The Traveler: A Time Travel Thriller Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Also By Fredric Shernoff

  Quote

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Also By Fredric Shernoff-1

  The Traveler

  Fredric Shernoff

  Copyright © 2015 Fredric Shernoff

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved.

  To Anna and Evan: Truly live in each moment.

  ALSO BY FREDRIC SHERNOFF

  Atlantic Island

  Rising Tide (Atlantic Island II)

  Angels of the Earth (A Silo Saga Novella)

  Doing the Job (Nonfiction)

  “Yesterday is a Memory.

  Tomorrow is a Dream.

  Today is a Bitch.”

  -Unknown

  Chapter 1

  1

  I was thirty two years old the first time I traveled into the past. It happened suddenly one night. Somewhere between the time when my wife Helena got up for more popcorn and when she returned to the couch to continue watching our sitcom of the evening, I disappeared from my home in the year 2013, went somewhere else, and returned. Helena never suspected a thing. For my part, I had no idea what had happened. I had the slightest sense of light-headedness. Almost a change in pressure like you’d experience taking off in an airplane but without the ear popping. I just felt weird and then I felt normal again.

  I just realized I told you that I went “somewhere else.” That’s not really true. I never left my location. What happened was I went somewhen else. I wish I could let you know when exactly that was, but it all happened too fast to tell. Like I said, I didn’t have a clue what had happened to me.

  These days, of course, I’m a bit of a pro when it comes to this time traveling business. Not that I’m bragging, mind you. It’s nothing to be proud of. My experiments with my ability were exciting but because of my bold, ignorant endeavors I almost ruined not only my own life but the entire known universe. Heavy stuff, right?

  Let me backtrack a little here. I’m eager to share everything I can about my experiences, but a little context and background might be nice before I dive in. My name is Daniel Wells. Okay, you’re probably pointing out that I share a last name with the author of arguably the most famous book about time travel. I applaud your powers of observation. “Wells” isn’t my last name, but give me a little credit here— I’m happy to tell my story, but not so happy to be poked, prodded and maybe locked away in the loony bin. I’m going to reveal many details but I’d like to protect myself with a little bit of reasonable doubt. Anyway, I grew up in a town with the fancy name of Waldorf. It’s not nearly as fancy as the name implies. It’s a suburb outside of Philadelphia, in between Mifflin and Jenkintown, if you know your geography. If not, don’t worry about it. I didn’t care for Waldorf so much, so you might think I’d leave it far behind. You’d be wrong. I bought my first home there right after Helena—not her real name—and I got married. Just five minutes from the house where I grew up.

  Mifflin, the next town over, is home to some pretty big international companies. I got a job working in customer service in this big office building in a complex of other big office buildings. Helena, whom I met at a bar in 2006 and married in 2009, is an elementary school teacher in the same town. I had no real complaints about the life I made for myself. It was quiet, simple, familiar. We talked all the time about having kids. She wanted three, I wanted one. Figured we’d compromise on two at some point down the line.

  Helena was the stereotypical wife: she cooked, cleaned, worked hard and nagged the living hell out of me. I have had a temper for much of my life, grown as a defensive response to the bullying I endured throughout childhood. Unfortunately for my relationship, my temper would flare up in retaliation for Helena’s endless criticisms. We fought a lot but I still loved her and hoped that we’d eventually grow together instead of continuing down a path to divorce.

  I don’t mean to come across as blameless in my marital problems. I wasn’t always attentive, or as responsible as I should be. I also think part of my issues, and I’m being pretty honest and self-reflective here, was a nasty habit of focusing on the past. Analyzing, interpreting and agonizing over past events, missed opportunities, and wrong decisions. I had found relative success in my life. That’s if you define success by viewing one’s life as a checklist: Married- check! Gainfully employed- check! Kids- check forthcoming! Despite this, I spent an unnecessary amount of time fixated on the mistakes I had made in the past and the good times I had experienced but had not fully appreciated. I heard once that someone said, “Youth is wasted on the young.” I would be hard-pressed to disagree.

  Helena knew this, at least to some extent, and I know it irritated her. There was something unspoken about it. I guess she wanted me to be so happy with how my life had worked out that I could say, “I wouldn’t change a thing.” I tried to keep my woes to myself, and I certainly didn’t tell her about the girls of my past who wandered through my thoughts when things between Helena and me reached particular lows.

  What baffles me even today is how I thought I could do anything about any of what had come before by dwelling so hard on those bygone days. Time, I had always believed, is a river that flows in one direction. Our perception of the speed varies, of course. Who hasn’t heard old people reflect on how fast the years are rushing by? Who hasn’t been stuck in a classroom as a child, watching the clock tick away the painfully long seconds? Yet the direction is supposed to be constant. Here today, gone tomorrow. Can’t go back, can’t go home again. I think you could fill a book of cliches based on the one-way flow of time.

  I guess, if I really think about it, the past filled me with an excitement that was missing from my daily life in the present. My memory of those long-lost days, even the bad parts, was filled with a rose-colored happiness that any marriage would be hard pressed to match and it inspired emotion in me that I couldn’t get any other way. In that way, the past became like a drug…an addiction that I would feed every day by dwelling and reminiscing. I thought about my childhood as a bright, shy, young boy. I thought about my transition to an awkward, withdrawn teenager, my attention caught by a series of unrequited obsessions. I thought about my journey to adulthood, and finally discovering my confidence in myself and my ability to speak to women with a dry, comfortable sarcasm. In all these things, there were good times and bad times, successes and failures. In that way, I doubt I was very different from most people. Truthfully, I don’t suspect that my unhealthy focus on the past was such a unique thing. What made me unique…well, it started with that lightning-fast journey while my wife went for popcorn. That was the beginning.

  2

  After I made that first trip through time, I thought I might be coming down with a cold. It was the only wa
y I could make sense of the brief period of disorientation and pressure. My wife wasn’t too understanding. As she told me once, “I don’t have the patience or sympathy for all your little aches and pains.”

  “What is it this time?” she asked.

  “I just feel…off,” I said.

  She sighed, exasperated. “Why don’t you go upstairs and rest?”

  I did as she suggested. First, I took a shower. As the hot water poured over me (not too hot…I’m kind of a baby about that) a funny thing happened. You know how you can wake up in the morning and think you didn’t remember anything you dreamt the night before…and then later, suddenly, a flash of imagery emerges from the recesses of your brain to remind you that in fact you had dreamt something after all? Well, I know that happens to me quite often. It happened then, or at least I thought that was what was happening.

  What I saw in that moment was the wall of my family room. The same wall I had been staring at for hours while Helena and I watched television. Except it was…different. The television I saw in that flash of memory was old. One of those models that had been old even when I was a kid, with all the controls on the panel next to the screen and no remote. The vision confused me. It didn’t seem to resemble any dream I could conjure up in my memory. I couldn’t understand the quick pulse of image at all.

  I don’t know why I gave such consideration to that vision. I’ve always had a tendency to get caught up in those kinds of things. A memory of a dream about a girl I had only seen in passing in college could lead me to waste a day researching to see what she’d made of herself. I guess maybe it relates to my obsession with the past. I don’t really know. It was just my way of being. So I pondered this flash of imagery, trying to negotiate some further details out of the corners of my mind.

  I didn’t produce any more images but I did give myself one blistering headache. It came in waves. The first wave made me cry out, more from surprise than pain. The second caused me to hang on to my head with both hands, as if I feared it might detach from my body. The third wave? Well that was something else all together. It came with a pulse of pressure far greater than the one I had experienced earlier on the couch. It was sharp and somehow blunt at the same time and it made me scream as it drove me to my knees.

  Suddenly, the pain was gone. I paused, catching my breath. Then I heard a new scream, one that didn’t come from me. It was higher. Female. I looked up, suddenly realizing that there was no rush of water coming from the shower head. Small droplets of water plunked down to the floor, the remnants of a shower now completed. Through the glass door I saw a woman, wet and naked but for the towel that she clutched in front of her. She looked as scared as I felt.

  “Who are you?” I asked as I moved forward. My foot slipped and my momentum carried me faster than I had planned. I closed my eyes and heard the crunch of glass. I felt the pulse of pressure in my head again, this time, thankfully, without any pain. Then I hit the floor and felt my wrists tweak as my hands bent backward beyond their natural range. I rolled over on my back and opened my eyes. I saw the ceiling of the bathroom, and heard the water running. There was no longer any woman screaming, but I heard a man’s voice continue to yell. It took a while before I realized that the voice I heard was once again my own. I heard the door open, and then Helena was there.

  “What happened?” she cried. “I heard you screaming! How did you get on the floor?”

  I rolled up to a seated position on the edge of the bath mat. “I… I don’t know. I think I slipped.” I held up my hands. They were bloody from going through the glass.

  “Oh my God, your hands! How did this happen?” She stepped into the room and reached for the hand towels.

  “Careful!” I called. “There’s broken glass. I fell through the door… I’m sorry.”

  Her eyes scrunched in concern. “Broken glass? Dan are you feeling okay? The door is fine.”

  I turned and looked behind me at the shower. The water was still running and the steam had fogged up the glass door. The door was whole and undamaged but… it was wrong somehow. I sprang to my feet and studied the glass as Helena pressed towels to my hands. “Can you stay still for a second?” she asked.

  “This…this door is different,” I said. We had not yet updated our bathroom (just one item on a long list of things to be completed one day) and it still looked as I imagine it had decades earlier. The shower door I was looking at so intently was not out of place. It looked to be of approximately the same age and time period as the rest of the bathroom, but there was something off about the pattern, something that only registered in my unconscious mind. This was a different door than the one that had been there minutes earlier.

  “Helena,” I asked, “did we replace the shower door at some point?”

  She was looking at me with genuine fright now as if she thought I had lost my mind. “Baby, no, this door came with the house. Why don’t you come lie down in bed? Your cuts don’t look too bad. I can put some bandages on.”

  I did as she advised. I played the part of a man suddenly ill while in my head I pondered my experience, trying to make sense of everything that had happened. I admit, I enjoyed the attention. Helena’s genuine concern for my well-being had cut through her usual crap. I supposed the whole experience in the bathroom could be chalked up to some kind of stress-induced illusion. Well, all of it except for the cuts on my hands. I had expected there to be glass embedded in the wounds, but couldn’t find any.

  Helena sat down in the bed next to me. I didn’t like the tone and pace of her voice, like she was speaking to a child or someone who had suffered a degree of brain damage. “Daniel, how did you end up with cuts on your hands? Did you try to hurt yourself? You can tell me anything.”

  Could I tell her anything? I wasn’t so sure. It wasn’t great for her to believe that I had intentionally injured myself in the shower, but I had a feeling that if I said, “I saw a naked woman and fell through the door, but it healed itself behind me into a different door,” I would find myself locked up for one of those seventy-two hour observations at a mental hospital. No, thank you.

  “I don’t really know what happened,” I told her. “I got lightheaded and I must have passed out for a minute. Maybe I got cut by the edge of the doorframe as I fell out. The wounds aren’t all that bad anyway.”

  She studied me carefully, looking for something telling in my face. Finally she seemed satisfied. “Okay. Just get some rest for now. I want you to make an appointment to see the doctor this week, just to get a checkup.”

  I began to protest, wanting to remind her that I had earned a clean bill of health at my last checkup eight months earlier, but thought better of it. “Okay, honey. You’re right. I’ll just try to get some sleep. Thanks for being so helpful and I’m really sorry that I scared you.”

  She kissed my forehead. “It’s alright.”

  “I love you, Helena.”

  She paused, and that silence spoke volumes about our relationship. “Love you too.”

  She got up then and walked to the doorway. She switched off the light and left the room, closing the bedroom door softly behind her. I watched the fan above our bed go around and around in the dim moonlight. I thought maybe I would go see the doctor, as Helena had suggested. I had a sense that something rather profound had occurred, or at least something which seemed that way. My best guess was I had some kind of a brain tumor that had chosen this particular evening to announce itself. That thought scared me to death.

  What about the screaming, naked woman? Was she part of the delusion? I only saw her for a panicky fraction of time and I couldn’t remember much about her. I thought she was about my age, and she didn’t look familiar. If she was a delusion, a hallucination brought on by cancer or something similarly ominous, she seemed to be an original creation of my ill mind.

  I followed some of Helena’s advice in the days and weeks that followed. I took it easy, getting as much sleep as possible and visiting the gym two times a week but never overdoing
it. I watched what I ate. Whether or not this healthy living contributed to the elimination of my “episodes” I couldn’t say, but they didn’t reoccur. Because of that, I put off going to the doctor. Though Helena nagged me about it for a few days, eventually she and I both forgot. We returned to the daily, foolish quarrels that made up our married life.

  As the next few months passed, I barely thought of that terrifying night in the bathroom. When I did, it was with some distance and less emotional impact. I dismissed my earlier worry about something serious going wrong in my brain. I now thought that I had fallen asleep in the shower and dreamt the whole bizarre thing. I didn’t even think about the cuts on my hands anymore. I was only looking for details that would reinforce my opinion on the matter and allow me to push it out of my mind.

  Had I ever entertained the possibility that I had traveled through time? Not even slightly. Despite being an avid science-fiction reader, I probably would have told you that time travel just wasn’t possible. I never imagined that it could be achieved without some kind of fancy futuristic technology. The idea that I could do it without a car, a phonebooth, or any kind of portal; that I could just slip through the timestream on my own…just madness. I would have never thought that was possible. Never.

  Chapter 2

  1

  I guess it comes as no surprise to tell you that my break from time travel didn’t last forever. Wouldn’t be much of a story if I just went on with my life and nothing bizarre ever happened again, right? Well, as luck would have it, a few months after the bathroom situation I went on another unexpected journey.

  I had planned to swing by the local 7-Eleven to grab a bite to eat. Helena was out with friends and she always encouraged me to eat my dinner from the food we already had in the fridge. I rarely listened. I pulled my Toyota Camry into the parking lot and found a spot along the side of the building. I rolled down the window, feeling the crisp, early autumn air steal into the car and circulate around me. I love that time of year. The smell of the leaves is intoxicating. I sat there for a while, listening to music on the radio and feeling at one with the universe. I closed my eyes. Suddenly I felt that sense of pressure in my head and an instant of pain. Then, a new sensation: falling. I landed hard on my ass and my eyes shot open. I was on the ground, only it wasn’t asphalt. Just plain dirt and rocks.