Wham!

by Carol Marrs Phipps

  W H A M!

  Timewalker

  ~ BOOK 1 ~

  CAROL MARRS PHIPPS

  and

  TOM PHIPPS

  WHAM!

  Copyright © 2016 Carol Marrs Phipps & Tom Phipps

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  www.niarg.com

  Cover Art by Marija Vilotijevic - Expert Subjects

  Formatted by The Book Khaleesi, Sept 2018

  ISBN: 1533026408

  ISBN-13: 978-1533026408

  To our very dear friends and beta readers,

  Karen Furk

  J.L. Gabarron

  Jena C Henry

  Catherine Lee Mantle

  Aidan Stone

  To my Grandmother Emma Walker Phipps, who told me that time was a river and that one can never put his foot into the same water twice.

  To my parents Jesse & Eleanor Marrs.

  I miss you every single day.

  Table of Contents

  Also from Carol Marrs Phipps and Tom Phipps

  Reading Guide: Archaic Modern Niarg

  Introduction

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  An Excerpt from THEN… Timewalker - Book 2

  APPENDIX

  General Dramatis Personae

  General Gazetteer

  GENERAL GLOSSARY

  Foreign or Archaic Words into Niarg Standard Words

  Niarg Standard Words into Foreign or Archaic Words (& Technical Terms Defined)

  About the Authors

  More Books from the Heart of the Staff Series

  Also from Carol Marrs Phipps and Tom Phipps

  Timewalker Series

  THEN… (Timewalker – Book 1)

  Heart of the Staff Series

  Good Sister, Bad Sister (Book 1 – FREE)

  The Collector Witch (Book 2)

  Stone Heart (Book 3)

  The Burgeoning (Book 4)

  The Reaper Witch (Book 5)

  Doom (Book 6)

  Heart of the Staff – Complete Series

  Elf Killers

  Reading Guide: Archaic Modern Niarg

  A few of the characters in Wham! speak Archaic Modern Niarg. This language uses very few words not found in present day English. By all means read it in any manner which allows you to enjoy the book. Its spellings are at least as easy to make sense of as those in the notes passed by grammar school children. However, if you wish to have it sound as we intended when you read it aloud, please heed the following simple rules. Do not hesitate to refer to the glossary.

  Archaic Modern Niarg should be pronounced thus:

  There was no vowel shift between Archaic Modern Niarg and Niarg Standard, so vowels sound much the same as in modern Appalachian English.

  However:

  - Each letter of a diphthong tends to be pronounced separately, for example:

  * maister would be pronounced may-ist-er.

  - Es at the end of words are not silent, but are pronounced.

  - Certain consonants which have become silent in Niarg Standard are sounded,

  For example:

  * the k in knight

  * the gh in knight. The gh is hard, much like a kh.

  * the gh in thought, just as in knight.

  Remember that Ich means I and should be pronounced to sound like ike.

  Hit means it and ybe is similar to is and are.

  Know more at:

  www.niarg.com

  Introduction

  Time does not Exist

  My how time flies. Isn’t it something how twenty years ago seems like only yesterday, yet back when you were four, a summer lasted for a small eternity? Not only have we all heard this sort of thing, but every last one of us experiences time exactly this way. Meanwhile, we have the clock ticking away at exactly the same rate today that it ticked forty years ago. The reason that this can happen is because there is no real time which exists in nature at all. And since it doesn’t exist, there is no way one could ever run it backwards, change its rate or travel in it.

  All that happens in nature is the progressive occurrence of natural phenomena. Cells divide at the speed which they happen to divide, the granite cliff face crumbles onto the talus pile below as fast as it crumbles. And the earth rotates on and on, independent of any sort of time.

  Time is our abstraction. We invented it, just as we came up with the inch and the foot and the mile. We began keeping track of the earth’s rotations and invented time based upon a rotation’s subdivision, hours at first with sundials, then minutes, once we had managed a reliable clock escapement and eventually nanoseconds. As soon as we had invented these hour and second pieces of a rotation of the earth, we could measure the duration of all sorts of things in terms of them.

  And from beginning to end, we remain biological beings. We do not innately look at things from the perspective of a ticking mechanism. Events fly by more as we get older simply because our only natural way of sensing them is by contrasting their duration with how long our life has been so far. A summer for a four year old is a far more noticeable percentage of his life than it is of the life of an eighty year old.

  There is indeed a progression of natural events that we are swept along with. And we can call this progression “time” if we must, but our label gives us no mastery at all. We only progress at the rate nature allows. We might someday leap into space faster than light and turn about to see earlier events brought to us by the light we outran, but this is not time travel. We are only fooling ourselves. If we are ever to go rollicking about in the distant past or future, we shall simply have to use magic.

  Tom Phipps

  Chapter 1

  Someone shouted in the kitchen. Tess Greenwood sat right up in the blackness. “Dad?” she gasped.

  Someone screamed.

  “Mom!” cried Tess as she stumbled onto the floor in a panic of pillow and sheets, in time for her door to fling wide with blinding light and a bang that shattered things on her dresser.

  “Hey!” barked the silhouette in the doorway. “No way you're running by me!” And with that, he tramped right in, jabbing her in the throat with the end of his e- truncheon.

  “Aah!” she wailed with the throb of its electric jolt as she sat down hard on the floor.

  “Like that, little witch?” he hissed through the mask of his plastic helm. “Now you're going into the kitchen on your hands and knees, real careful or I'll hold my stick against your stinking throat 'til y' pass out. Move!”

  As Tess rolled onto her knees, she could hear her sister's sque
als of defiance as she kicked at the pair of cops who had hold of her in the kitchen.

  “Nia!” shouted her mother before crying out in pain.

  “You vile bastards!” roared her father.

  Tess leaped through the doorway in time to see two of the police from Children and Family Assistance squirt his mouth full of thick polymer from their gob stopper gun, as he gagged, bouncing and jerking against his restraints in red-faced fury.

  “I told you!” bellowed Silhouette, grabbing Tess by the arm and yanking her onto the floor.

  “Tess!” cried her mother. “Stop! They'll kill you if y' don't quit!”

  “That's right!” shouted Silhouette.

  “Nia!” cried Tess at the sight of the police kicking her.

  “Hey!” shouted Silhouette. “That little whore's going to the capitol. And they won't take her all beat up! But this one,” he grunted, giving Tess a furious kick, “has earned it!”

  “Tess!” screamed her mother in time to be silenced with a kick in the head.

  Her father sprang from the floor in spite of his restraints, slamming into Silhouette in a rage that knocked over the refrigerator behind them. Suddenly police were everywhere, beating him senseless, dragging him and his dear wife out the door into the early light of dawn.

  “Mom! Dad!” screamed Tess as car doors slammed outside.

  Now they had Nia by the arms. “I'll love Drake forever!” she wailed as they forced her outside.

  Tess bit the hand that grabbed her mouth and dashed outside to leap down the steps as two of the police cars lurched into the roadway with a chirp of tires.

  “Bite me again, little witch!” roared Silhouette as his truncheon came down behind her ear.

  * * *

  Beyond the front steps, the sun rose well into the morning, glinting on a green bottle in the bare red dirt of the yard. Sparrows cheeped everywhere in the noise of the traffic from the roadway. Tess sat up just long enough to see that she was in her room, caught herself on her elbow to keep from toppling out of bed and lay right back down with a groan.

  At the bounce of her bed springs, an elderly woman pushed back a chair and stood up in the kitchen. “Whoa there, deary-do!” she called, stumping right in to look at her this way and that. “That might be a bit quick. You got two black eyes. And the nurse said the copper only whacked y' one good one on the back of the head. And what I want to know is, can y' even see out of either one?”

  “Kind of...”

  “I'm Maud, sweetheart,” she said, giving Tess's hand a squeeze. “Maud Baxter. How 'bout some tea? So far, the only pot I've found has half the spout gone...”

  “It pours. We've been using it... Please!” she said with a scald of fear as she sat right up. “Where's Mom and Dad? And Nia?”

  Maud stopped short with wide eyes. “Why Children and Family Assistance,” she said, scarcely shaking her head. “And I'm to be in here for a few days to help y' adjust...”

  “When are they coming back?”

  Maud shook her head as if she were about to cry.

  “No!” shouted Tess in a great wail of despair.

  Old Maud had her in her arms at once, rocking her and smoothing her hair for a good long time. At last, she gave her a pat and sat up. “I'm going to go fix that tea,” she said.

  Tess lay back with shooting pains in her head, in spite of the sedatives given to her by the nurse.

  Maud was back in short order, finding a chair for the tea. “I hope you're not too old for animal crackers,” she said. “I found this nice box. And it only had one teensy little maggot and some web. All I had to do was shake it out and put the crackers back in.”

  Tess drew in a deep, shuddery breath. “Where do you live, Maud?”

  “Up at the north end with Mort and Bart. That's my husband and m' crow...”

  “I don't feel so good,” said Tess handing back her half full cup.

  “I should say! You're white as a sheet. The nurse said that you're to be sleeping. Just lie back and I'll be right out here in the kitchen.”

  Tess lay back more quickly than she had meant to. “Your husband and who did y' say?” she said, wincing at the whirling ceiling. “I swore you said Crow somebody...”

  “My pet bird is a crow...” said Maud from the doorway.

  “And Mom and Dad really, really aren't coming back?”

  Maud shook her head and was back at Tess's bedside at once, smoothing her hair away from the tears she was squeezing from her swollen eyes. It was not long until Maud could see that she was sound asleep. She stood, propping her hands on her knees for a moment before straightening up the rest of the way and shuffled quietly into the kitchen.

  Beside the toaster under the cupboards rested a polished stone ball. The moment Maud stepped in, it gave a faint flash. “Yeh?” she said, looking right at the face which was appearing in it. “I know my place well enough not to discuss her family. I'm professional. Besides, I know very well that you saw the whole thing. Now, I want to talk to Mort.” She picked up the ball and sat with it at the table. “Mort?”

  Mort was already peering out of the “skinny,” as everyone called these things. “I've got the rest of the day, Maudy,” he said. “They don't have me spraying until tomorrow, first thing.”

  “As you might've overheard before I left, I'm at the south end of the far south barrack, facing the road. I've got to scratch around before I know what I'm fixing, but I'm starting on dinner, right now.” And with that, she parked the skinny in a storage jar lid, so that it wouldn't roll off the table, and set about to see what might be fixed to eat. There certainly was no meat of any sort. “I don't know why I'm even bothering to look,” she was careful not to say aloud. It was rare for anyone to get his hands on meat except for the day before one of the world holidays. All of the world holidays were mandatory to observe. Disarmament Day commemorated the destruction of the last private firearm. Emancipation Day marked the outlawing of all religions. And Unity Day was the day when the World Alliance began its tyrannical rule everywhere. She found a few pounds of limp carrots in the bottom of the refrigerator which she and the nurses had managed to set upright, some black pepper and a box of very old-smelling milk powder.

  While she was searching for a kettle without a hole in it, Mort was up at the north end, wheeling his bicycle out the door. He fiddled with the cuff of his breeches as the breezy whistles of the starling overhead gave way to a bubbling chatter. After a couple of tries, he was mounted. With Bart digging in his toenails and swaying ponderously on his shoulder, he gave a wild swing to the left, an immediate weave to the right, and with a rattle of fenders was underway with all the aplomb of a cyclist in his prime.

  “We're going to have carrots,” said Maud as Mort hauled his watermelon of a belly up the last step. “I just now put them on.”

  “Smells like old refrigerator,” he said, backing stiffly up to a chair by the table, “but I expect it will be good...” He sat down with a sudden plump and let Bart shuffle down his arm to the back of the nearby chair to begin at once, sorting through his feathers.

  “Maud?” called Tess from the bedroom. “Are you still here?”

  “I'm on my way with just a cup this time, dearie-do.”

  “I don't think I can,” said Tess. “I feel like vomiting.”

  “I hope y' get over that. I've got carrots starting to boil.”

  “I'm 'way too sick. Is someone here?”

  “Mort and Bart.”

  “Well please go on and eat without me. I'll just puke. But Maud, please stay.”

  Maud gave Tess's hand a squeeze. “I'll be right here as long as y' need me, sweetheart,” she said. And with that she returned to the kitchen.

  “Just the girl?” said Mort, looking up.

  Maud nodded.

  “Well, how is she?”

  Maud went straight to the cupboards as if she had not heard him, unplugged the toaster and parked it directly in front of the skinny as she took a chair at the table.

&
nbsp; “I said how is the young lady?”

  “Oh she's doing just fine. A nice long nap and she'll be right as rain,” she said as she leant across the table with a roll of her eyes and an ear-to-ear shake of her head. “I think she'll be ready to start her new life in no time.” She was still shaking her head as she glanced at the toaster to make sure that no one on the skinny had seen.

  “And she understands what happened?” he said, ignoring the stone ball, since he had no toaster to hide behind.

  “I think she's anxious enough to get going in her new direction,” she said, closing her eyes with an even bigger shake of her head. “But I'd not know for sure, since it's never our place to discuss such things. That's for the councelors at Children and Family Assistance. But I think most young clients are quite ready for a change, long before it comes.”

  Bart ruffled up his feathers and gave himself a thorough shake.

  “Maud!” wailed Tess from the bedroom. “The wash basin! Got 'o puke!”

  “Oh my stars!” said Maud. “Where do you reckon they keep it?”

  Tess thumped across her bedroom floor to the toilet in the bathroom with an explosive cough of yellow fluid.

  “Oh deary-do!” said Maud as she stumped in. “I'm so sorry I couldn't find the pan. Why you don't have a thing in your stomach to throw up, do you...?”

  “Gawf...angk...awmff...!” hooted Tess, nodding her dribbling chin over the iron stained porcelain of the toilet bowl.

  Maud saw at once that there was no skinny in the bathroom and pushed the door to. “Those rotten coppers!” she said in a low voice as she daubed at Tess with a towel.

  “I've cleaned up their work every blooming day now, for years. And I swear. I just don't begin to know how they can do that to families.”

  “I thought you worked for...” moaned Tess.

  “For Children and Family Assistance? I do, but my job's cleaning up after them.