Time Traveler - Books 1, 2, 3 & 4: Books for Girls aged 9-12

by Katrina Kahler

  A man who we all recognized straight away.

  “Thaddeus Banes,” Oliver whispered. “You’re supposed to be dead!”

  The old man appeared more haphazardly put together than he had in his pictures with Grandpa. His hair was mostly gone except for a few gray strands on the sides. His eyes twitched angrily, and the hand holding the revolver was shaky. I stepped back, trying to get away from him and the lingering smell of mothballs and cigarettes. My nose crinkled and I tried to move even further back when he reached out and snagged my arm. He was faster than I expected for an old man and I winced as his fingers dug into my flesh.

  Oliver and Kate yelled in panic, both ready to charge forward. But Thaddeus aimed the gun at them, and they slid to a stop.

  “Now then, we’re all going to have a nice little chat, aren’t we?”

  “About what?” Oliver snapped. “Just let her go, and we’ll talk about whatever you want.”

  “Not while you’re holding that machine. Set it down gently on this stack of boxes, and step away.”

  I saw Oliver’s grip tighten on the machine in his hands, but the second Thaddeus aimed the revolver at me, Oliver put the machine down and backed away.

  “There,” said Oliver. Now let her go.”

  I heard the old man’s teeth grinding before he shrugged and shoved me back towards Oliver and Kate. Oliver caught me in a hug before he pushed Kate and me protectively behind him. Thaddeus wasn’t paying any attention to us, just the machine at his side. His eyes were wide, and I thought for a second, tears were glistening on his cheeks at the sight of it.

  “You found it…after all these years, William’s grandson found it and got it working. Marvelous, just marvelous,” Thaddeus whispered in awe. “I knew. I knew that one day I would find it, find what he’d kept from me all these years. What they both tried to stop me from finding.”

  I frowned when he said both, but this wasn’t the time to consider his words.

  “For good reason probably,” Oliver muttered.

  Thaddeus lifted his head and leered at us. “You’re just like him, aren’t you? Thinking you know best, thinking that this science can only be used for one purpose and one purpose only.” He licked his lips, and his hands shook even more. “He never understood, no one ever understood! All I wanted was to show the world what we’d discovered. But William…he locked it away, claimed it was too dangerous.”

  He laughed madly, and I gulped, realizing we were stuck in the past with a crazy man holding a gun. “And here are his grandkids,” he smirked, “using it to mess around with things they don’t understand.”

  “We’re trying to find our dad,” Oliver corrected him sharply.

  Thaddeus laughed even harder. “Your dad? Oh, well then, by all means, enjoy your search.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I whispered. “You…what did you do to him?”

  “It wasn’t my fault,” Thaddeus said with a casual shrug. “Your dad poked his nose where it didn’t belong…so I sent him away.”

  “Where?” Oliver asked. “Where did you send him!”

  “Ah, ah, temper, temper,” Thaddeus warned and lifted the revolver again. “I’m the one asking questions here tonight, not you. Besides, you’re not even supposed to be here. But I had a feeling…a feeling that somehow my plan would work out the way I’d intended and I’d catch you in the act.”

  I didn’t want to hear any more. Thaddeus knew about Dad, but I doubted he would tell us anything to help us understand what had happened. We’d have to keep looking and find Dad on our own like Grandpa’s note had told us to. Thaddeus was unstable, and right now we just needed to grab the machine from him and get back to our own time zone. But the gun was a problem. Somehow, we needed to get the gun away from him so we could get to the machine. My head was spinning frantically as I watched Thaddeus mumble to himself as he leaned over the device, running his fingers along it, mesmerized by what he saw.

  Looking around, I suddenly knew what I had to do. The shelving unit behind Thaddeus was filled with old books and a heap of boxes. If I could topple it over, so it landed on him, it might give us the chance we needed. With no way to tell Oliver what I was planning, I took a few tentative steps towards the wall of the basement and held my breath. Thaddeus was too distracted and didn’t notice me moving.

  Oliver slid a sideways glance towards me, subtly shaking his head, but I indicated the shelf with a nod, trying to make him understand. He shook his head, more fiercely this time, but I was already moving.

  “Fascinating,” Thaddeus whispered loudly. “I would never have considered using the coils like this. And the power source…one wrong adjustment and it could blow the entire thing up. He actually managed to get it stable…all this time, I knew he’d figured it out. I knew it!”

  I inched my way past Thaddeus and around the shelves. Finally, standing behind the shelving unit, I readied myself for what I was about to do. With my heart pounding and my palms sweaty, I placed my hands on one of the lower shelves and pushed.

  Nothing happened. It didn’t budge.

  But I wasn’t giving up. Thaddeus was still bent over the machine. I climbed up onto the bottom shelf then made my way higher and higher. Using all my body weight, I pushed with every ounce of strength I had. The shelf groaned and creaked, and by the time Thaddeus turned, it was already crashing down on top of him. He yelled, but the sound was muffled, the shelving unit pushing him to the floor and the gun skittering away from him.

  I landed on top of the pile with a yelp of pain. Kate grabbed my hand to yank me to my feet as Oliver reached for our precious time machine. I saw that it was covered in some fallen debris and I prayed that it wasn’t damaged. Thaddeus’ hand flew out and grasped a firm hold of my ankle. At the same time, he struggled to escape the weight of the shelf on top of him. With a yell, Kate grabbed a thick hardcover book that lay at her feet and smacked him on the head with it, until he released his grip.

  “Let’s go!” Oliver shoved us towards the stairs, then followed us to the top, slamming the basement door behind him. We could still hear Thaddeus yelling, so we pushed a large armchair in front of the door to hold him off a little longer.

  “Come on, let’s go!” I bounced on my feet, wanting to get out of there before Thaddeus came charging up the stairs to attack us again. “Oliver!”

  “Ok! Ok!”

  He flipped the switch on the machine, and we held on tight as the blue light surrounded us. With a loud pop, we disappeared from the living room…but the second we landed, I knew something was wrong.

  “What happened?” I asked frantically, as I stared around the house and focused on the unfamiliar blue sofa. “This is all new stuff. We have all new furniture…Oliver!”

  “We went too far forward!” He fiddled with the knobs, and I heard him curse, something Oliver never did. “It looks like the coil was damaged! I’ll have to fix it before we can use the machine again.”

  “How far forward did we go?” I asked, waiting for one of us, or for Mom to suddenly appear.

  “Twenty years!! No! I don’t know if I can fix this!”

  “Twenty years??” Kate gulped.

  My heart was pounding. We had to do something. “Your workbench. Let’s start there. Maybe all the things you need are still in the basement!”

  I saw the doubt on his face, but now was not the time for doubting. We had to fix the machine and get back to our real time zone.

  I didn’t want to think about what would happen if we became stuck twenty years in the future!

  Chapter 8

  Creeping from room to room, we firstly did a careful but very quick check of the house, and to our huge relief, we found no one at home; that was a plus at least. But in the process, we saw that Oliver’s room was void of any tools or his usual boxes of gadgets. We then rushed down to the basement, tearing open box after box, praying we’d find something useful.

  “Found it!” Oliver yelled.

  Kate and I ran to the back co
rner of the basement. “Those are the parts from the old machine we found in the antique store,” I said over his shoulder.

  “Yeah,” he said, digging through the contents that had obviously remained packed away.

  I stood by, praying he would find whatever he needed to fix the broken coil on Grandpa’s machine. He’d set the device on the workbench, and it was still glowing blue. But the light was intermittent, and now and then, it shot out a stream of sparks.

  After a few endless seconds of digging around inside the box, he pulled his arm free. “Got it!” he cried, holding up a copper coil that looked similar to the one that had been damaged. But it wasn’t the same. Even I could tell the wiring was different.

  “You sure that’ll work?” I asked as he ran to his workbench.

  “It has to. Otherwise, we’re stuck here!”

  I paced back and forth. Kate did the same but went in the opposite direction, wringing her hands with worry. I wanted to tell my best friend that everything would be fine and that we’d get back home, back to our proper time zone, the one where we were supposed to be. But I had no idea if that would be the case. And the longer it took Oliver to fix the machine, the worse my panic grew. Until finally, it threatened to swallow me whole.

  Finally, we heard Oliver’s excited voice. “Done! Who’s ready to go home?” he announced proudly.

  “Oh my gosh!” Kate replied, her face filled with utter relief. “Let’s go!”

  Oliver tucked the machine into his arms and made for the stairs.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. “What if Mom comes home?”

  “The easiest way to tell if we’re in the right time zone is to land in the living room with all our original furniture. Trust me; we’ll be fine.”

  I didn’t argue and trailed him and Kate up the stairs. He set the machine on the floor and fiddled with the knobs and dials that would get us back to our time. When he told us it was ready to go, he stood, holding the machine in his arms as we took up our designated places beside him. He flipped the switch, and I prepared for the trip home.

  Then, in the sudden blink of an eye, I knew something wasn’t right…for some reason, my gut told me we should run, but run from what? The hairs on my arms stood on end, and every instinct in me said we had messed up big time.

  At first, it was a gentle rumble, like thunder in the distance. It vibrated beneath my feet and shook the walls. Then the subtle shaking turned to tremors, shooting so hard through the wooden floorboards they started to pull up out of the floor. Earthquake. It had to be an earthquake! There’d been no intense shaking the previous times we did this so what had changed? Panic set in and I wanted to tell him I’d changed my mind. But it was too late. The shaking turned violent, sending me to my knees, with Kate, my best friend beside me.

  My brother, on the other hand, whooped with excitement. I guessed he thought that the new part had caused a power boost. Typical Oliver to think this was something to be jumping for joy about, instead of freaking out. He was the genius. He should be the one realizing that something was wrong, terribly wrong.

  We pulled ourselves up using the furniture and clung on tightly so we could stay on our feet. Kate’s face was pale, and she opened her mouth in fear. I was sure my expression was no different.

  Trinkets and books from around the room lifted into the air, hovering all on their own as if gravity no longer affected them. The shaking that had paused for a moment picked up again violently; I waited for the house to collapse on top of us, burying us alive. Bad idea, this was a very bad idea! Whatever part Oliver used had messed up the machine somehow, it must have. Cracks appeared in the walls, and I clung to Kate’s hand.

  Oliver backed his way towards us. He grabbed my other hand, gulping. “I think we made a mistake,” I swore I heard him yell, but the crackling sound that filled the room stole his words away. I took a breath to reply, and a gust of air snatched my voice away from me.

  Then, for a split second, time stood still. A heavy silence enveloped the room. I wasn’t sure what was more frightening, the silence, or the shaking of the objects as they hovered before our eyes. It was the same and yet so different. What had we done wrong?

  Abruptly, it seemed that time sped up as everything blurred into a faded haze. I squeezed Kate and Oliver’s hands tighter, but they were pulled away from me. My gut twisted as I was lifted off my feet, my scream dying in my throat. I felt as though we’d been whipped into a tornado as everything spun in a frantic motion around us.

  A few seconds later, I landed on my butt and heard grunts from Kate and Oliver, too. I opened my eyes, blinking as I tried to take in my surroundings.

  Very different surroundings.

  I had a sinking feeling our experiment had worked.

  But instead of being overjoyed and excited, I was terrified.

  Completely terrified.

  The house was our house, but it was dark and dank. Cobwebs hung from the ceiling, and a few inches of dust covered the tables and furniture around us. The air was heavy, and all the windows looked like they were boarded up.

  “Oliver?” I whispered, my voice cracking. “Oliver, what happened?”

  He ran his hands along the coffee table, frowning at the dust as it fell from his fingertips. “I don’t…I don’t know,” he whispered and checked his watch. “It’s the right day and time, but this…this isn’t our home. It can’t be.”

  Slowly, I walked around the living room. The furniture was familiar, but it was old and dilapidated, covered in dirt and stains, and the cushioning on the sofa was ripped in various places. The wind whistled through the boards covering the windows, and when I reached for a light switch, I found there was no power. It was our home, but no one had been here in years. Where was Mom? What had we done?

  “Oliver, I don’t like this. We need to get out of here.”

  “And go where? We came from twenty years in the future; we can’t just go back there again.”

  “So we’re stuck here? We don’t even know where here is?” I spun around, hoping that if I shut my eyes tightly enough, everything would magically return to normal.

  But that didn’t happen. Instead, everything remained the same. Dark and dank and dirty.

  I spun around again and spied Kate, clasping her hands nervously as her whole body trembled. For a horrible second, I’d forgotten my friend was with us. What about her family? Her house?

  “Kate, we should check your place, too. See what’s going on,” I suggested frantically.

  She nodded but didn’t say a word. Oliver nodded too and hoisted the machine up into his arms. “Let me grab a bag and then we can head out. Hopefully, we’ll find some answers in town.”

  I hoped so. I wanted to know where our mother was. The fact that she wasn’t in the house terrified me almost more than I wanted to admit. Inside, I was screaming that we’d messed up big time. What had we changed? We still had our machine. Thaddeus didn’t have it, and it didn’t make sense that by going into the future we’d changed something that would affect the past like this.

  Oliver disappeared upstairs; I guessed to look through his old room and find a backpack. When he came back down, his face was white, and his hands were shaking.

  “Oliver? What’s wrong? What’s up there?” I asked, not sure I wanted to hear the answer.

  He shoved the machine in an old bag I didn’t recognize.

  Slinging the bag onto his shoulder, he replied, “Nothing, let’s just get out of here.”

  “No, not until you tell me what you saw.” I stepped in front of him, blocking his escape and grabbing his arms. “It’s not…it’s not Mom, is it?”

  “What? No,” he grunted and grabbed the straps of the bag tightly in his hands. “But I wasn’t kidding when I said there’s nothing up there. Our rooms…they’re completely empty. I’m not sure we ever lived here with Mom. Ever.”

  I couldn’t move after he spoke. It wasn’t possible, couldn’t be. We’d lived here all our lives.

  “W
e’ll find her, Holly,” He whispered and squeezed my hand. “Let’s just get out of this place first; it’s creeping me out.”

  Numbly, I nodded and followed him out the front door, Kate walking beside me. We held hands as we went and I felt her shaking just as much as I was. We had no idea what we’d find at her house. But the farther we walked along the street, the more I knew that something was horribly wrong. All the houses appeared dilapidated and rundown as if the area had been deserted at one point or another. The yards were overgrown, and there was no one else in sight; no one on the streets anywhere. It was overcast and cold. I wished I would have looked for a jacket to wrap around myself or something to keep the chill out of my bones, but there was no point going back now.

  “Oh no,” Kate whispered, and I looked up to see her house.

  Or what was left of it.

  “Where…where are my parents? Guys…what happened here?” she asked, clutching at my arm.

  There were broken panes in every window, and the walls were discolored and dirty looking, the paint cracked and stained. Oliver walked to the front door, but Kate was too scared to follow. He rang the doorbell a few times, but I guessed it wasn’t working when he pounded his fist on the door instead. On the second hit, it shuddered and fell right in off its hinges. It landed with a thud and Kate gasped beside me.

  “Mom! Dad!” she screamed, bolting into the house before I could catch her. “Mom!”

  “Kate! Hold on!” Oliver rushed in behind her. “Wait for me!”

  I reached the front door as the house groaned from their combined weight. Although from the outside, it looked solid enough, the interior seemed ready to collapse. “Oliver! Get her out of there!” I yelled, watching the house vibrate. “Oliver!”