Victor Writes History

I don’t know what made me do it. Curiosity? Fear? Good old-fashioned boredom? I work the night shift in a library. When I started working there, I was convinced that I could never get bored because there was so much around me to read. Four months in and I felt like I was climbing the walls. That might have been why I wandered so readily into the – typically locked – room of historical archives. Access usually being reserved for senior employees of the library; it was about the only place in the building that I hadn’t been to.

This room wasn’t like the rest of the place. The walls were a cool green, filled from floor to ceiling with beige folders. The furniture in there, crafted from mahogany, looked notably expensive and there was a distinct earthy smell lingering in the air. At the end of the room, under a small stained-glass window, sat a desk which was all but empty aside for a dusty white computer that looked like it could’ve been from the eighties. I found myself walking instinctively towards it, hoping that the library wouldn’t have put many restrictions on the number of websites I could visit – anything to keep me occupied for a bit.

A strange feeling shot through me as I sat down to the desk, and I almost fell off the chair as I heard somebody begin to hum. As I turned, standing, the noise drew to a close. Slightly confused as to where the noise had gone but chalking it down to tiredness, I sat again.

HmmMMMmmm… There it was again, but louder this time!

I stayed very still, looking around the room nervously; hoping that somebody would pop out of the shadows and tell me it was a prank. The noise stopped as I turned back to face the desk. I blinked rapidly, rubbing my forehead in confusion as I saw a brown paper box in front of me where there wasn’t before.

“Hello?” I called out tentatively. No response came. I felt goosebumps begin to rise on my skin. This was it… This was the moment I’d finally lost it.

Eyeing the box suspiciously, I tried to fight the urge to look inside. It had no name or address attached to it and the brown paper was folded around the box almost too perfectly. Glancing around the space again quickly, I found myself beginning to tear at the wrapping paper. Excitement bubbled up inside of my chest as I pulled apart cardboard, opening it up to reveal… another book. The air deflated from me as I sunk down into the chair. The package was obviously just part of a delivery of supplies the library had ordered the previous week.

The pages seemed old, the spine of the book, worn. One of the last pages had been torn out of it completely. Inside were images of an event in 1910 called El Encierro. A wild-eyed bull took up most of the picture, excited onlookers dotted around it.

I heard a soft buzz fizzing around my ears as I skimmed over the description, which made me feel lightheaded as I continued. Suddenly, I felt the sensation of a weight being lifted from me, almost as if I were being lifted with it. I looked down and noticed with abject terror that the chair I was sitting on had disappeared below me! A gust of hot air rushed towards my face, enveloping my whole body and I heard footsteps in the distance growing louder. Landing with a thud, I inhaled a mouthful of dust, obstructing my sight and causing me to splutter harshly. Voices grew closer, screams and laughter becoming almost unbearable to hear as I wiped my eyes, shaken by what was happening. Where was I?

I yelped as a crowd of people raced past me, knocking hard against my hunched body. A lengthy bellow made me jump to my feet and the glimmer of bulls’ horns in the sunlight caused me to run. Adrenaline coursed through me, sweat dripping down my face as I pushed on in a state of panic. The promise of certain death rampaging towards me had left me no time to question how I’d got here. Fight or Flight had given me energy that I didn’t know I possessed as I tried desperately to look for anything that I could escape through.

In the distance I saw eyes on me, they were cold, devoid of emotion as they watched me struggle from afar. Anger flashed through them, and they began to reach around quickly in a bag they’d been carrying as a hand grabbed hold of my sleeve and I was pulled off the course of the bulls by a stranger.

“Get in!” the person yelled as the angry eyes moved swiftly in our direction.

“What?” I let out in a fluster as my gaze ran over the face of a short-haired woman with a scar under her right eye.

“Now!” she ordered pulling me towards an old door. I gasped as Angry Eyes drew a gun from their bag and pointed it in our direction. The stranger grabbed hold of the door handle, pushing off the wall with her foot to get it open. A bright green light flooded out onto the street, and she shoved me through, slamming it behind her as she followed.

The light was blinding, and I screwed my eyes shut as I struggled to breathe. I heard a familiar buzzing next to my ears which grew closer, fizzing and gargling, lifting me upwards until my head emerged from underwater. I shrieked from the cold, clambering onto the closest bit of solid land I could reach.

I was sat on a sheet of white that stretched out as far as I could see, bordered by frosty pear trees and larger pine ones behind that. I could see shapes carved out of the ice below me and small fishing holes dotted about the frozen lake. Green lights, usually used to lure fish, pulsated beneath the surface illuminating the area under me and I heard another splash as the woman who had brought me here hauled herself out of the water.

“Come on,” she said grabbing my hand. “They won’t be far behind!” We ran into the trees, zigzagging this way and that until we came to a carved-out bit of earth behind a hill. I struggled to catch my breath as she set about getting logs for a fire. “You’re going to need to take that off,” she told me eyeing my clothes.

“What the hell is going on?!” I exclaimed finally.

“We had to get out of there. You didn’t want to stick around for the repressive rules of 1910, did you?” she raised an eyebrow.

“What??” I replied.

“What else can I say? There were quite a few double standards written into Spanish law around that time.”

“We were in Spain?? Where are we now?” I gawked at her.

“Alaska, USA, 1972,” she quipped, igniting the wooden logs below her.

Was I having a stroke? “This is bonkers,” I said, dumbfounded. She stared sympathetically at me. “Who are you?” I questioned.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I’m leaving,” I stated.

“You can’t, you’re a fugitive!” she retorted.

“I think I’m going to have a panic attack.”

“Please,” she said putting a hand on my shoulder. “I’ve been waiting for you forever…”

There was something in her eyes, an unknown familiarity that stirred the pits of my stomach.

She smiled sadly. “I’ve known you for a long time…” she trailed off unsure of how much to tell me. “You…older you, I mean…have been jumping through timelines for years – we both have. But there’s something wrong, we saw something we shouldn’t have and now…” she stopped as we heard footsteps. A gun clicked and she dived towards the fire, hurriedly putting it out.

Placing a finger to her lips, she gestured for me to follow her further into the carved-out earth. Neither of us moved, neither of us breathed until the footsteps had gone away. Striking a match, she unfurled a piece of paper; it looked like it had been torn out of a book. There was nothing on it but a picture of an old barn.

“This is where we need to get to. The thing that’s going to save us, it’s in this building.”

“What are we looking for?” I questioned hesitantly.

“Only you know.”

Great! I’m searching for a barn I’ve never seen, with a woman I’ve never met, trying to find an object I’ve never heard of to save us all for reasons unknown. On we go then.

The next few weeks came and went. I learnt her name was Maria, and I learnt that I could sometimes be a jerk unnecessarily. We’d known each other for seven years and had come close to dying almost eighty times. I’d also single-handedly caused the disappearance of American politician Nick Begich, right here in 1972. He was alive and well in Argentina. By the time Maria and I reached the next glowing green light, I couldn’t imagine being without her. Holding onto each other this time, we walked through together.

There it was. A rustic red building, with boarded-up windows and untouched hay bales parked around the side. The grass was freshly cut and from somewhere close by I could hear a firework going off. Maria let go of my hand, sinking to the ground. I spun round in alarm as blood pooled through the fabric of her dress. No…

They’d found us!

I grasped hold of the woman, dragging her desperately towards the barn. “Please don’t die!” I begged, carrying her through the door. She smiled again, that same sad look crossing her face.

“It’s okay. I got us here, you need to finish this.”

“That’s not how this is going to go down, I won’t let you die,” I stressed, barricading the door and looking around manically. There had to be something to stop the bleeding. Panicking, I pushed my hands against her wound.

“Leave me. You have to do what we came here to do! Or everything we’ve done will be for nothing,” she coughed – pleading with me.

“I don’t know what to do!” I cried. I could feel myself starting to spiral as the pressure mounted.

“Think of the place where it all began,” she strained to get out.

Think of where I began… I flinched hearing another gunshot followed by a rattling of the door handle next to me. The library! I started in the library. I zoomed across to the nearest bookcase and began pulling the books from the shelves. Troubled that there didn’t seem to be anything there at all, and anxiously listening to the banging on the front door growing louder, I almost didn’t notice the stained-glass window on the other side of the room… below it, a dark-brown mahogany desk.

Hurrying over there I began to sift through paperwork until I spotted it, the same book that I’d found in my library in the present day. Next to it was a note and the materials to wrap it up in a brown paper box. The words written: Victor writes history. Suddenly it clicked, Angry Eyes was changing history, rewriting it in their own image. Whoever I was in the grand scheme of things, it was clearly of great importance to them that I never get my hands on this book.

I grabbed hold of it as the door burst open and ran over to Maria. I didn’t know what was going to happen, all I knew was that we needed to get out of here, and we needed to keep going. Opening the book and reading the words scrawled across the pages, I felt a familiar buzzing in my ears. The space around me began to look distorted and I felt as if a weight had been lifted from me. Then everything went green.

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