The Forbidden Lock

by Liesl Shurtliff

  13

  Changing Tides

  1995

  London, England

  Matthew Hudson knew that the map he’d found in London was unique, but he had no idea it would change his life. Or more specifically, end it.

  He found the map at a little flea market. He wasn’t much for flea markets, but when he saw a stand displaying old maps he stopped. Most of them were tourist trash, crude and inaccurate replicas of old maps of various parts of the world. And then he saw a map that was something else altogether. A world map on thick vellum. He couldn’t place what time period it came from. It seemed both at once old and new, and something about it called to him. When he touched it, the land lines shimmered and shifted. He wanted to study it, but not here.

  “How much for this one?” he asked the seller, whom he couldn’t even see behind all the displays.

  “Oh . . . uh . . . I don’t know. What do you think it’s worth?”

  Matthew raised an eyebrow. It sounded like a kid. Maybe they were manning the stand for their mom or dad. He reached in his pocket. He was low on cash. He was low on everything. Money, energy, inspiration. His studies were sucking him dry. He only had a few coins in his pocket. “How about fifty pence?” he suggested.

  “Sure, okay.” A small hand reached out.

  He felt a little guilty. He was probably ripping this kid off, but he was broke, and it wasn’t his problem if the owners hadn’t properly instructed the child on how to sell to customers. He handed over the money and rolled up the map. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Enjoy!” said the kid.

  Matthew showed the map to his professor, who was almost as fascinated by the map as Matthew. The land lines seemed to shift to accommodate different eras. It also had a strange watermark stamped all over it in varying shades, a circle with a V at the center. Maybe it had something to do with Vikings? Or perhaps it was V for Victory. It could be a war map. Or a treasure map. There didn’t seem to be any particular pattern. The markings were scattered all over the world, land and ocean, though mostly land, and they didn’t seem to coincide with any one people or particular event. His professor wasn’t sure it could be used academically, but he told Matthew he should hang on to it. You never know. The map could lead to any number of interesting things. Historical artifacts or a burial site. Treasure. As a child Matthew had fantasies of finding a map that would lead him to hidden treasure, like a pirate. He thought he’d let those childhood fantasies die, traded them in for serious scholarly pursuits, but somehow this map had unearthed that old longing for magic and adventure.

  When he returned to New York, Matthew hung the map up in his apartment, just like a souvenir. He studied it closely for a while, taking down dates and locations, trying to find some kind of pattern. Sometimes new markings seemed to appear that he hadn’t noticed before. Or maybe they hadn’t been there before. He wondered who had made the map, how, and why. What purpose did it serve? Was it a toy? Or was it somehow useful?

  One day, as he was getting ready to go to a Mets game with a friend, he noticed a new marking appear on the map, very different from the others. It glowed like the blue base of a flame. It was in New York, right in Manhattan, not far from where he was. He promptly forgot about the Mets game and his friend. He grabbed a compass from his desk, took the map down from the wall, and ran out the door.

  The coordinates took him to Saks Fifth Avenue, but he saw nothing out of the ordinary, just pedestrians minding their business, cars and taxis, a woman walking her dog, a man in a suit leaning against the building, smoking a cigarette.

  Matthew unfolded the map. The symbol on the map was still there, still glowing. When he looked up again, a woman emerged from the store. Matthew Hudson’s heart stopped dead in his chest. He couldn’t quite say what it was about this woman that slapped him so silly, but he knew she was anything but ordinary. It wasn’t only that she was beautiful. Matthew had seen plenty of beautiful women in his life, and they never had this effect on him. It was something else, an otherworldliness, a certain energy. She was different. He wanted to meet this woman. He thought maybe he could offer to help her, since she had several bags and packages. That wasn’t creepy, was it? He wasn’t experienced in approaching strange women. He wasn’t much experienced with women at all. He’d always been very shy with girls. They always made him feel awkward and tongue-tied. He simply had no confidence when it came to those things. But this woman, for whatever reason, made him feel bold. He had to talk to her. He just had to.

  But before he took a step, a taxi pulled up. In all respects, it looked like an ordinary taxi, except for two things. It was full of people, surely more passengers than there were seat belts, and in the place where there would usually be an advertisement on top of the car, there was instead a symbol. It was exactly the same symbol that showed up all over the map in varying shades, a compass with a V at the center. In this case, the V was bright red.

  The woman shoved her packages in the trunk. She looked over her shoulders both ways, clearly checking to see if anyone was watching. Her eyes locked on Matthew. They stared at each other for a moment, and then her face spread into a smile, almost like she recognized him somehow. Matthew Hudson’s heart nearly leaped out of his chest. She gave him a wink and got inside the very crowded taxi.

  Then something happened that Matthew Hudson wasn’t sure he really saw or not. The taxi drove off and disappeared. Truly disappeared. One moment there, the next gone. He looked at his map. The symbol was still bright, but it was no longer glowing.

  From that moment on Matthew was obsessed. He could barely take his eyes off the map. When he was at home, it was on the wall in front of his desk. He looked at it about every five minutes. If he was forced to go out, to class or to work, or home to visit his mother, he always brought the map with him. His mom teased him about it once, asked if he’d found any nice girls to date on that map of his.

  Matthew would never mention the mysterious woman to his mother. She’d think he was crazy, and on some level Matthew thought she would be right, but he couldn’t get the woman out of his head. Who was she? Where did she come from? Where had she gone? And how? How had the taxi just disappeared like that? He had to know. He had this feeling that he was meant to find this map, that he was meant to cross paths with that woman, for whatever reason. Sometimes he saw glowing new markings appear, as he had in New York, but they were always too far away, and would often disappear before he could even make travel arrangements. Even if he could, he didn’t think he’d have much luck, not if the dates that hovered over the glowing symbol were correct. They were all over the place in time, as far back as 44 BC and even into the twenty-first century AD. Eventually Matthew figured out what was going on. As improbably as it seemed, the woman was a time traveler, and this map was somehow tracking her movements.

  It was almost a year before he was able to see the woman again. He almost missed it. August 24, 1996. He was trying to write a paper for one of his classes, glancing at the map every now and then, as was his habit. Then he saw it. The symbol was glowing blue, just like before. In New York City. Right now.

  Matthew grabbed the map and raced out the door. He hailed a taxi. Checking the coordinates he saw that it was in the theater district. He found her at Les Misérables. She was with a group of people, all of them dressed up, but she perhaps more than any of them. She was wearing a red dress. She looked stunning, like a movie star. Lots of people looked at her, but she didn’t look back at any of them. She was clearly with someone. A handsome man who had a hand around her waist in an extremely possessive manner. Matt’s heart sank. Had he been a fool obsessing over this woman for the past year? She could be married for all he knew. She could have children, for crying out loud.

  He almost left, but then she looked up and their eyes met. Matthew started to move toward her. She said something to her friends, and then she turned abruptly and walked out of the theater. Her group followed, and they all got into a limousine. But before she got inside she stop
ped at the vendor selling hats and T-shirts. She grabbed a Mets jersey, then looked up. Their eyes met again. He could tell she was confused, scared. She knew, just like he did, that something strange was happening, but neither of them knew what, exactly.

  “Ma’am, you going to pay for that?” the vendor said.

  The woman didn’t say anything. She jumped into the limousine.

  “Wait!” Matthew called, running after her.

  “Hey!” The seller pounded on the window. “I’ll call the police! I got your license plate number!”

  But he didn’t. The limousine didn’t even have a license plate, and seconds later, it disappeared.

  The vendor cursed.

  “Here,” Matthew said, pulling a twenty out of his wallet. “I got it.”

  “Nah, man,” said the vendor. “You don’t have to pay for the thieves.”

  “Neither should you,” said Matthew. “Please. Allow me.”

  The vendor thanked him. Matthew walked home, his mind buzzing.

  It was another year before he saw the mark again. August 3, 1997. As luck would have it, this time it was at the convenience store just down the street from him, which was fortunate as he probably would have missed her had she been anywhere else. When he walked in, he found her stuffing things in her bags. Was she stealing? Matthew found he didn’t care. He thought it somewhat amusing, actually. She tossed items in her shopping bags, cosmetics, creams, snacks. Then she stopped in front of the book section. Ah, a reading thief. Matthew was terribly amused, especially when he saw that what she picked up was a sultry romance novel, the kind his mom would buy and try to hide.

  The woman looked up, met eyes with him. Matthew smiled, waiting for recognition to come to her. It didn’t. This struck him as very odd. She had seemed to recognize him before. But then Matthew realized, if she really was a time traveler, as he suspected, it was possible that their timelines were mixed up. While he had seen her twice before now, this could be the first time she was seeing him. And the first time he had seen her may not have been the first time she had seen him.

  The woman looked around as though maybe he was smiling at someone else, but there wasn’t anyone else in the store, so she finally looked back at him, staring him down with a bold confidence that Matthew found completely irresistible. She held up the book, smiled, and tossed the book in one of her bags.

  Matthew almost started laughing. The woman grabbed something around her neck, a watch of some kind, it looked like. She twisted some knobs or dials on the watch. She looked up at Matthew, winked, and blew a kiss, right before she disappeared.

  She disappeared! Into thin air. Matthew ran out of the store, looked up and down both ends of the street, but the woman was nowhere to be found.

  Game on, he thought. He was going to get to the bottom of this.

  He didn’t have to wait long. The symbol appeared on the map the very next day, this time at the bay. He raced down as fast as he could. He had a feeling this time she was testing him, waiting to see if he would show up. When he arrived, he didn’t see her. But there was a man dressed all in black wearing red Converse. Matthew recognized him. He was the man who had been with the woman that night in the theater. He was looking at Matthew with cold hatred, and Matthew knew he had done something to anger him, though he wasn’t sure what. Sure, he was kind of obsessed with the guy’s girlfriend (assuming she was his girlfriend) but he hadn’t done anything. He hadn’t even talked to her.

  “Good evening,” said the man in black in an oily British drawl. “Looking for someone?”

  “I was, actually,” Matthew said. “But it looks like I’m in the wrong place.”

  “Indeed,” the man said. “The wrong place and the wrong time.”

  The man smiled as though he thought something was amusing. He took a step toward Matthew, who had a hard time not flinching or recoiling with fear. He wasn’t sure what it was about this man. Like the woman, he seemed to have an otherworldly quality about him, but not in a good way. Something was off about this man.

  “My mistake,” he said. He turned around to leave, only to come face-to-face with two other men. He didn’t recognize either of them, though he was sure he would have remembered if he’d seen them before. The one on his right was a young black man wearing an old-fashioned suit and smoking a pipe, something out of a 1930s gangster film. The other was a white man with thick clumps of hair sprouting out of his head like a plant. His clothes seemed to have been pulled out of a costume bin, including a red cape and purple cowboy boots. He also had a gun. He smiled, revealing a clear tooth that sparkled like it was made of diamond.

  Matthew felt alarm bells going off in his head. He needed to get away, but where could he go?

  “Don’t worry,” said the man in black. “This will be the last mistake you ever make.”

  And before Matthew could move or say another word, the man in black grabbed him by the throat. He was paralyzed.

  The man pulled Matthew close to his face so he was forced to look in his eyes, dark, depthless, almost inhuman. His heart raced. He tried to move, told his arms to swing, his legs to run, but they wouldn’t obey.

  “Whatever did she see in you, I wonder?” the man said.

  Who was he talking about? The woman? That couldn’t be. They hadn’t even met. It looked like they never would.

  “Ah, well, I suppose we’ll never know,” the man said. “Because she never will see you, and you will never see her. In fact, you won’t exist at all.”

  The man then pulled something from Matthew’s throat. It almost felt like he was unraveling him, pulling out his blood and sinew by some invisible force. But there was no blood or sinew. Streams of watery material poured out of him, shimmering, iridescent. What was happening? What was that? He saw people in the material. Himself at various moments of his life. His mother. His father! His brother, Charles. And there was the woman. She was holding a baby, smiling up at him. She seemed to glow with the purest love and complete joy. Matthew’s heart almost burst inside his chest. He tried to speak, to shout, but no sound would come.

  “You are probably wondering what is happening,” Captain Vincent said. “I know how frustrating it is to be left in the dark with no explanation, so I will tell you. Your existence is in the way of my happiness, and so I’m sorry to tell you that I must eliminate it altogether. Actually, no. That is incorrect. I’m not sorry at all.”

  He brought out what looked like a stick of dynamite. It glowed blue, just like the symbols on the map. The man wrapped the shimmering fabric around the strange dynamite. The woman holding the child disappeared in its folds.

  The fabric began to disintegrate. Matthew felt no pain, but still he was terrified. The world seemed to be fading. He felt he was being sucked into a black hole. His own reality of existence began to slip. Who was he? Where was he? What was happening to him?

  The last conscious thought of Matthew Hudson was fixated on that mysterious woman.

  14

  Unraveling

  Matt was getting restless. The others were too. They’d been cooped up for three days. Only Uncle Chuck and Haha had gone out once more to get food and supplies, and they came back with news that a battle was happening in Central Park that looked to be from the Civil War. Matt could hear the cannons and gunshots from their apartment. The news reported more strange happenings, not just in New York City, but in other parts of the world too. Buildings were relocating themselves. Landmasses were spreading, sinking, or crashing together. The Eiffel Tower had disappeared completely. Wars were breaking out all over the place. And people were disappearing and reappearing in different times and places. The whole world was in chaos.

  Matt still had not fixed the compass. He was having a hard time replacing the piece he had lost back at Gaga’s, during the storm, and he didn’t have all the tools he needed, so everything took longer. A couple of times he thought he had it, but then he’d run a test and it wouldn’t work and he’d have to take it all apart again.

 
Tensions escalated as the family began to argue over what they should do once the compass was fixed, whether they should stay put or move somewhere else. Mr. Hudson felt they should stay put, while Mrs. Hudson thought they should keep on the move.

  “The longer we stay in one place the more likely it is that Vincent will find us,” Mrs. Hudson argued. “We have to keep on the move.”

  “What are you suggesting?” Gaga said. “That we time-travel from place to place and century to century for the rest of our lives like a bunch of . . . of . . .”

  “Pirates?” Corey said.

  “Not pirates,” Mrs. Hudson said. “That’s Vincent. Not us.”

  “Castaways,” Ruby said. “We’re time castaways.”

  “I don’t want to be a pirate or a castaway,” Gaga said, pulling at her silver hair. “I want to go home! I just want to live what’s left of my life!”

  Haha tried to comfort her, patting her awkwardly on the back. “It’s okay, Gloria. At least we’re together.” But this only seemed to make Gaga cry harder.

  “I’m sorry, Gloria,” Mrs. Hudson said. “We’re doing the best we can.”

  “It doesn’t really matter what you do or where you go,” Albert said. “Captain Vincent will find you anyway.”

  “Well, he hasn’t found us yet,” Ruby said. “Maybe he’s not as powerful as you think.”

  Albert simply shrugged. “Believe what you like.”

  Jia was unusually quiet throughout all these arguments, Matt noticed. She mostly stared blankly out the window. Occasionally, she reached inside one of her vest pockets, but she never brought anything out that he could see. Matt tried to talk to her, ask her how she was doing, but she avoided him, preferring to spend her time with Ruby. The most she ever spoke was when Mr. Hudson brought out a stack of board games to fight their restlessness. Chinese checkers was at the top, and upon seeing it Jia became indignant.