let my body fall back onto the bed and shut my eyes. I squeezed them shut and tried to block out the pain in my lungs, whilst trying to clear my head. I had to think properly.

  Where were the others? I was the only one in the otherwise empty room. Had they survived? Would I survive? I cursed myself for not realising that this would be the inevitable outcome of our trip to Nelson Bay: what else could I have possibly expected to happen when we decided to visit the lair?

  Then one other thought hit me like a ton of bricks: WHAT TIME WAS IT?

  If my breathing wasn’t already strained by that stage, it would have been anyway as the gravity of that question hit me. I opened my eyes and looked around the room again, this time more frantically. There were no obvious clues: if I didn’t know better I would have sworn that I was in the same hospital bed that Robert Smith had been in earlier that week. The same familiar blue light bathed me. Oh God, I thought, catching myself: earlier which week? What if I’d been sent forward in time, years, decades even? Exiled to a time whereI didn’t know anyone, just like Robert had been, where my friends and family were dead, having died with the mystery of my disappearance haunting them forever.

  But the room. I tried to calm myself down and looked around me. If I had gone too far forward in time, the room would look different.

  ...Wouldn't it?

  ***

  I must have lost consciousness for a while, because the next thing I knew I was waking up again. I felt a lot calmer this time, and thankfully, each new breath I took didn’t feel make my lungs feel as though they were about to burst apart. I was able to move my head slightly, so I turned it towards the window on my left hand side, to see the old familiar blue-tinged panes of glass.

  Shit, I thought. I need to get out of here.

  ***

  There were heavy footsteps coming from down the hallway, towards my room. I stiffened in my bed, prepared for the worst. The door opened, and a slither of light peeked in, leaving a rectangle of yellow to appear for just a moment before the door was hurriedly shut again. The heavy footsteps began to head towards my bed. I couldn’t see properly in the dark, but a dim fear crept into my stomach.

  I tried to move in my bed, to free myself from the machines that were keeping me breathing, and quite possibly, alive. I prayed for some superhuman strength to allow me to pull myself up, so that I could leap off the bed and kick whoever it was right in the head. It was probably Nurse Bianca, ready to murder me. The man in black wouldn’t be far behind. They would never let me escape to tell everyone the truth, the awful truth, the one that, for some reason, no one was allowed to know about: that time travel was not only theoretically possible, but that it happened all the time. The secret that they killed people for — not just people, time travellers. And now I was a time traveler.

  The dark figure headed straight towards my bed in a quick blur of purple. I only had seconds left to live. The tubes that allowed the oxygen flow to my lungs didn’t allow me to scream.

  I began to twist and turn, trying to break free, still trying to scream out through the oxygen mask. “HELP!” I called, although only a muffled sound came out. I started to kick my legs out, trying to hit the person in the face —

  “Anna!” a deep, British-inflected voice called out to me. “Jesus, stop kicking!”

  Robert?

  I had never been so pleased to see anyone in my entire life. My racing heart beat began to settle, and I felt a smile creep onto my lips. I pointed at my mouth, towards the mask, and shook my head at Robert, trying to let him know that I couldn’t speak.

  “I know you can’t talk in an oxygen mask you idiot! I’ve been there, remember?” He took a seat next to my bed and grabbed my hand.

  I cursed the fact that I had no way of speaking to him: I needed to ask if he was alright. And if he was alright, why was he alright? Why was he walking around, able to breath to air just fine? A second trip through time ought to have killed him. I wasn’t sure how he was still upright and breathing.

  “Anna,” he said, gripping my hand tighter. “Thank god you’re alive.”

  Holy heck, I thought, I could have died. So I was actually lucky to be there, breathing at all, even if it was thanks to the assistance of the bloody machine I couldn’t escape from. I gripped his hand back.

  “Hey, it’s alright.” His tone was soothing.

  Where’s Martin? I thought. I wondered if he fine, if he was walking around like Robert, or whether he was trapped in a hospital bed just like I was. An even worse thought gripped me — was he dead?

  I tried to pull the mask away from my face again. Robert shook his head and pulled my hand down. “You’re in a really bad way Anna. Just rest. You have to try to get your lungs back to normal. Take if from me.”

  I shook my head with frustration. I needed to know what year it was, where Martin was, what was happening. I broke free of Robert’s grip and tried desperately to pull myself up. But panicking did not help the situation and my chest felt even more heavy and restricted after my struggle. I was suddenly afraid I would give myself a heart attack or something, as the restricted feeling in my chest got even tighter. I laid back, trying to relax. My eyelids were overwhelmingly heavy and I couldn’t fight the blackness. I fell into a deep sleep.

  ***

  The next thing I knew I was awake, this time in a totally normal hospital room, well above ground, with light streaming in through the c
lear windows. Bright light.

  I squinted and looked out into the dazzling sunshine. It seemed to be a typical Sydney sky, with bright blue stretching all the way to the horizon. I pulled myself up, my arms having seemingly found the strength they’d lacked in the downstairs dungeon room. I put my hands up to my face, checking for the oxygen mask. There was nothing there, my mouth and nose were now unimpeded.

  “Hello?” I called out. My throat was dry and scratchy, so it came out more as a loud whisper. I coughed and tried again. “Hello?” I sat back against my pillows, looking around for a buzzer to press so that I could get someone in to assist me. I found a button beside the bed with instructions that it be pressed for emergencies, but as my finger lingered above it I paused. Was it really the best course of action? I might have been in a normal looking room, but that didn’t mean that they were just going to let me walk out of there freely.

  I took my hand away from the button and looked around the room, deciding that I’d stay as quiet as possible and get out of there as soon as I could. I looked down at what I was wearing. Damn it, I was in a pale blue hospital gown. What had happened to my stuff? A surge of panic coursed through me as I remembered that all my personal belongings were in a bag in a rented apartment in Nelson Bay. That included my laptop. And my thesis.

  Come on, I told myself, you can worry about that later. In the meantime I had to worry about getting out of the hospital in one piece. Slowly, trying not to make any sounds that would alert anyone that I was awake, I peeled back the blanket that was covering me and placed one foot gingerly on the floor. Then I turned my body around and put the other foot down, and slowly stood up. I tiptoed over to the door and quietly opened it, peering around into the hall.

  “Goddamn!” I whispered, immediately regretting my decision. There were people everywhere. For some reason I’d thought the normal part of the hospital would be as deserted as the creepy dungeon part, but it certainly was not. In less than three seconds I was surrounded by four nurses.

  A round blonde one beamed at me. “Anna!” she called out in a delighted tone. “You’re up and about!”

  “Erm, I sure am,” I said.

  “You should be in bed. You could have pressed the buzzer. We’d have come straight away.”

  “Oh, I didn’t want to cause any trouble.”

  She smiled at me, and said her name was Rosie. A look of concern crept across her face. She glanced around us quickly, then took my shoulder. “Why don’t we go back inside?”

  Since there was nothing else for it, and she didn’t appear to be immediately threatening, I followed her back into the room. “Lie down sweetie,” she said to me and I did as I was told.

  I wasn’t sure if I should ask her the pertinent question, the one I needed to know, the one that would be normal to ask in this situation, when a person wakes up in a hospital bed not knowing quite what had happened to her. What the hell happened to me?

  As nice as she seemed I didn’t want to take any risks with any member of the hospital staff. I laid back quietly and waited for her to talk first.

  Rosie cleared her throat. “Anna, do you know what happened to you?”

  I shook my head. I stared straight up at the ceiling.

  She continued on in a gentle voice. “Honey, I don’t want to alarm you, but you went missing three months ago...”

  My eyes grew wide. So that was the time frame I was dealing with then. Three months. I’d gone forward in time three months. Okay, not a total disaster. Not three decades. But still, enough. Too much.

  Rosie continued on. “And then you were suddenly found unconscious on a road out near Nelson Bay.”

  I nodded and scrunched up my forehead. “Yeah — I remember. Well, kind of. I remember blacking out. I don’t remember being brought back here to Sydney though.”

  “Sydney?” she asked. “We’re in Newcastle, sweetie.”

  I sat up slightly and looked around the room, taking another glance out the window. All I could see was a courtyard. There were no markers to let me know which hospital I’d been in. Why had I just assumed I’d been in RPA all this time?

  Newcastle. That made more sense: it would have been the hospital closest to the scene of the crime.

  “We can arrange transport back to Sydney for you...” she began slowly. “But I think you should know, the media is going to want to talk to you.”

  I froze up. I may have still been groggy, still not 100% clear on what had happened to me, but I knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that talking to the media about any of this would be the same thing as essentially signing my death certificate. I didn’t respond.

  “I mean, you’ve been missing for three months. People were talking about it. And then, with you just suddenly appearing out of thin air like you did...” She glanced at me suspiciously. “Where were you?” she asked.

  Where was I? I wasn’t anywhere. For me the three months had passed by in a split second. How could I even begin to explain that to her? Even if I could, I knew that I shouldn’t. Again, I said nothing.

  After a moment’s silence I asked her a question. “How did I get to this hospital?”

  “Your friend Robert brought you in.”

  Robert? I frowned. How had he been able to help me? Wouldn’t he have travelled through time alongside me? How could his lungs have held up well enough to be able to get me to the hospital?

  But I asked her a different question. “Was anyone else brought in with me?” I braced myself for her response. Braced myself to hear that Martin had not survived the journey.

  She nodded. “You see, that’s the thing. That’s the reason the press are going to want to speak to you.” She raised an eyebrow. “You and your professor disappear together, then suddenly reappear again together three months later, out of the blue, both of you collapsed on the side of the road, unable to breathe? Sweetie, everyone is talking about it.”

  I lay my head back, squeezing my eyes shut. Oh crap, I thought, and the thought briefly crossed my mind: at least Connie Hung isn’t alive to see any of this.

  Chapter Nineteen.

  After collecting my thoughts for a few moments, I opened my eyes again, in time to catch Rosie staring at me with an increasingly suspicious demeanour. She saw my eyes fly open and averted her gaze, forcing her face back into a smile.

  “Is he still alive?” I asked. “My professor, I mean.”

  “Oh, he’s fine now,” Rosie replied. “You will be pleased to know, I’m sure.” Her tone was pointed.

  “Where is he then?”

  She paused before answering. “He’s back in Sydney.”

  “He’s back in Sydney?” I sat up in offence. “While I lie here in a hospital bed?” Jesus Christ. Martin really was cold and uncaring. He’d probably gone back to teaching while I was left alone in the middle of nowhere to die, for all he cared.

  I shook my head. “Unbelievable,” I muttered. “Hang on,” I added. “How come he survived this in better shape than I did?”

  “Survived...what exactly?” Rosie asked, looking confused. “Please, tell me, because we still don’t have any clue what happened to either of you. He is refusing to talk to us about any of it.” I wondered if Rosie’s ignorance was real, or whether she was working for them and was just fishing for info. I looked at her: she had the ordinary appearance of a regular nurse, not an assassin. If that was the case, then of course she wouldn’t know why Martin had reacted to travelling through time so much better than I had, why he had not had such a strong allergic reaction. She wouldn’t be able to help me. But if she wasn’t just a regular nurse, she still might not know, but she might kill me for the information. It was better just to keep my mouth shut, like Martin had.

  “Are you okay?” she asked me, “You look upset.”

  “I’m just wondering where all my stuff is.”

  “There’s a bag with most of your belongings in storage.” Thank god, I thought, although I was concerned about what ‘most’ meant. I smiled weakly.

&
nbsp; “Are you sure that’s all that’s bothering you?”

  “I just wasn’t expecting to be abandoned here in Newcastle,” I said bitterly.

  She smiled at me. “Well, if it’s any consolation your friend Robert stuck around this whole time, to make sure you were alright.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, I know, I saw him when I was in the other ward earlier.”

  Rosie looked confused. “…Other ward? What other ward?”

  I shut up. “Never mind.”

  ***

  When a tray of food arrived for me half an hour later I had to weigh up the risks associated with both eating it and not eating it. I still regarded everything to do with the hospital with grave suspicion, but if I didn’t eat anything I wouldn’t have the strength to escape or go anywhere if and when I needed to. Anyway, the news that I was in Newcastle, not Sydney, had changed things slightly. This hospital didn’t have quite the same sinister air as RPA. Then again...it did still have that same weird, scary dungeon ward. The one that Rosie apparently had no knowledge of.

  I picked up my fork and began picking at a pile of microwaved fake mashed potato. Screw it, I thought, if they wanted me dead they probably would have killed me by now. I shovelled the white mush onto the fork and brought it up to my mouth. Or had Martin been right? I thought about what he’d said in the dungeon, before we’d disappeared — that my father might do something worse to us than kill us.

  My thoughts were interrupted by the door to my left opening. In the doorway stood a tall, dark figure, dressed head to toe in a black feather-trimmed jumpsuit, with flared sleeves and white lace frills on each wrist. His matching black feathered hair hung over his massacred eyes.

  I grinned and almost jumped out of bed. I pushed my tray aside so that I could hug him as he made his way to my bed.