Worlds Away and Worlds Aweird

by James Hartley

  But I didn’t have to worry. She stopped growing soon after that. Her head and shoulders were in the spare bedroom next to mine, the torso was in the dining room, and the legs were in the cellar. The shape kept changing, and she was looking more and more like the dear Thalia I remember before some mysterious ailment took her from me. Last night I went in the spare bedroom and stretched up to the giant concrete cheek and kissed her good night. “Good night, Thalia, darling,” I said.

  I didn’t get any response, but then, I seldom got any response when I kissed her, that was her one major fault. Hmmm, a major fault, should I expect an earthquake? I kissed her good night again and went into my room to bed.

  Maybe Thalia’s mellowing in her old age and responding to the kiss. I woke to a terrible crash, and saw she had raised her arms and torn out the walls between the two bedrooms. Now she had her arms stretched out, around me and around my bed. The morning alarm was going off, and I would have gotten up, but she had me held just a little too tightly against the bed. The bed itself was bending out of shape a bit, but I didn’t think I could get away, she’d been too careful. Thalia always was a very careful, very meticulous person.

  Oh, have I introduced my wife, Thalia? She loves me very much, see how nicely she hugs me. She’s gotten a bit bigger than she was before I killed her, it comes from eating magic beans. But she’s very attractive. In a statuesque way, of course. Thalia always was a very statuesque woman.

  You’ll have to excuse me now. It’s getting a bit hard to breathe.

  The Letter

  [She knew very well where he lived, but not when]

  THE ENVELOPE LOOKED OLD and out of place in today’s mail of bills, ads, and begging letters, just the way my old house looked out of place on a block of modern development houses. The envelope did have my name—Michael Sanborn—on it, and the right address, but there was no zip code. There was no return address, just a name in the upper left corner—Elizabeth Parker. The stamp was one I remembered seeing when I was an avid collector at age twelve, a reddish two-cent Washington from the eighteen nineties. I took the mail into the house and dropped most of it on the front hall table, but I took that one envelope over to my desk and sat down to look more closely at it.

  Of course there was no return address, Elizabeth Parker lived right here in this house. In my dreams. The house was over a century old, and I kept dreaming about a girl living here in the eighteen nineties. A girl named Elizabeth Parker.

  It was a lovely Sunday afternoon in September. I had gone to Elizabeth’s house and invited her out for a walk. Somehow it was unclear where I had been before I got to her house, but that didn’t matter. We made a handsome couple. Elizabeth was wearing a pink and white dress, narrow waisted and full skirted, with a lovely flowered hat. I, of course, was wearing my brown-checked suit with the four button jacket, a high collar and bow tie, and spats.

  As we approached the intersection of Eighth and Main, she asked me, “Have you seen the new millinery shop on the corner, Michael?”

  “No, I haven’t. Shall we take a look?” We walked over and looked in the window. “Is this where you got the hat you’re wearing?”

  “Oh, my goodness no, silly. I’ve had this old thing for years. But I think I may come down here when they’re open and buy something new. Look at that beautiful one with the bluebird on it.” She pointed at the window.

  I looked, but it was hard to see the bluebird because there was a pigeon there too. The pigeon was sitting on one of the cars in the parking lot that somehow had replaced the millinery store. I didn’t say anything, I didn’t want to upset Elizabeth. But before I could say anything, there was a loud clanging down the street.

  We both spun around to see a fire engine coming, the team of horses straining, the steam engine of the pumper billowing smoke as the firemen stoked the boiler. Then, suddenly, the engine pulled to a stop in front of us, the bell getting louder and louder.

  I reached out my hand and slammed it down on my alarm clock to shut it off. I untangled myself from the sheets and got out of bed. Why did I keep dreaming of this girl, Elizabeth?

  The handwriting was feminine, and sort of old-fashioned. Spencerian, I think they called it. I pried at the flap and it opened easily, the glue was very old. Inside was a folded piece of paper and a sepia photograph. I recognized the picture instantly as Elizabeth Parker, the girl in my dreams. She was a very pretty girl. Her dress in the photo was very similar to the ones I had seen her wearing in my dreams and matched well the period of the stamp.

  Elizabeth and I were strolling down the street. Today she wore a blue dress that somehow matched the blue tie I had chosen. She was saying, “Very soon, Michael, I come of age and will no longer be under the thumb of my stepmother. She and my Aunt Beatrice are continuing their attempts at matchmaking, but I continue to resist. I have mentioned your name to them several times.”

  “Do you mean what I think you mean? You wish to think of me as a suitor?”

  She giggled and turned her head away, refusing to answer.

  “I don’t know how we would make that work, Elizabeth, but I’d love to try. It’s hard to explain…have you heard of a new book by H.G. Wells called The Time Machine?”

  She nodded.

  “Well, this is similar. I live in the same house you do, but in a different time.”

  Elizabeth laughed. “Michael, I love your jokes. But it will be handy if I need to send you a letter, I will know the address.” She laughed again, and I laughed with her.

  We walked a little farther, until we walked by a church. Elizabeth looked up at it. There was a man standing on the steps, dressed in tails and wearing a top hat, and he had a very sour and disagreeable look on his face.

  She said, “That’s the sort of man my stepmother favors. He looks like he’s eaten a bushel of lemons!”

  I was about to reply when the church bells started to ring, loudly enough to drown out anything I might say. I reached over to the nightstand and hit the button to silence the alarm. I had broken out into a cold sweat in my sleep and my pajamas were wet and uncomfortable. I quickly peeled them off and headed for the shower, thinking about Elizabeth.

  I unfolded the paper. It was a letter. Again there was no return address, but it was dated September tenth. That was just two days ago, except I had a feeling it meant September tenth of some long gone year. Just what year that might have been hadn’t been put on the paper. The letter read:

  Dear Michael,

  We have to meet. My stepmother and Aunt Beatrice are urging me ever more strongly to agree to the suit being pressed by Mr. Robert Claforth, and I am not sure how much longer I can resist. Even though I have reached my majority, they have managed to keep control of the money left me by my dear late Papa. I know you and I have met only in my dreams, but you seem so real to me, and I think I love you.

  Unless you can somehow help me, I shall be forced to wed the horrid Mr. Claforth, and I am sure I will spend a life of misery with him. So I write this letter to implore you to meet with me and rescue me somehow. You said you will someday be living in this same house so I can address the letter, but we must meet somewhere else.

  To allow you time to get this letter, I propose we meet at noon on September the fourteenth, downtown at Eighth and Main, in front of the new millinery shop. Please, Michael, please!

  With fond affection,

  Elizabeth

  I sat there, stunned. A letter from a girl I had seen only in my dreams. A letter mailed over a hundred years ago by someone who knew my name and where I’d be living in 2011. Impossible! I looked at the letter again, and saw I had two days to decide what to do. But deep down I knew there was only one choice, to be at Eighth and Main at noon on the fourteenth. What would happen I did not know, but I would have to be there.

  Elizabeth and I were sitting on a bench in a park. She had just picked a small bouquet of flowers and was placing it in the buttonhole of the jacket of my brown-checked suit. “There,” she said, “it looks ju
st right. It makes you look more elegant than ever.”

  “Well, Elizabeth, I’m not going to put any flowers on you, because you’d just outshine them. You are the most beautiful girl I know.”

  She blushed and twisted a curl of her hair around a finger. “Michael, you say the loveliest things. I wish I could be with you all the time, and not have to put up with the horrible men my Aunt Beatrice invites over to dinner.” A man wearing tails and a top hat came down the path towards us, wearing an expression that could sour milk, and Elizabeth continued, “They all look like that man there!”

  As he walked by, he turned and glared at us. In fact, he was so busy glaring at us that he didn’t see the bicycle coming toward him. The bicyclist, perched high over his gigantic front wheel, began to frantically ring his bell. He rang it louder and louder as he approached, until I reached out and turned the alarm off and got out of bed.

  More dreams of Elizabeth.

  I thought briefly of renting a costume, but decided I didn’t want to look any more the fool than I already was for believing in the letter. Besides, I doubted I’d find a costume that looked as good as the brown-checked suit I’d been wearing in my dreams. On the morning of the fourteenth, I threw on my regular slacks and a red and white striped polo shirt. It was still warm for September, and I would look like just another guy downtown shopping.

  Eighth and Main had changed a lot since Elizabeth’s time, or at least from my dreams of Elizabeth’s time. There was no millinery shop of course, just a large parking lot in front of Amberton’s Furniture Store. The store itself had its large glass windows easily a hundred feet back from the sidewalk. I looked at my watch and saw it was two minutes before noon. I walked back and forth, waiting. Precisely at noon the bells on a nearby church tower began to chime, except I knew there were no churches within a mile. Even if there had been, the anti-noise laws would have banned their chiming like that.

  I half expected the church bells to turn into my alarm clock again, but as if the bells had been a signal, there was Elizabeth standing in front of me. She was dressed in the long pink and white dress I remembered from one of my dreams, and she was surrounded by a blurred area in which I could see both the front of the millinery shop and the cars in Amberton’s parking lot. Each was partially transparent with the other showing through it. Elizabeth saw me at the same time I saw her, and we moved toward each other.

  I half expected to pass right through her, like a ghost or an optical illusion, like the millinery shop and the parking lot. But she held out her hands to me, and when I took them they were solid, the soft warm flesh of a real girl’s hands. She looked up at me and said, “Michael. You came. Thank you.”

  “Of course I came, Elizabeth. I had to. But what do we do now?”

  “I don’t know, Michael. But I feel we need to hold onto each other. Please don’t let go.”

  I kept hold of one of her hands, put my other arm around her waist and pulled her close, then bent my head down and kissed her full, warm lips. After the kiss, I raised my head and looked around.

  The blurred area was spreading, but the two scenes were wavering in and out. Sometimes the storefronts seemed more real, sometimes the parking lot. Now I could see several more storefronts of her time superimposed on a larger portion of the parking lot. Elizabeth’s face was crystal clear in front of me, but her body was now blurred too. She seemed to be simultaneously wearing her eighteen nineties dress and a modern blouse and plaid skirt, and the two were fading in and out, as if engaged in a battle. I looked down at myself and saw my polo shirt and slacks wavering back and forth with the brown-checked suit I had been wearing in my dreams.

  Elizabeth noticed the double images too, and said, “What’s happening, Michael? What is all this? What are all those large metal things where the millinery shop should be? Hold me, I’m scared!”

  “Elizabeth, don’t be scared. We’re seeing each other’s world, each other’s time, along with our own. Those metal things, we call them cars, I guess you’d say horseless carriages.” I hugged her tighter.

  The blurred area where both times were showing was still expanding, and suddenly a man walked into it. The man was dressed in top hat and tails and had an unpleasant scowling face with a sour expression. I remembered seeing him in several of the dreams.

  “Elizabeth!” The man said in a harsh voice. “What is the meaning of this? Who is this man, how dare you embrace him in public? And why are you not at the church, getting ready for the wedding?” Then, to me, “Get your hands off my fiancée, sir, or I shall soundly thrash you to within an inch of your life!”

  “Michael,” whispered Elizabeth, “this is Mr. Claforth. I never agreed to marry him, but after I sent you the letter, my Aunt Beatrice told him I had said yes. He immediately set up the wedding. What do we do?”

  Mr. Claforth was still yelling at both of us, but I was able to tune him out and hear Elizabeth’s whisper. “We need to concentrate, darling,” I said, surprising myself by calling her that. “We both need to concentrate on my time. The clothes I was wearing when I got here, you need to see me in those, not the suit you would expect me to wear. Think of my red and white shirt. The lot full of cars, horseless carriages, and the big building with all the glass, you need to will yourself to see those. Tell yourself the millinery store isn’t there anymore, make it fade out.”

  “I’ll try, but why? What is happening?”

  “We’re no longer just seeing each other’s world, we are actually drifting halfway between your world, your time, and mine. If we get sucked back to your time, we will have to deal with your stepmother, your Aunt Beatrice, and Mr. Claforth, and I don’t know how to do that. You need to concentrate on my world and leave yours behind. Look down at yourself, see the other clothes you are wearing, the clothes of my time. Tell yourself those clothes are real.”

  Elizabeth looked down at herself, then blushed. “Oh, my, these clothes are so skimpy, I feel half undressed!”

  “You must think of yourself in those clothes, Elizabeth, it’s the only way to escape from Mr. Claforth.” I was also concentrating on all the twenty-first century aspects of the scene.

  Mr. Claforth had stopped yelling at me and was looking around for a policeman. But his voice was getting fainter, and he was becoming more transparent by the minute. Elizabeth’s old dress was almost gone, and she was wearing the modern garb, her face blushing a bright red. Finally the last traces of the eighteen nineties faded from view. I kissed Elizabeth again, then cautiously let go of her, and was relieved that she didn’t vanish.

  Elizabeth looked around. “Where are we now, Michael?”

  “The same place we were, darling, at Eighth and Main. But the year is two thousand eleven, and I think you’re going to have a few things to get used to. It might be easier…Elizabeth, will you marry me?”

  “Of course, Michael. In my dreams, that is what I always wished for. How soon can we wed?”

  “I’d like it to be right away, but I’m afraid it may take a while…” I let my voice trail off as I thought about the problems. The problems of marrying someone with no birth certificate, no Social Security card, no identification at all. The problems of marrying someone who just didn’t exist in twenty-first century America. My head began to ache.

  Tilt!

  [It was joust a little problem…]

  IT WAS TWO THIRTY and there was still one car parked on the stretch of Maple Street between Ace Hardware and the Palace Diner. The patrolman on duty phoned it in. Out-of-state tags, probably a tourist or maybe a salesman. The tow truck from Mike’s garage was there in less than five minutes, and shortly thereafter, the tow truck driver hooked it up and hauled it down to the lot. The owner wasn’t going to be happy paying the fifty-dollar towing fee, but that’s nothing to how they’d feel if the car just vanished. Anyway, the signs along that stretch of the street were very clear. “No Parking 2 p.m.-4 p.m. VEHICLES WILL BE TOWED.”

  At three p.m. on the dot, the paved street disappeared and was
replaced by a dirt surface. There was a crude wooden fence on either side, just shy of the curb, and another small fence down the middle marking the center of the jousting area. As soon as the change was complete, the people who had been standing well back against the storefronts surged forward to get a good spot at the fence to watch the battle.

  As usual, the Black Knight and his squires were down by the diner. People craned their necks to see who his opponent would be today. It was always someone new, because those who fought the Black Knight never survived. This challenger wore a blue and gold surcoat over his chain mail and his shield bore three blue crescent moons on a field of gold.

  A trumpet sounded—loud, but horribly flat—and the two contestants started into motion, the horses charging at each other on opposite sides of the dividing fence, lances pointed at each other. They reached the center and there was a loud crash, the sound of lances breaking, and a second crash as the blue and gold knight landed on the ground, his armor making it sound like an explosion in a boiler shop. He sat there, dazed, until the Black Knight managed to bring his horse back around and swing his sword. There was a thud of the head hitting the ground, and a smaller crash from the armor as the headless body fell over onto the ground.

  The Black Knight dismounted and picked up the head. He held it up, apparently to the front of the bank, but all the spectators assumed that he saw something else there. There had been lots of discussion since this whole thing started, and the general consensus was that the Black Knight was looking at some sort of reviewing stand, probably a king or nobleman.

  After a minute or two, the Black Knight dropped the head, bowed low, and remounted his horse. The horse walked down toward the Knight’s squires, and the entire scene started to fade out. At the other end of the field, the attendants of the blue and gold knight were walking off despondently as they faded. Within a minute, the jousting field was gone, as was the dead body, and the pavement of Maple Street was back. The crowd drifted away, and a man who had just come out of a store was demanding to know where his car had gone.