by Eric Bower
“Rose?” M from 1891 yelled, clearly not interested in hearing my explanation. “Miss Blackwood? Please come in here! I think there’s something you’d like to see!”
I winced.
Rose Blackwood from 1891 was very different than Rose Blackwood from the present. She wasn’t actually evil, or even a criminal, and she certainly didn’t mean us any harm. But she wasn’t yet acquainted with the strangeness of my family, and she was likely feeling quite nervous (I’m sure everyone is very nervous the first time they kidnap someone), and she was also armed with a little pistol that she regularly threatened us with if we showed signs of disobeying her. How would Rose from 1891 respond to walking into my parents’ work garage and seeing two P’s, two M’s, an older W. B., and another version of herself ? Even an exceptionally kind and gentle person might get frightened if they were to see something like that, and then they might do something foolish. I know if it were me, I’d do something ridiculously foolish, if only to prove a point.
“I don’t think it’s necessary for you to call for Rose Blackwood, my little muffin,” P from 1891 said to M from 1891.
“What?” M from 1891 asked in surprise, after shooting me one more bitter look. “Why not, McLaron?”
“Because of this,” said P from 1891, twisting his left wrist until a long, metallic device slipped out of his sleeve. At the end of the metallic device was a little round mirror. It looked like a little dental tool, the kind of long and skinny instrument that a dentist uses to look at the teeth in the back of your mouth. “We can simply ask the people standing behind us. Hello! I knew you were all back there. I could see your reflections in the picture window, and now I can see them all a bit clearer. Ah. Now it all makes perfect sense to me. My little muffin, please allow me to introduce you to me, to you, to W. B., and to Rose Blackwood . . . from the future.”
There was no point in hiding it anymore. We’d been found out. My family and Rose from the present stepped forward and waved to P and M from 1891. The past and present Barons eyed each other warily, uncertain how one is supposed to talk to oneself. But eventually, P from 1891 and P from the present broke the ice, and introduced themselves, which I suppose was rather pointless, or at the very least, repetitive.
After everyone had shaken everyone’s hands (and after Rose from the present explained to P and M from 1891 that she wasn’t really a criminal, and that she actually worked for them in the future), P from the present pulled a strange, new device from his pocket. It was a device that we had never seen before, though we could tell from the delicate way he held it that it was a very important and unique invention, the kind that couldn’t be easily fixed or replaced. It looked sort of like someone had crossed a rat trap with a light bulb, and then sprinkled the entire mess with some multicolored confetti.
There was a little panel on the back of the device, and after P opened the panel and flipped a little switch, something went BOING!
MY MOTHER HAD ALWAYS LOOKED LIKE A MUFFIN . . . HADN’T SHE?
“Boing?” I said, turning to P from the present.
“What just went boing? Was that thing supposed to go boing? None of your other inventions have ever gone boing before. Boing isn’t a very reassuring sound. Good things don’t usually go boing.”
“Stop saying boing,” said M from the present, then she looked over at present P. “McLaron, what was that strange device? What did you just do?”
P from the present was staring wide-eyed at his little device, and smiling as brightly as a human can possibly smile. He looked like a kid who’d just been handed a banana split with extra cherries on top.
“It worked,” he whispered gleefully to the device while doing a little happy dance all by himself. “It actually worked. I can’t believe it!”
“Congratulations, P,” I said. “What worked?”
“Look at Sharon and me!” P declared, pointing behind us.
We looked over to P and M from 1891. 1891 M’s head was still crooked toward us, turned at an uncomfortable angle on the table. P from 1891 was still looking at us while strapped to the steering wheel of the flying Baron Estate. But neither of them was moving or making a sound.
In fact, nothing was really moving or making a sound. The coal burning furnace, which typically rumbled like my belly did after I had gone a few hours without eating, was oddly silent as well—which reminded me, I had just gone a few hours without eating.
Actually, no. I had gone even longer! I had traveled back in time one whole year, which meant I’d just gone an entire year without food! A whole year! Without food! Me! My stomach suddenly felt as though it was trying to digest itself because it was so empty. My head felt lighter than a feather. My hands began to tremble. My spine felt so terribly frail. My weakened knees were shriveling up into two little prunes incapable of supporting my body, and I was about to topple forward in a starving heap, when suddenly Rose Blackwood (from the present) caught me by the arm.
“I’m withering away into nothing . . .” I whispered, “please try to go on without me . . .”
“Knock it off, W. B.,” she said, giving my bicep a squeeze. “I know you think you haven’t eaten in a year, but you’re wrong. That’s not how time travel works. You just ate that pie fifteen minutes ago, remember?”
“Wrong,” I told her. “I ate that pie almost a year from now. In fact, I technically haven’t even eaten it yet, since it technically hasn’t even been baked yet. And what makes you an expert on how time travel works? I seem to recall that no one but me believed in time travel until very recently. I was told repeatedly that it was impossible.”
“Both of you, please be quiet!” M from the present snapped—I suppose she was getting a little sick of our constant bickering. “McLaron? Please explain what’s happened.”
“This,” P whispered reverently as he held up his new device, which was so unique and awe-inspiring, that it almost appeared to be glowing in the silent work garage, “is quite possibly the greatest invention in the history of inventions. It’s possibly the greatest invention that will ever be invented by an inventor. It’s an even better invention than the horseless carriage, the Air, Oh! Plane, the submarine, and those mechanical tap dancing shoes that I made last month.”
“Oh, those shoes were so annoying,” Rose moaned, rolling her eyes at the unpleasant memory.
She was right. Once the mechanical tap shoes started dancing, they didn’t stop until you introduced them to a hammer over and over again, beating them into a shiny mess. It took a good six hours of angry smashing before those awful tap shoes finally tapped their final tap. Later that night, my father had buried the tap shoes in the desert, and then, in a rare and confusing show of respect, he played the song “Taps” on his bugle.
M went to the picture window and looked outside. Her eyes widened in shock and disbelief when she spotted a flying V of ducks frozen in midair. Normally, when ducks stopped flapping their wings while hovering high in the sky, they come crashing to the ground. But these ducks seemed to be stuck up in the sky, as if hanging from an invisible thread, and so did the flying Baron Estate. We were all frozen in the silent sky, and there was only one explanation for why.
“You’ve frozen time,” M said to P in an awed whisper. “McLaron, how on earth did you do that? If time travel is impossible, then freezing time is . . . is . . . whatever is beyond impossible. It’s impossibler.”
“It’s impossiblest,” I corrected.
“Neither of those are words,” Rose muttered.
As my father from the present excitedly explained his crazy and impossiblest invention to M from the present (bleep blop booop blorp), letting her know why all of us from the present weren’t frozen as well (gloop blop gleep blarg, and so on) Rose Blackwood and I slowly walked up to P and M from 1891, and stared closely into their still eyes. It was like staring into the face of a statue, only much more familiar and lifelike, and instead of being made of marble or granite, it was made of whatever my parents a
re made of.
“They’re really frozen stiff,” Rose said in a hushed voice. “This is so weird. I wonder if they can see and hear us.”
I reached out and patted P from 1891 on his frozen spiky head.
“P?” I whispered. “Hello? Are you in there?”
“Stop patting my head, W. B.!” I heard my father say, and I jumped back and pulled my hand away as though it had been burned. It took me a moment to realize that it was P from the present who had said that, not P from 1891, who was still immobile. Which made more sense.
“Now that we have frozen time,” P continued, “we’ll need to find Werbert as soon as possible. I’m willing to bet that he’s hiding somewhere in this house, trying his best to ruin all of our pasts as well as our futures. Please, everyone, be very careful. He might not look particularly threatening, but Werbert is a very dangerous man. There’s no one on earth more dangerous than a failed dentist.”
“Wait, won’t Werbert be frozen as well?” Rose from the present asked. “How can a person be dangerous if they’re frozen?”
And then we all heard something. Normally that wouldn’t be a cause for alarm (we heard things all the time), but at that moment, it was particularly upsetting. You see, there shouldn’t have been any sounds in the Baron Estate other than the sounds that me, P, M, and Rose from the present were making. The rest of time was frozen, which meant it should have been unable to make a sound.
But we had all heard it. A pair of footsteps, scampering quickly through another part of the Baron Estate.
“No, he’s not frozen,” P from the present whispered, a perfectly fascinated smile forming on his face. “He’s moving around, just like we are. And I know why. Since he’s not from this time period, then that means I can’t freeze him here. You can’t freeze someone in time if they’re already out of time. And do you want to know something else that I find quite interesting? My gut is telling me that Werbert doesn’t just have a time machine. He has his own version of a Time Stopping Device as well.”
“No,” M whispered.
“That’s impossible,” Rose croaked.
“Time Stopping Device?” I said. “That’s the name you gave your invention? Not the Stop the Time Please, Stephen, Device, or something like that?”
“Of course not,” P from the present said stiffly, frowning at the very thought. “That would be a silly name.”
P, M, Rose, and I (all from the present) slowly crept out of the work garage and into the kitchen. It was an absolute mess. The cabinets had all opened during the herky-jerky trip across the sky, and most of the plates and cups stacked inside had fallen out and smashed on the floor. There was also the residual mess from when our old horse, Magnus, had become frightened when the house first took flight, and kicked several holes into the oven, wall, and cupboard door. The room looked like a disaster area, but it was otherwise empty.
“Where’s 1891 Rose and 1891 W. B.?” M asked.
“If this is the beginning of the race, then that means W. B. and I are in the living room,” Rose explained. “But what does it matter where W. B. and I are if we’re looking for Werbert?”
P lowered his voice as he led us across the kitchen.
“Werbert has already erased . . . someone, from our minds.”
Not only had P forgotten the name of the person we were looking for, he’d also forgotten that we’d all written the name on our forearms. I rolled up my sleeve and looked at what I’d written there in pen. It was just smudge. Huh. Was it possible we were looking for someone named Smudge? I sort of liked that name. Smudge. It sounded a bit like a small serving of fudge—Smudge. Smudge of fudge. Smudge Baron had a nice ring to it too.
“Dorcas,” M said as she read the name written on her forearm. “Her name is Dorcas. Oh dear. It appears that the ink is starting to fade again even though I keep tracing over it. Soon we won’t be able to read her name at all.”
Dorcas! That’s right, that was the name! I liked Smudge better, to be honest.
“We have to move cautiously and keep our eyes open at all times,” P explained to us as he placed his Time Stopping Device into his pocket. “I don’t want anyone else to be erased. Particularly me. I don’t think I’d do very well with being erased. Existence is one of my favorite things.”
“But how can he erase us if we’re already here?” Rose asked. “Let’s think about this logically, alright? If he got rid of . . . Dorcas during the race, then it wouldn’t erase her from our memories. Right? We would just have a new memory of her disappearing during the race. You would still have your memories of her from before the race began. Right? This doesn’t explain why it suddenly seems like she never existed in the first place. None of this makes sense.”
“She’s right, McLaron,” said M as she bit her fingernails. “Werbert must have traveled further back in time when he erased . . . Dor . . . Dor . . .” She frowned, unable to read the name printed on her forearm anymore. It kept fading and fading. “Dor . . . whatever-her-name-is. He must have done something to stop her from being born!”
We heard another set of footsteps quickly scurrying through the Baron Estate, followed by a high-pitched snicker which sounded as though it was coming from the walls.
“It’s definitely Werbert,” P said quietly. “I’d recognize that silly sounding snicker anywhere. And to answer your question, Rose, you’re absolutely right. Werbert must have traveled further back in time and done something to prevent D— I can’t read my writing anymore either—to prevent whoever-it-was from ever being born. He just came back here to our race around the country in order to toy with us, and perhaps do something else that’ll ruin our lives for good. Or maybe he’s already done something else at another point in time, and now he’s just watching us so he can see us suffer when the change finally occurs. The awful possibilities are endless when it comes to a madman with a time machine. We’ve already lost one person to time travel . . .”
“Oh dear,” said M, turning a sickly color as the last of the pen markings faded from her arm—the last connection to the mystery person disappearing for good. “Poor . . . whoever-it-was.”
Poor whoever-it-was indeed. I suddenly felt terrible for this person I couldn’t remember. I bet they were nice, and friendly, and generous, the sort of person who would surprise you in the middle of the day with a freshly baked strawberry cake. But even if they weren’t, even if they were loud, and boring, and irritable, and fussy, and finicky, and eggy, no one deserves to be erased like an old math equation from a chalkboard. I wouldn’t even wish that on my worst enemy.
“But,” P interjected, suddenly lowering his voice to just above a whisper, “I’ve given the matter some more thought, and I don’t think that’s what Werbert intended to do. I don’t think he intended to erase this other person from our lives. I think it was a mistake.”
“A mistake?” I asked.
“What do you mean, a mistake?” M asked P. “If he didn’t want to erase that other person from existence, then what was Werbert trying to do?”
As he turned to her, P’s eyes suddenly looked sadder than I’d ever seen them look before. He reached out and brushed a lock of hair from M’s face, then he pulled her in for a hug.
“I think, my little muffin,” he whispered, “Werbert was trying to erase you.”
We found W. B. from 1891 in the corner of the living room with a vase stuck over his head. He was lying on the floor, looking about as foolish as you’d expect a kid with a vase stuck over his head to look. Rose Blackwood from 1891 was staring at him with a very confused expression on her face, her hand outstretched as though she wasn’t sure whether to help him up or to point at him and laugh. They were both frozen stiff, just like M and P from 1891.
“I remember that,” Rose from the present said with a giggle. “I couldn’t believe how clumsy you were, W. B. In fact, I still sort of can’t believe it.”
“Werbert isn’t down here,” P told us after he finished scanning t
he living room. “Sharon, you and I should check upstairs for him. Rose and W. B., please wait down here. If you happen to see Werbert, yell for help, and we’ll come running.”
“Wait!” I called as my parents started up the stairs. “How will we know what he looks like?”
“Well,” P said thoughtfully, “I haven’t seen Werbert in about twenty years. But the last time I saw him, he was short and skinny with frizzy brown hair. He wore little spectacles, and was always dressed in a very drab looking suit with a long tie and ugly suspenders. And if that isn’t a good enough description, you’ll recognize him by the fact that, unlike everyone else in this flying house from 1891, he’ll actually be able to move.”
We heard another rustling sound from somewhere in the Baron Estate, and P and M wordlessly dashed upstairs, leaving me and Rose from the present standing there, staring at our frozen past selves. It was amazing how much had changed between us in just one year. Not only did we both look completely different (I was much taller now, and Rose had a much kinder smile), we also both looked at each other differently as well. Back then, Rose Blackwood was a nightmare to me—just hearing her name was enough to make my knees knock together in fright. I thought she was a monster. But now she was like a sister to me, and I couldn’t imagine my life without her.
“I was so scared of you back then,” I said to Rose as I pointed to the frozen versions of us from 1891. “I thought you’d be just as evil as your brother.”
“I was pretty frightened too,” she replied, mussing up my hair affectionately. “This was the first and only crime I’ve ever committed. I had more butterflies in my belly than a greedy toad in spring.”
“Well, I couldn’t tell. You seemed like you knew what you were doing.”
“Thanks, W. B.” she punched me affectionately on the shoulder.
“What about me?” I asked. “Did I seem like I was handling being kidnapped pretty well? Were you impressed by me too? Did you think I was very brave?”