by E W Barnes
The groups of numbers corresponded to pages in the dictionary and spelled words. Soon she had deciphered the list: The key is iris.
It was another message.
This time, she knew what to do with it. She scribbled down numbers from pages in the dictionary. Then she swung the bookcase away from the wall and opened the panel.
On the keypad she typed in the numbers that corresponded with the letters “I” “R” “I” “S”
898
1,483
898
1,591
Nothing happened.
She typed the numbers in again. Still nothing.
She flopped onto the couch with a growl and stared at the page with the list of numbers. She had no more ideas. She tossed the page onto the coffee table and got up to swing the bookcase closed again.
There was a small dim red light above the keypad she had not noticed before. It looked familiar, like something from a movie.
The key is iris.
She held her eye to the light. The panel, which had up to this point operated in complete silence, hummed. There was a flash of light out of the corner of her eye.
A figure was standing in her living room.
“Hello Sharon.”
It was Grandmother Rose.
CHAPTER FIVE
Sharon rubbed her eyes. Then she rubbed her forehead. She was hallucinating. That was it. She had the same illness as her mother, the dementia the doctors could not identify except to say it was probably genetic. That explained what she was seeing.
Grandmother Rose stood calmly, looking the same as she had before she had died, the same silver hair, brown eyes crinkled, smiling at her with her head tilted a little to the side. It was the same expression she would have while she waited for Sharon to sort through complicated ideas or answer riddles.
Sharon shivered, taking a stuttering breath, tears starting as she reached for her grandmother.
“Oh, my dear, everything will be all right,” her grandmother said as Sharon’s arms passed through her.
“I am a hologram, Sharon, not your grandmother, no matter how much I may look and sound like her,” Grandmother Rose said kindly as Sharon gasped, grasping thin air. “Perhaps it would be easier if you called me Mrs. Bower.”
“You mean you’re still…”
“Dead? Yes, I think so,” she answered.
“You think so?” Sharon’s brow furrowed.
“Well, with time travel it’s sometimes hard to say.”
The hologram of her grandmother - Mrs. Bower - watched from the living room while Sharon fixed a cup of coffee. It was midnight, and while she knew she would pay the price in exhaustion later, she needed the stimulation now.
She walked into the living room without looking at Mrs. Bower. The image turned as she passed and was facing her when she sat down on the edge of the couch. She took a sip of her coffee and, straightening her shoulders, looked straight at the hologram.
“You’re here to answer my questions, right? Ok, here’s the first one: What is this all about? This is more than just a keep my time-traveling and my futuristic bookcases secret thing, isn’t it? What’s with the newspaper articles? What do you want me to do?”
Mrs. Bower nodded and smiled. “I knew you would see the pattern,” she said. “Seeing to the heart of things made you a great journalist.”
“Don’t say it,” Mrs. Bower raised a hand as Sharon opened her mouth to respond.
“You don’t think reporting on bake-offs and 5k runs to raise awareness was journalism. Sometimes there is more heart in those things than there is in documenting great and historical events.”
Sharon set her coffee on the table. “That’s what Caelen said,” she murmured to herself.
“Caelen?” Mrs. Bower’s eyes twinkled. “Who is Caelen? Don’t tell me you finally got a boyfriend only after I died,” she teased.
Sharon blushed. “He’s just a friend, not a boyfriend. He helped me move the bookcases,” she pointed to looming furniture behind her grandmother’s image.
“Ah, yes, the bookcases. So much more than they appear…” Mrs. Bower began.
“Wait, stop. I don’t want to talk about the bookcases. I want to talk about you, your time traveling, what you’ve seen and learned… all of it. And the articles - what do they mean? Why did you save them?”
“I understand your curiosity and wanting answers to your questions. I am programmed with basic information to answer your questions and can be interactive to a degree, and I fear that the responses will be perfunctory and may not fulfill all your needs. For that, I am sorry. I can start by telling you that the answers you seek are tied together and are all connected to the bookcases.”
“How do over-sized bookcases with a futuristic magnetic levitation device tie into newspaper articles from decades ago?”
“The maglev component is a side effect of the temporal amplifier.”
Sharon’s face mirrored her confusion.
“The what…?”
“The bookcases house my time machine.”
Sharon stood up.
“Wait… I have had a time machine in my living room for almost a week?”
Mrs. Bower smiled again.
“Yes. And I need you to use it.”
“Please listen carefully because once I have told you all you need to know, I programmed this hologram to erase its data and you will not be able to retrieve it.
“My time travel story is simple. I wanted to be a chrono-historian as a child. We learned in school all about the works of the great chrono-historians, those who traveled back in time and shared the answers to all the great historical questions: learning how the dinosaurs died; tracing the evolution of humankind; and seeing how the pyramids were built. We no longer had to conjecture and craft theories from limited information. We understood.”
How were the pyramids built? Sharon opened her mouth to ask, but Mrs. Bower raised her hand.
“I cannot tell you details, and I think you can guess why.
“I was fascinated by the 20th century for its almost paradoxical combination of brilliant and miraculous inventions and discoveries coinciding with its horrifying atrocities and barbarism.
“I came to the 20th century with the goal of studying the convergence of post-World War II prosperity with the development of weapons of mass destruction. I met your grandfather only weeks after I arrived. When I realized I loved him and wanted to marry him, I received permission to remain in the 20th century. The Temporal Protection Corps determined that as long as I avoided impactful events, our marriage and resulting posterity would not impact the timeline or the future.”
“The Temporal Protection Corps?”
“Yes, the Temporal Protection Corps or TPC reviews and authorizes all requests for time travel, setting the time frames for visits, limiting when travelers can visit, reviewing timeline variations to insure there are no changes in history, and sometimes sending agents through time to correct errors.”
“And grandfather figured it out,” Sharon said.
“Yes, he saw me using my temporal amplifier and, well, you knew your grandfather. He was too sharp to be distracted by dissembling and I explained everything to him. He is the one who built the bookcases and helped me incorporate the amplifier into them.
“A few years before I was to die, I noticed things changing. Minor historical events that were supposed to happen didn’t happen, or things that didn’t happen in my history were taking place when they weren’t supposed to. They were small things, nothing that would make big changes in the future as far as I could tell.
“A condition of my staying in the 20th century was that I lost my ability to use the temporal amplifier or communicate with the future, and I couldn’t notify the TPC. I kept hoping they would see the changes and send a TPC agent to correct the errors, but the errors remained and appeared to be increasing.
“Just before I died, I came to believe something has triggered a chain of events, which will ultimat
ely result in massive changes to the timeline. You must correct it, or the results could be devastating.”
“I still don’t understand - what can I do?” Sharon asked.
“You must go back in time and correct the errors.”
Sharon’s eyes widened. “Me? Shouldn’t we wait for a… what do you call them… TPC agent to take care of it?”
“It can’t wait. I fear the future may have already been impacted, and the TPC is being hindered from seeing it, maybe even incapacitated.”
“Don’t worry, the temporal amplifier is easy to use,” the image continued, either misreading or disregarding the look of dismay on Sharon’s face.
“You type in the dates on the keypad you used to access this hologram. Add your target date, the amount of time you wish to spend in that time period, and your return date. The amplifier will automatically bring you back to your time.”
“But how do I correct errors?”
“That’s easy - you look for anachronisms.”
“Anachronisms?”
“Things out of place and time.”
“What causes the errors might be anywhere in the world. How am I supposed to cover the globe looking for these… anachronisms?”
Mrs. Bower shook her head. “There is no need to worry about that. The information in the articles will guide you to the places and times you need, and the amplifier will send you there.”
“It will send me to different locations not just different times?”
“Yes.”
The image fell silent, watching Sharon with that familiar head tilt.
“What if I don’t want to do this?”
There was a long pause before Mrs. Bower spoke again.
“That is your choice. Maybe the changes will affect you during your lifetime. They may not. I am not requiring your help; I am just requesting it.”
Sharon sat back on the couch staring at the dictionary. The half-drunk cup of coffee was now cold.
“What time are you really from?” Sharon asked.
“An interesting question. After a while, the fluidity of time gets under the skin of we time travelers. It becomes part of us, possibly reshaping our souls. You realize that you are not of one time but of all times, seeing both the warp and the weft, and the overall tapestry at the same time. We are part of time and time is part of us.”
Sharon shook her head, not understanding. Mrs. Bower smiled.
“Let me put it another way: What time we are from is in the eye of the beholder.”
Sharon frowned.
“What about the article that talks about my death? What’s that about?” she asked more angrily than she intended.
Mrs. Bower looked puzzled. “What article are you talking about?”
Sharon retrieved it from the dining table and read it out loud.
“This was an error that has already been corrected.”
“How?” Sharon asked.
“It could only have been a TPC agent.”
“But that means that there is one here, now,” Sharon exclaimed. “You don’t need me to go back in time for you.”
“If that were the case, the other articles would have changed or would no longer exist.”
Sharon pulled out the articles and read the headlines one at a time.
Mrs. Bower shook her head.
“If there is a TCP agent in the 20th century, he or she is not seeing the errors, and must be here on a different assignment. Being unable to contact the agent, we are still the only ones who can correct the errors.”
“And when you say ‘we,’ you really mean ‘me.’ Why didn’t you tell me this in your message in the crawlspace?”
Mrs. Bower’s brow furrowed.
“What message?”
“The message that told me you were a time traveler. It was on the walls in the crawlspace behind the bookcases. It was your handwriting. The message told me to take the bookcases and not to live in your and grandfather’s house because an earthquake would destroy it.”
The image shook its head.
“I did not leave you any message in the crawlspace. I hid the strongbox in the crawlspace.”
“The strongbox wasn’t in the crawlspace. It had been hidden somewhere in the house and we didn’t find it until after the earthquake and the house burned down.”
“Wait. Here,” Sharon grabbed her laptop and pulled up the photos she had taken of the hand-written message.
“I uploaded the pictures from my phone and stored them here,” she said as she typed in the password and opened the file.
Sharon clicked through the pictures slowly while Mrs. Bower read each sentence of the message.
“You saved the message after I told you to destroy it?” Mrs. Bower asked half-seriously, half-teasingly and then laughed at the chagrin on Sharon’s face.
“I am glad you saved it - your instincts served you well.”
“You didn’t talk like this,” Sharon said. “It sounds odd.”
“That’s because there is another message hidden inside this one.”
“What?” Sharon leaned in, trying to see the message again.
“See the capital letters starting each sentence? They spell out the message.”
Sharon grabbed the yellow pad and pen from the table.
“B… E… W… A… R… E… T… H… E… C… H… E… S… T… N… U… T… C… O… V… I… N.”
One by one she pieced the letters together.
“Bew… are… heches… there’s nut or nutco… and then vin…?” She fell silent as she pieced the message together.
“It says Beware the Chestnut Covin.” Sharon read aloud.
Sharon didn’t know if it was possible for a hologram to grow pale. Mrs. Bower’s pre-programed composure vanished, and her startled eyes peered at Sharon.
“What’s a Chestnut Covin?” Sharon asked.
“I… I am not programmed to answer that question. I am sorry. There is nothing I can tell you.”
◆◆◆
Sharon slept on the couch again.
It was after 2:00 a.m. when she had written out how to use the time machine step-by-step, and exhausted all the questions she could think of, getting the same information. She didn’t watch as the hologram faded out.
It was painful knowing she could not reactivate it or save it to see her grandmother and hear her voice. It was like her grandmother dying all over again.
As she dozed off, she remembered that her grandmother’s life would begin again in the future. She would be alive and vibrant again even if Sharon wouldn’t know her. It was a comforting thought as she relaxed into sleep.
◆◆◆
The ring of her phone woke her at 3:00 a.m., pulling her out of fuzzy dreams about running and fire.
“Hey Sharon, it’s Pete. Holly’s gone into labor and we’re in the hospital.”
“Oh, that’s awesome!” Sharon said foggily.
“Holly, Sharon says ‘awesome!’” Pete relayed the message.
“It is not awesome!” Holly shouted in the background. “It’s painful!”
“Want me to come in and spell you for?” she asked Pete, stifling a yawn.
“Nah, I think I can handle it,” he answered. “The doctors say this might take a while.”
“Doctors! What do doctors know? You will handle it as long as I have to handle it, mister!” Holly’s yell ended in a squeak of pain.
“Ok, I’ll come visit later this morning.”
“She’ll be here in a few hours, Holly,” Pete called out.
“If she really loves me, she’ll bring ice cream… and coffee… make it coffee ice cream…” Holly shouted as Pete ended the call.
Sharon set the phone on the coffee table and gazed through the curtains next to the couch. The moon was setting off long shadows of the trees in the park across the street, the monochrome beautifully stark. Everything was quiet and motionless, even the man standing under a tree watching her apartment was completely still.
Cold ran
down her spine as she looked again.
There was no man, just the moon and the trees and the grass in the park.
CHAPTER SIX
When she woke five hours later, she knew no amount of coffee would cure her exhaustion. A hot shower helped wake her up, and she thought about contacting Caelen who would want to continue discussing the mystery of the articles. She wasn’t sure what to tell him when she saw him.
After the experience with the hologram of her grandmother - learning she had a time machine in her living room, and that her grandmother wanted her to use it - she felt as if she was a different person than the one who sat with Caelen debating the articles from the strongbox the evening before.
For now, she would go to the hospital and be with her sister while she brought new life into the world. There wasn’t much Sharon could do but be there and it would give her time to think about everything she had learned.
As she was readying to leave her apartment, she double-checked the locks on the windows. On impulse, she pulled books from the bookcases. She set them upright leaning against the windows.
If someone tried to get in through the windows, the books would fall, and she would know if someone had been there. Then she closed the curtains.
Tucking the articles in their plastic sleeves into her laptop bag, along with the yellow pad with the notes Caelen had taken and a pen, she locked the door and left for the hospital.
◆◆◆
Holly had forgotten her request for ice cream when Sharon arrived. She was lying in a bed hooked up to monitors and an IV bag.
As Sharon kissed her forehead, Holly tensed up with another contraction.
“How’s it going?” Sharon asked. As Holly was taking deep breaths, Pete answered.
“It’s going slowly, but steadily,” he said, his hand turning white as Holly squeezed it. “She’s dilated to four centimeters, and they put her on an epidural to make her more comfortable.”
“Comfortable, hah!” Holly gasped, then her body relaxed as the contraction ended and she broke into a smile.
