WINNER

Timeless - A Short Story

By Julia Wong

The heat and the lack of humidity were overpowering, but somehow all her ideas and thoughts came together in one epiphany of understanding, relieving her concentration of its goal. Katherine slumped back in the rickety bed, her lap overflowing with papers, and of course, the diary. The evidence added up. Even the Horologist himself had admitted it in his transcripts. Relief came fast, followed closely, as if pulled by magnetic attraction, by fear and doubt. But would her father believe her? What would happen to Leamingcord if she warned them? Would anyone believe her? After all...

She had always been told she had an overactive imagination.

Katherine had always seen things a different way, whether she liked it or not. Sometimes it seemed like magic, sometimes it felt like a curse. But was she right this time? Could it be? After a few hours of speculating about the strange inhabitants of the town in which she was vacationing, could it be that her theories were right? All these coincidences seemed too strange to be simple accidents. No matter how many times her father dismissed her ideas, he couldn’t dismiss her latest discoveries. Or could he? He probably could. Being the professor of technology at their local university, he was always taking the logical and scientific route to solve problems. Her father wasn’t always right, though. After all, they had gotten lost on the way to the small, quaint cottage that he had rented for the summer from his friend, the professor of Horology and Chronology. Prof. Graham was very quiet and introverted, but had a passion for photography, documentation, and of course, chronology. He was drawn to Katherine’s father because of their shared love of logic and documentation, and the two had become good friends.

Professor Chan had shown his daughter pictures of the light blue house, a pretty flower garden, and some Polaroids taken of the small town near the house that looked almost vintage, as if they had been taken during the last century. Katherine had assumed that he knew the way there, but then again, she made mistakes too. They had eventually arrived in their rickety old car, but far too late to do anything other than sleepily brush their teeth, unpack a little, and then collapse into their respective beds. It had been too late, too dark, and too quiet to go take a peek at the little town not too far from the little front garden that Katherine had been tasked to keep up for the summer.

Well, not that she needed to water it or anything. After all, it was already dead when they arrived, July 14, 2018. The morning after they had driven in, after the rusty alarm clock had unexpectedly started chiming at 6am, she had destroyed the clock and decided to take a short, explorative walk through her new home- for the summer, that is. While tiptoeing through the cramped living room, she found a mildly interesting-looking book she planned to read later. “The Horologist’s Diary”, which looked handwritten, intrigued her greatly as she could not tell whether it was fiction or nonfiction. After a short, quiet breakfast with her father, he encouraged her to “go out and meet new friends”. Reluctantly, she had walked into town that morning down the woody path dotted with bushes and ferns, not suspecting what she would begin to discover. No one really interesting appeared to live there, its outward appearance made it seem like it was just a small, not very racially diverse town with a general store, a doctor’s office, a post office, a candy store, an ice cream store and a police station all on the same street. The townspeople ranged in age, there were some toddlers and small children running around, some teenagers closer to her age, and various ages of adults. Walking down that street, Katherine decided to visit some of the stores. That’s when the strange encounters started.

Walking into the General Store was like a blast from the past. (Not that Katherine had experienced that past, but she had certainly listened to her share of old eighties tunes.) The old, slightly dingy building didn’t seem to have any modern appliances, or, really, anything modern at all. In fact, Katherine noticed that the entire town seemed pretty outdated, compared to the cottage. Maybe it was just so isolated that the town’s old-fashioned manners hadn’t rubbed off on it. The jovial-looking, elderly shop owner nodded at her with a smile and told her, “Just ask if you need anything.” On sale were some glass bottles of Cola-Coca, next to some large bins of penny candy and graham crackers with a neatly hand lettered sign, “50% off until July 16th!” A tidy row of cigarette packs and matches were in the open for all to see.

“Candy for pennies? Not weighed or anything? Well, there aren’t many modern appliances here, so there must not be an appliance store. And of course...they must all smoke...I wonder why the cigarettes aren’t hidden behind the counter?” thought Katherine. Being logical saved her mind from wandering onto more imaginative conclusions.

After smiling at the owner and exiting the old-fashioned General Store, she was simply walking down the street in front of a pastel-painted ice cream store, when a group of local girls started staring. “You’re not from around here…” one of them called out. Katherine turned. “Yeah, um...my dad and I are staying at a cottage for the summer.” she mumbled vaguely. The girls exchanged looks. Katherine clearly stood out amongst them, not just because they were all blonde except for her, but because they were clearly a clique. They talked for a bit, until one of them made an excuse and the whole group left together, walking side by side. It came to her as a startling surprise that they didn’t know what Instagram was. Or wi-fi. “I mean, this is a little weird, but maybe their parents are really, really against cyberbullying or something. Or maybe this town is just a bit backwater.” she thought, both pitying and envying them at the same time.

As they walked away, their matching clothing caught Katherine’s attention. The girls were all wearing denim shorts and overalls, bright t-shirts, and bunchy socks. Which was plausible, of course. But their hair was poufy and done with brightly coloured scrunchies. Reminiscent of the 80s….Her father hadn’t mentioned this being some sort of historical reenactment town. Even if it had been, there were no tourists. As Katherine stopped walking and quickly peeked around, she was the only one dressed the way she was.

Katherine caught on fast, but this seemed too large and too unbelievable to process. It was unfathomable. Kind of like if someone told you the world was ending. At first you wouldn’t believe them, let alone want to believe them. You’d try to prove them wrong, for the sake of your peace of mind. And that is exactly what Katherine did.

As she walked down Main Street, Katherine noted a small, decrepit library and several people smoking thin cigarettes in the middle of a dusty alley, talking and laughing loudly. She wrinkled her nose, speeding up her walking to pass them quickly. Had they no shame of smoking? Apparently not. To escape the musty smell, she shuffled into the library door. The books might be interesting, if not antiquated.

Pretending to browse through the town library’s outdated bookshelves, she located a thick paper copy of the town’s records, which she asked to borrow for a while. The librarian, peering at her over a pair of cat’s eye glasses with tired eyes, nodded sleepily and returned to reading a worn-looking copy of Pride and Prejudice.

Katherine walked home quickly, trying to block out everything except for the path leading to the cottage. Clutching the large manuscript tightly to her chest, she strode shakily across the uneven path, shuddering slightly as the overgrown plants on each side of the path tickled her legs and arms. As she stepped through the door of the little blue cottage, her phone vibrated with a notification, happy to be back in the land of working wi-fi. She sat quietly at the old oak table and flicked through the crisp white papers.

Deaths and births flicked by like they had never happened. “When deaths or births are listed, it doesn’t make as much of an impact on us when we read it.” thought Katherine. “A number or a name or a year can’t properly express the entirety of someone’s life...nor the pain they or others have felt.”

“Getting off track, Katherine,” she scolded herself internally. Shaking her head, she continued turning the pages until she reached the latest entry.

Sure enough, the last birth recorded had been a girl’s birth in 1980. “Anna-May Saunders. Born February 16, 1980. Blond and blue-eyes, 8 pounds 51cm.” But maybe the town just didn’t have many children? Impossible. If the last birth had been in 1980, how would that explain all the kids running around? It was 2018….wasn’t it?

Her head spun. She stood shakily, clutching the old wood table. After several deep breaths, she sat back down and rationalized. Maybe they were all just summer vacationers that had not been born in the town. Maybe...there was a logical explanation. Running up the creaky stairs to her room, she flumphed on her bed and sighed.

“Katherine? You’re home already?” called her father from the next room, where he was typing a study on his laptop. “Meet anyone?”

“No, and I’m not feeling well.” she said casually. “I’m going to rest for a bit.”

“Okay. You don’t have a fever, right?”

“Nope. Just tired. I’m going to nap now.”

She shut her door and dug her phone out of her pocket, needing a distraction. Scrolling through recent news and social media, checking up on her messages, Katherine became uncharacteristically bored. Plugging in her phone, she picked up the small, leather-bound book lying innocently beside it. “The Horologist? Oh yeah, the book from this morning.” Shrugging to herself, she flicked the cover open and started reading, not suspecting what would be revealed.

Between the pages she found a deep, dark secret.

When you discover a secret, it eats away at you no matter the circumstances. If you have obtained it honestly (by having something happen to you), accidentally (overhearing something), or by other means, no matter what, it eats away at you. Not literally, of course. The feeling of secrecy is very smug but very restrained. The irony of not expressing your joy, your thoughts, and worst of all - the secret itself - can never be expressed unless you want to out your secret to the world. It’s like a hook in your mind and in your heart, gradually pulling you to something you so desperately want and fear at the same time. A scab you want to pick. So satisfying to be rid of, but painful and threatening once released.

It will torment you until you release it and silence the darkness. But even then, will it haunt you? Layers of regret will begin to seep into your soul, and you will wonder what may have happened if you had kept it to yourself. But now that Katherine knew the secret, it troubled her deeply. It gnawed at her conscience and her heart. How could she keep her mouth shut, like she had always wanted to do? It had always been said that she was too talkative, too over-reactive, too obsessed, too invested, but if she became quiet, what would they have said?

They say that silence is the sleep that nourishes wisdom.

Katherine had often wondered in the past if it would be simpler if she didn’t talk at all. If she didn’t exist at all, perhaps. No regrets. No failed first chances. None of the aimless, endless wondering and worrying if she had done something wrong or said something strange or behaved strangely or not said sorry or excuse me. None of that one friend who always looked at her smugly, who was always right, who was always better. Who was always mean.

The diary was fact, there was no doubt about it. Katherine had hesitated to believe it at first, finding traces of mirth in the smudged entries of the man who called himself the Horologist, but in the end, behind her trembling, she knew it was real.

The small, worn journal told the story of the dusty summer of ‘83. Hewitt Graham was a kind, gentle, unassuming, average man in the town where he had grown up, living in the cottage he had bought to complete his greatest project of all time: Finally creating time travel.

Katherine had not understood any of the logistics and calculations noted. She had skipped from a section about wormholes to a joyous entry whereupon the man had written that he had succeeded in creating time travel.

It was too much to process. It was impossible to process. And a frantic, scribbled entry in fading pen on the next page made everything worse. Dated a month later, it was the final piece of a puzzle that silently clicked into place. Katherine felt a bump form in her throat.

“It has failed. I cannot believe it. After all my attempts to fix it, it has failed.

I didn’t notice when I came back to the ‘present’ after my venture through the past that something was wrong. But these townspeople have no concept of time. They are stuck- all stuck- in an endless time loop. Their summer repeats, over and over again. They don’t seem to age - I believe it can be attributed to the nature of the time loop - and the loop appears to only affect the town itself. No strangers have visited lately. No one has left lately. Since the location of the wormhole was around the centre of the town, I suppose that it affected only the town?

“I know that I have done this to them, created this terrible dilemma that I cannot reverse. But there is no going back. The time machine was destroyed after one simple trip, 10 minutes into the past. I cannot go back one month without disrupting something, trapping myself- or even worse, killing us all.

“Their minds have been clouded- by who, or what, I do not know. They ask me, ‘Why would anyone want to leave?’ and I cannot bear to leave them. I simply can’t leave the mess I have created. There is no way of fixing it, I have doomed them all to an endless existence and I am the only one who can see this mess of a world. Time has no meaning here. Nothing has any meaning here. I have to escape this place, yet I cannot leave them here to such a cruel fate.

Perhaps if I continue with my studies, I will find a solution. Perhaps if I leave, I will forget.

If only I could. I can only give thanks that I have remained unaffected, and carry with me the guilt of what I have done to them.”

Katherine was shocked. How could the townspeople have been doomed to this? They seemed so content in everyday life, yet didn’t know they had no existential purpose. They had no lives outside of the town, their little sanctuary, their home for the rest of eternity.

Forever was a long time, even for Katherine to imagine. She couldn’t fathom having to repeat the same thing over and over again, without being aware of it. Somehow, not being conscious of it was much worse than simply being trapped.

Relief at having solved the “mystery” overtook her, followed by guilt, pain and sadness.

She plunked the book down on her nightstand and ran down the stairs.

Katherine floated through the rest of the day, going through the motions, not paying attention to any of it, not paying attention to the growing pain and disbelief in her mind, telling her father she was fine, until she collapsed into her bed that night. She attempted to cry herself to sleep, yet her head was too full of nightmares to partake in any lasting rest.

At 6am, the alarm clock rang.

And the book was gone.

Katherine sat bolt upright in her bed. She shakily grabbed her phone and looked at the date.

6:00 Saturday, July 14, 2018

Had it all been a dream? Had it all been imagined? Could it be believed?

She took the alarm clock downstairs and smashed it with a hammer out of anger. Quickly slipping on her flip-flops that had been abandoned by the door, she ran on shaky legs outside down the woody path. Ferns and bushes brushed her legs uncomfortably as she sprinted to the town through the thick groups of trees, expecting to see the white-washed storefronts and wooden homes that belonged there; ready to reveal the secret that had been kept for too long. But when she stepped out, panting from exhaustion, into the clearing, there was no town. Abandoned concrete roads and pieces of long-rotted charred wood dotted the enormous space that had once been occupied by a tightly-knit, bustling community, yet there was no one - and nothing - to be found.

At the end of the month, they returned home, and things were as usual. Nothing had changed except for the unsettling feeling looming over Katherine in the back of her head when she thought of the incident. She’d tried to ask her father if she could meet with the professor, but her father insisted that he was a busy man and had no time for the ramblings of a child raving about how cool the cottage was. Little did he know that wasn’t what she wanted to discuss.

“Oh, Katherine, I have something for you.” said her father enthusiastically, brandishing a small piece of laminated paper. Katherine turned around from her seat at the kitchen table where she was eating . “What is it?” Professor Chan passed her a yellowed, newspaper clipping. “Professor Graham gave this to me for you. I was telling him about how you were so curious about the little town that used to be behind the cottage, and he found this in his archives for you.”

“SMALL TOWN PERISHES IN FIRE, NO SURVIVORS AMONGST TOWNSPEOPLE.

July 14, 1983. Earlier today, the firemen of nearby town Traverdow were called to the scene as the little neighboring forest town of Leamingcord was set aflame! Witnesses from the fire brigade believe that the devastating fire was a combined result of the dry, dusty weather and the surplus of smokers inhabiting the town. The only survivor was a student of Chronology and Horology at our state’s university, who lives in a cottage several hundred metres from the unfortunate settlement. The only object recovered from the fiery inferno was a small, handwritten diary, unfortunately too charred to read.”

THE END