Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine

by Jw Schnarr

  The boys were lost for a moment as the tree shook, then they reappeared, crawling spider-like down the trunk. When they got to the ground, they leapt to their feet and scurried off into the deeper darkness of the woods.

  “Holy shit,” Laci breathed.

  On the screen lightning flashed again, and as the thunder pealed across the sky there was a brief, dazzling instant where the twins were perfectly outlined, their loping gait caught in the final frames of film, their arms waving like an anemone in the rain. The light gone, the screen went black.

  “…Sheriff Danton has asked people to be on the lookout…”

  “Oh, crap!” Laci said. She got up and stumbled to the phone, her feet unstable. She picked it up with two hands and held it to her ear.

  “Hello?”

  “Laci, goddammit,” Danton said. His voice was angry. “I don’t have time to sit on the phone all night…”

  “Sorry,” she said. There was a moment of silence.

  “So did you see it?” Danton asked. The anger was gone—now there was something in his voice that sounded dangerously like fear.

  “I saw it,” said Laci. “I can’t believe it.”

  “Well, I didn’t either. But it happened. Any idea where they might be headed?”

  “No, I…” she stopped, then, as Caleb put a hand on her shoulder. Then she nodded.

  “I have no idea, Sheriff.” She turned and looked into Caleb’s pale, frightened face. He looked a hundred years old.

  “Do you think they might be going back to the lighthouse?”

  “Do I think they’re going to the lighthouse?” she repeated, making sure Caleb could hear. He immediately shook his head no.

  “No, Sheriff,” she said quietly, her eyes fixed on the old man’s. “Why would they? I think they probably just ran off into the storm. If they don’t die of exposure, I’m sure someone will see them and call it in.”

  “That pair would be hard not to notice, I guess,” Danton said. “Okay, Ms. Powell. If I have time, I’ll keep you informed about what’s going on here. I still need to talk to you, though, so don’t go anywhere. I’ll call you by tomorrow at the latest.”

  “Goodnight, Sheriff, and thank you for calling me,” Laci said.

  “Goodnight, Ms. Powell.” There was a pause, then a click.

  The lights flickered, once, as she put the phone down.

  “We have to go,” said Caleb. He reached for his coat, began to slip into it.

  “To the lighthouse, right?” Laci asked.

  “That’s the only place they could be going. It’s where they went before.”

  “What did you mean when you said ‘so that’s how they did it’, Caleb?” Laci grabbed her coat, and picked up a ball cap to keep the rain out of her face.

  “Come on,” Caleb said, picking up the Maker’s Mark. “I’ll tell you in the car.”

  The rain made driving more than twenty miles per hour impossible. It blasted the windshield of her car, and she could barely see a couple of feet in front of her. The wipers worked overtime, but they may as well have been shut off for all the good they were doing.

  “Take a left up here,” Caleb said. He took a swig from the whiskey bottle.

  Laci almost said something when she smelled the tang of the booze, but decided against it. The old man had been through several varieties of Hell tonight, and she figured she wouldn’t add to his problems. Instead, she decided to get back to the story.

  “You gonna tell me what they did?”

  Caleb shook the whiskey sting away.

  “They were at that hospital before,” he said. “After Sally died, I couldn’t handle it. I blamed the boys for her death. Oh, they didn’t push her off that ledge, but it was their weird ways that drove her to jumping.

  “So after we had an empty-casket service for her, I arranged to have the kids sent to the sanitarium. Cedar Pine, the place was called back then.”

  Laci took her eyes off the torrents cascading down the windshield and looked over at him. He nodded, staring straight ahead.

  “Yep,” he said. “I put ‘em in the crazy house. I couldn’t stand to think about just me and them in the house together, way out in the middle of nowhere. No one to help me, should they ever decide that I was in their way, too.”

  “I guess…I guess that’s understandable,” Laci said.

  “I put ‘em up, then moved the hell away from here. All the way to California, where I had some kin. Got a job working’ in a shoe factory. Mostly, I just tried to forget about Jed and Jerry.”

  Laci pulled off the highway and crept onto a lonely stretch of road that led further up the coast. It had been the original highway before the four-lane road had been built. Now it was a scenic route—or would have been, could they see ten feet past their windshield.

  “One day about six months after I moved, I got a phone call from Cedar Pine,” Caleb said. He took another sip of whiskey. “Seems my boys somehow managed to find their way out of a locked room on the fourth floor of the place. Just up and walked off into the woods, like that. Nobody knew where they’d gone. I didn’t know for a long time, neither - ‘til I got a letter from John Newman, the fellow the USLS put in charge of the lighthouse after I left.”

  “He’d seen them?” Laci asked.

  “He’d seen somethin’,” Caleb said. “He wrote me a letter and asked if I ever saw anything weird out near Corpse Cove—some strange wild animal or somethin’. Some kind of creature that lived in the trees, ate dead animals off the highway and things like that. He also said there’d been a couple more wrecks offshore, and hardly any bodies had washed ashore—or, if they had, something had gotten to ‘em before the authorities could. Wanted my advice on how to deal with the situation.”

  “What did you do?” Laci asked.

  “I called him up,” Caleb said. “Asked him to go into details about this…creature, but before he’d even said two sentences I knew it was my boys. Said whatever was living in Corpse Cove was coming up into the balcony of the lighthouse at night when the lamp was on. Couple times he’d seen it from the Keeper’s house, standing in the night like a giant spider or somethin’. Poor bastard thought he might be going crazy.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “Nuthin’,” said Caleb. “He told me he’d been out there with his binoculars one night in a rainstorm—like tonight’s—and he could see them outlined every time the lamp swung round inside the lighthouse. So he decided to take their picture. Ran inside, grabbed his camera, snapped a shot or two, then bam! They was gone.

  “He said the light was on ‘em, then it wasn’t. He couldn’t figure it out. Decided to track me down and ask me about it and got my address from the USLS.”

  “What do you think happened?” Laci asked.

  They were coming up the road that would lead them around the cove and up to Frenchman’s Head. It was an access road, and Laci remembered the Sheriff taking her up it after last night’s excitement, taking her back to her car.

  “I don’t rightly know,” Caleb said slowly. “I’ve thought about it, though, and I’ve got kind of an idea.”

  He took a long pull from the bottle, then capped it tightly and tossed it into the backseat of the car.

  “Imagine I’ve had about enough of that for the night,” he said. Then he went on.

  “I think those boys weren’t never meant for this world. It sounds strange, but it also sounds true. I think they found themselves here, for whatever reason, but they didn’t belong here and they realized it. Well, maybe once they figured out where they was supposed to be, they just…went there.”

  “You mean like another dimension or something?” Laci asked. She’d slowed the car down to ten MPH on the road and she could still feel it slipping in the mud. The rain was relentless. Lightning crashed overhead and the wind blew hard off the ocean. Impossible as it seemed, the storm was getting worse.

  “Maybe,” Caleb said. “Maybe not. I don’t rightly know exactly where they came from. H
ell, maybe. Or maybe they’ve just been living in the past all these years. Time travelers, like you said. At any rate, I think they found a way to get back there, and that’s why they disappeared like that. It’s also why they just appeared suddenly on your camera, because they decided to come back. And I think I know why.”

  “You came home,” Laci said. Another flash of lightning illuminated the lighthouse some ways ahead of them. They were nearly there.

  “Exactly,” Caleb said. “They slipped away when they realized I wasn’t coming back to the lighthouse, but the day I make it back to Calamity Falls, they show up. Just lucky you was out here when they appeared, or I might not have known. Or maybe I would have, when I finally made it out to look at the old girl one last time.”

  “Why did you come back?” Laci asked. This conversation felt more like an interview, but she was too wrapped up in the story at this point to care.

  “I’m dying,” Caleb said, without a pause. “Or, I will die. I’ve got early-stage Alzheimer’s. I’m going to die, but I’m gonna be a mental baby first. I just wanted to say goodbye to my hometown again before I got too messed up to enjoy it.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Laci said.

  “Don’t be,” said Caleb. “I’m an old man now. That’s what old men do - we get old and we die. Except…I think my boys are here to take me with them when they go back to wherever it is they came from. It’s the only thing I can think of.”

  Laci stopped the car. They were there, the lighthouse towering above them. She turned and met the old man’s eye.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t get out of the car,” she said. “Maybe we ought to just turn around and go back to town, let Sheriff Danton deal with this.”

  “No,” Caleb said. “I want to see them one more time before I go. They were scary as hell, my boys, but I did love them in my own way. Guess I want to show ‘em I’m man enough to come back and face ‘em after all that I done, after all the years that’ve passed.”

  Laci looked at the man for a moment, then slowly nodded.

  “We’re going to need flashlights,” she said.

  “There’s a breaker inside. If the storm hasn’t wiped out all the power in town, I’ll turn on some lights,” Caleb replied. He opened the car door and stepped out into the blinding rain. Ahead of him, weathering the storm like a stone titan, the lighthouse at Frenchman’s Head…

  …suddenly blazed to life.

  “They’re here,” Caleb said, watching as the beam shot out from the top of the lighthouse, shooting out into the ocean. The rain caught it and gave it near-solid form, a tube of brilliance stretching out as far as the eye could see.

  “How do you know that?” Laci asked, pulling herself out from the back seat of the car. She stopped short, looked up and saw the light. Her face dropped.

  “Oh,” she said in a small voice. Then she held up the little flashlight she’d dug out of the camera bag. “I guess this is going to be useless in there.”

  “Keep it,” said Caleb, his eyes never leaving the roving beam of light. “Never know when you’re going to need a little extra light, even in a place like this.”

  “Got it,” Laci said.

  Caleb turned to her.

  “You ready?” he asked.

  “No,” she replied, then smiled weakly. “I imagine you can’t be ready for something like this. But we’ve got to do it anyway.”

  Caleb nodded and walked toward the door to the lighthouse, Laci falling in behind him. When they got to the entrance, she looked down at the padlock and sighed.

  “I don’t have anything in the car that can get us through that,” she said. “I thought maybe they would have left the door open for us.”

  “What, and risk having some stranger find them first?” Caleb asked. “My boys are smarter than that.”

  “So how are we going to get in?”

  “Simple,” Caleb said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a set of keys. He jangled them in Laci’s face.

  “How did you…” she began.

  “Honey, I used to work here, remember? I always kept a spare set on me, just in case.” He reached down and fit the key into the lock.

  “But they never changed the lock in all those years since you’ve been gone?” Laci asked. She watched him fiddle with the device, half-expecting the old key to fail.

  The lock snapped open, and Caleb smiled.

  “Why would they?” he asked, pushing open the door.

  “Good point,” Laci said.

  The pair stepped out of the howling storm, and back in time.

  “It looks like nobody’s been here since last season,” Caleb said. “Jesus - it looks like it did when I left.”

  They stood in a small round room with a desk and fold-down bed. There was a little bookshelf, some sea charts and old green beer bottles lining its ranks. The walls were lined with paintings of ships and the ocean. Everything was covered with a thin layer of dust. They could hear, two stories above them, the groaning machinery of the lantern, grumbling its displeasure at having been woken up so early in the year.

  Along the far wall was a simple iron ladder that ran up to the next level. The ladder ended at a trap door in the ceiling.

  “Up?” Laci asked.

  Caleb nodded. “It’s the only direction to go in a lighthouse.”

  The pair shuffled over to the ladder, dripping rainwater onto the dusty floor, and then Caleb rubbed his hands together and gripped the ladder. He climbed up to the portal in the ceiling - it was heavy and rusted and didn’t give easily. Laci was amazed at how well the old man still navigated. She’d known plenty of men half his age who couldn’t bounce up a ladder like that. His movement spoke volumes about how long he’d worked in this place.

  Finally the door gave with a groan and a shower of rust particles, and Caleb disappeared through the hole in the ceiling. Laci followed. Halfway up, though, she had to stop. A spear of pain lanced through her head, causing her knees to buckle. She gasped. Squeezing her eyes shut, she laced her hands through a rung on the ladder and waited for the agony to subside.

  “You alright down there?” Caleb asked from above, peering down through the trap. “You don’t look so good.”

  “Fine,” Laci said, her eyes pressed shut. When she opened them, her vision was blurry. She could barely make out the white face of Caleb above her.

  “It’s a side effect of the tumor,” she said. “The treatment was…unique. I’m the experiment that worked.”

  Caleb looked at her quizzically.

  Laci smiled.

  “It was the size of a pool ball, and it had invaded my entire limbic system. The doctors gave me a zero percent chance of being alive in six months.” The pain finally receding, she began to climb again. “So when these surgeons in San Diego approached me about an experimental procedure, I said ‘why not?’. The only place I was going was to an early grave.”

  “And it worked,” said Caleb. “That’s amazing.”

  “Yeah, well,” Laci said. She reached the top of the ladder and pulled herself into the next room. “They used pulses of radiation and a vacuum to get rid of the tumor. Some special laser thing they’d been working on, wanted a willing guinea pig. They said there was probably only a five percent chance that it would work. I died four times on the operating table, but they managed to revive me each time, and kept going. Something to do with Tachyons. You know, particles that travel backward through time? Well, they said it reduced the tumor in size by moving it backward along its growth line or something, and when it was small enough to manage they were able to burn it out of my head. Pretty much right outta Star Trek or something.”

  “Incredible,” Caleb said. He looked at Laci with no small measure of awe.

  “So now I have a hole in my brain and it gives me these terrific headaches. A nice scar behind my ear, too. I spent six months in rehab, learning how to speak and walk again.” She paused for a moment, trying to focus in the dim light given off by the small, dirty light bulbs on the
walls around them. “What is this place?”

  “Storage room,” Caleb said, looking around at the boxes surrounding them. There were crates of lenses, bulbs, mechanical equipment, all bearing the stamp of the USLS. “Do you need to rest? I imagine we can stop here for a while.”

  “No, I’ll be fine,” Laci said. “It comes and goes in waves. The doctors said it might take years to fully recover—it’s like my brain’s been rewired.”

  “Sounds like a lot of work ahead of you,” Caleb said, his face solemn. He pointed to another ladder, a smaller one, against the wall.

  “That one’s gonna take us up into the lantern room. If they’re not up there, they’ll be out on the railing. You sure you’re ready to do this? I don’t know what’s gonna happen when we see them.”

  “I’m ready, Caleb,” she said. “Really, I’m fine. If I can die four times and come back, I’m sure I can handle whatever your sons throw at us.”

  Caleb nodded and walked to the base of the ladder. He stopped suddenly, staring intently at the little trap door above him.

  “What is it?” Laci asked.

  “It’s nuthin’,” Caleb said. “Just that I haven’t been up here since Sally died.”

  “You all right to go on?” she asked, placing a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “Like I said, we could just turn around and go home. Let the Sheriff take care of it.”

  “No, I’ll be fine,” Caleb said. He patted her hand, then stepped onto the ladder. Laci followed close behind.

  Outside, the wind howled in rage as the sea pummeled the shoreline. Lightning struck like artillery up and down the coast as the front moved inland, bringing armies of rain to the defenseless shore. It was going to get much worse before it got any better.

  The lantern room was only twenty feet across, much smaller than the rooms below it. The immensity of the lamp mechanism in the center of the chamber made the size deceptive - in reality, there was only five feet or so on either side of the massive rotating contraption.

  Half the room was walled with large glass panes while the other half was stone, like the rest of the building. The beam of screamingly bright light spun slowly on its axis, clockwise across the horizon, letting ships know exactly where the shoreline was.