A Twist in Time

by Susan Squires

  There was a picture on the last pages, after all the diagrams and calculations, and all the scientific stuff she didn’t have a hope of understanding. In the illustration the machine seemed to be just a bunch of gears. Appropriate for 1508 when the book was written, but not exactly the kind of thing that could manipulate the time/space continuum.

  It would be easy to check it out. As a supervisor she had a set of master keys. But in the five months she’d had the book, she’d never used them on the door. Opening it, thinking there might be a time machine behind it, seemed like crossing some line toward insanity.

  Like it wasn’t crazy to carry the book around all the time. Or to sleep with it.

  Okay. A little crazy. And it had gotten so much worse in the three days since her father had died. It was like the book was shouting at her now, where before it had only whispered. But you had to draw a line somewhere. She wouldn’t believe there was a time machine hidden in a children’s museum. Bad enough that she thought she had a stalker. The fact that she’d been researching Camelot was research for the novel she couldn’t seem to write. She’d brushed up on her Latin because it gave her something to do as she sat with her father.

  Oh, hell. She brushed up on Latin because that was what they’d spoken in Camelot as a second language to Brythonic Proto-Celtic. Because she wanted there to be a time machine behind that door and she wanted it to take her back to Camelot, far from this stark reality. She’d always had an affinity for Camelot. She wanted to live in a time when things were simpler, when anything could happen, and people believed in love and magic and honor. She felt like she belonged there, and she, who had no childhood, wanted so much to know where she belonged.

  Her chest heaved and she couldn’t seem to get air. She glanced over at the book. It exuded hope. It almost seemed to be pushing at her. Like maybe it could make her happy, like the red-haired Lucy said it could, like maybe stalkers and deadlines and obsession and grief were what was unreal and there was some new reality just waiting for her.

  That was dangerous. Sanity was knowing reality for what it was, no matter how stark, and learning to cope with it. If there was no machine that could change your life behind that door, then she’d be able to go home to her empty apartment, make an appointment with a therapist at some free clinic, and face her future. So she knew what she had to do.

  She was going to the Exploratorium tonight and look behind that door marked “Danger.”