Yielding to the publisher, I’ve done extensive pruning in the first section of the manuscript. Again, I’m not sure I’ve done the right thing. I can’t dispute the fact that this section was lengthy and occasionally tedious. Still, I do feel guilty about it. If it were up to me, I’d publish the manuscript in its entirety. I hope, at least, that my excisions have been faithful to Richard’s intent.
In addition to believing that my brother’s book deserves to be read, there is another reason for having it published.
Frankly, his story is incredible. No matter how I try, I can’t believe it. I hope its publication creates the possibility that someone will. For myself, I can accept only one aspect of it—but that I accept completely: To Richard, this was not a work of fiction. He believed, without question, that he lived each moment of it.
Los Angeles, California
July 1974
ALSO BY RICHARD MATHESON
The Beardless Warriors
Button, Button
Duel
Earthbound
Hell House
I Am Legend
Nightmare at 20,000 Feet
Noir
Now You See It …
7 Steps to Midnight
The Incredible Shrinking Man
A Stir of Echoes
What Dreams May Come
Postscript by Robert Collier
Richard came home on Monday morning. November 22, 1971. He was pale and quiet and refused to tell us where he’d been or what had happened to him. As soon as he arrived, he lay down on his bed and never rose again.
His decline was rapid. In a month’s time, he was in the hospital. There, as at home, he lay all day in silence, staring at the ceiling, the gold watch in his hand. Once, a nurse attempted to remove it and Richard spoke the only words anyone heard from him in the last months of his life. “Don’t touch it.”
It is not surprising that Richard evolved the delusion that he had traveled back through time to meet Elise McKenna.
He knew he faced imminent death. There was no question about it and the shock must have been tremendous to him. He was only thirty-six years old, and had to feel betrayed. Never in his life had he achieved emotional fulfillment, and now that life was being terminated prematurely. He had to seek escape from this betrayal—and what more natural haven could there be than the past? Too aware to successfully regress to his own past, he elected to flee to another.
This election is evident in his manuscript from the beginning when he visited the Queen Mary and allowed his consciousness to be permeated by feelings of what had been.
When he accidentally came across the Coronado Hotel, the process was crystallized. Soon the past came to exist, in his mind, as a viable force in the hotel, his emotions gravitating toward the conviction that things no longer in existence somehow did exist in some approachable way.
Little wonder that his entire being concentrated toward Elise McKenna, a perfect symbol of his need to find, at once, escape from the untenable present and fulfillment through love. I have that photograph he framed and she was everything he claims—a hauntingly beautiful woman. It takes no imagination to understand his obsession that, if he tried hard enough, he could actually reach her. It takes no imagination to understand why his research into her life would be interpreted, by him, as signifying that he actually had reached her. Obviously, his mind was in a state of ferment, stunned by fear and unresolved needs. Under the circumstances, is it strange that he came to believe what he did? Dr. Crosswell’s words complete the picture. He told me that the sort of tumor Richard had could cause “dreaming states” and “hallucinations of sight, taste, and smell.”
Who knows how many disparate elements contribute to the making of a hallucination? How many threads of circumstance must intertwine before an imagined tapestry is woven? All I know is that Richard wanted desperately to escape his lot and did escape it, at least for a day and a half. Lying in his room, in a state of self-hypnosis probably, he experienced his 1896 sojourn in vivid detail.
This detail, which he carefully recounts in his manuscript, was achieved, no doubt, through research, his subconscious mind feeding back to him the facts he had installed there through his “crash course” on the past. (Bizarre that the convention which was being held in the hotel at that time was a Crash Convention.) Slowly, surely, he developed the illusion in his mind. Proof of this lies in the fact that, after speaking to me on the telephone, he lost it temporarily as his mind came into a “head-on collision with reality.” (His own words.)
Reviving the self-deception—as he had to—he “discovered” his name in the 1896 hotel register and proceeded to accelerate his fantasy by repeated mental suggestion that he was no longer in 1971 but in 1896. It is revealing that, as he did this, he listened to the music of a composer who, as he wrote, “took him to another world.”
In keeping with the purity of his delusion, he rented an outfit suitable to 1896, acquired money of the period to carry in his pocket, had stationery printed duplicating that of the hotel in the 1890s, and even wrote himself two letters ostensibly from Elise McKenna; he must have expended immense care to achieve such perfect penmanship. The watch he doubtless purchased from some jewelry store. It does seem rather new for such an item but I’m sure watches of all kinds are still sold today and can be acquired if one searches enough. As Dr. Crosswell put it, there is no limit to the incredible patience and precision of a subconscious mind intent on constructing a delusion.
When it was obvious that Richard was close to death, I did something that neither the hospital nor Dr. Crosswell cared for. I had Richard brought home and put him to bed in his own house, set the framed photograph of Elise McKenna on the table near him, put the watch in his hand, and saw to it that his Mahler symphonies were played twenty-four hours a day. It was not a coincidence, I feel, that he died during the playing of the adagio movement from the Ninth Symphony which he believed had helped to bring him to her. I was sitting by his bed at the time and can attest—thank God—to the, at least physical, serenity of his passing.
What more is there to say? Yes, Elise McKenna was at Stephens College in 1953. Yes, she did die of a heart attack one night after attending a party and her last words were “and love most sweet.” Yes, Richard was in Columbia, Missouri, at the time. Yes, she did burn those papers and that fragment of poem was found. Yes, there remains the enigma about the alteration in her personality which took place after 1896.
Why do I mention these things? Perhaps because, despite what I’ve written, I would like to believe, for Richard’s sake if no other, that all of it actually happened. Want to believe it so much, in fact, that I will never go to that hotel and ask to see that register for fear his name would not be written in it.
It would make my grief for my brother’s passing immeasurably lighter if I could convince myself that he really went back and met her. Part of me wants very much to believe that it was not a delusion at all. That Richard and Elise were together as he said they were.
That, God willing, they are, even now, together somewhere.
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.
SOMEWHERE IN TIME
Copyright © 1980, 1998 by RXR, Inc.
Originally published as Bid Time Return
All rights reserved.
A Tor Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC
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New York, NY 10010
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Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.
eISBN 9781429913652
First eBook Edition : February 2011
First Edition: October 1998
First Mass Market Edition: July 2008
Somewhere in Time Page 28