Book Five, Chapter 117: A Short Rest

🔴 REC    SEP 24, 2018 18:01:02    [▮▮▮▮▮ 100%]

“Man, this place is a dump,” Bobby said as we walked through the neglected historical building that would one day be the museum we worked at. “But there are no vagrants here. I checked the whole place.”

We could barely see as we walked around. The windows were all still shuttered in 2010.

“I don’t know. Looks pretty much the same to me,” Logan said. “If anything, the wind doesn’t whistle through the walls quite as loud.”

The building wasn’t exactly a wreck, but it was dusty, and there was all kinds of detritus on the floor—all evidence of what these rooms had been used for in the past. From the tiny courthouse to the police station, from back when Carousel wore short pants, the place held a lot of history.

“Are we safe here?” Anna asked. “Is there someone that might show up?”

“I don’t think so, sweetie,” Kimberly said. “This is pretty much how it looked when we started renovations, so as far as I know, not many people come through here between now and then.”

We made our way through the building, looking for a room that was at least habitable. The office was a mess. We settled on staying in the courthouse side of the building because it was the best sealed off and had less stuff on the floor.

As we entered, we all gravitated toward that same alcove where we had fatefully found those videotapes. I filmed the bricks that were still stacked neatly and tightly.

“In case we need any spare tapes, we could grab a hammer,” Logan said.

“What would that even do to the timeline?” Antoine asked. “That’s the worst part about this. I feel like we can’t make a plan because I have no idea how this is supposed to work.”

“Lot of possibilities,” I said. “My money says that since we took the magic carpet ride, we’re pretty much stuck this way. Even if we were to take those tapes and burn them in 2010 before we ever found them, we would still be stuck out of time. We would still be here. We would just be on a different version of the timeline.”

Even if I had ideas, I didn’t want to share them.

Typically, you learned the rules of time travel very early in a time travel movie, but we were pushing on toward the midpoint, and not only had we not learned the rules, but we had been given no opportunity to.

There was no convenient time travel manual. None of us were physicists. Even when we perused the Internet for theories on time travel, we didn’t find anything. We probably needed a special trope for that. Being able to use a search engine would be cheating.

I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that we were in a version of time travel where the rules were less important. Perhaps, as the glowing amulets suggested, we were in a magical version—or worse, a cosmic horror version.

I waited on bated breath to find out what Camden would have to say. Heck, I waited on bated breath to find out if Camden would end up being an NPC or not.

Anna swore he wouldn’t.

“So we need to get some rest,” Bobby said. He was talking about him and his dogs because they were going to take the night shift. “Try not to make too much noise. Shasta is just way too curious for her own good.”

We nodded, and I stopped recording.

■ STOP

▶ PLAY SEP 24, 2018 16:53:42

I sat down with the camera to rewatch footage from the drag race disaster.

The footage of the trip through time had appeared as nothing but static—but not the type of static created by the device. It was a visual kaleidoscope too complex for the camera’s lens to focus on, too compressed for its memory to record, and too hectic to make any sense of.

Luckily, as soon as we arrived on the street with the drag race, the camera started working again. And as I watched the footage, I started to see the very thing I was afraid of.

This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

There was a man in a fedora and a trench coat holding an old video camera—one much bigger than mine.

He was hardly fifty feet away from us, and we hadn’t seen him when we were originally there. In fact, I suspected that he wasn’t there when we showed up. It was only later, through time travel efforts of his own, that he arrived—and our recording changed to accommodate that.

But as I watched the film, the man never paid us much mind. He never focused the camera on us or even stared at us.

Was it possible that he had not chased us to this point in time, but rather came here of his own accord because history said that there was a mass death event?

Was it that simple?

There was an easy way to find out—because we had brought with us all of the tapes that Camden had stolen from them and that Anna had hidden in the wall.

I could simply check.

■ STOP

So I did.

Sure enough, there were changes. An extra tape could be found inside the bag we had put all the tapes in, and this one said racing lane. Of course, that title also appeared on the manifest Logan had written of all the tape titles, but that didn’t mean anything—because the manifest itself would change as the past did.

Clearly, this universe used the trope where human memory doesn’t change when the past changed even though other markers of the past do.

That was awfully convenient.

In fact, when I checked the book of Carousel’s biggest tragedies, I saw that there was now a listing for the drag race accident.

I sat back, put my head against the wall, and breathed deeply.