“No, dear, dear Anna I’m forever lost in your eyes. I love you so very much, but as you said once, we live so many years apart. We continue to steal minutes from a clock that ticks us both into eternity.”
“You said the heart has no boundaries.”
“And that’s true. Time lays down those boundaries—not the heart.”
“Then time is villainous and cruel,” she sighed. “It is a flower that blooms at midnight, only to pass into eternity in the morning sunlight.”
“Yes,” he nodded, “it remains the enemy of even the purest, most celestial souls. But you’re here, not as a dream, but as one not stopped by the cold hands of time. You are in my arms, Anna. I feel your heart beating, and your words are not silenced by time. They are beautiful, honest and tender words that will live unbroken in the long shadows of eternity.”
“Minutes taken from time’s evil and relentless clutch. I tell you this with a heart that has been pierced by an arrow—a heart that will not heal, and I must continue to endure this awful pain.”
A chilling silence suddenly took hold of the great room. The moon, higher in the windows, showed an angrier face, as though it had been frozen too long in an alien sky. Unable to smile longer on two hearts beating furiously, it was the great round face of a clock, ticking minutes off their lives together.
“You do not know how I long to see you, how I want to be held in your arms and hear my name on your lips.” With tears welling in eyes that only minutes before were bright with moonlight, she sighed, “I can no longer bear this appalling darkness that comes between us. This fire that rages so violently inside me now must die, as surely as stars fall to their death each night.”
The great room, for the most part unused by Ben, did have a few chairs, a large oak refractory table stacked with books, and an early 20th century settee beneath the tall beveled glass windows. Two people whose emotions for each other were no longer concealed sat quietly. Anna’s pale hands were nearly concealed in the folds of her skirt, as though she was trying to keep them from being exposed to the cold that had fallen across the large room.
For nearly a minute, Ben wondered if there was something—anything—he could say to acknowledge the strong emotions she was feeling. Anna, unaccustomed to declaring so openly such deep feelings, seemed to draw back, possibly with thoughts of impropriety. He sensed it when she deliberately looked away as though slightly embarrassed. Or, possibly, she realized once again that the years between them were too many. Any declarations of love were decisively vain. But both, despite the futility of such beautiful words, felt compelled to express the deep feelings they had for each other.
“Sweet, Anna, my wish to be near you is spoken without remorse.”
“So lovely are the words you speak that I can hardly believe they are meant for me.”
“I speak words too long silent. They are meant for no other than you.”
“Then you must kiss me again . . . and again, until there has been a kiss for every year between us.”
Though passions of the heart were expressed convincingly, and with the conviction of love, not so the thoughts that were unrelenting hammers drumming furiously inside his head. They were noisy saboteurs already drawing their swords to cut away his heart. Anna’s beauty was unforgettable and each moment with her was captivating. Such enthralling emotions he refused to dispute.
Such enchantment would have impacted her husband every day of their lives together, just as it affected Ben now. Appearing in front of him that day on the stairs, must have been coincidence, or had she always known how to travel from her time to his? He knew the brooch she’d asked him to return had a kind of sorcery, because he had used it, what seemed now like a lifetime ago. Continuing to push through the sweet moonlight were those provoking doubts at the top of this steep and rapturous mountain. Maybe these were the illusions of a man who had lost his way too many years ago, at a time when he no longer remembered it happening at all.
When he kissed her again, he was sure that there was no turning back. Anna had him. The clutch of her fingers on his heart was tightening. But he would have it no other way. Let the world spin out from under him. He’d survive. With Anna in his arms, nothing else mattered. That thought was in every kiss, every touch, and she must have known, because the grip she had on him tightened even more. Still, there was a tightening in his chest, a suffocating emotion apprehending his senses. Maybe it was the fear of taking a chance, the echo of Jenna’s admonishment.
“I can no longer imagine a day when we’re apart,” he admitted. “You have hung the moon low enough in the sky for me to touch, and I cannot, I will not let it go. I love you and could never stop telling you how completely you’ve taken my heart from me. Love is not blind as they say, Anna. It’s as bold as the full moon, as dazzling as the stars above our heads.”
“If propriety has put a shroud across my face, you must remove it, so that you will remember forever the love that is in my eyes. Can you see it shining like starlight? Can you see the great sky full of stars and the two of us riding the wings of Pegasus? Look carefully, Ben, before it is too late.” She put her arms around him and pulled him closer. “Kiss me, please kiss away my fears. Show me again what is in your heart. Let me feel the love you tell me is there.”
“Oh, dear Anna, how could such a wonderful thing happen to us?”
“Come with me, Ben. Stay in my life forever. I love you so deeply.”
He knew instantly it was the beginning of an ultimatum he didn’t want to hear. Turning away from her, he took a few steps toward the doors to the great room. “I can’t go with you, Anna.” He looked at her with tears in his eyes. “You know I cannot.”
“I love you so much.”
“You’re taking my heart from me, and I can’t stop you from doing that.”
“You said you loved me, Ben.”
“I do love you . . . more than you know.”
“Yet you hesitate.”
“Oh, Anna, how could I not love everything you are? You’re the mist, the sunlight in the morning sky, and the moonlight at night, the soft rain breathing life into the flowers. You are everything beautiful, your smile, so bright in this dismal world of mine. How many times I have prayed you’d come in the night and lay beside me?”
She looked at him with stardust in her eyes and when the music began again, they danced, and danced, through the entire night. He held her so close that her breath sometimes came in short gasps. Still she smiled and begged him to hold her tighter, and tighter, until she would become part of him, and if such a thing as that was possible, it was going to happen that night in the great room at Atwood House.
“I love you, Ben Manning. I have not known this kind of love in my life.”
Pink early morning skies appeared in the windows, with the slightest trace of orange deepening as each second passed. Ben finally let her go. She looked at him from across the room, in the same place he’d seen the dancers disappear the previous autumn. He knew it was inevitable. She was only seconds from leaving, and nothing he could do would stop it from happening. She continued to reach out to him, her arms motioning him to follow—and this time in the pink glow of morning sunlight, and much to his surprise, he did.
Chapter 44
When it came to research, Dr. Charlie Chase was as skilled as any in the business. Thorough in every respect, his exhaustive search of the literature usually turned up what others missed or weren’t looking to discover. He looked through Warrick County, Indiana plat books from 1895 to 1900 until he found it—a two-acre plot of land deeded by Ollie Jessup. This was property on which the church and parsonage were constructed in 1900, and later after the fire, the land was purchased by William Atwood. Chase had found the 1901 Herald account of the church fire, which appeared to be the only mention of a Pastor Thomas Arnold.
Further research in Bible records of the same period made no reference to
Pastor Thomas Arnold, and even after a careful search in the National Registry of Ordained Ministers, there was still no mention of the man. Responsible for rebuilding the church in 1902, and a man of immense mystery, Arnold had supposedly spent less than a year in Newburgh before moving to Evansville. After a thorough Internet search and a review of public records, Charlie found three Thomas Arnolds, but all three had owned businesses in the Evansville area. Presumably, not one of these men had been an ordained minister.
No matter how deeply he searched, there was no record of Pastor Thomas Arnold during the years 1902 to 1930. Either the man was a self–ordained minister or hadn’t been a minister at all. If he was an impostor, there had to be a reason why, and Chase was sure he knew what that reason was. There was still a Jessup family living in Newburgh and after further searching, Charlie learned that the Jessup property was adjacent to what was now the Shanklin farm, and northwest of the Atwood property. The deeper he dug, the more Dr. Chase was convinced a strange event had occurred in 1901 Newburgh, Indiana, and he was slowly putting all the pieces together. It all made perfect sense to Chase.
With the extremely heavy confluence of ley lines converging between the 37th and 38th parallels, and the high incidences of UFO reports in the Evansville and Newburgh areas, Chase’s explanation reached deep into the paranormal. Though a scientist, whose contentions were derived not exclusively from facts, Walking Einstein was once again thinking beyond the rigid constraints of mainstream science, considering with serious purpose an explanation that fit the circumstances as he knew them. These circumstances were terrestrial in nature and had nothing to do with the Sirius star system, as he was sure Smith and his colleagues still believed.
Using X-Ray fluorescence or XRF spectrometry, as it was often called, he’d analyzed those pieces of metal gathered from the creek near the site of the old church, and found each to be nonferrous, with an oxide layer or skin called a passivation layer, that was nonporous to oxygen. He’d forged the metal alloy, which had high concentrations of the elements, iridium, magnesium, tellurium, germanium, and palladium to several degrees Fahrenheit, with no trace of decomposition. When put to yield strength and tensile strength stress tests, the pieces had an extremely high tensile strength-to-density ratio and were virtually indestructible. Nothing he did altered the shape or composition in any discernible way.
Evidence piled up, all of it supporting, not an extraterrestrial craft but one from earth’s own future. Though it was impossible to determine when, Chase remained convinced that what the military recovered in 1947 was something they hadn’t anticipated. Consequently, they created a cover story, that upon real examination was preposterous.
A group insisting what was retrieved in Newburgh was from another planetary system could not determine with any certainty from what system the craft had traveled. Chase was convinced that the Sirius star system remained the most likely contender among this sanctimonious bunch of elitists, whose rhetoric was little more than repetitious thinking, whose members continued to beat the extraterrestrial drum; but their shockwave was nothing more than one disinformation campaign after another—a noisy shudder, easily shrugged off as blatant hypocrisy. It was left to clandestine groups like Smith’s to put it all together, by searching out the facts, no matter how improbable or impossible the results.
Chase realized that he had not been called in as a consultant to something as ancient as the 1947 retrieval. But while a member of Smith’s team, he’d heard and seen enough to know that extraterrestrial intervention was one of two contentions still on the table. The other, and the one Chase was sure of, was increasingly more than a possibility, and a contention with high probability—that the future had already occurred in 1947, and this was considerably more perplexing than the alien assertion.
General Elkins had weighed in with his usual aggressive demeanor, by adding to the mix a distinct concern for national security. Aliens from destinations unknown would pose manifest threats, and the United States military might be helpless against what he referred to as advanced technologies. “If we’re outgunned,” he was heard to say, “extraterrestrial incursion would be catastrophic.”
Since no bodies were recovered, and if what had crashed in Newburgh in 1947 was an unmanned craft, a possible drone from the future, it would certainly have been taken apart and even replicated. If that was the case, the military would already have those advanced technologies, frequently spotted in the skies, and mistakenly identified as UFOs. As plausible as that was to Chase, there was another very intricate piece that many in the established scientific community refused to consider with any real seriousness. Though Charlie felt his contributions had been minor and not fully understood, Smith considered the simplicity of the transmitters the beginning of something bigger, and further felt his organization had the information needed to flash messages out into space—messages aimed specifically at Sirius.
What if a craft recovered on the Newland property in 1947 had a pilot, or possibly more than one occupant? What if these occupants had been left behind and reconstructed a church on property originally deeded by Ollie Jessup? And what if there were seams, rifts in the space-time continuum that existed at various places across the earth, at sacred places, at places where ley lines created portals? And had parallel universe research been sacrificed to other military dictates, the most prominent of which was national security? Did national security rhetoric fail to consider a multiverse? Or did the government already know that portals opened and closed, and where these portals were, and how they were controlled? Had Chase misread Smith’s intentions? Had the man deceived him into thinking the military concern had focused entirely on establishing communication towers?
There were, however, a few reputable physicists much involved in the study of parallel universes and interdimensional travel. Something, maybe weather anomalies, caused these gateways to open and close. Maybe there were no controls. Dr. Charlie Chase, now outside the constraints of the laboratory, was on the hunt for answers.
Newburgh was just a one hour drive from Vincennes, so he’d resume snooping in the area that seemed to have the most answers. After all, the craft had been retrieved from property in Newburgh. Charlie thought himself innocuous enough, and even when he started asking questions, he’d simply say he was doing research on the 1947 retrieval. There was no reason to lie about it. His credentials could certainly be verified, but he didn’t think it would come down to that. He’d start with those who would remember what Charlie was calling the “event.” Old-timers could be found in any restaurant that served up home cooking. He’d stop at the Knob Hill Tavern, conveniently located on Old Highway 662 at the west edge of Newburgh, serving hot fiddler crabs since 1943.
He got there early one Friday evening a few minutes before the crowd arrived. Securing a corner seat at the bar, he had a good view, especially of those tables in the tavern side of Knob Hill. It was a dim cozy room with a definite small-town atmosphere. Charlie ordered a beer and prepared for a lengthy stay. The bartender’s name was Mack. In his 70s, Mack had what was left of his gray hair pulled into a short ponytail tied off with a piece of black ribbon. The few others at the bar were probably regulars whose butts fit perfectly into the black-cushioned barstools. A couple of seats away from where Charlie sat on the corner stool, was an older man dressed in faded overhauls, with bright red suspenders over a green flannel shirt. This was John Deere farmland and the four–legged deer on his hat had been leaping that way since mid-century.
Mack served up a large platter of fiddlers to the man. Charlie wondered how much of the fish would stay in the moustache and beard, both so thick and unruly that they resembled the worn bristles of a paintbrush. But the man found the small hole that was a mouth and chased down each bite with a slug of beer. Since the man had a jovial demeanor, Charlie decided he’d often been a mall or department store Santa Claus.
Eating fried fish at the opposite end of the bar were a well-dressed man and
woman in their forties. Behind them on the wall was a large mounted catfish that looked like it had been there several years. It was a big one, probably a trophy fish pulled from the Ohio River that was a couple of hundred yards to the south, where the Big Bend, as it was called locally, turned in the direction of Evansville. There were other fish mounted on all the walls. It was clear to anyone that this was a proud river town floating lazily into a predictable future. It was not a town in a hurry to go anywhere. A scenic town with small businesses on both sides of Main Street, there were no dilapidated or boarded buildings. A Farm Bureau Insurance office had been in the same building for several decades. Newburgh was a survivor. Since everything they needed was as close as Evansville and the Internet, most people living in Newburgh had no reason to travel, unless they wanted to view new scenery or visit family or friends who had moved away.
Chapter 45
As the dining room gradually got busier, crowd noise started spilling into the tavern. A few of the tables near the bar were already occupied, most of them by couples who seemed comfortable in each other’s presence. The bar and backbar were turn of the century mahogany, polished by decades of wear. A beveled glass mirror ran the length of the bar, making it easy for the bartender to see everything going on when his back was turned. Nicked and chipped in many places, especially along the top edge, the wainscoting was probably original. The Knob Hill Tavern was what you’d expect in a small town, especially on a Friday night—kind of homey, a suitable place to eat and drink away the week.
Every so often, Mack retrieved a flyswatter from the back counter and took a whack at a few persistent flies. It must have been a routine action, because nobody but Walking Einstein even noticed. The entire place smelled of fried fish. Charlie didn’t care much for fish, too boney for his palate. He did like chili so that’s what he ordered from a Millennial in a stained apron, whose frown seemed permanently fixed, and who was given to long exhalations at the end of each order she took.
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