In Medias Res

PART ONE

December 17, 2008

The room was silent except for the whisper of the oven as it warmed her dinner from the kitchen and the soft snore of her neighbor through the paper-thin walls. She had hardly moved for the past three days since coming home from the hospital; replaying over and over in her mind her mother’s last words.

“I got you out of it, didn’t I?” She had said, and then her head had rolled to the side of the pillow and she had spoken no more.

It was the peace in her mother’s voice that had stuck so securely in her mind. The peace in the old woman’s voice that filled her with so much rage. She stood abruptly, her fists clenched, her teeth gritted, and took her place by the wall to study her handiwork.

The wallpaper had been torn in multiple spots, and there were traces of dried blood and flakes of skin painted upon it like physical manifestations of her fury.

She punched it and the impact echoed around the room dully.

“Got me out of it?” She whispered to nobody as tears began to fall from her eyes. “Got me out of it!” She said again and punctuated the thought by throwing a second punch. A blister on her knuckle popped and began to run. She hardly noticed.

“And what did he get?!” She asked, this time nearly yelling. She threw a third jab. Two blisters cracked and blood began to flow in earnest. A fourth blow, a fifth, each one only serving to increase her anger.

“What did he get? What did he get?” She was screaming now and crying and bleeding. The man from next door awoke and began pounding on the wall himself for her to quiet down but she did not hear him over the fire burning in her chest.

“Got me out of it?!” She howled one final time, then reared back, her red hair flying about her face and into her eyes, then lurched forward with all of her might. Her bloodied fist slammed against the wall and then rebounded off of it with a loud crack. She fell backward, clutching her hand and screaming in rage and pain.

She lay there a long time, whispering over and over her mother’s final words, “Got me from it…Got me out of it…Got me…” until from exhaustion or pain or both, her eyes closed and the world faded from thought.

March 3, 1987

The tunnel was dark except for the tiny pinprick of light from some distance up ahead. A small blemish in the otherwise perfect, velvety blackness. The doctor moved through it without fear. Not because he had walked it before and knew what to expect, though he had, but because the idea of being afraid had never occurred to him.

He was large. Had been a large baby, grown larger as a boy, and became a mountain as a man. Other men blessed by such a condition might’ve made it their identity. Taken comfort in the fact that their generous proportions would get them far in life and left it at that, but not him. He was of a different kind.

He had become, well, a doctor, but even then was not satisfied. Soon after that, he realized his talent as an author, a professor, a speculator, and a socialite. The type of man who could take a salt shaker in hand and sprinkle out gold. The type of man who once his mind was set on something would surely have it. One who knew anything standing in his way would surely get it, and so if there was something hiding in the darkness it better damn well stay hidden until he had made his way through.

Before long the small tear of light began to grow wider and wider until the room it was illuminating came fully into his view. It was a small place, carved deep within the heart of the Earth as if by a collection of moles rather than a man. Its walls were rough-hewn rock and dirt, and its shape was irregular. In the back of the hollow was a tall structure hidden by a white bed sheet, and at its center was a candle-laden table with three chairs set around it, two of them currently occupied and the third awaiting his arrival.

“So this must be the man,” The doctor said to no one in particular as he entered the den and flung his scarf over the back of the unoccupied chair. He pulled it out and took a seat heavily, then put on his most charming smile.

“I must be,” said the man who now sat across from him. “Though, I’m a little confused as to why.”

The doctor chuckled spitefully as he studied the man. He was young. Early twenties, twenty 25 at the oldest, and was large and well built like the doctor himself. “As am I my boy, but Margarett has her reasons.”

He looked over at the third member of their company and smiled at her with a wolf’s smile, studying her red hair gleaming in the candlelight. He loved red hair on a woman. It was an attraction he had discovered early on and would pursue for the rest of his life, but something about hers made him wary. A sense that reaching out and touching it might burn his fingers.

“Margarett, anything to add?” The doctor asked sarcastically. He knew full well she wouldn’t. In truth, the woman hardly ever spoke, preferring to communicate with her cold, blue eyes unless speech was absolutely necessary. She looked at him now, then pointed at her watch.

The doctor nodded and turned to the boy. “The woman says it’s time to go, are you ready?”

The boy smiled but seemed hesitant. “I am, but…” His sentence faltered.

“But what?” the doctor jumped in, growing impatient.

“Well, first off, I thought we might talk for a moment,” he said shyly.

Margarett’s eyes flicked over to the boy’s face with a gaze sharp enough to cut his cheek. The boy ignored her.

“If we’re to be traveling through time together, I’d like you to know my name, in case the worst happens. My name is Richard.”

The doctor nodded, “Richard…that’s my wife’s late father’s name. In truth, I never really liked the man, but I won’t hold that against you.” He reached out and offered his hand for a shake. “My name is…”

“Oh, I know what your name is,” Richard interrupted as he grabbed the doctor’s hand and shook it firmly. “You’re Teddy Thatcher. I’ve read your books. They’re brilliant, I’d even say genius.”

The doctor smiled, soaking in the young man’s admiration like a sponge. “Dr. Thatcher, if you would, but I appreciate your feedback.”

The boy nodded, “Dr. Thatcher, then. Excuse me.”

“We don’t have time for this,” Margarett said with a soft hiss.

“I beg to differ!” The doctor said, his temper rising. He was not used to taking orders from anybody, let alone a woman, and her constant dour attitude was beginning to grate. He shot to his feet and walked over to the covered object behind him. “I think we may be the only three people in the world who can honestly claim we have time to waste!”

He reached out and ripped the sheet to the floor, revealing in a flourish the hidden object. It was tall, its highest point reaching the very top of the room, and shaped like an old-fashioned telephone booth, though it was not made of metal. Instead, its form was colored by the same drab gray and brown as the walls that surrounded it, and its surface had a rough look to it, like worn leather or aged skin. On its side protruded a small box-shaped growth whose look matched the rest of the construction exactly except for two small, glowing red orbs deep set into its worn surface.

The doctor turned and looked at Richard with a wry smile, anticipating with glee the gasp the performance was sure to elicit. To his disappointment, the boy was mostly unimpressed except for a small smile and the uncrossing of his arms.

Richard sat up and leaned forward, his tone conspiratorial. “It’s incredible, Doctor. It almost looks…alive.”

“Oh it is, my boy, it is.”

This time, Richard gave the appropriate reaction. His mouth fell slightly ajar and he slumped back into his chair, dumbfounded. Internally, the Doctor laughed, though his face remained serious.

“At least, I think it is,” the Doctor conceded. “There are still many tests to be done, many discoveries to be made.”

The room fell silent a moment. Richard glanced nervously at Margarett, then cleared his throat. “I would like to know, Doctor, what you’ve discovered so far, before we proceed.”

“It’s not important for you to understand,” Margarett jumped in, her own anger clearly rising. “This isn’t a science class!”

“That’s enough, Margarett!” The doctor shouted and clapped his hands, “I’ve held my tongue long enough! Shut your mouth, or I will shut it for you!” To emphasize the point he slammed his closed fists down on the table hard enough to knock over one of the candles.

He had expected to see fear in her, or at the very least, a new respect for her current situation, but when her eyes turned and met his all he could see in them was ice. They stared at each other a long moment, then the Doctor turned away and began pacing back and forth in front of the machine.

“The first thing you ought to know when speaking of time travel is quite simple.” He stopped moving and looked at Richard for effect. “You know nothing.” He nodded and then continued pacing. “In fact, even the most brilliant minds of Hollywood and science fiction literature were far wide of the reality, and it is for one simple reason. Anchors.”

* * *

“Anchors?” Richard chimed in quizically.

The doctor nodded. “Yes, Anchors. At least, that is what I have dubbed them. When I first discovered the machine…” the doctor stopped pacing again, this time to look at Margarett. She was staring back with narrowed eyes.

“Well in truth, it was Margarett here who showed me the machine, but since that time my knowledge has come to far outpace her own. In any case, time travel is impossible without an Anchor. An object whose only criteria are that it must have mass, and must have existed in the time in which the interloper wishes to travel. It is to this object that your journey is bound, and without it, can’t have made the trip at all.”

“And this anchor is assigned to you somehow?” Richard interjected, truly fascinated.

“No, it is an object of your own choosing. You must simply enter the machine and think hard on the object you wish to anchor yourself to, and then think of a specific moment in the past in which that anchor existed.”

“Interesting,” Richard said and scratched his chin. “So how would you make your return to your own time?”

The doctor laughed, “An interesting question, but the wrong one.”

“What is the right one then?”

“Simply put, ‘How long can I stay in the past?’”

Richard heaved a sigh. “I think you’ve lost me.”

The Doctor laughed. The boy was truly an excellent audience. “Fall not into despair,” the doctor said encouragingly. “A greater mind than your own struggles with these very concepts.”

Margarett exhaled thinly at the Doctor’s self-serving remark. Neither the Doctor nor the boy seemed to notice.

“So, for instance,” Richard ventured hesitantly, “Say I wished to see the signing of the Declaration of Independence, could I choose the quill they used as my Anchor?”

“Yes!” The Doctor agreed with glee, “You’re starting to get it, but your choice of anchor strikes right at the heart of the problem with this whole venture. Back to our proverbial, ‘right question’.”

“That being?”

“To a large degree, the mass of your anchor determines the amount of time you have to spend in the past. The greater the mass, the longer your stay, or the slower the ‘Timeline Decay’. I would call it the, ‘First law of Time Travel’, if I were writing a book.”

“Timeline Decay?”

The Doctor blushed good-naturedly. “Yes. It’s a term I coined as part of a mathematical equation I am working on. I think it describes the experience quite nicely.”

“So you’re saying the quill’s mass is too little to prevent this, ‘Timeline Decay’?”

“I am, though no matter the mass of your Anchor eventually Timeline Decay will prevail. I’d say, taking no other factors into consideration, you’d have about fifteen or so seconds with our founding fathers based on such an Anchor. But there are other considerations that would limit you further.”

“By all means, list them,” Richard said happily.

The doctor laughed again. “Where did you find such a fine young man, Margarett? I’d kill for twenty more like him in my Evolutionary Biology course! So eager for knowledge I’d suppose he was egging me on if his face weren’t so damn, honest!”

Again, Margarett did not vocalize a response and instead fixed him with a cool gaze, but this time the ice in her eyes was different. Melted, just slightly. In them, he could see her rebuke. Involuntarily his hand dropped to his side and landed on the hard outline of the pistol hidden beneath his long coat. He fingered the length of its barrel slowly downward until he felt the subtle ridge of its forward sight, then remembered himself and shoved his hand in his pocket.

Perhaps the woman had been right about all this. Perhaps taking the time to talk was a mistake. He did not let the uncertainty reach his face.

He turned away from the fiery-haired woman and scratched his beard as if lost in deep thought.

“Where was I…Ah yes, back to the example of the quill. It is not only an issue of the object’s small mass, but also of its purpose. You see, the quill the men used to sign that document would by its very nature need to be in motion to do so. That brings us to the,” the doctor raised his hands and air quoted his next few words, “‘Second Law of Time Travel’. That being, any movement on behalf of the Anchor, or the time traveler himself mind you, increases Timeline Decay. I’d venture that based on your Anchor’s movement you will have further reduced your stay down to about ten seconds.”

The boy shook his head. “It seems to me this might all be more trouble than it’s worth.”

“Ahhh, but isn’t that always the case when something new is discovered?! When the frontiers of man’s knowledge are expanded past its comfort and pushed into the dangerous unknown? Take Edison for example. Should he have given up when his light filament burned out after only fifteen minutes or so? A candle is far superior to that after all. Or Ford’s prototype Model A, a machine so famously unreliable he himself preferred a horse. Should we content ourselves with only moving forward in time? Chained to the linear path our Lord and Saviour deemed fit for us, or heave the bulwark forward like the greatest men of all time?”

He realized he was shouting by the time his speech had come to an end. He paused and looked at the two of them, his breath ragged and his brow wet with sweat. Margarett, forever the cynic, looked wholly unimpressed, but the boy, his eyes were filled by youthful energy and admiration.

“I am with you Doctor,” Richard said and pounded the table with a closed fist. “I would follow you as far as you were willing to go.”

“Of course you would, my boy! And why wouldn’t you? We’ve been given a gift. To squander it would be the worst type of sin.”

“So, you have discovered a way to delay the Timeline Decay then?” Richard asked eagerly. “You have been hiding the secret from me this whole time, haven’t you?”

The Doctor pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of his coat and wiped his upper lip and forehead. “Yes and no,” he said as he stored the article back in its place. “There are ways to extend one’s stay, but let us first return to the example of the quill and finish our lesson.”

Richard leaned back into his chair, ready to listen.

“The third law of time travel is this; proximity to one’s Anchor slows Timeline Decay. And, this is important, it is not just proximity in a general sense that is relevant, but proximity to the Anchor’s center of mass, that is key. When making a trip to the past, the machine will always place you as near to the chosen Anchor’s center of mass as possible without putting you inside of the object, and without placing you in the air.”

“And so again, the quill is no good,” Richard interjected. “Because not only is it in motion but it is also being passed around the room, thereby getting further and further away from me.”

“Exactly,” the Doctor confirmed. “You would have to follow it around the room as closely as possible to negate this third law, but that presents not only the problem of putting you in motion, but I’d think the founding fathers themselves might think it odd that a man in our modern clothes and whom they did not know was running around the room following their pen.”

Richard laughed, and even Margarett’s stony lips curled up ever so slightly at the absurdity of it all.

“Is that it then? All of your discoveries?”

Feeling his legs begin to tire and his throat begin to ache, the Doctor pulled out his chair and sat down.

“No, not by a wide margin, but those are the major three. Some lesser ones are that any object you bring with you to the past suffers extremely rapid Timeline Decay as soon as it is no longer in contact with your person. That includes everything, even writing. The carbon or ink on the page will disappear rapidly after having written them. Another, and very useful one, is that organic anchors are far better at slowing Timeline Decay than inorganic ones. The longest I’ve spent in the past was two hours and seventeen minutes standing stock still next to a giant Redwood tree in California in the year 1756. Also, you cannot approach yourself in the past. Even if you pick an Anchor along a path you knew you once walked, as soon as your past self gets close the Timeline Decay speeds almost infinitely. Or this, that no matter the amount of time you spend in the past, be it five seconds or two hours, you will always be sent back to your own time one minute and thirteen seconds after you left.”

He paused, cracking his chuckles against his cheek as he tried to remember all the others. Richard spoke, interrupting his reflection.

“You hinted before that there were exceptions. Ways to get around the eventual return to the present.”

The Doctor glanced at Margarett. Her eyes narrowed and her head shook slightly.

“Yes, two that I have discovered thus far,” The Doctor said, ignoring Margarett’s silent command.

“Well go on then!” The boy almost shouted when the Doctor did not immediately continue.

He nodded. “Very well. The first exception is one Margarett shared with me upon my first visit to this little hollow. I entered the room and found that she was already here, sitting at this table much as she is now. We talked and worked for a few hours, ate, then worked some more, and finally, when I grew so tired that every time I sat down I fell asleep, we decided to leave. We put out our candles and I picked up my flashlight and followed her into the tunnel. Then, after a few feet, she disappeared. Vanished into the ether. The next day I came back again, and here she was, waiting.”

Richard nodded and looked at Margarett, “She’s a time traveler.”

The Doctor was surprised the boy had caught on so quickly. “Yes, she is.”

“And I wager a guess that her anchor was not a chair or a table…or a quill.”

“Correct again.”

“The machine itself, then?” The boy asked, but by the look in his eye the Doctor could see he already knew the answer.

“Exactly,” the Doctor confirmed. “If you anchor yourself to the machine, the Timeline Decay is slowed…well, I don’t actually know by what degree it is slowed. All I know is that Margarett has spent hours, half a day, a full day down here with me as I experimented, and never has she been sent back unless by moving away into the tunnel.”

“Fascinating…” the boy said and leaned to the side to look at the object sitting behind the Doctor. “Why though? Why do you think that is?”

The Doctor smiled. “You spoke of the machine’s look when we first began our conversation. Of how it almost seemed…alive.”

Richard’s eyes moved about the machine like searchlights, taking in every inch of its telephone booth shape until finally they met the two glowing red buttons impressed into the box-like growth protruding from its side. “I remember,” he said slowly as he looked deeply into that red light until it nearly filled his entire field of vision. “But that can’t be, Doctor.”

“Oh, but it must be, my dear boy,” The Doctor corrected.

Suddenly a deep and primordial fear filled Richard like the coming of a sudden storm. Laughter, deeper and blacker than a starless night sky began to sound in his ears and the red of the light turned to blood. His blood, he knew, though how he was so certain of that point he could not tell. It washed around him and spilled from his mouth and ears and he saw himself falling into the dirt and then becoming it, his body decomposing in the span of a heartbeat. He wanted to scream, and cry, and hide, but most of all to look away. To look away from the accursed red light burning through his retinas and into his brain. He would die now, he knew. He would die and be forgotten in the infinite and uncaring stream of time. He closed his eyes.

“Boy. Boy! Richard!”

At the sound of his name Richard’s eyes opened and found himself exactly where he last remembered, still leaning to the side and looking at the machine, only now the Doctor’s hand was waving up and down in front of him as if trying to get his attention. Richard bolted upright so that the Doctor once again blocked his view of the animal in the back of the room.

“It’s alive!” He shouted, then realized he was shouting and spoke again, but this time with more control. “It’s alive, Doctor. And it loves us not.”

The Doctor looked at Richard with a furrowed brow and pursed lips. “I know it’s alive,” he finally said, “though I couldn’t tell you about its love. I can tell you that, based upon the discoveries I have already laid out, it must be alive to so completely stay the Timeline Decay. Organics make the best anchors. I can also surmise that it is quite massive, though its mass does not lie in this realm.”

“In this realm?” Richard asked with a tone that still had the faintest trace of panic.

“I’ve picked it up, you see,” The Doctor answered, ignoring the boy’s condition. “It doesn’t extend into the Earth below it, and neither into any of the walls that surround it. My theory is that its mass extends into the dimensions that lie beyond our mortal senses. Into the fourth and fifth and ever higher, but its center of mass, whether by its own choice or some unknown law of nature, exists right here in this very room. I expect, but will most likely never know, that a young man could travel back in time using the machine as his Anchor, live his life to a ripe age, and die an old man never being sent back to his own time as long as he stayed in this room.”

Richard shuddered at the thought of living in this room his entire life with only those red eyes to keep him company. He was tired of all this and sorry that he had come. Even now the vision he had seen in the light was fading, but the fear he felt was not. It was time to get this over with and go.

“What is the last exception, Doctor? Tell me, and let’s be off.”

The Doctor sniffed and cleared his throat. Something in Richard’s demeanor had changed. The thought that Margarett had been right to discourage conversation crossed his mind again, and again his hand fell to the gun secured in his waistband.

“That you can end Timeline Decay for any organic, humans, cats, birds, etc…by killing it. If it dies in the time you sent it to, then there it will stay.”

* * *

“Take this picture, and concentrate on it. Imagine invisible ropes springing forth and binding you to it. Then, think of the date, June 23, 1965, at exactly 9:37 P.M.”

Richard took the picture from Margarett’s hand and held it up to the light of the candle. As he examined it, his face grew skeptical. “And then I’ll be transported to…this?” He held the picture up and showed her as if she had not just handed it to him. “To this rock in some empty desert? Why would we need to go there?”

Margarett didn’t answer. Instead, she stood up and walked over to the machine where the Doctor was standing, arms crossed.

“When you get there, it’s very important that you stand still. For reasons Thatcher here has already explained to you, in painstaking detail I might add, you will not be bound there for long. By our estimates, you will have a mere ten seconds before the Timeline Decay sends you back.”

“But why here?” Richard asked again.

“Do you understand?!” Margarett shouted, her temper finally breaking. “The time for talk and explanation is over! Are you ready to go, or should we find somebody else?”

Richard breathed a long sigh, contemplating his answer. When the woman had first approached him and promised him the chance to see his father, he had laughed. “Get away from me,” he recalled himself saying, and then, she had. Disappearing without a trace in the blink of an eye. Then, she had reappeared once again, but this time directly behind him.

“Do you want to meet your father?” She had asked again, whispering the question directly into his ear. Of course, he had screamed and began to run. When he looked over his shoulder she was already gone.

The third time she had appeared, he had been sitting alone at a table in a small diner. He had been expecting her, for if she were real why should she give up after two attempts, and if he were mad then why would the madness suddenly end?

“My father died a long time ago. Before I was born.” he had whispered before she spoke. Margarett had nodded from her place at the table opposite him, taken a drink of his cherry coke, and then said, “Well why should that stop you?” Upon her fourth arrival, he had decided that whether this were madness or reality, he would see it through.

True to her promise, she had taken him back to meet his father. And though he was cocksure and arrogant, he was also just as brilliant and impressive as he had ever imagined. Everything he wanted himself to be he could see in the large man standing just a few feet away.

But he had seen into the eyes of that machine, and though he had already entered it once, the thought of doing so again was not something he relished. He could still leave now. Run into the tunnel behind him and disappear back to his own time.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of, my boy,” his father said to him in as soft a voice as he had used since they had first met. “I’ve done it hundreds of times.”

He wanted to tell his father that he had entered the time machine already. That he was his son and not a coward, but Margarett had warned against such a thing. That the point of all this was to save his father’s life, and letting slip the secret of their relation would destroy that possibility.

“If you don’t go, all of this was for nothing,” Margarett added, her voice cool and calm and heavy with implication. “We will have changed nothing.”

Finally, Richard stood, the picture gripped tightly in his hand, and nodded.

“Step this way then,” his father said as he stepped aside from the machine.

Richard moved forward until he was next to the thing, then took a breath, and stepped inside. He looked down at the picture and imagined steel tethers sprouting from the rock in the picture, and attaching themselves to him. Then, he thought of the date Margarett had given him. June 23, 1965, at exactly 9:37 P.M.

“I will meet you there,” his father said as though from a long distance away, and then the voice was gone, and so was everything else.

* * *

“Margarett, I’m not sure about this,” The Doctor said when the boy had vanished.

“There’s nothing left to discuss, and we really don’t have time for this right now. He’ll be back in a minute.”

“A minute and twenty-seven seconds,” The Doctor corrected her. She shot him a cool look that he ignored. “I mean, this is the boy that supposedly kills me, in what? Two days time?’

Margarett nods.

“But I’ve never met him. In fact, I probably never would have if not for you bringing him here.”

“You would have, trust me. He’s not what he seems. You were not his first victim, and you wouldn’t have been his last if not for what we’re doing here today. Besides, we need the Anchor.”

“Yes, you keep saying that, but I’m with the boy on this. What’s so important about this moment, in the middle of a field next to this boulder?”

As was her way, Margarett didn’t answer but instead turned and walked to the bag slung over the back of her chair. The Doctor paused and let his hand fall to the gun at his side. Silently, he eyed Margarett as she fished around in her bag. That red hair. He loved red hair. Always had.

His lovely bride, whom he had married only two months ago was a fine woman. He had begun his relationship with her when she was twenty, an undergrad in his Biology course, then married her upon her graduation. She was from a good family, politically connected and, for lack of a better term, filthy rich. In other words, she was perfect marriage material. But she was blonde.

Margarett was forty at least, and by the look of the soft lines on her face, had lived hard. Lived the life of a common woman. One who had to scrape and struggle. She was not his type. Even so, he could almost feel the soft silk of those fiery locks sliding easily between his fingers every time he glanced at her.

Margarett pulled her hand free of her purse and tossed the picture of the boulder to him. “June 23, 1965. 9:37 P.M. Go now.”

The Doctor caught the picture and let the image of their intimacy fade, for now. “I’ll be back soon,” he said with a wolf’s grin, then stepped into the machine and disappeared.

* * *

June 23, 1965, 9:37 P.M.

The night was still and silent. The moon was full and bright enough to illuminate the vast plain of rocky landscape all the way to the foothills of the far-off mountains rising up out the land to the East like jagged shards of broken glass.

Richard could see the place before he got there. Far off at first, then closer and closer as he squeezed through the tendons of the universe and back into existence. He landed with a jolt directly next to a small boulder that stood about knee high, and to his surprise, was not alone.

He almost turned to face the Doctor, who was standing right beside him, but remembered Margarett’s word and instead remained still.

“We don’t have much time,” Richard said to his companion, his breath visible in the cold evening air. “I wonder what she wanted us to see.”

“I don’t think she meant for you to see anything,” the Doctor responded quietly.

Richard felt the Doctor’s arm move slightly, and then the press of a gun’s muzzle on the back of his neck. He meant to jump forward. To flee into the night, but something held his feet firmly where they were.

Terror washed over him and a burst of dark laughter, deep and black as a starless night began to ring in his ears.

The last thing he saw before his brains were scattered about the wide-open Texas plain were red eyes. Fiery eyes filled with hate. Then he saw no more.

END OF PART ONE