by Eric Bower
Rose raised an eyebrow as her lips curled up into a smirk.
“W. B., look at yourself.”
I looked over at W. B. from 1891. Not only was there a vase stuck over his head, his pants had also split. And there was a mustard stain on the back of his shirt as well. How the heck does a person get a mustard stain on the back of their shirt?
“So what?” I said indignantly. “You can be clumsy and brave at the same time.”
Rose laughed.
“W. B., I’ve seen you do some incredibly brave things. In fact, you’re probably the bravest kid I’ve ever known. But on the first day I met you, you seemed so jittery and nervous and clumsy and frightened, that I just felt really sorry for you. Every time I showed you my gun, you looked like you were about to faint or throw up or both. One of the reasons I started hiding the gun in my handbag was because of how pathetically frightened you looked whenever you saw it. I felt pity for you.”
Before I could tell her that W. B. from 1891 didn’t need her pity, we both heard a very unsettling sound. It was another high-pitched giggle, followed by the pitter patter of furtive footsteps scampering across the first floor of the Baron Estate. In fact, if my ears weren’t deceiving me, it sounded as though the person creating the footsteps was making their way down the hall at that very moment and was about to dash into the living room! Rose and I both spun around with our fists held up like boxers, hoping to catch and pummel my father’s mortal enemy the moment he crossed the doorway.
But he never appeared. We stood there for another thirty seconds, crouched in wait, fisticuffs ready, while trying to hide the fact that we were both shaking like a bowl of watery jelly in the middle of an earthquake. I looked at Rose Blackwood’s trembling fists and hid a smile—it was good to know that I wasn’t the only one who was afraid. She saw me staring at her shaking hands, and her cheeks turned bright red.
“W. B., I refuse to stand here and shiver like a frightened kitten,” she told me as she stood up straight, quickly hiding her shaking mitts in her pockets. “We know Werbert is here somewhere. Your parents had us split up so we could look for him upstairs and downstairs simultaneously, and I think that was a great idea. Now I think that you and I should split up too, so we can properly search the downstairs of the Baron Estate. We need to make sure that Werbert can’t sneak from room to room as we search for him, hiding in places that we’ve already searched. I’m pretty certain that that’s what he’s been doing to stay hidden from us. Please be as brave as I know you can be, W. B., because our existence is at stake here. The moment you see Werbert, scream as loud as you can, and your parents and I will come running. Alright?”
“Alright, good plan,” I said, “I’ll go check the kitchen.”
Rose caught my arm as I started to leave the living room, my mind already considering the country ham that I knew we still had in the larder in January of 1891.
“I think it might be a better idea if I check the kitchen. Otherwise, you might get distracted, and then forget to check the other rooms too. Why don’t you search your parents’ bedroom and my bedroom, and I’ll explore the kitchen, garage, and all of the downstairs closets. We’ll meet back here in ten minutes. Good luck, kid.”
As Rose carefully stepped through the swinging door into the kitchen, I slowly made my way down the hall to my parents’ bedroom. My frightened legs twitched with every uncertain step I took. My heart was pounding so loudly in my chest that it was beginning to give me a headache. I was suddenly feeling more frightened than I’d ever felt before, which unfortunately meant I’d have to be braver than I’d ever been before. There were few things in life I hated more than having to be brave, but unfortunately, I rarely had much of a choice in the matter. I would have to be brave, if only to prove a point to Rose. She had told me that she thought I was a frightened and clumsy mess when she first met me. And while that might be partially true, I certainly didn’t want to prove her right, especially not when my entire family’s existence depended on it.
When I threw open the bedroom door, I was blinded by a terrific flash of brightness, as though a bolt of lightning had struck in the middle of the room, creating an explosion of sparks.1 I didn’t know what to do, so I dropped to the ground and covered my head with my hands, hoping that my father’s time-freezing invention hadn’t accidentally done something silly like destroying the entire universe as we know it. When the bright light finally cleared, and I lifted my head up from the ground, I saw that there was no one in my parents’ bedroom. It was just as it always was, but it was also . . .
. . . different?
It was definitely different, though I couldn’t say precisely why or how it was different. Something was wrong though, I could smell it like a cookie baking a mile away. Something had been changed, but it wasn’t a major thing, not like the significant change that had occurred in the empty room upstairs which had belonged to . . . whoever it was that it had belonged to. This was a small change, tiny enough to not seem crazy, but large enough to be noticeable, and to eventually drive me a little bit crazy.
As I stood there and stared at the familiar and yet noticeably different bedroom, I heard a terrified scream, followed by another wild giggle. The giggle echoed throughout the entire Baron Estate, and then it slowly began to fade, as though the giggler had opened the back door and jumped out while still giggling.
I rushed out of the bedroom just in time to see the entire living room light up as though there’d been another explosion. I once again dropped to the ground, covering my head with my hands, though this time I mistakenly forgot to protect my face as I dropped, resulting in me getting a rather painful and unpleasant rug burn across my forehead, nose, and chin.
“Rose?” I called blindly into the dusty floor (while wishing that I had actually swept the floor on that day in 1891 like I was supposed to, instead of just lying to M about it). “Rose, are you alright?”
“W. B.?” Rose cried as she stumbled into the living room from the kitchen, looking baffled and dazed. “What was that sound? The lights flashed twice and then I felt something rumble throughout the Baron Estate. I thought that someone might have lit a stick of dynamite or something. What happened? Did you see?”
“I saw the lights flash and heard the rumbling, too, but I don’t know what actually happened. On a completely unrelated note, does my parents’ room look strange to you now? Am I crazy, or is something different in here?”
Before Rose Blackwood could answer, I saw P thunder down the stairs, followed by my slowly moving mother (who preferred not to thunder if she could avoid it). The moment I spotted them, my eyes did a double-take, as though they couldn’t believe what they’d just seen.
But I couldn’t tell you why they had done that.
In fact, a few seconds later I felt quite embarrassed for doing the double-take in the first place. It was just my parents. My father and my mother, the same father and mother I’d known for my entire life. My eyes should have done a single-take (which I guess is called just regular old looking), though for some reason, they didn’t. Curious. My mind was beginning to fill up on curiosities, mysteries, and confusions, and it had no idea what to do about them all.
“Did you see him?” P asked us. “Did you see Werbert?”
“McLaron, take me back to the present right now!” my mother ordered P before Rose and I could answer. “My feet are swollen and my head hurts. And I haven’t had a decent cup of tea in almost one hour! You know I need my tea! It helps my digestion! And my allergies! And my knee pain! And my temper! And my uncontrollable shouting!”
“I’m sorry, my little muffin,” P said to my mother with a sympathetic grin. “But it’s very important that we find Werbert as quickly as possible. Otherwise, he’ll grow tired of toying with our lives, and then he’ll erase us all from existence. I have to say that the most terrifying part about all of this is that we have no idea how much he’s already interfered with our lives. He could have already changed something hug
e, erasing a key person or event from our minds, and we would never even know about it. We’d naturally forget all about how our lives used to be. He could change everything we believe forever.”
“That’s nonsense!” my mother snapped as she adjusted her hair. “Everything you say is nonsense, codswallop, poppycock, and podsnappery! And stop calling me your little muffin. Do I look like a muffin to you? Do I? Huh? Hmmm?”
Rose and I exchanged a secret look. She did sort of look like a muffin. Her shape was undoubtedly muffinish, her hair looked like a muffin-top, she smelled a bit like a pan of stale muffins, and the blue beads she wore on her dress looked exactly like the blueberries on a blueberry muffin. All and all, she probably couldn’t have looked more like a muffin if she was sitting on a plate beside a giant mug of coffee.
“I’m sorry, Madge,” P said to my mother. “I forgot how much you hate that. I’ll take you back to the present right away, and then we’ll continue our search in the past while you rest and drink your tea.”
“Hurry up!” she snapped. “I need a hot bath immediately, or I might start to become a bit unpleasant.”
My mother had always looked like a muffin . . . hadn’t she?
I REALLY HATE NOT EXISTING
After my father dropped off my thoroughly annoyed mother back in the present, he, Rose, and I began to flip through all of the Baron books in search of fuzzy moving letters, so that we could see where Werbert had gone next. P had been clever enough to bring several copies of the Baron books with him, which meant all three of us could constantly be flipping through them to check for changes. We figured that three sets of eyes would give us a better chance of spotting a change just as it was occur-ring—it was of the utmost importance that we catch Werbert before he could finish altering or erasing any more of our history. Since we were clearly running out of time, we would have to be very quick and very smart to stay one step ahead—er, behind?—Werbert.
“Ouch,” I cried, having given myself a paper cut for the fourth page in a row while flipping through my copy of The Idiotic Imbecilities of the Ridiculous Baron Family. Coincidentally, the W. B. on the cover of that book had just given himself a paper cut as well, though I must say I was weeping in a much more brave and tough manner than he was—there was barely even any mucus running out of my nose as I cried.
We were searching intently for a good five or ten minutes, our eyes scanning every inch of the pages, before Rose finally spotted a slowly changing sentence in her copy of The Underwater Bungles of the Ridiculous Baron Family.
“He’s in the submarine!” Rose cried. “He traveled back in time to when we were taking the long submarine ride to that island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean! We need to get there right away!”
“To the time machine!” P declared.
“Oh no,” I muttered quietly.
The submarine adventure. Of all the places for Werbert to go . . .
I must admit that I’ve enjoyed most of my family’s adventures, even the really intense and frightening ones that almost cost me my life, which, come to think of it, has been most of them. But I didn’t enjoy the time that we spent in the submarine my father invented. In fact, it was one of the most miserable experiences of my life. It was cramped in that cursed submarine, it was boring, we eventually ran out of food, the view was very repetitive, and there was a smelly monkey living in there who made it his life’s mission to make certain that I was as unhappy and uncomfortable during that submarine trip as humanly possible. In the end, that monkey had actually saved my life, but that didn’t change the fact that he spent over six weeks torturing me in an enclosed underwater ship. Lousy, stupid, lifesaving monkey . . .
P, Rose, and I felt the time machine land with an oddly metallic sounding clang, which rang throughout the invention like a struck gong. But even from inside the time machine, I could still smell the strong ocean air outside, which presumably meant we’d reached our destination. I suddenly wished for a window in the time machine; we had no idea where exactly we’d landed.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Why, we’re in the submarine, of course,” P said proudly.
“You managed to land the time machine directly inside the submarine?” Rose asked P. “That seems unlikely. You’d be hitting a moving target while traveling in a vehicle that passes through space and time. You’d need to be pretty darn precise with the control panel in order to do that.”
“I suppose that’s true,” P answered with a grin and a wink, “but as we both know, Rose, I’m nothing if not precise. Precision is my middle name.”
He opened the door to the time machine, took a step forward, and immediately dropped out of sight. Rose and I rushed to the edge of the doorway and looked down, breathing a sigh of relief as we saw P crumpled on a floating bed of metal, moaning in pain, but otherwise safe and sound.
In case you were wondering, P’s real middle name is Aaron.
The time machine had landed on top of the submarine just as it had surfaced in the middle of the Pacific Ocean; I suddenly remembered that we had done that several times during the submarine adventure, surfacing for the opportunity to get some fresh air and to gaze at the beautiful surface of the sea. It was especially pretty in the early morning and afternoon, when the bright rays from the sun skipped across the frothing white capped waves. Those occasional breaths of fresh air were one of the only things that kept us sane during the long and tedious journey across the sea. They were our reminder that there was a world outside of that cramped little tin can that we were all stuck in, which smelled much too strongly of monkey for my liking.
Rose and I jumped out of the open time machine door and landed on the familiar metallic top of the submarine. It was slick from being underwater, but miraculously, neither of us slipped and fell.2 As I helped P to his feet, Rose pounded on the circular door at the top of the submarine and screamed for someone to open up.
“I wouldn’t bother knocking on the door, Rose,” P told her. “We can’t hear you in there. The shell of the submarine is practically soundproof. I designed it that way on purpose so we would have a quick and quiet ride without being bothered by chatty dolphins, singing whales, or belching sharks. You would need to pound on that door with a sledgehammer in order to be heard.”
“But according to my book, Werbert is likely inside the submarine, doing something else that will ruin our lives,” Rose argued. “How do you propose we get in there to stop him?”
“An idea!” P suddenly declared.
“Yes?” Rose asked excitedly. “What is it, Mr. Baron?”
“That’s what we need. An idea.”
“Oh.”
I stood there scratching my head (apparently, time travel makes a person feel a bit itchy) when suddenly, I saw the periscope slowly rise up from the submarine. It extended a good six feet up in the air, looking a bit like a mechanical ostrich stretching its neck, before slowly rotating in order to scan the surrounding sea.
Suddenly, I had an idea.
“I know how to get everyone’s attention in the submarine,” I told P and Rose.
I quickly shimmied up the periscope like a monkey climbing a palm tree, and once I reached the top, I stuck my face in front of the viewing apparatus so that I could get the attention of the people inside the submarine. But when I looked through the glass portion of the periscope, I saw a giant eyeball staring back at me, which sort of frightened me. A lot.
I screamed. Rose screamed. P screamed. And though I couldn’t say for certain, I’m pretty certain I heard myself scream from inside the submarine as well. Moments later, we heard the sound of a furnace roaring, bubbles bubbling, and then the steam powered submarine began to slowly sink back into the sea. P, Rose, and I had to quickly climb into the time machine and shut the door, firing it up and forcing it to hover in the air before we were dragged underwater as well.
“Great idea, W. B.,” Rose grumbled sarcastically as she tried to close the door to the time m
achine with one hand while flipping through a Baron book with her other hand. “Now we’ll have to catch up with Werbert somewhere else. According to my book, it looks like he’s already left the submarine, and who knows what damage he’ll have done there—Mr. Baron, would you please help me? I can’t seem to get the door closed. It’s jammed. Something must have happened to it when we landed on the submarine.”
“I’ve found him!” P cried—he’d been flipping through his copies of the Baron books as well. “He left the submarine in a hurry—I imagine little Waldo must have frightened him away, heh heh, that naughty little monkey. Now it looks as though Werbert’s back in the Pitchfork Desert, and according to this book, it’s around the time when W. B.’s friend B.W. used my Doppelgänger Device to transform himself into our son. Alright, everyone, we have our next destination!”
“Oh, no,” I moaned, plopping down on the time machine floor in exhaustion. “We have to go back and see B.W.? I hated B.W.”
“Mr. Baron?” Rose called again. “You never answered me about the door. It still won’t shut. Will that be a problem?”
“You hated B.W.?” asked P, his nose twitching in disbelief. “Since when? I remember you two being the best of friends, thick as thieves, two peas in the same pod, a pair of pumpkins from the same patch, two partridges in the same pear tree, a couple of bananas in a hammock. In fact, I was wondering just the other day why I haven’t seen that kid around lately. I’ve missed him.”
Another explanation is in order. Sorry for all of these explanations, but traveling back in time has made most of them necessary—well, I suppose they’re only necessary if you want to know what’s going on. If you don’t care about what’s going on, then go ahead and skip the explanations. I swear I won’t mind. The story will probably be more entertaining that way, or at the very least, it’ll be shorter.
You see, B.W. is a kid who I first met in school. At first, I thought we were best friends, but it turned out he was only pretending to be my friend so he could steal my parents’ inventions and give them to his father. B.W.’s father also happened to be Benedict Blackwood, who is the worst human being in the history of human beings, in addition to being Rose’s brother. After B.W. knocked me unconscious and placed me on an eastbound train, he used a device that my father invented, the Doppelgänger Device, to transform himself into me, so he could pose as W. B. without either of my parents realizing that I was gone. The Doppelgänger Device is a baffling invention that can transform you into someone else with the press of a button—but I couldn’t even begin to tell you how it works or why. It might have something to do with altitude. I really don’t know.