Temporally Out of Order

by Unknown

“Whoa!” Jeff reached out and clutched my arm.

  My jaw hanging open, I covered her hand with mine and clutched, too.

  In the distance, we heard the chimes of the clock tower ringing.

  I looked around and saw other people on the street who seemed just as stunned as we were. Ordinary people dressed in regular twenty-first century clothing.

  “Aristhosthenes, what’s going on?” Jeff croaked.

  “I don’t know,” I said faintly.

  A woman across the street who was looking toward the river suddenly dropped her purse, screamed, turned around, and ran off—still screaming. I was staring after her when I heard the menacing trumpeting of an enraged animal coming from the direction she’d been looking, followed by the heavy thud-thud-thud of thundering footsteps.

  I whirled around as Jeff gasped loudly and tightened her grip on my arm until it hurt. And then I saw what she saw. Coming uphill toward us, trotting rapidly along Greenup Street, was a woolly mammoth.

  And it looked very angry.

  “Inside,” I said urgently, reaching for the door handle. “Jeff, let’s get inside. Now!”

  I turned and rattled the handle, but the door remained closed. I pulled harder on it. “Urngh!”

  “Oh, no, I locked it,” Jeff said breathlessly. She pushed past me, her hands shaking as she pulled her key out of her pocket.

  Thud-thud-thud.

  “Hurry,” I urged.

  She was frantically trying to shove the key into the lock but kept missing her mark.

  The other people in the street were screaming and fleeing, some going inside the buildings, others running off in all directions.

  The beast trumpeted again, and the sound seemed to run straight through my bone marrow. I couldn’t believe how loud it was.

  I also couldn’t believe the size of that thing. It was enormous, and those tusks looked like they could take out the army column that had just vanished. As it bore down on us, its tonnage making the street tremble with every heavy step, Jeff panicked and dropped her key.

  “God damn it!” She stooped down to grab it, but I realized we’d run out of time.

  “Come on!” I grabbed her hand and ran for it.

  This, as it turned out, was a bad plan.

  I only realized too late that we had no hope of outrunning a wild animal that was twenty times our size (this is a rough estimate, since I was fleeing for my life at the time) and in much better condition than we were—or, rather, than I was. I supposed Jeff worked out or did some jogging, since she quickly pulled way ahead of me. Adrenaline is an amazing chemical, but it can’t make up for a lifestyle of sitting in front of computers and drinking too much caffeine, and I was already panting hard and feeling fatigued when I reached the next corner.

  “Aristhosthenes!” Jeff cried, looking over her shoulder. “Come on!”

  I saw her slowing down as she realized I was far behind her. “No! Go! Go!” I didn’t want her to become woolly mammoth rubble just because I had all the athletic prowess of overcooked broccoli.

  “SCREEEEEEEEECH!” The hairy monster was right behind me now.

  “Noooo!” Jeff was standing stock still now, staring at me in horror.

  “Run!” I shouted—a second before I tripped and fell.

  Thud-thud-thud.

  The ground shook, and then I felt a heavy gust of hot animal breath on my legs.

  Chime, chime, chime, chime …

  I thought the chimes of the clock tower were the last sound I’d ever hear, besides my bones breaking and my own screams.

  But instead, I heard the toot-toot of a horn as a vintage car puttered past me, driving up the street. Really vintage, like something from a hundred years ago.

  Still lying on the sidewalk, I craned my neck a little to watch it, wondering why the driver—wearing goggles and a spiffy hat—didn’t seem bothered by the sight of a woolly mammoth killing me on Greenup Street.

  “Aristhosthenes!”

  I heard footsteps running toward me, then saw Jeff’s sensible shoes only inches from my nose.

  “It happened again!” she cried while hauling me off the pavement. “That—that—whatever that thing was, it disappeared! Just vanished!”

  “Woolly mammoth,” I said hoarsely.

  “No, it couldn’t be,” she said with certainty. “They’re extinct.”

  “Even so, that’s what it was.” It looked just liked every drawing of one that I’d ever seen.

  “How is that possible? And what was it doing running loose on Greenup Street?”

  “I don’t know,” I said in a daze, leaning on her, since I wasn’t ready to stand alone on my shaking legs yet. “What the hell is going on around here?”

  Another horseless carriage drove past us. A very large piece of paper flew off the car seat, floated briefly on the air, and then fluttered to lie on the pavement near us. It was the front page of a newspaper, and the headline read: Titanic Sinks Four Hours After Hitting Iceberg.

  The clock tower chimed again.

  Jeff and I flinched as a gunshot rang out. We crouched down and watched as a stag with an impressive set of antlers ran past us. Looking further down the street, we saw a guy dressed like Daniel Boone uncork his powder horn and set about priming and reloading his musket.

  “A herd of wild buffalo heading for the river …” I said slowly, thinking of the mural portrayal on the flood wall. “It predates European settlement of this region.”

  “And a woolly mammoth goes back even farther,” Jeff said.

  “But those cars are early twentieth century, and the Titanic sank in 1912.”

  “The Union Army occupied Covington in 1862,” said Jeff. “I learned that on the ghost tour.”

  The pioneer strode past us, oblivious to our existence as he stalked his wild prey.

  “So what exactly are we saying?”

  “I think we’re saying that guy might not just look like Simon Kenton,” she said. “He might actually be Simon Kenton.”

  “Who?”

  Jeff looked at me. “How can you not know who Simon Kenton was? There’s a statue of him three blocks from my shop. This county is named after him.”

  “I was thinking Daniel Boone.”

  “No, that’s the next county over.”

  “No, I mean I was thinking this guy looks like Daniel Boone.”

  “Oh.” She nodded. “Right.”

  “So … are we saying that all these things are exactly what they seem to be—from another time?”

  “That woolly mammoth did not escape from the Cincinnati Zoo,” Jeff said with certainty. “And those Union soldiers were not sucked up into the sky by the mother ship.” She paused and added, “Well, not as far as I saw, anyhow.”

  “So either you and I are both crazy and have entirely imagined all this, or else …”

  “Or else?”

  “There must be some sort of weird—really weird—temporal distortion going on here.”

  “Wow.” Jeff shook her head. “This shit’s fucked up.”

  “That’s another way of putting it,” I agreed. “This isn’t my field. What we really need, I think, is a theoretical physicist.”

  “But there’s never a theoretical physicist around when you need one, is there?”

  I noticed she rolled her eyes when she said that.

  Chime, chime, chime …

  The frontiersman, his musket, and the stag disappeared from the city street. Several African-Americans, all dressed in very humble Victorian clothing, bustled past us, whispering to each other, looking furtive and anxious.

  Jeff snapped her fingers. “Underground Railroad!”

  “Did you learn that on your ghost tour?”

  She nodded. “If escaping slaves could get across the river, then they were in a Northern state and free.” She frowned and added darkly, “Unless the slave catchers caught up with them.”

  “There was no bridge until after the Civil War.” The year of 1867 was plainly inscribed on the Roebling Bri
dge, the first one built in this region, which I drove across every time I went to Cincinnati. “They must have needed boats to escape.”

  “The tour guide told us the river often froze over in those days. So they could walk across it in winter.”

  I shuddered, imagining the risk. “I wouldn’t want to have to try that. But I guess they had no choice.”

  The clock tower chimed again, the fleeing slaves vanished, and a large group of nuns in full traditional habit appeared out of thin air and walked sedately past us. As anyone who spent more than five minutes here knew, Covington was heavily settled by German Catholics.

  “The time period changes every time the clock tower chimes,” I said. “Did you notice that?”

  “I notice that it’s been ringing like crazy, that’s for sure,” Jeff replied. “It must be broken.”

  “And every time it rings, it seems to act as some sort of temporal TV dial that’s turning randomly through the centuries, giving us glimpse after glimpse of what once was here.”

  “This could get really out of hand,” Jeff said. “We need to fix that clock!”

  “We might be able to find a theoretical physicist at University of Cincinnati,” I said hopefully.

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Aristhosthenes, we need to do something now and for real, not desert Covington in its time of need while we go in search of a theorist!” She turned and marched west. “I’m heading for the clock tower! I can’t force you to come with me, of course, but I would hope that you—”

  “I’m coming, I’m coming,” I assured her.

  She had a point, I thought, as the chimes rang again and a group of Shawnee Indians from some previous century ran past us, clearly intent on serious business. We saw other current-day citizens like us, and most of them were screaming, running around in confused circles, leaning out of windows and laughing maniacally, crying, or trying to hide under parked cars as temporal rift after rift disoriented and terrified them with each new peal of the clock tower chimes. This situation was spiraling into chaos so fast, the city might not even be here anymore by the time we found and secured the help of someone with more expertise on temporal phenomena than either of us had (which was none at all).

  We approached Mainstrasse at a brisk pace. I was panting and feeling the burn; Jeff wasn’t even slightly flushed, never mind breathing hard.

  Mainstrasse is the most picturesque area of Covington, a nostalgic tribute to the German villages that the immigrants in this city left behind in the Old World. Nineteenth century townhouses and attractive brick buildings line a broad and very long village green. The neighborhood is a mix of private homes, restaurants, bars, and businesses.

  Some of the most visible features of Mainstrasse, though, are recent renditions of a traditional German setting. The Goose Girl Fountain, which was inspired by the Grimm fairy tale and sits in the center of Mainstrasse, was erected in the early 1980s. (Almost every year, usually during Oktoberfest, some joker sneaks bubble bath into the fountain.) And the other prominent example of recent nostalgia evoking a magical past is the clock tower, also built around that time. Inspired by a medieval clock tower in Munich, it rises high above the park that lies at the end of the village green.

  A combination of narration, music, and motorized figurines in the bell tower recount the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin every hour. The tower also features a glockenspiel with chimes that ring-in and ring-out the hours, day in and day out.

  But now our glocken seemed to be broken and spieling all over the place. Maybe a reality-altering crisis was the inevitable consequence of deliberately building a fairy tale clock tower and then failing to maintain it properly, and perhaps the city should have thought this through before committing such folly. But it was too late now for such reflections to be constructive, and Jeff said (when I hung back a little, admitting that I’m afraid of heights) that we had to do something about it, since most of the city currently seemed to be crazed with fear or paralytic with shock.

  While we hovered at the base of the clock tower discussing this, Jeff picked the lock on the gate that opened onto the stairs which ascended up to the bell tower. I was contemplating this ascension with some dismay when the chimes rang again, and then we heard what sounded like an epic quantity of water roaring toward us.

  “What’s that?” Jeff asked with a frown.

  I had a dark feeling I knew, even before I looked north and saw the rising water rushing through the narrow streets. “Oh, dear God, it’s the flood of 1937.”

  “But there’s a huge flood wall,” she protested.

  “Not in 1937, there wasn’t! Come on, Jeff, up—up!”

  I pushed her ahead of me and raced up the steep, narrow, curving metal staircase behind her, my fear of heights submerged by my newfound fear of drowning in a flood that had occurred almost eighty years earlier.

  “How can this be happening?” Jeff wondered.

  “How can any of it be happening?” I gave her another push. “Keep moving! The river rose so high that neighborhoods twenty blocks south of here were underwater!” I’d seen photos of the devastation.

  As we reached the bell tower, the glockenspiel chimed again, switching the temporal dial to yet another channel.

  “Oh, thank God,” said Jeff. “Imagine if the whole flood had played out all over again.”

  “I don’t want to imagine it,” I said sincerely.

  “What’s happening now?” she asked, looking down at the town below.

  I gazed east and replied, “It looks like John Roebling is about halfway through building the bridge, so I guess it’s soon after the Civil War.” Roebling, who would go on to build the more famous Brooklyn Bridge, had designed the suspension bridge over the Ohio River that was still in use in our time.

  “Let’s put a stop to this mess before someone who doesn’t know what’s going on drives across it,” Jeff said firmly.

  The chimes of the clock tower’s glockenspiel used to be played manually, but I saw that they had long since been programmed to play electronically.

  “Didn’t you say you’re an IT guy?” Jeff asked, looking at the electrical system with me.

  “Yes. You remember that?” I was surprised and pleased. I’d mumbled this information two weeks ago, while paying for my coffee, when she’d asked me where I worked.

  “So can you reprogram this thing?”

  “I can do better than that.”

  I pulled the plug.

  “That’s it?” Jeff said incredulously.

  “No power, no chimes,” I said. “Now let’s see if it worked.”

  We went back to the railing and looked out over the city.

  “The bridge is back!” Jeff said with relief. “All of it.”

  And there had been no chime to signal another temporal shift. In cutting the power supply to the glockenspiel, I had somehow bypassed or eliminated whatever strange time-keeping power had gone haywire in the town’s clock tower, and thus the temporal continuum reverted to its standard flow.

  Let this be a lesson to people who want to install fairy tale devices in their modern cities. It doesn’t work out well.

  Jeff and I continued to watch anxiously over our city for some time, but there were no more disturbances in the city’s normal one-way time flow. The crisis was past.

  “We need to put an ‘Out of Order’ sign on the glockenspiel before we go,” I said “And then have a talk with the mayor, to make sure no one plugs it back in.”

  She nodded. “I suppose I should go check on my coffee shop. Who knows what’s happened to it, what with the woolly mammoth, the Civil War, and the flood?”

  As she turned toward the stairs, I said, “Um, Jeff, I was wondering …”

  “Yes?”

  Go for it, I thought. Would you just go for it, already?

  “Would you maybe, um, think about going out with me some time?”

  She hesitated for such a long moment that my stomach sank, and I wished to God I hadn’t spoken up after all.
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  Then she said, “Before I say yes, Aristhosthenes—”

  “You’re thinking of saying yes?” I blurted with enough enthusiasm to make her fall back a step.

  “There’s something you should know. I’m a transgender woman.” Seeing my puzzled expression, Jeff added, “I was born with male genitalia, but I identify as a woman.”

  “Oh! Um … have you still got the male genitalia?”

  “Yes.” Jeff waited. “Is that a problem?”

  I thought it over.

  The barista was pretty, vivacious, and sexy, and I had been getting up ridiculously early all week in hope of having a moment alone with her. She was brave and reliable and had convinced me to help her save our city from a mad glockenspiel and temporal disaster.

  “No, not a problem,” I said. “Will you have dinner with me on Friday, Jeff?”

  She smiled. “Yes, Aristhosthenes, I will.

  THE PASSING BELL

  by Amy Griswold

  My hired horse threw a shoe between Bristol and Bath, and by the time the wearying business of getting another nailed on was complete the shadows were growing long and the wind was sharpening its knives.

  “It’s kind of you to put me up,” I said, jingling pennies in my pocket to encourage such generosity. In a town so small it had neither pub nor inn, I considered myself fortunate to be offered the chance to sleep in the blacksmith’s loft.

  “Glad to, if you’ve got the coin,” the blacksmith said. “Only the missus is particular in her way about knowing something about strangers who are going to sleep under her roof. What’s your name, and what’s your age, and what’s your trade, good man? For she’ll ask me all three.”

  “Rob Tar is my name, and my age is twenty and six,” I said. “And I’m an able seaman aboard the Red Boar out of Bristol. My girl Minnie lives in Bath, and I’m on my way to keep her company a while until we sail again. I’ve never claimed to be a good man, but I’ll be no trouble to you, and I can pay you for supper and bed.” In fact I had three months’ pay, most of it stuffed down my shirt to pose less temptation to thieves. “Will that satisfy your lady?”

  “It should,” Mister Smith said, with a sheepish sort of shuffle that would have looked more at home on a boy than a big man with biceps like hams. “You understand, she’s a particular sort of woman.” He seemed to notice for the first time that his dogs were circling me suspiciously, as if waiting for the cue to set their teeth into an intruder. “Get by, dogs, we’ve a guest tonight.”