Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel

by Michael Bunker

  Nicolo hadn’t offered me a job. Instead, he’d wanted a mistress. His wife was old, dried up, and mean. I’d visited him five times—and when I discovered I was pregnant, I told him the truth, believing in my heart, as my mother had taught me, as she had named me—Carita—love—that there was more love in the world than hate. I believed that he’d take the child, even if he discarded me. The child would have a life without struggle, a life of privilege.

  But he did no such thing. Instead, he told me to get rid of the child before it took its first breath of life. So I hadn’t visited Nicolo again. As you saw, this wasn’t enough for him.

  He kept me a prisoner for days, or maybe weeks—I couldn’t be sure. I became rail-thin. My skin became an ocean of black lumps and red pustules. Nicolo didn’t return to the room since infecting me, and the only mercy he showed was allowing one of his servants to bring me water, and, when I was too weak to move, to untie me.

  I was resigned to my fate, and eagerly awaited my final breath. In was then that my gaze was forever fixed on the back of the cheval mirror—the dark world where you now find yourself. I would study the rich grain of its mahogany, the only beauty in this room of sickness and death. The only good.

  When the day of my last breath finally arrived, and my soul could no longer hold on, I had but one goal. The Black Death had rampaged through my flesh, sapped it of life, except for one waning spark. And before the Black Death completely extinguished that small spark, I knew what had to be done.

  I strained to slide toward the edge of the bed. My withered muscles barely responded. I didn’t even have the strength to swing my legs onto the floor, so I didn’t try. Instead, I slid off the bed—oh—how my bones ached when I landed on the floor.

  I dragged myself ever so slowly, painfully, toward the back of the mirror, toward the beautiful mahogany. The dull throbbing I felt didn’t start in any one place or end in another, but consumed every inch of me. I wanted that spark of life to die right there, and see where my soul would go.

  But I dragged myself to the mirror, where I rested for a minute and considered my destiny before I changed it forever.

  What would my life have been like if I hadn’t met Nicolo? Would I have found true love and proved that love was stronger than hate? That love conquered all? Or was that just a terrible lie that my mother had believed in and taught me to make life bearable? I would’ve preferred to have believed in that lie, to have lived a long life, to have found my love and raised my family even in poverty. But Nicolo robbed me of that life.

  So with the little strength I had, I reached up and turned the mirror back around…

  The world spun and the darkness vanished. I was once again looking into the small room, but Rebecca—Carita—was no longer on the bed. She was now prone, motionless, on the floor, directly in front of the mirror. At first I didn’t recognize her. The Black Death had destroyed her beauty. She was emaciated, her skin ravaged with sores, and her raven hair matted and knotted.

  I wanted to turn away, to avert my eyes from the cruelty of her fate, so painfully visible, when I saw a faint ethereal wisp rise from her lifeless body and take shape: Rebecca—Carita—the woman I had loved. Her soul, her spirit, her essence intact, and her beauty restored.

  She—her spirit—approached the mirror and entered it—I watched her float right through the glass. But she wasn’t in the mirror with me. Somehow she’d disappeared.

  I pushed at the glass. It wouldn’t budge. I tried to move forward, but I was still trapped.

  As I pushed once more against the glass, the door to the small room swung open and a man walked in, dressed in the strange uniform of a plague doctor. He looked down at Rebecca’s body, then looked at the mirror. He reached for the mirror as if he was going to turn it, but stopped and instead slowly lifted the beak headpiece off of his head—revealing the creepiest part of this nightmare yet.

  The man was me.

  I held my breath, stunned, trying to grasp this.

  Then the man wiped his brow, and I saw that he no longer looked like me. It was Nicolo. He quickly exited the room.

  Again I pushed on the glass, and this time my hand went through. Without hesitation, I lunged forward, out of the mirror, and found myself back in the shop just as Detective Moore and two other officers, guns drawn, were rushing to the back of the store.

  * * *

  The arrest was a blur. During the car ride down to the precinct and the booking, I was focused on understanding the real story of what was happening, not the story Detective Moore had put together.

  Carita had forced me to see Nicolo as a reflection of myself—so I’d know that my soul had come from him. My soul was traveling the normal path: with each new life, each new person it inhabited, it was cleansed of the memory of all of its prior lives—including the life of this murderer. But Carita’s soul received no such cleansing. She was cursed to forever remember the tragic end to her life and to seek revenge century after century, lifetime after lifetime.

  In the holding cell, I wondered if there was a way out.

  Melvin came to visit and told me he’d found a good lawyer. The DA was going to charge me with kidnapping and attempted murder, and it was time to start building a defense. The NYPD had found Rebecca Ward, the real Rebecca Ward, in an abandoned building in that decrepit Queens neighborhood Moore had questioned me about. She’d been imprisoned there and was now lying in a hospital bed, in a life-threatening coma.

  Melvin insisted that the evidence against me was all circumstantial and emphasized that Rebecca could still come out of the coma and clear me, but I knew that neither of those outcomes were in the cards. Carita would make sure she got the conviction, just as she’d done with all the men who’d come before me bearing the plague doctor’s soul. She would create hard evidence against me. In fact—though I didn’t know it at the time—she already had. And if Rebecca did recover from her coma, I knew Carita would somehow get her to identify me as the perpetrator.

  My only hope was to make amends with Carita. I had to make her understand that even though I had the plague doctor’s soul, I wasn’t him. But how?

  My first hearing was two weeks away, so I had plenty of time to come up with a plan. What I finally decided on would surely sound insane to anyone who hadn’t experienced what I had: I planned to meet Carita in her own world, on her own terms. And to do that I needed the cheval mirror.

  There was no way the NYPD was going to let Melvin bring the mirror to my holding cell, so I asked Melvin to bring it to the hearing. When he and my attorney asked why, I lied to them, telling them I wanted to present it as evidence. There were markings on the mirror that pointed to another suspect. Of course, Melvin had Roman check out the mirror, and Roman came up empty. Still, I insisted he bring it. He finally agreed, and cleared it with the courthouse security detail in advance.

  On the day of the hearing, I arrived in court, handcuffed, and sat quietly as an assistant DA read the charges against me. A few minutes later, I learned that Carita had created incriminating evidence: my fingerprints had been found in the room where Rebecca had been held captive. On a mirror.

  As the ADA and my attorney sparred over bail, I scanned the room, plotting out the logistics for my plan. The mirror was at the back of the courtroom, near the door, where a police officer stood guard. Up front, another officer was stationed at the door that led into the judge’s chambers. Both officers had weapons. I checked to see if there were any other armed officers. There weren’t. I had hoped there’d be more, but I had to work with the cards I’d been dealt.

  My attorney was still fighting for reasonable bail when I suddenly blurted out, “I’m innocent! I didn’t do it. Why would I—?”

  The judge banged his gavel. “Don’t interrupt the proceedings.”

  I jumped up from my seat. “But I would never do some—”

  The judge banged his gavel again. “You can’t—”

  “You don’t understand what’s really going—”

 
; “That’s enough!” The judge banged his gavel one, two, three times, and I turned and jumped over the railing onto the first row of the spectator benches, then ran toward the aisle.

  The officer at the back of the courtroom snatched his revolver from his holster and shouted, “Stop! Now!”

  I didn’t stop. I had no intention of stopping.

  I made it to the aisle and ran straight toward the officer.

  “Stop!” he shouted, training his gun on me.

  I kept running toward him, believing with every ounce of faith I could muster that this was the only way to save myself—and that, like Carita, I had a soul as well as a body.

  “Stop!” the officer shouted again, and this time I saw panic spread across his face as he realized he was being forced to make the biggest decision of his career.

  He fired two shots.

  I felt a burning in my chest and heard a ringing in my ears. A tingling numbness spread through my body as I stumbled and fell forward. I hit the floor hard. But before losing consciousness, I forced myself to focus on the mirror, just a couple of yards away from me—and I thought about my soul.

  The colors of everything around me started to lighten, to desaturate, and the people closing in on me—Melvin, the officer, and others—were moving in staccato slow motion, halting and fragmented. Their words, their shouts, were long baritone yawns of incomprehensible syllables.

  Then everything around me turned pure white, and the sounds all disappeared.

  I was with her.

  In the mirror.

  Carita was as she’d been: the raven-haired beauty with the pale gray eyes. But the small-town-girl quality that I’d fallen in love with was gone. Her eyes were hard, her face severe, and her body rigid. She was vengeance embodied.

  “I’m not the doctor who murdered you,” I said.

  “Oh—but you are.”

  “You know me. You came into my life. You saw who I was.”

  “I saw your soul.”

  “But this is my soul. Right here. Standing in front of you. Isn’t it?”

  Confusion flickered in her gray eyes. She looked out from the mirror, into the courtroom. Everyone was harried and distraught, moving to and fro. My body was sprawled out on the floor and Melvin was holding my hand, tears running down his cheeks.

  “Doesn’t a soul learn and change through its lifetimes?” I asked, pleading.

  “You haven’t learned.”

  “I’m here to show you I have.”

  Paramedics rushed into the courtroom, and one of them knelt down over me and opened his kit. The other unfolded a stretcher.

  “I’m sorry for what that doctor did to you,” I said. “But me, here, this soul—I love you.”

  The paramedic who was kneeling over me checked my eyes, then grabbed a hypodermic needle from his kit. He prepped it, stuck it in my chest, and pushed the plunger.

  “You must’ve felt it—out there—when we were together?” I said. “I thought—I hoped—I still hope—that you feel it. I love you, and I will always love you, Carita.”

  The paramedic checked my eyes again, then glanced at his partner. “We’re losing him.”

  Carita turned to me. Her face had softened, and a gentleness had returned to her eyes.

  “Carita. I want to be with you. That’s why I’m here. Love is more powerful than hate.”

  She reached out and touched my face and—I was staring up at the paramedic. I blinked a couple of times, disoriented, and he smiled.

  “Hang on, pal,” he said, then went to work on my wounds.

  I looked past him, into the mirror, and saw Carita walking away.

  * * *

  A month later I was still in the hospital. The officer’s bullets had done some serious damage, but I’d recover. My breathing would forever be hampered from the damage to my right lung, so there’d be no marathons or hikes up Mount Everest for me. Still, for the most part, my life would be normal. Especially because the visions from the Middle Ages had stopped haunting me.

  Rebecca Ward had come out of her coma and had cleared me as a suspect. She told Detective Moore she didn’t remember much of what had happened to her. On the night of her disappearance, on her way to our undiscovered Italian restaurant, she’d felt faint and had blacked out just as she was passing the alleyway where I’d had that first vision. The next thing she knew she was a prisoner in a room in the decrepit neighborhood in Queens where the NYPD had found her. She had never seen her captors and no one had ever explained to her why she’d been kidnapped. The only details she could recall from her captivity were a pervasive scent of vinegar and a mirror hanging on a wall.

  The first few times Rebecca and I saw each other again, it was awkward—not so much from her side, but from mine. She remembered our relationship as it had been and wanted to put this entire nightmare behind her. But when I was with her, eating in our favorite restaurants, walking through Riverside Park, lying in bed, I kept looking for signs of Carita hidden beneath Rebecca’s auburn hair and green eyes. It took me a while to accept that Rebecca was Carita—or at least, she was the part of Carita I’d fallen in love with: the clever and down-to-earth woman, the one who somehow embodied the earnestness of a small-town girl even though she’d been raised in Manhattan.

  I asked her to marry me, and she accepted with joy.

  As for the mirror, Melvin decided to buy it from Rebecca. He swore that when I was lying on the floor in the courtroom, on death’s door, right after the paramedic had said, “We’re losing him,” a flash of pure white light had leapt out from the mirror, and a second later, my eyes had blinked open. Melvin wasn’t superstitious, but, as he put it, “You wanted the mirror there that day, and it did its job. Seems like a good idea to keep it around.”

  A Word From Irving Belateche

  “The Mirror” is one of those story ideas that’s been in my story file for a long time. Most of my story ideas make it to my story file because they have one of two elements: either a science fiction element or a supernatural element. “The Mirror” is no different. It’s based on a little-known superstition.

  But for a story idea to actually make it out of my story file, it has to deliver great characters. Characters that a reader wants to follow. “The Mirror” did that. It delivered two characters who would never have met were it not for this superstition. And that led to the story you have here.

  I’ve always loved science fiction and supernatural thrillers. For me, those stories heighten the emotional journeys that we’re all on in our own lives. Good science fiction and supernatural thrillers always reveal something about human nature. Something that we recognize in ourselves and in others.

  If you enjoyed “The Mirror,” please check out my novels and other short stories listed on my website (www.irvingbelateche.com) and/or join my newsletter.

  I want to thank David Gatewood and Michael Bunker for inviting me to participate in this anthology. I’m honored they gave me the opportunity to have my story included with the stories of such accomplished authors.

  Reset

  by MeiLin Miranda

  I’m so sorry I haven’t seen you since you got back, Janelle. I’ve been so busy with the probate and the move and the new grandkid. Anyway, thanks for coming. Tonight’s the end of a tough year.

  I know you’ve heard a little about my friend Catherine since I got the house. I don’t know why you never met—well, yes, I do. I’m embarrassed to say it. There’s always your one friend who’s too weird to introduce to people. You know what I mean? That was Catherine.

  This is what I wanted to show you. These boxes here were hers. They’re filled with drawings of children. Seven boxes, one kid per box. I have them memorized by now: Margaret, Jess, Amanda, Tim, Aaron, Maya, and Emily. I have no idea who they are.

  Catherine didn’t have kids, never married. Never had a boyfriend as far as I know. We went to grade school and high school together. I’ve known—I knew her most of my life. I’d know if she had one kid, let alone seven,
even if she gave them all away. I did know about the drawings but I didn’t know she’d done this many.

  She was a really good artist, huh? Catherine couldn’t draw a straight line before we turned sixteen. Then suddenly, right after her birthday, she started drawing these kids over and over, all different ages. Nothing else, and they’re really, really good—like, photographic. Who were they? She’d only say, “Kids I have to draw before I forget them.” She’d start crying, and that’s all I could ever get out of her.

  Catherine was normal before then. Boys, college plans, the usual. Getting her first car. Music—she was totally into Bowie. And then the drawing started, and she withdrew.

  Her parents called it sulking. I think they were worried, but they didn’t know what to do and they didn’t like the idea of sending her to some doctor who might send her to the nuthouse. It was embarrassing. These days it’s hard to think of getting help as embarrassing, but it was back then. You’re lucky you’re a little younger.

  I tried to help. I’d say, let’s go down to the record store, Bowie’s got a new album out, and she’d say, no, heard it a million times already. “Wanna watch Fantasy Island? You love that.” No, waste of time, seen it.

  Seen it already, she said that to everything. Star Wars? Seen it. “How can you have seen it? It just came out, there are lines around the block. You have totally not seen that movie!” Nope, seen it.

  Catherine lost a lot of friends that year. She hardly talked to anyone but me. She’d been my best friend since kindergarten, and someone had to be her friend. She wasn’t a bad person. Something just switched off in her brain.

  Or maybe something switched on, I mean, she was always smart, but suddenly she knew everything. She challenged all her classes. Finished them before they even started. I had no idea she knew so much Spanish, or American history—or chemistry. What the hell? Catherine hated chemistry. She just said she always brushed up on everything in the months before she reset.