In Times Like These (12 page)

If I was confused about the exterior of the house, I’m even more at a loss when I get inside. The living room to the left of the doorway is trimmed in aged, slightly sun-faded fu
rniture, over a dingy, green shag carpet. The kitchen we pass has Formica counter-tops that are yellowed and stained and have begun to match the tan refrigerator, whose humming is the only noteworthy sound in the house. The place looks orderly and simple, but dated and cheaply decorated. I’m overwhelmed by the sheer ordinariness of it all. Even Francesca, who is usually brimming with polite comments, seems to be at a loss for anything to say.

We don’t have long to c
ontemplate this problem, because we’ve sailed directly through the house and out the screened-in laundry room into the moonlit backyard. A wooden fence obstructs any view from the neighboring yards but has provided an exemplary backdrop for the mob of diverse plants that have taken over the yard. Ivy drapes the fence and leafy palms and flowering shrubs seem to fill every available inch on the perimeter of the yard.

We’re led along the brief flagstone path that leads to the modest garage, entering through a corner door and coming to a stop in the mostly vacant interior. Pegboards line the
side walls, and the wall that divides us from the yard we just came from has a wide workbench supported by wooden 4x4 legs that has been butted up against the wall. Miscellaneous tools are scattered on the workbench, along with a dusty, broken, picture frame. A few nails lie beside the frame as if someone had begun a repair but given up in the act and wandered off to some more interesting pursuit. I would hardly blame them. The garage is even plainer than the house, and I would have a hard time staying entertained in it for more than a few minutes. Fortunately we don’t have to wait that long.

Dr. Quickly directs us all toward the middle of the concrete floor. “If you will all be so kind as to stay here for just a minute, I’ll be right back.”

We stand awkwardly together, not sure what direction to look, as there is nothing in particular to look at. Dr. Quickly steps back through the door we just came from but just before he shuts it, he stops and pokes his head back in to say, “Oh. Don’t be alarmed.” Then he is gone.

Francesca looks at me and immediately her eyes are wide.
“What am I not supposed to not be alarmed about?”

“Haha. I don’t know,” I reply.

“You’re clearly failing at following instructions,” Carson says.

“Hey. If you don’t want someone to freak out, you should probably give them
a little more information than just, ‘Hey, don’t freak out,’” Francesca retorts.

“Actually he said, ‘
Don’t be alarmed,’” Blake says. “You can freak out all you want as long as you’re not alarmed about it.”

“Great. We’re gonna get axe murdered in a garage in the eighties and you guys aren’t
even concerned.”

“He’s a senior citizen,” Carson says.

“He looks pretty spry to me,” Francesca counters.

“True enough,” I reply.

“I call the hammer,” Francesca adds, pointing to the workbench. Before anyone can reply, there is a loud clunk. The wall she’s pointing to, and the bench itself, both give a slight shudder. “What the hell was that?” Francesca exclaims.

I stare in amazement as the entire wall and workb
ench, including the door, begin sliding toward us. Even a section of the floor that I thought was simply a rubber mat is sliding evenly along the concrete. “Oh, sweet Jesus!” Francesca blurts out.

“Okay, is this thing gonna crush us?” Blake asks, now sounding concerned.

Carson walks to the door on the wall that is slowly advancing toward us, and tries the doorknob. It doesn’t move. Blake goes to the electric garage door and tries to lift it but it doesn’t budge. I’m growing concerned now too, so I join him in pulling on it.

The wall has slowly inched its way across approximately a quarter of the floor when it
abruptly stops. I can hear Francesca’s sigh of relief. A moment later, the door opens and Dr. Quickly reappears. He takes a look at our still-panicked faces but doesn’t appear to notice our concern.

“Right this way.”

I’m confused as to why we’re headed back out the door we just entered, but once I step over the threshold, I can see we’re not back outside at all. We’ve entered a space between two halves of the wall. The wall we originally walked through has been neatly bisected, including the door. I can see the other half of the door still blocking the way to the backyard. The innards of the doorknob now protrude out into space directly across from their counterparts on the other half of the door. Just to our right, the wall and workbench being moved away has revealed a set of stone stairs descending down into the ground.

“This is amazing,” I say.

“I didn’t know anyone could even build basements in Florida,” Carson says.

“There were challenges to be sure,” Dr. Quickly says, and motions
for us to descend the stairs. “After you.”

We file toward the stairs and as Francesca steps in front of me, she catches my eye with a stern stare and mouths two words. “Axe Murderer.”

My curiosity has far exceeded my concern at this point, so I follow her down the stairs, intrigued at what we’ll find.

We descend the stairs about twelve feet and turn left into a long tunnel. The hallway is brightly lit with overhead fluorescent lights, and while the floor is plain concrete, the walls have been
drywalled and painted an eggshell white. We pass occasional metal doors that have numbers painted on them and I can see through the small windows in each door that there are steel ladders behind each one that extend upward toward whatever lies above us. We follow the hallway for what must be a hundred yards before we make an angled turn to the right and continue for another length that is easily as long as the first. There is a periodic humming from beneath the floor.

“What’s that noise?” I ask.

“Bilge pumps,” Quickly responds. “The tunnel is fairly well waterproofed, but it still manages to find its way in. The pumps keep me from having to wear my galoshes.”

We are about fifty yards from the end of the hallway when Quickly abruptly stops. There are
no doors visible, so I’m not sure why we’re stopping. It becomes evident a moment later when Dr. Quickly pulls a remote control keypad from his pocket. He aims the remote at the ceiling, punches in a series of numbers and steps back. I watch with rapt attention as the section of ceiling ahead of us slowly tilts toward the floor. The other side of the ceiling contains a set of stairs not unlike an attic access I once had in my family house in Oregon. This stairway is easily twice as wide however, enough that a couple people can walk up side by side.

“You really like the secret doorways, huh?” Carson comments.

“If you are going to go through the trouble to build an underground tunnel, you may as well keep up the mystery,” Quickly replies.

Francesca considers the stairs angling
into the void above us. “No secret elevator?”

“Stairs keep me young.” Quickly smiles.

We follow him into the darkness above. The stairs begin to curve once we’re past the level of the ceiling. I guess that to be ground level but I can’t be certain anymore. A push from another button on Quickly’s remote illuminates the stairwell from light blue bulbs, evenly spaced along the curving walls. The section of the stairs from the tunnel closes behind us and I feel entombed. The feeling doesn’t last long, because once we’ve climbed what I imagine to be the equivalent of a couple of stories, we emerge into the middle of a tall open room that is filled with moonlight. Glass windows make up one enormous wall that overlooks a busy street.

Our floor appears to be the second story of a very tall building. The ceiling of the room is at least fifty feet above us. To our left, facing the huge wall of windows, are tiers of beautiful wooden railed balconies that extend out to varying distances from the back wall, like a theatre. The r
oom is relatively narrow. I could stride across it in a couple dozen steps. Its impressive height is accented by the fact that every inch of the balcony walls is filled, not with theatre chairs, but with wooden cubby-holed shelves holding more unique objects than I can fathom. Quickly spreads his arms wide to encompass the breathtaking space. “Welcome to the best place in the world to travel through time.”

Chapter 8

“With a name like Harry Quickly, grade school wasn’t easy. Losing hope of social acceptance early had its perks however. By the time I became president of the science club in high school, no one even paid attention. Then I mastered space and time and vanished completely. That one people noticed.”

-Excerpt from the j
ournal of Harold Quickly, 1999

Dr. Quickly is illuminating lights around the room while I take in the various spaces. Hanging from the ceiling high above us is a chandelier, formed into the shape of the sun. It illuminates a mosaic of dark blue tiles with constellations and planets laid out in silver across the ceiling. Smaller lamps on the balconies are now shedding a warm glow on the items around them. The largest of the balconies has a collection of leather armchairs grouped loosely near a wooden table positioned by the railing.

The dark wood railings and countless shelves along the walls give the place a feeling of age, though I can get no concept of the building we’re in. It gives me the impression of a library far more than a laboratory. I’ve never known of anything like it in St. Pete.

Quickly invites us to join him in the center of the floor, where we find a circular table with cabinets built into the base. There are stools positioned around it and we take seats on these while Quickly himself remains standing.

“I know you all have many questions, and I’ll do my best to answer them, but we should get through the important stuff first. The night is finite and we have a lot to cover to make sure we keep you all safe.”

“Are we in danger?” Francesca asks.

“Well, you are in a unique situation that has natural hazards associated with it. You don’t need to be alarmed, but there are some things we need to discuss to make sure that you stay with us in the here and now.”

“We’re actually hoping to not stay here and now,” Blake says.

“Understood, but there are far worse places you could be at the present moment, and in order to get you back where you want to be, we need to make sure you don’t end up someplace else. You see
, the five of you are currently being affected by the results of something I ultimately bear the responsibility for.”

“It’s your fault we time traveled?” Robbie asks.

“Not directly, but yes. The event that sent you back in time was an indirect result of the research I started in the 1970’s. I worked nearly twenty years on it, and in 1996 I made a huge breakthrough. I also made a huge mistake. I sent myself through time quite involuntarily, but by the grace of God was not killed in the process. The event was obviously traumatic and exciting at the same time. I’d made quite possibly the biggest scientific achievement in human history, and then promptly found myself out of reach of all my research materials and colleagues.”

“This was when you disappeared and everyone was searching for you.” I lean forward.

“Yes. I understand it made quite a stir about town for a while, and presented a major setback for the colleagues I left behind. I will confess I was quite guarded with my research, and not all together trusting as a young man.”

Dr. Quickly places his palms on the table. “I had a sense of what the potential dangers were to the work I was doing and felt extremely possessive of the responsibility to keep things under control. I had not shared all of my insights with my colleagues, and when they began to piece together my work after my departure, there were a few details that most likely escaped them.”

“You didn’t trust them?” I ask.

“No. It wasn’t really that. I think I was a bit selfish then. I should have trusted them with more, but I justified keeping it to myself by saying I was protecting them. That was half true. Their research did come together in a workable form, but the errors they made, combined with the unpredictability of Florida weather, conspired to prove catastrophic to the results.” Quickly gestures to clouds in the night sky
beyond the wall of windows. “The electrical disturbance at The Temporal Studies Society yielded unexpected results, that being you five coming here. The lightning caused an overload of their machinery and allowed the escape of unique particles, called gravitites, into the environment around the lab, by way of the electrical power lines. When that power line broke free of the pole and hit your bench, it transferred not just the electricity, but the gravitites as well. My colleagues had far too many of the particles in use during their experiment, and the result was a very large area being affected. The error was theirs, but the ultimate responsibility lies with me.”

“Did you realize we were coming?” I ask.

“Yes. As a matter of fact, tonight is not the first time I have met you, even though it is the first time you have met me.”

“You just lost me,” Robbie says.

This is getting crazy.

“It’s a long story,” Quickly says, walking around the table and looking out the window. “I promise I’ll explain it another time.” He turns back to us. “For now, let me tell you a few of the things it is imperative that you learn.”