Not knowing what exactly we were going back for, we found we had less to discuss than we had thought. Soon we were all just sitting there with little to say. We eventually decided we might as well go now that there was no reason to wait. We made our way back to my room where the gate had already been opened. We started the experiment very easily this time; after all, this marked the fifth time for my friends and the sixth for me. Once in the limbo stage, I immediately became aware of the warmth of my friend's souls. As the light of the area became noticeable I realized that we were moving at a slower speed this time. I felt Cindy seemed to be aware of the ability to read each other"s emotional state during this part because I felt her probing into everyone. Myself, able to comprehend more each time, could actually see parts of the gaseous mass that I knew to be her extending into each one of us. I was more interested in the mission that we were on to probe anyone myself or to care if I was being probed. The reason I was preoccupied was because the trip did not seem to be going as smooth this time. Entering the stage of limbo went as normal as before, however, after the thrust of being thrown into the limbo stage, the sucking from the opposite tunnel should have become evident. This time, however, the same tunnels could be seen; I felt that I had to fight to get to it. My mass, which I refer to as my body, was moving in a swimming type fashion. The movement seemed to do little. The desire to get to the tunnel seemed to keep us moving. Once we got to the tip of the tunnel I could feel the end of the tunnel. I made my body enter it. The pulling from the tunnel took over.
I lay there still. My eyes opened slowly. The room was dark. Jeff started to say something but I reached over and grabbed his arm. He too seemed to take notice of the snoring noise emanating from the bed. We all stayed quiet, being scared to death. Even though I knew that John the Friar was a member of the church, the sight of his big body and that long sword which seemed to fit him stayed in my mind. Handy took the lead because of my frozen terror. He, on all fours, started to crawl to the door. We all fell in line behind him. He opened the door for us as we went past him, and then closed the door once we were all in the hallway. The flickering candle light in the hallway was eerie. We silently made it back to the stairs and went to the kitchen.
This was the first time I had seen the kitchen in William's time. The walls were made of rough stone which continued up to a hole in the ceiling that must have acted as a vent for cooking. The area that I am so familiar with Maggie cooking in then contained a large open cooking pit. The area that would be the breakfast room was used to store crates and baskets of food. The walls leading up had a large assortment of cooking instruments lining it. A long table was against one wall, where several servants were sitting preparing food.
The servants didn't take any special notice of us. We asked the cook for breakfast. She obeyed without seeming that anything was unusual. I asked her about how William was doing. She seemed to want to keep the classes separate by referring to us with dignity and replying in a polite non committing manner. We went into the dining room and waited for our food. We sat there for a rather long time as the day changed from dawn to daylight. A man that I remember from the dinner table several days before walked into the room then left soon afterwards without saying a word. About ten minutes later, William appeared uncombed in the doorway as he hurried into the room. He looked more than slightly amazed to see us.
After looking each one of us in the face to reassure himself that it was true, he said, "We must talk, can we go somewhere more private?" With very little conversation we followed him into the library. The room was arranged in its usual manner, absent the seating area from before. At his directions, we moved a few chairs around. "Why did you come back?" He asked as soon as we sat.
I said "We found out that we had some unfinished business in this time after all. William, my friend, you seem to be troubled. Has something happened?"
"Do you know how long you have been gone? Do you know it's been half a year?"
Handy and I looked at each other for a moment. Handy took over. "No we did not. To us it has been days."
William said slowly in the voice of a beaten man, shaking his head from side to side, "The last several months have been hard on me. The king, being upset that I missed that appointment with him, has reduced funding to the nearby town. I have realized that my family has always invested our capital so I cannot help the people until I sell some property. The experiments to the Garden of Eden have also gone bad. One of my pupils, on his own and without proper training, went to the Garden of Eden and has not come back yet. I have made several attempts to find him however, because time freezes at the moment we arrive there, he is stuck at the time he left. When we go there it is the present time and he cannot be found. And to add to the problem, starting a few weeks before you arrived the first time, the tunnel has been getting smaller each time. Now I can barely see through the tunnel. And to top everything off, most of my students, disenchanted with what is happening, have left. How can you help me? I need your help."
Handy said slowly and thoughtfully, "We have less control of going back in time and stopping your man from making his mistake than you do. As far as helping you out with your money problems, one gold piece from this time would be a worth a fortune in our time. I'm afraid that the only way we can help you seems to be moral support, unless you know of a way we can help?"
"If moral support is all you can offer, than I shall take it with my deepest gratitude. Now how can I help you in your unfinished business matter?"
Hanna said, "We need to go to town. If you can supply horses, I know the way."
"Granted. Anything else?" Handy told him that was all for now. William said that due to the vacancies of recent, he would prepare rooms for us in case we needed to stay a few days. I asked if we could have the same two rooms that we had before on the third floor. William nodded and gave us some spending money. We left him still sitting in his library looking at his stained glass window.
Hanna led the horses we borrowed from the stables toward town. The ride seemed to take forever. We took a break at the church to relax. The fence around the surrounding cemetery seemed wrong. It was too confined. Then as I felt like kicking myself for overlooking the obvious, I realized that not as many people were dead now as will be dead when I see it in the twentieth century. So at some time the fence must be moved. Or several times perhaps.
The original part of town was of course all that could be seen. The streets were full of people coming, going, and just standing around talking. This brought to mind something that has always bothered me about old western movies. Why is it that in the movies we can see that the town only has 10 stores, two small hotels and a dozen houses, yet there would always be a hundred men standing around the gunfighters? This was not as ridiculous as that, the original town of Hamelton had over a hundred dwellings; however the people of this time seemed to prefer the outside life.
Hanna, of course, was the most familiar with the town and how to get around so we naturally allowed her to lead in the investigation of the town. She seemed constantly amazed time after time, seeing everything in the town she grew up in 300 years before her birth. The town stable had always been in the same place so Hanna led us right there. The stable was on the western most outside edge of town. There wasn't a sign in front but the fact that it was a stable was obvious. There was a long post in front to tie up horses. Stacks of hay were off to one side. A small corral was at the furthest part of the property from town. A teenage boy was in the corral with a rope tied to a horse leading him in circles. As we approached, I could see two lazy dogs lying in front and a kitten, not intimidated by the dogs, playing in the hay.
Handy stopped short and the rest of us stopped our animals to see what he was doing. Handy asked, "What are we going to say when we find this ancestor of Maggie's? What are we going to do for him? And what is his name?"
I must admit those were some good questions. We had not really researched this thing before we jumped into it. As far as his name,
I could not remember Maggie's last name for the life of me. Luckily my temporary lapse of memory also did not affect another source of information that I had forgotten about.
Hanna recalled, "Mulligan. Her family name is Mulligan. ...and perhaps we could ask him to watch the animals as we are in town. And I think I should do the talking since you yanks are hard for me to understand, I know the town's people will think you unusual." No one had any idea let alone a better one, so we went along with Hanna's simple plan.
After tying up the horses, we went in the open large front door that had no handle or lock and seemed to always stay open. We found ourselves walking through a pathway that seemed familiar to Hanna. After walking past an office and a tack room we entered the area of the stalls. A man was kneeling by a horse examining its ankle.
He looked up and asked, "Excuse me; I did not see you there. What can I do for you?" The man stood up and greeted us.
Hanna replied in an exaggerated accent, "We are staying at the Hamelton Mansion. We are giving ourselves a tour of the town. We felt that it would be safe to leave the horses at the stables."
Finding this amusing, the man started to pack tobacco in his pipe as he said, "I don't know where you came from, but in this town, there has never been a theft. You can feel safe taking your rides with you wherever you go." He stopped awaiting a response.
The man wasn't what I expected from Maggie's family. He was about twenty-five, slim and nearly six feet tall. His face was round and his red hair was short. His mustache was bushy and by far the major land mark on him. He kept looking over Hanna and lifting his eyebrows. His responses were slow and to the point.
Hanna asked him several questions starting with his name which was Edmund Mulligan. The other questions were directions that she probably already knew but she was keeping him talking. When we had run out of conversation, Hanna excused us and we left out the door.
We mounted the horses and Hanna suggested that she wanted to see some parts of town starting with the Knights Edge. Entering the tavern was much like the last time I was there. The door was the same and inside was just as dark as before. We went straight to the counter and Hanna ordered us beers. There were some men off to the side that had several candles lined up. They were playing some version of darts in which the men were throwing shortened arrows at a piece of wood for money. My eyes did not adjust to the dark for a long time. We let Hanna do what little talking was needed to the town's people. We stayed longer than we planned and we all got a little more tipsy than expected. As I sat there at that bar I thought about all the dents and cuts that I saw there a week ago. There was some damage already done. A man that sat next to me for a short time had thrown his darts on the bar in anger due to his financial losses. That act alone made scratches that would be there for hundreds of years.
With the harsh beer going down I wondered, "If I scratched the bar, now will it show up when I look at it 300 hundred years from now? Did I put my hands on a scratch a week ago that I will make today? Last week if I had known that I was going to go back in time, and I looked at an area that had no scratches, decided to scratch it, then when I went back in time, would a scratch appear? Or would I have not picked that spot because I could see the scratch that I was going to make so the spot was not clear of scratches?" I realized that the real question my mind wanted to know was. "Am I making history, or just playing out what has already happened?" The thick beer did not agree with Jeff's stomach, and we decided that not much more could be done for Edmund Mulligan that today. We could continue to explore the town the following day. We paid the bill with some spare coins of William's and headed home.
We stopped several times on the way back to let Jeff sit and settle his stomach. I found out days later that Handy had taken Hanna aside during one of those breaks and asked her to spend that night with him. She had abruptly turned him down. I can't blame her for being firm after nicely discouraging him for a week. In fact I kind of admirer her now that I have lived life more since that day because I have seen so many women confused with their own self esteem that a complimentary male confuses them into trading sex for compassion without any sincerity on either side. Hanna seemed to need emotional support but the price, even though she liked Handy, was too high a price to pay.
At the mansion William was having a meeting of all the followers he had left in the main room. There were about a dozen of them. John the Friar, the over dressed man that had put his cape over Hanna, and the two bearded men that I first met during the first dinner with William were among them that I recognized. The man I had talked to at the fountain was no longer a follower and not there.
William waved us in when he saw us. He continued his talk about energies emitting from light as we sat and listened for some time. After about an hour of what I thought was a bunch of nonsense, I told myself that he should keep to what he knows best, and motioned to the others that we should retire to our rooms to discuss the Mulligan problem. Handy whispered that he wanted to stay and listen to William for a little longer. I would have objected had I known then that he had just been turned down by Hanna. Now a woman reading this may think "Handy seemed strong enough to take being dumped by a woman he had never dated." But the misconception that because a man does not show pain, even to his best friend, he is not hurting, is not only wrong, but the pain is often magnified by the self inflicting agony of keeping the pain bottled up inside of him.
The four of us just talked as close friends for hours about the mission we were on, Hanna told stories about the town of Hamelton. The stories were interesting but unrelated to anything that was going on at the time. We eventually retired for the night before Handy returned from his classroom talk with William.
XI
I awoke with the sound of Jeff fidgeting around looking for his pants. As I sat up I looked over to Handy to see that he did make it to bed. "I slept longer today than I've slept in a month," I said to Jeff.
Jeff, smelling his shirt as he was putting it on said, "This is really a filthy time in history. They don't have showers, baths are a pain to take and the water is cold. Washing clothes takes a day. Why didn't we think to bring a change of clothes?" That was a satirical question and he was not expecting an answer. Jeff threw a pillow at Handy's head. "Wake up, we have dragons to slay." Jeff's energy level seemed to shoot up as he jumped on the foot of Handy's bed and did an animated sword fight with an invisible opponent and sword. Jeff ran the villain through then fell on top of Handy.
"Get off me," grumbled Handy, "can't you children act with the slightest level of maturity?"
"Whoa!" I mocked him not understanding the level of seriousness he had. We got ready for the day with barely a word spoken between us. We then walked across the hall to knock on the girl's room.
"Come in," was the reply. Entering the room we saw both girls sitting on one of the beds with their legs crossed. They were giggling as girls often do when they are bonding.
"This sounds fun; can we join in on the joke?" I said, not really expecting an answer, but to get a response.
Before the girls could say anything, Handy still in the hall said in a firm voice, "William is waiting with breakfast for us. We should attend." Then he turned and walked down the hall. We gave each other 'stuffy' looks then smiled as we followed him.
Looking back to that day, in pain, I wish I had taken to heart the serious predicament of my best friend. On the contrary, I was so wrapped up in the problems of the people of that time that the clues that were being thrown at me about the mental stability of the person that was the easiest for me to read went unnoticed. I have spoken numerous times about that day to counselors, who did not have a full understanding of the entire episode until they will eventually read this manuscript. They say that I did not know that Hanna had insulted him and I had no way to know how seriously he had fallen in love with her, so therefore how could I have blamed myself for not taking action at that time? My response is simple; no one else could have but me! Had I given the person that meant
the most to me in my life five minutes of thought, I would have known that something was needed, but I didn't. Handy was cold and disoriented. He seemed angry at the rest of us. He had and would again break his promise to keep together as a group. Now I can see that in the state of depression he was in, he probably thought Jeff and I were teasing him that morning and the girls were talking and laughing about him. We followed Handy to the main dining room where William was in his usual place at the end of the table. There was a large assortment of fruits and breads set out on the table. Much of the food seemed picked through as if the rest of the guests had come and gone. William stood to greet us as we came in. We took our seats around him at the end of the table. We talked about unimportant matters for most of the meal to break the morning ice. Cindy had asked if he was having financial problems, how he could afford such a wonderful meal. William informed us that he had plenty of ready money to support his house and servants for months, maybe a year. The king whom he refused an invitation from was taking political action against him and those he cared for. It is the increased taxes that were being levied on the townspeople, whom he cared about, that he was trying to collect capital to pay for. He said he was still a very rich man and owned property all over England, however those people that could afford to buy property as large as his, had been instructed not to buy any of it until he had learned his lessons from the king. He said that he would be leaving soon to take a day long trip to see an old friend to ask for help talking to the king.
I asked him what he knew about the stable master in town. He said that he had traded horses for years with him and their fathers before him, "The man always makes a good profit but is a very honest person to deal with.” Hanna asked if there was anything that we could do for William that would involve dealing with the stable master. William thought for a moment then said that the stable master was going to go to the leather maker with him to order a custom saddle for one of his horses he was to soon give as a gift to a friend to pay back an old favor. We could do that for him. I said, "I do not think it's a good idea to spend money on a custom saddle right now. Is there something else we can do for you?"
Hamelton (Dr. Paul) Page 8