Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel

by Michael Bunker

  He pressed me hard and added another layer to his theory of the spurned obsessive lover. He said I was a social climber who’d slowly clawed his way up from poor Indiana country boy to high-class antique dealer, and that this tough journey had taken a mental and emotional toll. My seething jealously toward my wealthy clients and my repressed insecurity about my background were violently discharged on the night Rebecca refused to marry me. Her rejection had been proof that I was worthless.

  This was so far from the truth, and I was feeling so penned in and distraught, that I did the unthinkable: I told Detective Moore that the woman I’d been dating wasn’t Rebecca Ward. I didn’t know Rebecca Ward. I had never met Rebecca Ward.

  “What kind of shit are you trying to pull?” he said. “If you wanna plead insanity, you gotta confess first.”

  “I can’t explain it. I know Rebecca’s parents. I know her friends. They all saw me with the Rebecca Ward you’re looking for. Same with every place we went to. But I was with a different woman—every time. The entire time. A woman who looked nothing like Rebecca.”

  Moore shook his head, disgusted. “So your story is, you’re sitting there with Mr. and Mrs. Ward and this other woman, sitting there all cozy, just the four of you, one big happy family, and her parents don’t notice she’s not their daughter?”

  “I don’t get it either,” I said, and pulled out my wallet, then showed him a photo of the other woman. “She’s the one I was dating.”

  He looked at the photo, then got into my face. “So where—pray tell—is this other Rebecca? She missing, too?”

  “I don’t know…” And I didn’t know. I knew nothing about this other woman.

  Until that night.

  I locked up the shop, but lingered because I didn’t want to head back to my apartment just yet. All afternoon I’d been worried sick about what Moore had said when he’d dismissed me earlier: my arrest was imminent, and the DA would be easier on me if I confessed.

  The shop was deathly still, and the purple dusk seeping into the shop’s bay window threw an otherworldly glow over the showroom. Running away was on my mind, and though living the rest of my life as a fugitive wasn’t appealing—in fact, it was shameful and tragic—I was beginning to think there was no other way out.

  I walked over to the antique mirror. Lately, I’d kept away from it. What had once brought me joy now brought me sorrow. I stared at my reflection, pale and gaunt from weeks of worry, and wondered how it had come to this.

  And then she was right there, staring back at me from the mirror: the raven-haired beauty whom I’d known as Rebecca, the love of my life. But instead of her earnest smile, she now boasted a malevolent smirk, openly mocking me. A beat later, she was gone—and I was left staring at my shocked reflection, my eyes wide with confusion and fear.

  I knew immediately that this hadn’t been a hallucination. After all the creepy things that I’d witnessed, I had no doubt that I’d just seen Rebecca in the mirror. She’d wanted me to see her. But why had she chosen to appear in the cheval mirror?

  Within a minute, I was on the phone with Roman Myers, trying to set an appointment with him. He wanted to meet in a couple of days, but I told him it was an emergency. I needed to see him right away and would pay triple his rate. And he didn’t need to come down to the shop. This was about a piece he’d already evaluated.

  He agreed to meet right away, but I sensed he was worried that he’d authenticated a forgery. So I put him at ease and told him that I was calling about the cheval mirror from the Middle Ages and needed to know more about its pedigree for a possible sale.

  Then I hopped into a cab and took it up to Riverside Drive, where he lived. When I stepped out of the cab, I heard a dog barking, incessant and disturbing, from Riverside Park below. I might’ve ignored it, but there was a violent wind sending trash and leaves swirling madly up and down the road, so I thought the dog might be lost or injured.

  I jogged across Riverside Drive and peered over the retaining wall, down into the park below. The tree branches were swaying aggressively in the wind as I tried to locate the barking dog. Suddenly it darted out from under a large oak. Even from a distance, I could tell the mongrel was in bad shape, mangy with an uneven gait. Then three men, wearing body-length black overcoats, brimmed hats, and bird-beak masks, emerged from under another tree.

  The men quickly caught up to the mongrel. One man took it down, another helped him hold it down, and the third pulled out a knife—and slit the poor mutt’s throat.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I yelled out.

  The men didn’t look up. They just calmly moved away from the dead dog and back underneath the trees.

  The dog lay there in a pool of blood, while I did nothing but stare down at it, incredulous, burying my instinct to clamber down the long staircase into the park. Instead, I replayed what I’d just seen. These men had been dressed like the man I’d seen in the alleyway on the night of Rebecca’s disappearance. It didn’t take a genius to realize that both incidents were related not only to each other, but also to Rebecca and to the mirror and to the bulbous lumps on Robert’s hands.

  I hurried back across Riverside Drive, and buzzed Roman’s apartment. Roman, a small compact man in his forties, had been an art history major who hadn’t been able to land a job out of college. He’d fallen in with a private investigator and done well, and eventually combined those skills with his art history background to establish a business in authenticating glass antiques. His skills were in demand all over the world.

  When I stepped into his apartment, he told me he’d already started putting together a more detailed pedigree for the mirror. “I went back as far as I could this time.”

  He invited me into his “war room,” which was a mix of old school and new school. He had hundreds of reference books that hadn’t been digitized, and a T1 line feeding three high-speed computers capable of sifting through billions of pieces of data in a flash.

  “Okay,” he said, breathless and excited. “Luckily there aren’t many pieces like it, so even when the trail went cold, I was able to pick it up again by skipping even further back. I got four new owners before I lost the trail in the seventeen hundreds.”

  I was impressed, though I shouldn’t have been. This is what Roman was known for. The first time he’d authenticated the mirror, he’d traced it back to an English nobleman who’d purchased it in the late nineteenth century.

  “I got some paper on all four of them, tying them to the mirror, so that’s nearly two hundred more years. You’re definitely good to go at whatever price you’re charging. No question about it.”

  I could have beat around the bush, trying to draw more information out of him, the kind of information I was really looking for, but after what I’d just seen in the park, I got right to the point. “Did you find anything strange about the mirror itself?”

  “Strange? Well… no… except for a weird coincidence. A pattern with the owners. They all ended up in prison. Every one of them was convicted of a serious crime. Including the English nobleman.”

  I suddenly felt sweaty from panic and my heart started to race. I had to sit down and take a deep breath. Was I destined to be convicted of kidnapping, or worse?

  “Do you want some water or something?” Roman said, concerned.

  “No thanks.”

  “Listen… I’m sorry I haven’t called to check in on you. How have you been holding up?”

  “Some days are better than others,” I said, then got back on topic. “Did you find anything else unusual?

  “Nah. But isn’t that unusual enough?” He moved over to his desk and grabbed some papers. “I printed out the bills of sale. I’ll email you the PDFs.”

  I took the papers.

  “Who’s the buyer?” he asked.

  “Can’t say yet.”

  And since there wasn’t much I could say, I thanked him and beat a hasty retreat, still reeling from the knowledge that I was destined to be the next in a long line of
the mirror’s victims.

  * * *

  I lived just a few stops away, so instead of taking a cab home, I walked over to Broadway and headed down into the subway. The train arrived within minutes. I boarded, sat down, and tried to give some thought as to how Rebecca was tied into all of this. Around me, all was normal, the subway car filled with the usual eclectic mix of people.

  The train pulled out of the station, but as soon as it entered the tunnel, it stopped. The lights went out, and many of the passengers groaned. I didn’t think much about it—this was a fairly common inconvenience—but when the lights came back on, all the other passengers—Hispanic, Caucasian, Asian, African-American, young and old—were shivering with feverish tremors. Some were breathing hard, their tongues, coated in white, hanging from their mouths.

  My heart was pounding and I told myself that this wasn’t really happening. But it was just as real as anything I’d ever seen.

  Blood vessels beneath the passengers’ skin began to burst, and the blood that pooled under their skin quickly turned black.

  I got up, ran to the door at the end of the car, and tried to pry it open. It wouldn’t budge. Then just as I was about to give up and run to the other end of the car, the door slid open—and a huge man, with soot on his face, dressed in rags, stepped into the car.

  He was carrying a lit torch.

  I stood there in shock.

  The man went over to the nearest passengers—now dead, and covered in sub-dermal black sores—and lit them on fire.

  Horrified, my knees wobbly, I turned, ready to race through the open door, when the lights flicked off—sending the car into total darkness—and just as quickly flicked back on again.

  Everything and everyone was back to normal.

  Except every passenger was staring at me.

  The train suddenly lurched forward, and I grabbed a handle and tried to gather myself.

  By the time I stepped into my apartment, I still hadn’t gathered myself. My mind was racing, trying to connect everything I was seeing—or imagining, or hallucinating—to Rebecca. I fired up my computer and started googling what I’d seen. My perfunctory research revealed that the men I’d seen earlier—the ones wearing bird-like beaks, wide-brimmed hats, and ankle-length garb—were dressed like “plague doctors” from the Middle Ages—which connected directly to the mirror’s origin. In the fourteenth century, doctors had no idea what caused the plague, but they were sure it was contagious, so they came up with this early kind of bio-protective suit, including the headpieces with beaks. Those beaks were filled with vinegar and sweet oils to counteract the strong stench of the dying plague victims. And the people I’d seen in the subway car bore the horrific marks of those infected victims.

  But I still had no idea how Rebecca fit into this. So I decided to go back to the source of this nightmare: the cheval mirror. I took a cab back to the shop and didn’t even look out the window along the way, for fear of hallucinating again.

  Inside the shop, I picked up the mirror and hauled it to the back—so that my presence after closing hours wouldn’t raise the suspicions of passing pedestrians—and inadvertently set it down opposite a mirror that hung on the back wall. The two mirrors reflected into one another, creating that hall-of-mirrors effect.

  And what I saw in those infinite reflections was startling: other men—dozens of them—all staring into the mirror. From their clothes, it was clear that they spanned the centuries; and from their faces—fearful, sweating, and panicked—it was clear that they were the other victims of the mirror, struck down by its curse.

  I half-expected the raven-haired woman to make her own appearance—to smirk at me, lord her beauty over me, mock me for falling for her—but she didn’t.

  One by one the other men disappeared from the reflections. I immediately called Roman, desperate to understand how and why I’d been sucked into some cursed supernatural world along with these other victims, and looking for any slim hope of avoiding my fate—spending the rest of my life in prison.

  I asked Roman if there were any kinds of superstitions or legends associated with mirrors in the Middle Ages. He was quick to answer.

  “As a matter of fact, yes—one that was quite popular in its time, now long forgotten. A lot of people in the Middle Ages believed in reincarnation. They thought souls traveled from one body to another after death—”

  “But how did that play in to mirrors?” I interrupted, impatient, knowing the clock was running out on me.

  “Well, some people believed that you should never leave a mirror in a room with a dying person. And if you did, you should turn it away so it wasn’t facing that person.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m getting there. If you didn’t turn the mirror away, it would capture that person’s soul when it left his body. Then that soul wouldn’t be able to enter a new body, and it wouldn’t be cleansed of its previous life. Anyway, that’s the theory, based on what historians found in diaries from the Middle Ages.”

  Was Rebecca a soul caught in the cheval mirror? And if she was, why did she ruin the lives of those men? And why had she targeted me?

  Then, as if she was at last ready to move to the final stage of her plan—now that her secret had been revealed—there was a sudden pounding on the shop’s front door. I looked down an aisle to the bay window at the front of the shop. An NYPD cruiser and a plain-wrapped detective car were parked at the curb.

  The end had come.

  I didn’t want to turn myself in, but going on the run didn’t seem like the smartest strategy either. Still, what choice did I have against a supernatural foe?

  The pounding on the door continued. Had Detective Moore connected me directly to the kidnapping of Rebecca Ward, a woman I’d never met? It didn’t seem possible—but then again, none of what was happening seemed possible.

  And facing that truth was enough to convince me to flee. I considered trying the back alley, but decided Detective Moore would have that covered, and opted to go for the roof exit instead. I took a step toward the back stairwell—

  And felt something grab my arm.

  I looked down. Stretching from my arm back to the mirror was a long stream of flowing glass—a smooth, reflective, living tentacle. It had coiled itself tightly around my forearm.

  And it was pulling me in.

  I fought to rip myself free of its grip, but I never stood a chance. As I passed through the mahogany frame and into the mirror, a chill cut through me.

  And then, I was inside the mirror. Facing out, unable to turn, and barely able to move. I could only stand—and stare.

  And what I saw, through the glass, most definitely wasn’t the shop. I looked out instead on a small room, furnished with antique pieces—chest, bed, chairs—all solid, large, harsh, and rectilinear. All from the Middle Ages. The mirror would fit right in here.

  The door to the room suddenly swung open and two brutish-looking men hurried in, carrying a struggling woman, bound and gagged. The men were wearing short, coarse wool tunics fastened with leather belts, while the woman wore a rough-looking gray dress with a gray apron.

  The men dumped the woman on the bed—it was Rebecca.

  What the hell was going on?

  The men untied Rebecca then bound her hands and legs to the bed’s posts. When she was secure, one of the two men—large, muscular, with a grubby face and a piggish nose—said, “I’m taking out the rag, miss. If you scream out, we’ve been told to kill you.”

  Rebecca nodded, terrified. The man then pulled the rag from her mouth, and she spoke quietly, wary of the warning. “I do not have the Black Death. I am not sick. Please. Please let me go.”

  “That’s not up to us, miss,” the pig-nosed man said.

  Why was I being forced to watch this?

  Rebecca struggled to free herself, but it was futile. Again, I tried to break out of the mirror—this time to help her—but my attempt to free myself was as futile as hers.

  Then two men left the room just as ano
ther man entered. He was older and effete, with a refined face, and dressed in a royal blue surcoat, the attire of a wealthy man.

  The fear on Rebecca’s face turned to anger. “Nicolo? You? You’ve done this?”

  “You’ve done it to yourself,” Nicolo said. He was holding a metal cup in his hand.

  “Let me go. Now!” She fought against her bindings.

  Nicolo smirked and grabbed her jaw.

  She swung her head from side to side, throwing his hand off.

  He slapped her hard. “Stop, or I’ll break your neck right now.” He grabbed her jaw again, this time more firmly. “Drink this. You need it.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because you are still with child. I understand that you intend to keep it. I told you not to.”

  Nicolo raised the cup he’d been clutching and put it to Rebecca’s lips. She kept her mouth shut, so he wrenched her jaw open and forced the cup’s contents into her mouth.

  After a few seconds or so, during which Nicolo quickly retreated from the bed to the other side of the room, I saw the expression on Rebecca’s face turn to horror—she began to spit, cough and gag.

  On the sheets of the bed were the results of her spitting—spots and splashes of crimson blood.

  “You’re the devil!” she shouted. “You have fed me the Black Death!”

  “As a physician, I have taken an oath to do no harm,” Nicolo said from the safe confines near the door.

  Rebecca glared at him with hatred, which quickly turned to fear. “Why should you punish me so? Your own flesh and blood is within me.”

  Nicolo didn’t answer. He stepped over to the mirror and looked at himself—I saw the cruelty in his eyes.

  Then he turned the mirror around, and I was plunged into total darkness. I tried to move, but I was still trapped.

  In the blackness, I heard Rebecca’s voice, steady, somber, and captivating…

  My transgression came back to haunt me. But you see, I’d had no choice. I hadn’t been able to find work for such a very long time. Employers, like everyone else, were frightened of strangers—you never knew who might bring the Black Death to your doorstep. Few would even talk to a stranger for fear of contracting the disease.