Book Five, Chapter 116: The First Jump

🔴 REC    SEP 24, 2018 16:48:13    [▮▮▮▮▮ 100%]

“It’s not anything to be nervous about,” Anna said, though I could tell that she was nervous even as she said it. “It’s not like a blink-and-you-miss-it kind of thing. You can feel it happening. As long as you’ve got this necklace with you, you can feel yourself start to slip.”

It was a bright and beautiful day.

People were out walking their dogs, which distracted Bobby’s two hounds, but they never disobeyed him. They sat eagerly, awaiting his next command, straining against the script in hopes of getting a sniff of something in the wind.

Kids were playing at a playground next to a daycare center across the street.

Six people from different walks of life stood on a sidewalk, waiting for a man in a blue suit to walk next to the historic mercantile building—at which point bricks would fall from the roof, striking and severely injuring him.

Nothing to see. Just an everyday, ordinary thing. Strangers hanging out.

The nerves were palpable.

I mostly focused on getting shots of the street. It was really nice out, and I knew that these shots would make a valuable juxtaposition for what had come before and what would surely come next.

“When is this guy supposed to show up?” Antoine asked. He was carrying his duffel bag filled with a variety of goodies—from firearms to construction tools, whatever we might need.

“It should be any minute,” Kimberly said.

“About five minutes, actually,” Logan added.

“How can you know that?” Kimberly asked.

“In the picture of him being taken away on the stretcher in the article, you could see that the shadow of the building was on that fire hydrant. I figure with people around, the ambulance was probably called immediately and couldn’t have taken more than a few minutes to get here with the hospital so close. Given where the shadow of the building is now and where it is in the photograph, I’d say we have about five minutes.”

He was holding onto a printout of the news article. He had printed out several other articles.

I walked up to him and aimed the camera at the sheets in his hands.

“Ingredient number one,” I said. “A historical document memorializing an event in the timeline.”

Logan turned the papers and shuffled through them to show the article about the drag race where things almost got deadly—well, more deadly.

“Ingredient number two,” I said, moving the camera over toward Anna, who held the necklace with the ruby-red jewel on the end. “Magic space rock. Highly decorative.”

Anna didn’t look directly into the camera. She just looked at me as if annoyed or unsure about my presence. That was probably the best way to handle it.

I had to get footage—a variety of footage at that—so that Carousel would have something to cut together in hopes that the audience might miraculously understand the rules of this storyline.

But in order to get that terribly invasive, repetitive footage, I was going to have to do cameraman things—like getting close into people’s personal space and expositing in a humorous, if annoying, way.

I got footage of Bobby petting his dogs. He was playing a good-natured guy—someone who could just go along with a ridiculous plot like this.

We couldn’t all be in denial.

I was going along with it because I was the cameraman, so of course I was. The cameraman can’t be cautious or doubtful.

Kimberly played the empathetic mama-bear role, focusing on her desire to protect Anna and the rest of us.

Logan played the cynic and the skeptic, who—despite his great doubts—was still curious enough to go along with everything.

Antoine didn’t want to be there, but he didn’t want to be alone either.

I felt we covered the spectrum of character reactions pretty well, though I didn’t know how much screen time they were going to get to show it off.

Most found footage tropes were designed to distract from a lack of characterization and common sense.

I kept getting footage from all around, and I did it for one particular reason—I was on the lookout for a man wearing a long trench coat and a fedora.

I didn’t see him, despite my vigilance.

I really needed to see him. I needed to look at his tropes. They would tell the story—perhaps even better than Camden could.

That might have been exactly why Carousel was keeping him from me.

I hadn’t seen him at the daylight dance. I had been looking around, but he wasn’t there—until we looked at the footage. That was fair play, I supposed, because it made some amount of sense with the rules of time travel.

When I saw the man in the blue suit, I immediately turned my attention to him and pointed the camera at him to ensure we got a good shot.

He was just an ordinary man, talking on a cell phone as he walked down the street.

Little did he know that his life was about to change forever after getting hit on the noggin by a falling brick.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Or at least, it would have.

Just as he was walking up to the mercantile building, we were there.

“Watch out,” Antoine said before the man walked past us. He held his hand out.

The man—whose name was ironically Ron Mason, according to the red wallpaper—stopped, apparently annoyed at the interruption.

“Can’t you see I’m on the ph—” he started to say, but before he could get the words out completely, a loud succession of thuds sounded as bricks fell from the top of the building and landed on the sidewalk right where he would have been.

There was a look of alarm on his face that didn’t quite go away.

“Marsha, you would not believe it. I almost died! This building is falling apart right next to me. I almost got squished,” he said.

“Wouldn’t have died completely,” I said under my breath. “Just head trauma.”

He turned to look at us, to thank us, but he must have felt something odd about the group of strangers who were all huddled together, holding on to each other.

“Did you see that?” he started to ask.

Poor guy couldn’t get out the sentence.

At that moment, I started to see a red tinge in the air. While I thought it would be coming from the amulet, it actually kind of felt like it was coming from everywhere.

Suddenly, I got this sensation in my stomach—like I had fallen.

But I hadn’t.

I was standing still, holding on to Kimberly and Bobby, who was desperately holding on to his dogs.

Again, I felt like I fell—but I didn’t.

“Whoa,” Ron, the passerby, said, tripping over himself and falling forward toward us.

Antoine caught him before he could fall completely.

And then the falling continued.

But this time, when we fell, all of our surroundings started to shift.

Suddenly, the day shot upward, and it was the middle of the night.

Then it was day again, and we were standing in the same place, with solid ground underneath our feet. And yet, the sensation of falling continued—as if we were in a runaway elevator.

The next two falls became more turbulent. This time, we didn’t just fall—we changed location.

We were still standing on the ground, but not in the same place. And I couldn’t say where it was we were—because it was impossible.

Even to describe it would be an unimaginable task.

It was as if the place on Earth where our feet were planted was connected to a million different places all at once, circling us. And I could perceive all of them—like I was trapped in a kaleidoscope.

And as we moved, the kaleidoscope changed. Buildings whirred past. Cars on the street flooded by so repeatedly that they became one solid mass—a blur of metal, lights, and paint so seamlessly blended together that it didn’t even look like moving objects anymore. It just looked like a solid chunk of motion.

In the sky—in the million skies—I saw airplanes everywhere. Lines of them, sometimes so numerous it looked like the sky had metal prongs running along it, the planes blurring together in my vision.

We were moving in space quickly now too. Not just time, but the world itself was shifting around us.

I fought through the mental fatigue, trying to understand what was happening, but the only takeaway was that this time travel implied some sort of innate intelligence.

Even as that thought entered my mind, I didn’t quite understand what it meant. Was this time travel itself intelligent? Or did it just appear that way?

Wherever we stood, it was always in a place where humans normally stood. Even as we moved geographically, we were always on a sidewalk, in a street—never phasing through buildings, never colliding with cars. Even people never touched us.

In fact, I didn’t see other people at all. I only saw blurs of color and shape where people should have been—like outlines on park benches, fragments of motion.

There were so many different things to see in the kaleidoscope of time that my mind simply could not comprehend it.

I heard… rushing water against a shoreline, but I saw nothing of the sort. It was information overload.