Abney Park's The Wrath Of Fate (2 page)

Making sure he was outside the circle of globes, he took a deep breath, and threw the switch. His eyes flickered down the now trembling pipes and rested on one of the glass orbs. It quickly filled with a glowing pink gas that swirled slowly, glowing the color of sky during a lightening storm. The rabbit flinched. Suddenly, a gust of wind blew on its fur like a tornado, the rabbit’s eyes widened in surprise, and it was gone. So were the carrots and the center of the wooden platform, gone as if they had been cleanly sliced right out of the tower in a perfect circle. The tower creaked a bit, adjusting to its new weight, and lack of rigidity.

“Oops. That was unexpected,” the man murmured to himself, as he clenched the railing for support.

He was a man of science, but his passion was not for learning. It was for building. Long hours of research held no joy, this was simply a means to an end. He would take his knowledge and run towards his creations with it – sometimes literally. Even upon finishing one project, he didn’t rest, as he was always in a hurry to achieve his next creation.

The end-result was that he sometimes overlooked very important details. In this case, his experiment nearly left him on a collapsing tower twenty feet above the ground. This hardly mattered to him at the time of his calculations. The goal was the bunny.

He pulled a golden watch from his pocket, and pushed a button on it. Exhaling impatiently, he sat down on the platform and pulled out a sandwich wrapped in waxed paper. As he took the first bite, he noticed the cut on his hand. He looked at the cut, and wondered where he had gotten it.

Presently, he saw a boy running up the hill. The boy was wearing a vest, knickers and page-boy cap, and was waving a letter in the air. This letter was an invitation to meet with financiers regarding his experiment today. In his haste the old man had already reported to them success, and now he was going to get funding to turn this little test into something much grander.

Behind the boy, in the middle of the air above the center of the valley due west, at the exact height of the platform on which the doctor stood, with a puff of wind a tiny cloud formed, then quickly dissipated, revealing a circle of wood. On it was the pile of carrots and on top of that – one white rabbit.

Wood, carrots and rabbit hovered in the air for just a moment, and then gently fell out of sight to the valley below.

THE CHRONOFAX

When my father sold our family home I was told I could go back for one last visit before the new owners took possession. The house was filled with stacks of boxes, and furniture covered in white sheets. As I walked from room to room, the sheets gave the place a spectral feel. Chairs and tables were now merely the spirits of what was once my childhood playroom, family room, and dining room. My father’s workshop, where once we built toys, was now a series of empty tables. The music room was just tile, dust, and darkness.

Now that I am many years older than that young troubled version of myself, exploring the ruins of my childhood home, I can’t blame my parents for running away from our family. I had an older brother named Samuel, and he had…issues. When he was six he was so strong willed he would terrify his babysitters, and they would run from the house. When he was ten he fought with my parents, screaming at them, and they would scream back at him like he was an adult. When he was sixteen he chased my mother around the house with knives from the kitchen. When he was eighteen I was forced to lock myself in my bedroom to get away from him, and he took an axe and chopped through my door. I escaped through a window, and found my way to my grandmother’s house, where I stayed for days until my parents’ return. He was a monster, and my parents told no one about him, because they somehow blamed themselves for his disorders. My parents’ guilt became his validation, and our family’s destruction.

This left the younger children constantly in an emotional dichotomy. We hid because we didn’t want to be noticed by Samuel, for fear he’d lock us out of the house or hurt us. At the same time, we wanted love and attention from mother and father that we couldn’t get because they were always dealing with Samuel. If there was a conflict between one of us and him, my parents would unfairly weigh the scales of justice. “You should have known not to make him mad, this is Samuel!” They would say, as if the great crime was that we didn’t cower to him soon enough. We should have known better. My parents feared him as much as we did.

This is where my pain comes from. This is the source of my hunger to be important, to be noticed, to be a hero, and not the wounded little boy. As I became older and stronger, I tried to stand up to him, to protect my sister and my mother. I wanted to be their hero, but standing up to him made
me
the villain, since
I should have known better than to stand up to Samuel.
As I walked through this dead home, this shell of a broken family, I felt a mix of fear and hatred towards those memories.

But not everything about my childhood was dark, and horrific. As I entered my parents’ private office, I noticed it hadn’t been touched in years. The office walls were bookcases, and were still filled with hundreds of dusty old books on anthropology and psychology, some of which had been written by my parents. Masks, headdresses and weapons from various tribal peoples lined the tops of bookshelves collecting dust. Models of the human brain sat on the massive oak desk. My parents had grand careers which I believed I could never measure up to.

Maps, prickly with the pins of a hundred expeditions, lined the walls. These expeditions were no mere family vacations: this was the field research of my mother. India, Thailand, China. I made forts of coconut fronds on Polynesian sands when I was four. I played in ruined temples in the jungle when I was eight. I lived in houses made of sticks, built on stilts over elephant paddocks in the jungles of Thailand when I was sixteen.

When we traveled, I rarely saw my brother Samuel, and life was good. Samuel would be put into a boarding school, or left behind with my father often enough that I saw travel as the perfect life. It was the only time I had a happy childhood.

On the old oak desk, I found a photo of myself, at age five climbing the steps of beautiful ruins in Delhi, India. Next to it was a photo of me in Bangkok on my old rented motorcycle, a young man of fifteen, with a beautiful girl’s arms wrapped around my waist. I remember racing gas-powered rickshaws in the crowded streets, and although I don’t remember the girl’s name anymore, I still miss the motorcycle terribly.

As I looked over all the aging artifacts, I thought,
This was my childhood.
The life of an explorer, as exciting and romantic as anyone could hope for – as long as my parents’ marriage held together, and as long as we were traveling.

But now that my family had ended so had the adventure. I had been living on my own long enough to feel like a complete failure. I had a series of lame jobs. I bagged groceries at Safeway. I sold clothes at the mall. I was even the only employee at an umbrella store. These were miserable, degrading wastes of time compared to the illustrious careers of my parents.

I hated my life, and I hated how I turned out as much as I hated the violence of my childhood.

My only remaining dream was music. Music was part of my mother’s family. My Grandma owned a music store, and my uncles were musicians playing in bands with their children. Music to me was symbol of loving family, and I was good at it. I wrote music and song lyrics constantly. I dreamed of making this my life. I was often reminded by my parents that this was a pipe-dream, but it took me away from the misery of not living up to their achievements.

I started a band, and we would play on the weekends whenever we could find the time or energy away from our life-sucking day jobs. I passed through my twenties, slowly starting to hate my life, as my prospects of becoming a rock star seemed less and less likely, and my dream of returning to being an adventurer was so far gone that just remembering I had once had the dream was heart wrenching.

Being young, money was always a worry. Bill collectors calling, a constant threat of losing my horrible apartment, always wondering how I could pay the next month’s bills. I never had the hope I could climb above it all.

So here I stood, in this empty house, at the source of all my pain, but also the source of all my longing and unfulfilled dreams, looking for…
something.
Here in the dark, between African masks with horrific expressions of pain and anger, between primitive weapons both deadly and rotting, between vacant headdresses of long dead chieftains, I found something. On a small table, hand carved with the faces of gods of old, sat the Chronofax.

The Chronofax had been in my family’s possession for years. It was a vintage novelty my father had purchased in London on the way back from one of our many expeditions. As far as my family was concerned, it was a one-hundred-year-old joke, like the sewn together ‘mermaid mummies’ you might see in a curiosity shop.

It looked like an antique typewriter, with a small greenish screen on the top that had the same sort of look as a Magic 8-Ball window. Its keys were round and laid out similarly to a contemporary keyboard. Just above the keys was an abacus-like slider, with dates on it. If I typed on the keyboard my words would appear on the screen. Then, if I pulled the lever on the side it would make a “
shunk-chiing
!” sound, and the words would disappear.

Supposedly, this machine would send a message forward in time, reappearing at whatever time was chosen. It worked, however, by clockwork not magic. It would simply delay your message, and show it in the future.
Time Traveling letters! Magic!

When I was a small boy, I would type letters to myself to be read when I was an adult. The letters I sent were mostly warnings. I sent them to appear in twenty years, when I could obviously use the wisdom of an eight-year-old child. I think we could all use the wisdom of an eight-year-old child at times. I would pull the lever and the note would disappear. Then I would picture some adult reading it “in the future”. Part of me must have known this was futile, but I had few friends, so talking to myself at least felt like company.

So here I sat as a young adult before this Victorian wonder, this copper and brass magical marvel of horology. It was covered in old passports, travel journals, and a thick layer of dust, but under all the clutter, I could see the screen still glowed green.

I brushed off the old passports and maps, and wiped the dust off its screen with my sleeve. There was a letter!
Probably the last thing I had typed on it as a child,
I reassured myself. So I pulled up my father’s massive old riveted leather office chair and read:

Dear Mr. Brown,

One day I’ll be you, so I thought I should write to you and make sure you don’t change too much, or become anyone we’d hate.

Being a kid sucks. There has been a lot of fighting and yelling lately. It’s not fun here. I’m scared all the time. I can’t WAIT to grow up and get out of here.

Please please please do something cool as an adult. I need something to look forward to. Be an astronaut, or a pirate or something cool like that. Don’t be a loser with a lame job at a bank or something.

If you are reading this please reply and tell me what we are when we grow up. I need something to look forward to.

~ Robbie

Well, I guess the machine did work! Some desperate message from my eight-year-old self had reappeared, and I was reading it as an adult. The message stung, especially since life was not cool or glamorous. Here was proof that as a small boy I was hoping life would get better. It hadn’t, and it would get much worse for that small desperate boy. I felt like I had had the floor ripped out from under me.