Time travel – The Word Worker

Under the Oaks

Photo taken and edited by Becky Strike, Oak Alley Plantation, LA

He stared down the well groomed brick walk, his worn pack slipping from his shoulder to land with a metallic rattle. His torn, mud-stained uniform was a sore thumb against the impossibly manicured lawn and the milling people nearer the big house.

A woman in skintight pants, of all outlandish costumes, skirted around him with a sidelong glance. A little girl in garishly combined colors jumped up and down and pulled a man’s sleeve; he heard her ask as they passed why he was dressed in such weird clothes. He raised an eyebrow, locking eyes with the open-mouthed child until she lost interest and skipped on toothed road.

The road was all wrong, as well, and shining contraptions sat in neat rows near it on what should have been the cane fields. At least savory smells wafted from the big house. Maybe he could fill his empty stomach while he figured out what was going on.

If only his head didn’t feel so muzzy. He must have had fever; he really didn’t remember how he got back to the plantation. What had he been doing? He flushed with shame at the flash of memory. Cannonfire and screaming men, rivulets of blood polluting the rainwater churning under patched boots. A welcoming hollow in an ancient oak, just waiting at the edge of the field. Curling into a fetal ball with head wedged between his knees and hands locked white knuckles behind his head as battle faded into nothing. Then he was standing under the great oaks of home, only it wasn’t home. It was a nightmare.

Wormhole

https://pixabay.com/photos/fall-fog-dippoldiswalde-town-light-4784597/

She could still see the town below as if through a pea soup fog, street lights shining incongruous against the blue sky. It was near midnight when she had walked out of the glare of those lights into the darkness of the hills. She hadn’t expected the night to be so dense, nor for it to explode into sunlight within a single step.

Nothing made sense. The asphalt-paved county road she had chosen for her escape was now nothing but deep ruts in a sea of green. No trace remained of the farms and homes that had skirted the town; only bare, rolling hills marked the horizon instead.

She had shaken her head wildly and hefted her suitcase. It was a hallucination. Or a dream. Or… she had marched onward, ignoring the evidence of her senses. In a minute she would be alright. In a minute everything would be normal. When sweat had trickled down the back of her neck she had turned back to see the town bathed in white shadow, and knew.

She had been so desperate to get away, to disappear. Walking was a long shot, but it was the only chance she had to escape his omniscient fingers that probed every corner of the world. Her suitcase dropped from nerveless hands and she collapsed to her knees beside it in the red ruts. She would wait here. If he didn’t walk up that wagon trail by nightfall, she could breathe. A different time? A parallel universe? It didn’t matter. He would never find her again.

The Warp

FB_IMG_1590604606681 The city burned. Well, technically speaking, cities, since there seemed to be several versions all at once. It had started on Times Square. Everyone on the street suffered the same blinding headache at the exact same moment, and when they recovered the billboards had been replaced with the original New York Times building. Brand spanking 1904 new. Except that 1904 hadn’t had access to 2020 technology, and within seconds broken electrical wires and gas lines had exploded half the building.

It hadn’t stopped there, obviously. No one knew what had created the time rift, but every explosion warped it further. Theatre facades from the 1920s replaced gleaming modern glass and steel, only to burn. Modern street signs stood before the flaming remains of storefronts from the 1800s. Over it all towered the twisted and shattered skyscrapers of the last forty years.

After the buildings, the warp affected living things. First trees and other greenery shifted and broke, sparks from the blazing city setting them alight like living torches. Then people began to change. Some were suddenly mysteriously confused, insisting they were someone else and cowering in terror. Others simply disappeared, while men and women in costumes from long ago days blended in bewilderment with the screaming theater crowds. The worst cases no one talked about, the ones caught between as the rift continued to warp. The ones who didn’t survive, could never have survived.

Most fled, trampling each other in wild abandon like animals racing a forest fire. Here and there a trace of humanity survived: a man snatching a crying child from the path of a bus careening out of control, a woman supporting an elderly man who could barely hobble. For the most part, civilization fell to its basest instincts, the urge to survive at all costs.

It was vain. The city lay silent, its hodgepodge of time staring with bloodied and emptied eye sockets on a burning concrete wasteland.

The Time Cottage

It was the strangest hodgepodge of a house Jax had ever seen. The solid plank tower butting up against the back wall looked oddly out of place against the cobblestone and steeply pitched shingles. Placed where it was in the spray of a waterfall that seemed to feed nothing, it looked as if someone had snatched random bits from across time and space and pasted them together in homage to time itself.

The impression grew even stronger as the door opened and the occupant appeared. She was a wizened old woman, with incongruently red straggling strands of hair escaping a bonnet starched stiffer than the Magistrate. Her feet were clad in solid leather work boots, while a patchwork cloak barely hid a gown fit for the ballroom.

This dizzying figure rushed toward Jax, grinning widely. “Why, there you are!” she exclaimed, throwing her arms around him with a disconcerting familiarity that he was too thunderstruck to resist. “I was beginning to think you had lost your way and would never arrive after all!”

She released him only to grab his arms and hold him at arms length, surveying him with the critical eye of an aging aunt or fussing grandmother. “Well now, you could use some meat on your bones, but I can see there’s something going on behind that open mouth and those wide eyes. Yes, you’ll do.”

In an instant everything vanished, the house, waterfall, and woman together. Jax was left standing on the empty moor, staring into space like a daydreaming child, blinking in bewilderment. Feeling dazed, he turned around and headed back to the city as fast as his legs would take him, eager for the comfort of familiar surroundings. But as he topped a hill he stopped so suddenly he nearly lost his balance. The city was gone. FB_IMG_1569700668713