Time at the Top

by Edward Ormondroyd

  “Marvelous old horror, isn’t it?” my friend said. “The architecture buffs here practically worship that house. Perfect example of the Hudson River Bracketed style.”

  “Have any idea where it stood?”

  “No, not much. It could have been in your part of town, though, up near Ward Street. One of our oldest members thinks he recalls a house like that out there when he was a boy. Of course it was still open country then.”

  “Hmm. Is the picture dated?”

  “I think so. Eighteen eighty — oh, eighty-three, eighty-four; thereabouts. Here, I can look it up in the catalog.”

  “Don’t bother,” I said, “that’s close enough. Have you got a magnifying glass around here somewhere?”

  “Sure. Just a minute.”

  He came back with a reading glass, saying, “Have a good look at the scroll-work around the porch. It’s priceless.”

  I am no connoisseur of scroll-work, but I looked at it to please him, and duly pronounced it priceless. But of course it was the people that interested me. The photograph was very grainy; but if I held the glass right and narrowed my eyes, quite a bit of detail could be made out. Here is what I saw:

  On the left-hand side of the group stands a boy. He wears a kind of military uniform, and his arms are folded. There is a terrific scowl on his face, which I suppose is intended to quell a whole army of hardened veterans; but a certain well-fed plumpness of feature renders the attempt unsuccessful.

  Next to him stands a woman. She is extraordinarily beautiful. There is a bundle in her arms, a great swaddle of blankets and lace concealing what is inside; but from the way she smiles at it there must be a baby — a very warm one, no doubt — under all that covering.

  A man stands in the middle of the group. There is something familiar about him, but I cannot and will not swear that it is Mr. Shaw. You must remember that I met him only once, and he had no mustache then. This man does have a mustache, a very imposing one; and behind it is the happy but faintly bewildered expression of one who has been led against his better judgment to the foot of a rainbow, and has found, contrary to all common sense and education, a pot of gold there.

  Next to him stands a lovely girl, evidently the woman’s daughter. She has the faraway musing look of a confirmed romantic.

  With the last figure in the group I am on safe ground. It is Susan, all right. She has not yet graduated to long dresses that go swish, but to judge by her figure that happy day is not far off. Looking at her face, I remembered her voice saying to me, when we once went up the elevator together, “I can’t make it come out right.” But she is no longer puzzling over how many two-hundred-pound people can safely ride in an elevator of 1500 lbs. capacity. She has the rather smug little smile of a girl who has undertaken something much more difficult than an arithmetic problem, and has seen it through to her perfect satisfaction.

  “I know where that is,” I said, giving the glass back to my friend. “You can tell your architecture buffs that that picture was taken on — what did she call it? — Weird Street.”

  He smiled uncertainly. “What’s the joke?”

  “Oh, never mind — you wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Come on,” he insisted. “Grinning like a Cheshire cat. What have you got up your sleeve?”

  “Patience, patience!” I said. “Maybe I’ll write a book about it.”

  Preview of All in Good Time

  Susan Shaw and her new best friend Victoria Walker just know that when their single parents meet it will be love at first sight, and the two families will become one.

  But nothing happens the way it should. Their parents meet — and don’t fall in love. Domineering cousin Jane pounces in to forbid any more meetings. The treasure mysteriously disappears overnight. The vanquished scoundrel returns, unvanquished — and with sinister plans of his own. Everything is spinning out of control!

  So why does an old photograph show that Susan’s and Victoria’s fondest dream comes true? Here’s chapter one for a small preview.

  1. Susan Shaw Again

  One Friday in August, late in the morning, Susan Shaw came into my life again, more than a year and a half after she had vanished from Ward Street and the twentieth century.

  It had been a phone call that told me of her disappearance, and it was another that served to bring our paths so curiously together again. But this time I had no inkling that she would be involved; her name wasn’t metioned, and what I heard on the phone was mostly noise. It was the kind of call you can’t take seriously. If I hadn’t been in trouble with my work, nothing would have come of it. But I was in trouble. I had been trying to write for two hours, without any success whatsoever. When the idiot phone began to ring, my first impulse was to tear it off the wall and throw it out the window into Ward Street; and when I finally answered, it was in a very surly fashion.

  There was a moment of silence at the other end, followed by a thin, tremulous gasp, as though someone very far away were trying to catch a breath. And then I jumped. Out of the receiver came a BL-L-LA-A-AAATT BL-L-LAAAAMMBRMRMRM that nearly ruptured my eardrum. It sounded like some fool revving up an engine without a muffler. I was just about to slam the phone down when a little quavery feminine voice began to talk through the racket. I heard the word “books.”

  “What?” I yelled.

  “Books,” the voice doddered. “A box of —”

  BLAHAHAHAAAAMMM!

  “Can’t hear you!”

  “At the” brmmm-rm-rm “Historical Association” vrooooooOOOM! “very important” blat-blat-blammm.

  “Are you sure you’ve got the right number?”

  She mentioned a number. It came through a lot of rrrrrr and fap fap fap, but it was mine.

  “Who is this, please?” I asked.

  She gave a wavery little gasp, and then there was such an insane crescendo from that motor that I had to jerk the phone away from my ear; and when I was ready to listen again, there was only the sound of the dial tone.

  Some kind of dumb practical joke …

  I went back to my desk. It was hot outside; a heat wave had been predicted. It was even hotter inside. For half an hour I waited for the next word to come, and then stood up again with a sigh. It was going to be one of those days … Well, sometimes when my head is stuck I can get it moving again by taking a walk. And now that the place had been mentioned, why not drop in on the Historical Association? It was the right distance, and I hadn’t seen Charles for a while. He is Vice-President of the Association, and a good friend of mine.

  I headed for the elevator — the same elevator in which Susan and her father had disappeared. But I didn’t give them a thought as the old machine groaned its way with me down to the first floor. Why should I? That affair was over and done with.

  The headquarters of the Historical Association is a solemn old brownstone house. The hush of the past falls over everything as you step inside. Even the air has a kind of antique taste to it — much more breathable than the yellow-tinted stuff out in the streets.

  “Edward! Good to see you again. Did you drop in for another look at your favorite mysterious picture?”

  “Hello, Charles. No, not really — just out for a walk to clear my head. But now that you’ve mentioned it, I think I will.”

  And while he regarded me with an ironic air, I went over to the reading room wall where an old dark brown photograph was displayed. It showed a Victorian family group standing in front of a tall, narrow, much-decorated house. The group, from left to right, consisted of a boy in uniform, a lovely woman holding a baby, a man with a mustache, and two girls. The girl on the far right had a satisfied little smile on her face; and as always, I found myself smiling back at her.

  “By the way, Charles,” I said, turning back to him, “there wouldn’t happen to be some books here for me, would there?”

  “No, not that I know of. Why?”

  “Oh, somebody called me up, and imitated a little old lady in the middle of a motorcycle race,
and said there was a box of books here.”

  “Oh? I’m the only one here who knows you — and I don’t do imitations.”

  “Well, it must have been somebody trying to be funny, then.”

  “People do dump books on us, though — old junk from attics and so forth. Want to see if any have come in recently?”

  “Oh.” I began to shrug, but he had already turned away; so I followed until we came to a room in the back of the building, where boxes and manuscripts and pictures and bundles of letters and antique household articles and weapons were stacked all over.

  “Well!” he said. “How’s that for a coincidence?”

  On the floor stood a breakfast-food carton heaped with dingy volumes. We picked them out, one by one: sixty-year-old novels, a book of verse entitled Heart Throbs, Stodgeley’s Lectures, little green Latin textbooks … At the bottom of the heap a battered blue leather volume caught my notice. There was no title on the spine, none on the front cover. I opened it: lined pages; handwriting — a fast loopy scrawl. Some kind of journal or diary … On the first page—

  “Hey!” Charles cried. “Are you all right?” He swept a pile of letters from a chair and pushed it toward me. I sat, or rather fell, on it. He hovered over me, saying, “Glass of water?”

  “No,” I gasped. “It’s all right—just shock. Oh, good lord! Oh, my word! Charles I — I want this book.”

  He took it from my shaking hands and riffled through it. “Hmm — an original document. Well, I don’t know, Edward, I don’t know. Mmm …” A little curl appeared at the corners of his mouth. “I might consider it.”

  I reached for the book, but he put it behind his back. “Not just yet,” he said. “I’m going to blackmail you a little. You want this book. I want an explanation. Ever since I first showed you that old photograph out there you’ve been acting like the cat that swallowed the cream. You know something about that picture that I don’t and I want to know what it is.”

  “Charles, I told you I was going to write a book about all that, and I did. It’s coming out next month, as a matter of fact, You can read—”

  “I don’t want to wait another month. I’ve already waited more than a year.”

  “Well … you’re not going to believe any of it.”

  “I want to hear it anyway.”

  “Oh, all right,” I sighed. “Brace yourself.”

  “Let’s see, now … I guess I’d better identify everybody first. The name of the family in the photograph is Shaw. The woman with the baby was a widow when she married Mr. Shaw —her name before all that was Walker. The boy in the uniform and the tall, dreamy-looking girl are her children, Robert and Victoria. The girl on the right with the little smile is Susan. She’s Mr. Shaw’s daughter. Got it all straight?

  “It looks like a typical nineteenth-century family, doesn’t it? Well, it is — and it isn’t. The fact of the matter is that Mr. Shaw and Susan come — came — from the twentieth century. They were living in my apartment building on Ward Street not two years ago. Don’t make those faces, Charles; you asked for this. Mr. Shaw was an accountant for a firm in the city, and Susan went to school somewhere in this part of town.

  “One day in March last year she was coming home from school when she met a strange old lady in the street. The old lady asked for help, and Susan gave it to her, and the old lady thanked her by saying, ‘I’ll give you three.’ She was a witch, you see. Don’t look like that, Charles. It turned out that she meant three rides on the elevator in our apartment building—rides into the past. Susan took the first one when she got home, although all she intended to do was go up to the seventh floor, the top, to look at the view. What happened was that the elevator kept on going past the seventh floor; and when it stopped, and she got out, she was in a hallway of that house in the photograph, and it was early summer of the year 1881.

  “She landed in an interesting situation. A beautiful widow named Mrs. Walker was living in the house. She had a daughter, Victoria, who was Susan’s age, and a son, Robert, who was younger. There was also a servant named Maggie, and a cat named Toby. Mrs. Walker was being courted by a man named Sweeney. She wasn’t in love with him, but she was on the point of accepting him because her money was almost gone, and she wanted to secure a future for her children. Victoria was sure that Mr. Sweeney was a scoundrel who was only interested in her mother because he thought she was rich. So Victoria had gone to a wishing well and dropped her locket in and wished for someone to come and chase Mr. Sweeney away. That’s apparently why the witch had sent Susan there.

  “And she did chase Mr. Sweeney away, too. She and Victoria and Robert made up a story that Mrs. Walker had been robbed of all her money by a swindler, and had just caught smallpox as well. Susan pretended to be a servant girl who was running away from all this disaster. She met Mr. Sweeney in the back yard of the house next door, where he was boarding with some people named Hollister. She was an excellent actress, and convinced Mr. Sweeney that the story was true. He took to his heels at once, proving that Victoria’s suspicions had been correct.

  “Well, the children didn’t know it, but Mrs. Walker really had lost all her money. She told them—Robert and Victoria, that is—she never did learn about Susan until much later—she told them what the situation was, and started making plans to sell the house, and wrote to her Cousin Jane for advice and help.

  “But Susan thought she could save the situation because she knew where a treasure was buried. Just before she’d come up the elevator she had been reading the newspaper. There had been a front-page story about a bulldozer operator who had uncovered thousand of dollars in pre-Civil War gold coins at a construction site not far from the apartment house. There was a map with the story. Susan’s idea was that she would go down the elevator to the twentieth century — she had three rides through time, remember — get the newspaper with the map, take it back to 1881, and then she and Victoria and Robert could find the treasure themselves. And that’s what happened. It was all open country back then, you see, following the map and pacing off what would someday be city blocks, they found the place and dug up the treasure. It was a lot harder than I’m making it sound, or course.”

  “Hold it — hold it!” Charles interrupted. “If they dug up the treasure in 1881, how could a bulldozer operator dig it up again last year?”

  “Well, as it turned out, he didn’t. He couldn’t. After the children found the treasure, they happened to look at the newspaper — and there was no longer any such story on the front page. It hadn’t happened after all, because now it couldn’t. The kids called it ‘changing history.’ ”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “It’s what’s known as a time paradox, Charles. All it means is that if you can travel in time, you can, oh, sort of erase things that have happened where you came from so that they won’t happen when you go back. For all I know, you might even be able to do something in the present that could change the past.

  “Anyway, they had the treasure, and they were bringing it back that night to hide it in the stable when Susan sprained her ankle. They couldn’t carry her and all that heavy gold too, so they hid the treasure under a bramble bush by the roadside. Next morning she had an idea. She loved Victoria and Robert, and she thought Mrs. Walker was marvelous. Her own mother had been dead several years. Why couldn’t she go back to the twentieth century and bring her father up the elevator? She and Victoria thought that if Mr. Shaw and Mrs. Walker met, they would fall in love and get married, and then they could all live happily ever after in the nineteenth century. If they didn’t fall in love, then Susan and her father would come back to the twentieth century. At least the Walkers would be saved from their predicament, because the treasure would stay with them.

  “She thought it was worth trying, anyhow. So she came down the elevator, and found that she had created quite a mystery by her absence. She’d been gone from the apartment building for several days, you know, and everyone thought that she’d been kidnapped. There was a det
ective working on the case, and her father was half crazy with worry. So there was quite a hullaboo when she suddenly appeared again wearing nineteenth-century clothes. When she was finally alone with her father she told him the whole story. There was a snoopy cleaning woman, Mrs. Clutchett, who had been in on the mystery from the beginning, and she listened to Susan through the keyhole and told me — that’s how I know about it. (Mrs. Clutchett married a flying saucer crank last year and moved across town, but I can put you in touch with her, Charles, if you want to hear all this from another source.)

  “Nobody believed Susan’s story, including me at first. Her father thought she had had some sort of mental breakdown, and he was determined to get her to a psychiatrist. She made a bargain with him; she’d go to the psychiatrist if he would first go up the elevator with her to see for himself whether or not her story was true. She didn’t hide anything from him, either. She told him frankly that she intended to arrange a meeting with Mrs. Walker, and that she hoped they would fall in love and get married. He agreed to go because he was afraid her madness might become worse if he refused. She even talked him into wearing a nineteenth-century costume for the occasion. They went up on a Saturday night. Our janitor, Mr. Bodoni, saw them getting into the elevator. He thought by the way they were dressed that they were going to a costume party. He was the last person ever to see them. They vanished without a trace. That’s a fact, Charles. Whatever you think of the rest of the story, Susan and her father did disappear. I’ve got newspaper clippings to prove it.”