The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Romance (64 page)

Writing on the back of some of the “paperwork” caught his eye. In lovely, large loops, a woman – presumably the one in the photograph– had carefully written, “To my B-beloved David, may this image I-inspire you to look deeper into the mysteries of love and life. Yours F-Forever, Elaine.’

Turning it over, he found his breath escaping him. David fumbled the chair out from the desk, shoved aside the dust cloth which had partially snagged on the oak-rail chair and sat down before the last dregs of blood vanished from his head. He arranged each photograph lovingly.
She’s probably quite dead by now. These photos are from a hundred years ago. No one lives that long . . .

He had always been fascinated with the turn of the previous century. When other kids were grumbling about having to take a newspaper route to pay for Walkmans and CDs, he had been dreaming he was a street urchin hawking papers on a city corner in the days of horses and carriages. When they chatted about the latest action movie, he had wanted to talk about the old silent films. And now, here in this house he had inherited, he had found a treasure trove of antique delights.

David had seen turn of the century erotica before, and had found the profusion of ruffles, the crispness of the muslin and the contrast between demure layers and exposed skin incredibly sensual. But those pictures usually had been taken rather impersonally, either for commercial sale – however discreetly underground– or for someone he didn’t know. These pictures had been taken for someone he knew. Sort of. And the subject of all these photographs was beautiful. Long, dark hair, gleaming eyes, mischievous smile, little round spectacles perched on her nose in some of the pictures, and every last one of them was provocatively posed.

Those intimate bits of feminine flesh below her slender neck kept drawing his attention. He could easily imagine kissing her lips, her breasts, even the secrets exposed between her thighs. Knowing he had to move on, David reluctantly returned the erotic images to their pigeonhole in the desk. Studying them in depth could wait until after he had fi nished exploring the rest of the attic.

His fingers brushed against a book. He pulled it out and opened the plain, dark green leather cover to a random page, finding more of the same looping, feminine handwriting inside as on the back of the photos. It seemed to be a personal journal of scientific experiments of some kind. Sorting through to the front page, David found a piece of paper, much whiter and newer than the rest, tucked into the front.

The moment he opened it, he felt the blood rushing out of his face a second time – but not, now, from lust. It was written in
his
handwriting, and was signed with
his
signature, in the spiky loops that weren’t quite copperplate.

The real David – the one living in the twenty-first century – stared at the note for several long seconds. The chill in the attic penetrated his dazed thoughts. He adjusted the straps of his suspenders for comfort and cracked open the book once more. It wasn’t an easy read, either, despite the lyrical quality of the writer’s penmanship and her engaging, slightly rambling, almost conversational style; he was a computer programmer by trade, not an electrician, and never mind a physicist.

But the gist of the technical diary was how this woman, Elaine Cuttleridge, had managed to tap into what he guessed were nineteenth-century terminology equivalents of quantum wormhole physics, and powered it all by means of the several lightning rods he had noticed sticking up over the roof earlier; lightning rods which normally channelled all that energy safely down into the ground, but which, when switched over, could power the machinery cluttering up his newly inherited attic, causing its whirling cube of rings to link to itself four-dimensionally.

In other words, she had somehow managed to create a time machine. In his attic. Which he had deeded to himself in his own will . . . under the pseudonym of “Uncle” David Cuttleridge.

Twisting in the chair, David looked around the attic at the half-uncovered equipment. Well, a corner of his mind thought idly, that explains the archaic, accordion-style camera over in the corner. I must have taken these pictures of my . . . wife . . . myself . . .

His wife. For a moment, David felt dizzy with the contradiction between his bodily lusts and his mental quandaries. Shaking it off, he forced himself to concentrate.
If this is all true –
if
it is – then somehow I have to figure out
how
to get all of this stuff working again. Because . . . dayamn . . . that is one
hot
woman. Brilliant body and a brilliant mind, and somehow she ends up all mine? Predestination paradox, here I come! And – wow – how liberal she must have been, to be so willing to pose so naughtily . . .

Another thought had him flushing hot and cold with the possibilities. If she
can
create a time machine, then I can go back in time. I can live in the era I’ve always wanted to visit! Of course, the medicine and the transportation technology levels would suck, he acknowledged, but just think of the possibilities. I could see Caruso perform in person, not just on some rusty, static-filled cylinder recording. I could invest in companies I could look up in the stock market’s history books! And best of all, predestination paradox would work in my favour, because I know I’ll have succeeded in going back in time . . .

. . . No, no, don’t rush, he reminded himself, looking at the note he had penned to himself at some point in time. Romance is the key . . . well, along with compromise and equality. And “S-steam”. Or did I mean “esteem”? Well, probably straightforward steam, given those photographs . . .

Flushing again, this time with excitement of a more cerebral and emotional nature, David hurried to finish uncovering and dusting off every precious piece of equipment in the attic.

Pushing his bowler hat back on his head, David lined up his feet on the floor and lifted the dart in his hand. The noise in the pub swelled for a moment, then quieted again, allowing him to hear the
thwup!
of his dart hitting the dartboard for a fifteen-point score. His teammate and buddy Kevin cheered, clapping him on the shoulder while the other two guys groaned. Turning around to face them, David caught sight of the television over the bar. The sports channel had given way to a weather update.

One of the words on the screen captured his attention:
Thunderstorm
.

“Uh . . . I gotta go, guys.” Glad he had chosen to stick to a flavoured club soda, David grabbed his long brown duster and shrugged into the leather overcoat. He paused to fetch his darts from the board, packing them into their plastic case, and tucked the case in his pocket. “We’ll continue this later, right?”

“But . . . we’re winning!” Kevin protested. “And what is
up
with you and bad weather, lately? Ever since you inherited that house on the hill, you’ve been vanishing into it any time a thunderstorm rolls along!”

“Maybe he’s fancying himself as a modern-day Doctor Frankenstein,” one of the other two dart players drawled, then laughed as he picked up his beer.

“Maybe I am.” David fl ashed his friend a grin and a wink. Tugging at the brim of his hat to make sure the wind outside wouldn’t sweep it away, David nodded a polite fare well to the three of them and left the bar. The drive home in his truck didn’t take long, but the lightning was already flickering in the distance by the time he got out. Hurrying inside, David didn’t bother to remove his coat. That storm was approaching fast, and he didn’t want to miss a possible lightning strike.

As soon as he reached the attic, he double-checked the batteries of the flashlight on the neatly tidied desk. One of the many notes to himself he had found had concerned the power going out for a few moments. Once he was satisfied he would still have light if the storm overloaded the power grid, he moved to the switch board. They were large, stiff, old-fashioned levers insulated with glass and padded with rubber, and the thought of his Elaine – well, she wasn’t
his
just yet – playing with such dangerous equipment made him nervous.

The flare of light and rumble of sound encouraged him to try. Grasping the wooden handles, David pulled each of the four levers down. The arrays of copper wiring, glass tubes, brass fixtures and those strange wire-wrapped hoops forming a sort of oval-sided cage . . . did nothing.

Nothing.

Disappointed, David wondered if he had done everything right. Some of the equipment had been replaced over the years by more modern versions, and he had added a few replacements of his own, mainly of things which had corroded or deteriorated with time. The instructions in Elaine’s diary weren’t always clear, though the worst parts had been appended in his own handwriting with terminology the twenty-first century man
could
understand. But the machine wasn’t working.

It
is
predestination paradox, David reminded himself, staring at the inert machinery. I
know
these things are going to happen, because they already did happen. I—

KERBOOMMMM!

Dazzled by the flare of daylight-bright whiteness, deafened by the window-rattling explosion, David struggled to see and hear. He could feel every hair on his body prickling up at the sheer proximity of all that electricity. Blinking several times, he finally focused on the oval cage and found it glowing with an eerie purplish-white light. That light suddenly stretched inwards to the centre of the rectangular cage, shading from violet to blue, green, gold, red, and crimson where all the streaking lines met in the three-dimensional centre. Then they flared outwards again, opening into a rippling mirage of milk-white light.

It blurred the lines of the machinery visible on the far side, and distorted the voice, too, but not so far that David couldn’t tell it belonged to a young woman.

“Oh! Oh, I did it! I actually did it! I’ve invented a temporal vortex! But . . . to the past or to the future?”

Prompted by all the notes and clues left by his future and past selves, David moved closer and called out to her. “ To the future, my lady!”

“Oh! Uh . . . who is this, please?”

“David Maddock. I take it you are Miss Elaine Cuttleridge?”

“Uh, yes. Yes, I am. But I am T-totally surprised you should know my name – unless I’m F-famous in the future?”

Good grief, she even talks like she writes, David thought, amused. She didn’t stammer, she
pronounced
the letter, stating it as
eff-famous
. He knew it had been an affectation in some American circles a hundred or so years ago, meant to emphasize a particular word by stating its starting letter as a sort of fancy prefix.
The verbal and print version of italics, back in an era where italic fonts hadn’t been differentiated yet . . .
“I’m afraid not, Miss Cuttleridge. It seems I know you because I inherited this house . . . from my time-travelling self, in association with you.”

“Oh – oh, that is utterly I-impossible!” she snapped, and the blurry, milk-water oval rippled. A tallish woman dressed in a waistcoat, ruffle-necked blouse, long skirts, and ankle boots, carrying a carpet bag in her hand, stepped through the milky oval. She did so very carefully, making sure to not brush the wire-wrapped oval frames with anything, not even a stray bit of hem. “I’m glad I made the transduction ovals big enough . . . It is I-impossible, Mr Maddock, because
I
am moving into the
future
. I refuse to spend any more time living in the O-outmoded past.”

Her long brown curls, swept up at the top but left hanging free in the back, had auburn highlights. Her eyes were hazel green, and her chin was lifted in a stubborn, defiant tilt. Her declaration caught David by surprise, but his mind leaped swiftly through the variables of her claim.

“The future, my dear, is incredibly complex. First of all, you—”

“Don’t patronize me!” Elaine snapped, lifting her chin a little higher. “I may be a ‘mere’ woman, but I am clearly quite intelligent!”

“I am
not
patronizing you. I’m explaining certain facts, of which you need to be aware in order to live in
this
century,” David countered patiently.
I can see why I wrote myself a note; she’s a real firecracker. Brilliant, beautiful and bearing a chip on her shoulder. A Suffragette as well as a scientist, if I’m not mistaken.
Glancing at the oval behind her, David saw the bluish-white glow beginning to fade. “Look, according to the notes I read, you will have five days in the future before the next thunderstorm rolls through and the machines can be linked again. Between now and then, I will show you the complexities of life in the twenty-first century. But
you
have to promise me to keep an open mind, and not prejudge me, thinking I’ll treat you like a nineteenth-century man. I am not one.”

Her hazel eyes glittered with wariness. “Go on . . .”