“Einstein said time travel was possible?”
“In a way, he did. Einstein said that time does not travel in only one direction. That makes time travel theoretically possible. I think your brain waves are predisposed to catching that reverse flow.”
“Which is why I’m not myself going back in time?”
“Right,” he said, pointing at his diagram. “It’s like your brain waves are an extension of your consciousness, not just an effect of it. And they can skip across the time flow, like a stone.”
“Or a HAM radio signal,” I said.
“Yes, sort of.” He looked surprised.
“Well, but one time I just jumped by myself, not in your lab.”
“By that point I think your epileptic brain was capable of ‘jumping,’ as you call it, all on its own.”
“Okay. But I don’t have epilepsy anymore,” I said, shrugging as if I’d done something wrong.
“Oh, that’s not a problem. We can make you seize.”
Jeannine’s eyes narrowed. “Isn’t that like, against your oath as a doctor or something?”
“Yes, if there’s no medical benefit to it, sure. But my license to practice has been suspended anyway,” said the doctor. He flashed a sad smile. “I suppose I sounded pretty crazy, didn’t I?”
“A little,” I said.
“I could really use a shower.”
Sanjay had to head back home. I’d told my parents I’d be out late, which was fine with them, and Jeannine’s father worked the third shift at the firehouse, so her mother took this as downtime until she turned in for the night. We decided to keep Dr. Dorfman company since he hadn’t actually talked to anyone after he’d been committed, and since we needed his information.
I filled him in on the story about the people in Kentucky.
“Doctor?” asked Jeannine, who’d been lost in thought.
“Yes?”
“If Jack is in someone else’s body when he’s in another time, could he die there?”
“Well, I don’t know. Our conscious selves respond to the signals they receive from the brain, which gets its input from the body. If the body has suffered catastrophic damage, I suppose Jack’s consciousness could fade, but then I don’t know what happens.”
It was a question I didn’t want answered.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
WHILE DR. DORFMAN WORKED on building a crude EEG machine, I drove out to Marion, Kentucky for more information on the town and who lived there now. Whatever town square I’d seen was gone, absorbed into a street grid. Farm lands hugged the outlying areas, but the vast majority of the area had been developed. I pulled over, seeing a yellowed sign in the window of a storefront: Marion Historical Society. I fumbled for dimes in my pocket and filled the meter, then headed inside. An older lady with curly white hair greeted me.
“The suggested donation is one dollar,” she told me, “but you can see if that’s worth paying after you walk through.” It’s not a good sign when the volunteers at the museum aren’t real excited about the place. I smiled and put a bill in her metal box. I was the only visitor there.
The museum was once a home. Two rooms in the front were lined with glass cases filled with pictures and trinkets of earlier times. I asked the greeter where the oldest items were. She pointed me to the next room.
Founded in 1804, the town didn’t expand past eight hundred residents until the twentieth century, when it found itself between an increasingly busy highway and a major waterway. It was formally incorporated before the Civil War, the last bastion for slave owners before the free states of Ohio and Michigan picked up in the north. Several hundred slaves moved through central Kentucky as they fled toward Canada. Only a few pictures of abolitionists sat pinned inside the jewelry cases. I searched but didn’t find any information on the Underground Railroad. Wouldn’t it have been something a little museum would tout, if they’d brag about being a refuge for ex-slaves?
I worked my way up to the 1880s, and found a faded photo of Mr. Rushman’s farm: the house, the stables behind, a small granary, and the long rows for planting. It must have been taken around the turn of the century, because there was a Model T Ford parked at the front of the house, next to the porch.
Pushing my face closer down to the glass, I strained to read the hand-written caption in white ink beneath the photo:
ORIGINAL FARM HOUSE OF WILHELM FOLK
Somehow Mr. Rushman had come to acquire the house, I gathered. Maybe Mr. Folk was richer.
Further along, in a case at the corner of the once-dining room, was a plastic model of the original layout of the town. I stifled a gasp, looking at it. I could see the view from the trail on the hill, the one I walked up in my first two jumps. Why had I started out here? Was it random? Work, damn brain, work!
“Can I explain anything?” asked the old woman from behind me. I jumped a little in surprise.
“I’m sorry, young man,” she said.
“No, it’s fine,” I said. “I’ve seen this farm house before.” I pointed at Mr. Rushman’s house on the map.
“You couldn’t possibly have seen that house,” she said, smiling and the hair on my forearms stood at attention. She was definitely creepy. She walked over to me. “That burned down well before you were born. 1927 or so.”
“Really? How did that happen?” I hoped I sounded nonchalant. But let’s face it, you don’t really do nonchalant, Captain Obvious.
“Hmm, I’m not sure. I was just a little girl when it happened. Electrical system? A lot of these houses were retrofitted because they were built before electricity.”
That was plausible, certainly, but something about her story unsettled me.
“Are you from the area, son?”
“I’m just doing a school project.” I should have thought of an excuse before, I thought. That sounds pathetic.
“Well, if you’d like me to point anything out, I will help if I can.”
“Thanks, Mrs.—” I glanced at her nametag. “Griffith.” I’d heard that name before. The horse I stole. “Are you related to a Lucille Griffith?”
She inhaled sharply and smiled. “Why, she’s my aunt. I’m the daughter of her younger brother, Alexander. “So you are local.”
“Not anymore,” I said, hoping I didn’t look like a total fraud. I really wasn’t spy material. “We moved away a while back.” A while back? What the hell are you saying?
“Well, do let me know if I can help.” She left me alone again, and I studied the miniature model of the town. Where Mr. Van Dorn’s tavern had once stood, the model showed a squat hotel. I scanned the top of the hill but didn’t see my mother’s house. Finally I turned back to the pictures for 1910–1930. And right there, he glowered at me, looking cruel with his weasel eyes: Dr. Traver. He’d grown a white beard in the years since I knew him, but it did nothing to warm him up. This photo must have been taken in the winter.
He had his arm wrapped around a smaller figure, a young woman or girl, and then I gaped at the faded photo because Holy Hostage Batman, it was Jacqueline Bishop being smothered in his arms. I read the caption:
MAYOR MELVIN TRAVER AND HIS WIFE JACQUELINE,
DECEMBER 26, 1926
I stood there for a time, shaking, trying to get a grip. Jacqueline looked miserable. And holy wedding bells here was something else I needed to prevent from happening.
I thanked Mrs. Griffin and asked when the museum closed.
“Four o’clock sharp,” she said, making it clear that she didn’t intend to wait for me or anybody else to return to browse more, potential dollar donations be damned. I thanked her and left through the front, the door jingling quietly as it shut behind me.
I drove down Main Street slowly, trying to orient where I was in relation to the model. Rushman Farm was my first stop. Driving into the valley was ridiculous. I was stuck in some kind of traffic jam. A construction worker held up a sign that read “Slow,” so naturally I thought about yelling that he should change it to “Screw You Drivers You
’re Never Getting Anywhere,” but whatever, that was probably too long for a sign. The engine idled and I thought about Jacqueline bound up in Dr. Traver’s arms. Lucas would never have allowed such a thing. If Jacqueline was married to Dr. Traver, who somehow became mayor, and Mr. Van Doren had betrayed the cause, did it mean Lucas had died in the fire? There were only two months, give or take, between the events.
In any case, I had to change history so that this didn’t happen, especially because I worried I’d already changed history to make them happen. But who knew? Time was like molasses, sticky and messy as hell. I might not have asked for the ability to jump time, but if I could do it, then I had to try to make things better for people. And I really wanted to be with Lucas again, feel him next to me, hear his voice and wipe his stupid bangs out of his face. I had to save him.
And I had to face it that I was in love with him, whatever that meant.
***
The big farm house was definitely gone, surrendered at some point to a suburban neighborhood that looked a lot like mine, ninety minutes away, but this one didn’t have any sidewalks. It seemed rude to walk on the lawns of strangers so I kept to the edge of the street. I mean, the last thing I’d want to be when trying to rescue friends from a time before I was born, in a totally different person’s life, was to forget my manners. I stared at the block of houses, trying to assess which one was closest to the old spot, based on where the ground began to rise. Even if the house had burned down, what became of the basement tunnel?
I checked around the street, always afraid Dr. Traver or one of his cronies would show up to stop me by force, even though that wasn’t possible. Why pretend time had any stability, after all?
No lights on in the house, and no cars in the driveway, so I hoped that meant the house was empty. I skirted along the side, which was covered in dingy, light blue vinyl siding. Maybe it had looked nice for a few years, but now it was chipped and looked like garbage. In the back yard tall evergreen trees ran the length of the property. There must be a door around here that I can jimmy, I thought. Since I’d already abducted someone, breaking and entering was small potatoes for a criminal mastermind like me. I found a sliding glass door that was held in place by a metal bracket, and I couldn’t budge that, and the rear door that led to a laundry room was locked shut. Lex Luther I was not.
Looking for windows, I tripped over something hard in the grass. I tapped it with my toe and saw that there was a round piece of concrete under a light layer of grass, kind of like the well caps at some of the older houses in my town. The grass pulled up like ribbons, which I tried to stack so that I could pat them back in place later. I worried the slab would be too heavy for me to move by myself, but I was able to get some leverage on it, and with a thick grating sound, it slid over, revealing a vertical shaft lined with rusty ladder rungs, leading down into the blackness. Totally inviting.
No time like the present! I tested the top ring with most of my weight before I let go of the top of the shaft.
Down in the dim column, memories flooded me of creeping through the tunnels with Lucas, kissing him while on the run from Traver’s thugs. I wondered what Jay would think of my eagerness to be back with Lucas. Shit, maybe that was why Jay and I had fought in the first place. Leave it to me to be all ridiculous about having sex feelings I couldn’t deal with.
My feet hit the ground, and my thoughts evaporated when I saw an old lantern, long since dried out of oil. It had created its own rust ring where it sat on the cement. I wasn’t sure if it was the same lantern Lucas and I had used, but it looked similar. I didn’t touch it.
A line of light streaming in from the top of the shaft hit the concrete floor in a tight sliver. My eyes adjusted a little more to the darkness, and I made out a door about twenty feet away. A few paces in front of it, I hit an object on the ground and stumbled forward. Crouching down, I patted it. I couldn’t figure out what it was except that it had thin rods of metal and some floppier pieces stuck to it.
I walked over to the rungs I’d climbed down and held it up to the tiny ray of light. It was a leg brace, the kind that strap around the calf and have a knee pivot joint. Was it Lucas’s? It looked mangled, little stiff wires poking out of it in places that would slash someone if they tried to strap it on. Why was it here?
I’d come all this way, and that door taunted me. Next time, bring a freaking screwdriver. I wanted to explore what was beyond it, but I admit I was scared down there all by myself. This was definitely part of the tunnel structure I’d been in with Lucas. I could blink and see him back with me. Almost.
I climbed the rungs and was halfway up when my left foot crashed through the bar, which had rusted out. I hung from my hands, bits of metal digging into my skin, and scrabbled against the damp sides of the shaft. I pulled my right leg up high and found the next bar and quickly climbed up the rest of the way. I dragged the concrete cap back into place and wiped my hands on my jeans.
I walked back to my car and climbed in, looking around to measure up my surroundings again, but everything seemed the same until I got to the end of the road. Turning right would have taken me back the way I’d come. That was when I noticed the older woman from the museum sitting in the passenger seat of a brown Impala parked along the curb. In the driver’s seat was a middle-aged man, talking to her and waving his hands around a lot, but when they saw me, they stopped talking. His engine raced and he shot across the road toward me. I hammered the gas pedal to the floor and turned left, getting as much speed as I could. My transmission screeched in anger. A small sign along the side of the road pointed to the highway, and I turned sharply, nearly tipping over. The driver chasing me was forced to slow down a lot more—thank you, Chevrolet engineers, for such a crappy wheelbase—giving me some distance. I took a fork in the road, heading deeper into the valley, not wanting to stay in his field of view. I could feel the adrenaline flooding my bloodstream, and I nearly wiped out because I was looking in my rear view window and didn’t see the huge pothole until the last moment. My squat car teetered around as I yanked hard on the steering wheel. Behind me, the Impala careened along the road, hitting the hole hard, and then he stopped pursuing me. A thin twirl of gray smoke wound out from under his hood.
I made a quick turn and saw another sign for the interstate. Finally, on the entrance ramp with no Impala in sight, I relaxed a little. Why were they after me?
***
I walked into the mansion, feeling tingles at the back of my neck because the parking area was empty and the lights were out inside. I found the front door unlocked, and I didn’t know what to make of that. I tried not to make any noise as I nudged inside.
Creeping along the wall toward the back of the house, I saw strings of wires lying across the floor in the den. I looked for a weapon of some kind, hoping nobody had planted a bomb. What if the three of them were strung up in the corner, or dead already? I picked up a heavy stone planter from a table in the hallway, holding it in front of me to use as a shield or a bludgeon. In all likelihood I would just drop it on my feet but whatever, it looked intimidating.
“What on earth are you doing?” asked Sanjay, who stood next to the video machine, loading in a tape. “Redecorating or a sudden interest in floral arrangements?”
“I’m sorry, I thought, uh,” I said, taking in the scene. The mess scattered around the room started making sense to me: a sound equalizer had been pulled from the electronics behind the couch, a peg board, probably from the garage, set against the coffee table, and a clump of different colored wires leading from one to the other.
“That’s one smart fellow I rescued from the hospital,” said Jay, walking over and looking at the homemade EEG machine with me. He hefted the vase out of my hands and gently put it back in the hallway.
“You’re so tense, Jack. What happened to you?” He put one hand on my shoulder and I was embarrassed at how knotty my muscles had gotten. I told him the story about the tunnel and showed him the screwdriverish tool. Then I told him abou
t being chased by the Impala.
“Wow,” he said, his eyes wide. “Weird. I’m glad you’re okay.”
“So that’s why I thought I was in for more trouble.”
“I don’t know what to make of that.”
“I don’t, either. Like, were they just super territorial about their town? They’re not going to come all the way back here, right?”
“You say you lost them before the highway?”
“Yeah.” I’d checked my rearview mirror at least a hundred times.
“Then I think you’re okay. You need to relax, man. Being alert is good, being paranoid, bad. Between you and me I’m not too sure about this contraption here.” We looked at Dr. Dorfman’s handiwork.
“I mean, what do I know? Does it look anything like a regular EEG?” For emphasis Jay scratched his right temple.
“Kind of,” I said, crouching down to get a better look. “I never got very close to these things.” All of the reading about HAM radio had paid off, and I understood more about the assemblage and wiring.
“I think he needs a screen or a print out,” I said, standing back. “Where is he? Where’s Jeannine?”
“Off in search of a printer,” said Jay. “The people who live here are rich, right? Jeannine says her friend has her own Apple computer and dot matrix printer upstairs.”
“Has it settled down at the hospital yet?” I asked him, still not comfortable with the idea that we’d kidnapped him, even if he was happy to be free from there. We’d probably broken a gazillion laws. But also, I had brought other people into this situation, and it seemed like a lot more danger than we’d bargained for. If one of them got hurt, how would I live with myself?
“It’s still under a lot more security,” he said. “There was a headline about it in the paper today.”
Dr. Dorfman was going to attract attention, and we needed a plan about what to do next. I also didn’t know what he thought about all of this.
The Unintentional Time Traveler (Time Guardians Book 1) Page 16