Authors: David Kempf
I was twelve when they believed I was old enough to see the half of our estate in Deer County Pennsylvania that the servants could not enter. Like some comic book hero, I traveled down deep via elevator into an elaborately lit cave with vast space. Inside of this cave, only Mother and Father knew this was…… the unnamed species. My parents used to refer to it as the travel bug but it was so much more menacing that either of those names could ever be. It was the size of a jet with about four hundred tiny arms on both sides of it. It had a stinger the size of a limo, bright yellow it was. The eyes, there were eight were a bright blood red. It was hideous and terrifying and probably prehistoric. Advanced technology kept it frozen but in a state of hibernation. The slightest error and it would either wake up or die. God help us if it woke up and set itself loose on the world.
“Are you okay?” asked my mother… Mary Godley.
“I think so,” I answered her.
“Good,” said Luke, my father.
They thought that perhaps this would be too much for me to handle at the ripe old age of ten but dear reader; I was going to be okay. I didn’t ask how long it had been in our family but I found out later that it had been with us for ages. Since the beginning, it might have even been directly responsible somehow for our family fortune and we were billionaires. They explained to me the unnamed species or travel bug was quite safe but a bite, even a little nibble from one its enormous black legs would take one into the past or future…
“We don’t suggest going to the extreme past or future,” said Mother.
“Let’s start out with something small,” said Father.
I wanted to go to see the Vikings fight battles or perhaps witness Washington crossing the Delaware. I really wanted to see the dinosaurs eating one another or to watch Jesus Christ give the Sermon on the Mount.
“Have you thought about where you would like to go?” asked Mother.
“Yes,” I answered her.
“Excellent,” said my Father.
So the priests, the nuns, the butlers, the maids were all pretty much the same to me. Well, except for one woman by the name of Jezebel Eden. She was a natural troublemaker and she has and continues to bring more trouble into my life than any other human being alive ever has.
“Where would you like to go, be specific, please?” asked Mother.
“Just thirty or so years into the past to see the dedication of Main Street, if you don’t mind,” I said.
“I think that would be lovely,” she said.
It was. All we had to do was take a very small portion of the frozen bug and swallow it down whole. It tasted appallingly foul. No problem. The three of us just thought about that July day in 1979 and there we were! President Carter gave the opening speech, this was a Democratic town of rich folk with the exception of the Godley family who were and always will be raging Republicans. What I didn’t know or at least fully understand at the time was that every trip, no matter how large or small produced this terrible exit when one came home to reality again. The present, I should say. You really did feel an undeniable obsession to write down a story or two upon your immediate return. The other strange phenomenon to me was that you were in a very foul mood once you came home. I don’t use profanity especially that much but I have always cursed like a drunken sailor when I have returned from traveling through time.
Now one cannot change the past or future, it’s an awful lot like being Scrooge in the famous Christmas story. We can see and feel and smell and taste but that’s the end of it. The only folks we can communicate with are direct descendants, in other words strictly blood relatives. Then you can haunt them like the ghost of Christmas or Halloween past or future or whatever you want.
“Did you have fun dear?” Mother asked.
“Words do it no justice,” I answered.
“Great,” said Father, enthusiastically.
They explained to me that there were many rules to this wonderful burden. The rules were simple for the most part. The extreme future or past could bring one to the brink of madness. How they knew this, I never asked. Meeting certain historical figures, in my case Jesus of Nazareth could have serious consequences on one’s religious faith.
“Don’t just think about where you want to go and go!” said my Father.
“It’s a big bug but it’s a huge responsibility!” said Mother.
My parents told me that they firmly believed in their own way that a higher power had willed this ancient insect into the lives of the Godley family. It was through his purpose that time would be revealed and we just didn’t know what it was all about yet.
My grandfather James, my mother’s father was very superstitious about this creature. He didn’t want anyone preventing his inevitable death or going back in the past to try and save him. Above all, the man insisted that life take its own ordinary, natural course of events, he didn’t want his great grandchildren coming to see him in the past. If they were not meant to meet by the natural order of things then so is it was meant by nature. Harold, on the other hand, he thought was wild, reckless and abusive to nature. This was a man in favor of bending the laws of nature until they were pretty damn close to breaking. James never questioned Harold’s love of family or his motives. He did, however, question his sanity, many, many times.
It was good fortune that I got to visit the 1970’s. Even if it was at the tail end of it all, it mattered very little to me. I enjoyed myself. The decade where we could finally see great movies, hear wonderful music (except disco, of course) and read intellectually stimulating books.
“History’s lessons must be learned slowly,” my Father said.
“I’m not too anxious to learn them all at once, father,” I said.
Perhaps if I would have learned more about the lessons I would have paid more attention to the details. They were always hard to spot and full of irony. They were quite often soaked in blood as well. Jezebel was just the nut, the outcast, hired by my parents because they felt desperately sorry for her. A sad reason to bring a maid on board but it was the truth. She had been abandoned by her husband and she lost her only child, a son. It was tragic. She had come very close to getting fired because the other staff grew extremely wary of her constant proselytizing.
She had her good points. The woman was always against any type of racism within fundamentalism. She logically figured that Jesus died for all people, not just white people. So everyone should be equally loved in God’s invisible kingdom.
Of course most of humanity was not invited to the party of eternal life…
The woman came from a part of the south that was always hot. It was filled with snakes and she became very good at killing them at an early age.
There was no racism at the Truck Stop Chapel in downtown Knoxville. It was ironically very close to where two innocent kids were murdered for being white. Blacks and whites ate and prayed together at the truck stop and they were truly brothers and sisters. This represented the spiritual and good side of her personality. This was before she killed. This was before she traveled through time.
“There are vast oceans of time and Mother and I have only been through a few drops of them so far.”
“I’m sure that I do understand,” I responded.
“Think about where you would like to go on your own next time trip. Don’t get too complicated because that would be a terrible mistake,” said my Father.
“I will think about where to go next,” I told him.
I wasn’t sure where to go but then I got real adventurous. After all even good kids have to be rebellious; it’s part of growing up.
“In the beginning……” I said out loud, in my room.
I walked to the forbidden side of our mansion. I knew the right codes and had the special key for the secret elevator. I flew like lightening in it, like it was an amusement ride to the bottom of the caverns. Then I got out of the elevator and stared at the unnamed species. It scared the living hell out of me to even glance at it. I had to take a bite out of one of its frozen black legs to travel through time. It was a necessary evil for the journey. The eating of the bug will set my soul free, dear reader, yes, set me free, I thought.
Time actually makes you a slave and not the master. I wanted to see man’s humble beginnings but there was no tree or the knowledge of good and evil. There was no Adam and Eve and that tempting serpent was nowhere to be found. A few volcanoes and primordial ooze, what a great beginning, I thought, a humble beginning to such an arrogant species as man.
“Are you okay, son?” Father asked me on the other side of my locked bedroom door.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” I screamed.
He pounded on the door and I reluctantly let him in. He starred at me with a rather accusing expression.
“Why did you do it, son?”
“What?” I responded.
“You look like you’re already half mad!”
“Oh,” I said.
“You must obey the rules of time travel. We asked you to go out on your own. Perhaps to yesterday or tomorrow, you know what we meant. Don’t push us too far, son. We took a great risk telling you about the unnamed species but you are exceptionally mature for your age. Now, where in the world did you go?”
“I went to the beginning of life on earth, the very start of all things on this planet,” I answered my father.
“Well, at least you didn’t go see…”
“Jesus of Nazareth,” I said.
“Yes, exactly, son…”
That would be a bad move for a future Catholic seminarian like me. As far as I was concerned, one had to be dead to meet the boss man. There was no cheating death or time to have words with him.
My father smiled at me. “You know we would never want to be the type of family who would dare to shelter our children from true science. I think, Andrew that you already believe in evolution anyway.”
“Yes, Father,” I said.
“You realize of course that just because one doesn’t believe in Adam and Eve, doesn’t mean one cannot believe in Jesus.”
“I know that…”
“Good, excellent,” he said.
“Sorry about the language…”
“Andrew, you might want to write your stories or hallucinations down, that’s, of course, entirely up to you.”
He didn’t realize the power he was giving me because I have chosen to write them all down for you dear reader. Whoever reads this knows my conscious and unconscious mind. They will know the power of my trips, the confusion of my mind and all else I have written. I may never solve the puzzle, my goal of understanding where superstition ends and faith begins.
“The story of mankind, the real story, Andrew, I would imagine is very dangerous information to have.”
“I can believe that,” I said.
“Never let the harsh, dark truths of time travel cloud your faith or allow them to destroy any delusions you need to have to get through life.”
“Father, you sound like an atheist.”
“I’m not an atheist but life is.”
“What?” I asked him.
“You’ll see, I’ve spoken too soon, son.”
Then he let me go to sleep and that was the last talk about time travel that I ever had with Luke or Mary Godley.
The Rapture woman or the woman from Rapture was Jezebel Eden, one of our servants. Rapture, Tennessee was where she was from. Never was someone more aptly named. We could never be sure that Jezebel Eden was her real name. She joined a cult, several years before coming to us that waited impatiently for the world to end. They were terrified of the upcoming new world order and may have found a way to dispose of their true identities and each chose aliases.
The one thing that we always found the most bizarre about her and she had many bizarre tendencies was that she constantly ate apples. Pieces of apples, half bitten through, apple cores littered all over the staff quarters. They were on the floor and the head maid spoke up to my mother and demanded that Jezebel be fired. My mother told her she would not fire her but she would warn her not to proselytize or litter apples anymore.
That wasn’t really a plague that was just an annoyance. My plagues began that evening. My parents were going to take me to an opera the evening after I witnessed man’s humble origins. We typically had chauffeurs to drive us around wherever we wanted to go. Tonight was kind of special. Mother and Father were going to drive me themselves. I waited for them but they never arrived. I went to see their car of choice for this elegant evening and found them. They were in the back seat, all dressed up with no place to go. Their throats had been slit from one ear to the other. I fainted.
The police did not have a suspect, there were no finger prints. No clues, really, none to speak of anyway. Mother and Father were dead. I was only twelve, just three days short of thirteen. I had lawyers come in to help me, priests, nuns and politicians. Everyone was concerned about a poor lad who lost his parents, even if his family could buy and sell the Rockefeller clan like they were trailer trash.
The machines in the basement, in the caverns seemed to take care of themselves oddly enough. My parents would never have approved of me going back in time to warn them. Well, hell, I did it anyway. It was the most wretched heartbreaking experience of my entire life. The experience of coming back home was never the same. What my parents told me, the answer they gave me, was always the same, over and over and over again. I wanted to warn them about their own murders but they were not having any of it. They didn’t want to violate the laws of nature. They wanted to hold on to the delusion that we were raping and cheating nature by eating a bug. They refused my help but I told them in time where my next dark travels would begin.
The baby was screaming his head off and it was 1917. This was a child who would enjoy Kellys, Gene and Grace and remember World War 2. A Great Depression era child would either be obscenely rich or frighteningly poor…
“I love you,” I said to the newborn.
He was so beautiful and his young mother was in the next room. She would die of cancer at the age of twenty-one in six months. I already knew of all of this. I loved seeing this lovely baby. He was the most important person in the world to me. He was my great grandfather. The only family member that I promised not to avoid after their deaths by taking an unfair advantage of time, he was all I had really. I was an orphan of the worst sort, I had a terrible tale to tell, a wicked little secret and I was an only child with no cousins to speak of. I came back to my room, cursed like an angry drunken sailor with syphilis and cried myself to sleep in my lonely bed. Tomorrow I would resume school, well a very private Catholic education where the men of the cloth and the sisters would comfort me in hopes of future donations. Well, perhaps I’m not being entirely fair here. Some of them really wanted to get to know Jesus and follow his ways of madness, despair and eternal salvation. I dreamed many a terrible nightmare after my return from watching Harold Godley sleep the innocent sleep of angels in his crib.