Time Travel House Story

 

As the blue temporal light around Daddy’s time machine vanished, Adan and I found ourselves in a little garage—one I knew well.

“Eruanna, you mean that these ‘disturbances’ are coming from your home?”

“Looks like it—I found out just before the dragon cornered us. Wow, that seems like a long time ago.”

“Indeed, but where are they coming from, specifically?”

I took out the Portable Anomaly Detector, invented by my younger brother, and turned it on. However, it flashed a red ‘LOW BATTERY’ signal at me, then turned off again. “Darn it, the PAD’s dead. I don’t know where exactly they’re coming from.”

“Then we shall search for the source ourselves. These disturbances must be stopped before more harm is done.”

Adan and I left the secret garage, going into Daddy’s library. If Daddy had been there, I could’ve asked him for help in finding the source. But since he wasn’t, we went upstairs. We’d arrived at night, and all the Christmas lights were on. No one was around.

“We’ll split up,” Adan said, “and search individually.”

“Right.” Then, as I started to go, “If you meet anybody, tell them to watch out for rogue rifts!”

I poked my head into my parents’ room and said “Hello?” The dark room was empty. However, I did see, through the window, the colourful Christmas lights on the porch. But something seemed off. Perhaps it was the fact that their light was shining straight up, in long, blurry streaks.

I ran outside onto the porch, hoping it was an optical illusion of the window blinds. But it was the same outside. I looked up the length of the strange glowing streaks, and found their destination: a small, blue rift, hovering in the rafters. And it didn’t seem to be vanishing.

I noticed some loud thumps and sounds of children screaming and laughing, somewhere inside the house. At last, signs of human life! I walked around the porch (to check if anyone was out there), then went back in. Sure enough, the girls were jumping on the bigger bed in our loft bedroom. I went up the stairs, hoping to ask a few questions. After they stopped jumping.

“Oh, hey, Grace!” said Abi, the oldest of my three sisters, and the only one not hopping around.

“Jar-Jar!” squealed the youngest, Sarah, and bounced off the bed to hug my leg.

“Hey. Girls, I wanted to ask…” I trailed off, noticing the crack in the wall. “Wait, what are you doing?”

“Kate and me are going in the secret passages in the attic!”

“To set up our secret clubhouse!” added Kate, the next youngest.

“Well, make sure you watch your step, or you’ll fall through the kitchen ceiling. Also, stop jumping on the bed.”

“Sure,” said Abi, pushing open the secret door further.

“Before you do that, though, where’s Daddy?”

“I don’t know. I think he went to the store.”

I threw up my hands and plopped down on my bed. “Of course. We would get back when he’s not here.”

“What do you mean ‘we’?”

“Adan and I,” I said quickly. “Now—”

My answer was met by surprised chatter. “Mr. Adan?”

“At our house?”

“Yes, yes, but we’re really busy!” Both girls groaned. “Look, there’s been a bunch of rifts in time and space, and they’re bringing all kinds of dangerous stuff into different times. And Adan and I have gotta fix it.”

“There’s a bunch of rifts?”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Um, first, yes. Second, stuff like dragons. Third, I can’t tell you everything right now.”

Abi groaned again. “You never tell us anything!”

“Well, this time, it’s because it’s super dangerous and I have to fix it before something worse happens! Not because of spoilers. But hey, I’ll tell you later, and it’s gonna be great, I promise. Have you seen any rifts around here?”

She shook her head, and Kate said “Uh-uh.”

“Well, be on the lookout.”

“Why don’t you check the PAD?” Abi asked.

I held it up. “Dead. I gotta get Nate to recharge it.”

“What about—”

“Look, I really gotta hurry, okay? So, uh, I’ll be back in a little bit.” Without waiting for an answer, I started back down the stairs. I felt kind of bad for leaving them in the lurch, but this was important. So I turned my attention back to the task at hand.

I met Adan coming out of a room off the hall—one I knew as William’s. “Anything?” I asked.

“Not that I could see. I met your brother, and although he was preoccupied with decoding a set of what appeared to be runes, he told me he would keep a sharp eye out.”

“Good. We need all the help we can get.”

Adan decided to look outside, and started for the back door (our main entry). After he left, I frowned. “Where is this stupid thing?” I muttered to myself. “I mean, I figured it’d be big and obvious—like a metavortex, or some kind of machine. But we can’t seem to find it anywhere!”

Suddenly, there was the sound of a small explosion down the hallway. Normally, this wouldn’t surprise me, since I knew where those sounds came from, and who (if not what) caused them. But this time, it gave me a brainstorm. “Of course!” I crossed quickly to the second door on the left and yanked it open. “Nate!”

My younger brother, whose room it was, turned around slowly to face me with his head tilted back. “Yes?”

“Okay, where is it?” I held out my arms.

“Where is what?”

“The big invention or program you’re working on. You know, the one that’s tearing rifts throughout the space-time continuum?”

“I’m not…t making anything like that!”

“Oh no?” I stepped past my younger brother to a picture-curtain covering most of the opposite wall. It depicted a bunch of steampunk machinery. I pulled the curtain back, revealing… a bunch of steampunk machinery, all inside a hidden workroom. At the front of said room was a machine I’d not seen there before, with several flashing lights on it. “Then what do you call this?”

“That’s not anything that could make a tear in the space-time continuum. I tested it.” And he held up his own PAD.

“Well, something is making these rifts, and the source is definitely on our property. This is the first thing I’ve seen that even looks like it could cause it.”

“But it’s not!” he said impatiently. Then he calmed down and said carefully, “It’s to track JPEG Image!”

“Oh, yeah, those guys. But look, do you think you could shut it off for a minute, just to see if anything changes with the rifts?”

“Weeeellll… I guess I can turn it off for a little while.” A few punched buttons and an unplugging later, the machine was off. I was about to ask Nate if he could check the temporal energy, but I never got the chance. Suddenly, we heard the sound of screaming coming from the loft upstairs. Except this time, they weren’t screams of laughter.

We ran out into the living room. Blue light flickered across the walls from somewhere in the loft. I dashed up the stairs as fast as I could, leaving Nate behind.

When I got up there, Sarah was screaming loudest, huddling in the corner by the stairs. There was a slightly large, jagged rift, halfway in the secret passage. Kate was trying to run against the gravitational pull of the rift, slowly failing, and Abi was scrunched up on the floor, holding tight to the leg of the bed.

I didn’t wait a moment. Grabbing onto the railing, I inched as quickly as possible toward Kate. Closer, closer… I grabbed her arm, and pulled her back against me. “Kate, are you okay?” After she stopped screaming, she looked up at me and nodded. “I need you to grab onto the railing and go back toward Sarah. And don’t let go until you’re right at the stairs. Got it?”

She nodded again, and grabbed the rail. Once she was on her way, my focus shifted to Abi. She was far out of my reach, so I couldn’t grab her. I noticed Nate, now standing by the stairs, staring at the rift. “Hey, Nate!” I shouted. “Can you tell from your PAD how long this thing will stay open?”

He looked down at the Detector in his hands and pressed a few buttons. After a moment, he replied “Could be up to ten minutes! Unless something goes through, anyway!”

“Unless something goes through? That’s it!” I looked down at the trusty-but-dead PAD in my hand, then threw it hard at the rift. My aim was a little off, but it got caught in the gravitational pull anyway, and soon vanished through. The rift began to warp and slowly shrink.

At that moment, and to my horror, Abi’s hand slipped. I thought she was going to fall, but she clung to the bed leg with one hand. “Grace! Grace, help me!”

“Oh no, what do I do?” Then I stammered “T-try to hold on just a little longer!”

“I can’t! Help me!”

Her grip failed. She fell toward the warping, flickering rift. There was nothing I could do.

Suddenly, someone leaped past me and barreled straight toward Abi. He caught her, then jerked up, and when he was closest to the rift, banked off the sloped roof and soared out of the way. They landed on my bed with a thump. A second later, the rift vanished.

Before I fully processed what had happened, I heard Abi squeal one name that filled me with relief. “Daddy!”

The next few minutes were a blur of hugs, a few tears, and a lot of people being asked if they were okay. In the midst of this, Adan returned, and the story had to be told him (albeit briefly). Once everything was said, Daddy turned to me.

“So what have you been up to?”

“Uh, it’s a long story. But Daddy, that rift wasn’t the only one.”

“I know, and they’re getting worse. Much worse than when it started a few days ago.”

“Wait, you knew?”

“Yes. I’ve kept an eye on the temporal fluxing, but I wasn’t able to check it today until about an hour ago. That was when I noticed. I was looking for the source until I got the incoming.”

Adan looked confused. “Incoming?”

“An alert when something time travels to our house,” I explained.

“I didn’t want to take a chance, so I came back. Looks like it was just you and Adan.”

“Yeah. I guess you didn’t find the source, then?”

“No, I found it. I didn’t have time to check it out before I got the incoming, though. I’m going back as soon as you’re all settled.”

“I want to come.”

“I admit, I feel obligated as well,” added Adan.

“Why’s that?”

“We’ve been through a lot to find the source. Why stop now?”

Daddy smiled.

--

We soon arrived at the spot—a spring in the woods near the southwestern edge of our land. But we found a surprise waiting for us.

“There’s nothing here?” I looked around in confusion.

Daddy’s brow furrowed. “This has to be the place. The readings are off the charts, and the temporal energy trails all lead here.”

“Perhaps that vehicle is of some import.” And Adan pointed to the nearby hill.

“Nahh. That old wreck has been there since long before we moved here. Daddy, are you sure?”

“Positive.”

“I shall search the opposite bank,” Adan said, and started off.

“I don’t understand!” I said to Daddy. “Shouldn’t there be something here? This place looks dead, at least with temporal energy.”

“Maybe. Unless—”

He never finished. Adan’s cry and a growing light alerted us to the fact that a rift was opening: right beneath our feet. I held onto Daddy as everything around us disappeared…

 ---

Well, Happy New Year, all! Or very nearly, since the new year won’t come for an hour or two (by our time at least).

I thought it might be fitting to have, in the last hours before the big time change, a story about time travel. And I hope you enjoyed it!

This is actually the answer to a challenge my mother posed to us kids several months back. It was when we first moved to our current house. She challenged us to write a “time travel house story”—a story that involved both time travel and our new house or something about it. I came up with a few ideas, several of which ended up in here. But a few… well, let’s just say they remain to be seen.

And yes, there is more of this story yet to come in the new year! The next part will be posted around the end of January, and then, the final part of this entire series will be posted in February. I hope you’ll join us for it!

Tomorrow night, or at least, sometime in the coming week, there will be a more regular New Year’s post. In the meantime, I hope you all have a wonderful New Year’s Eve.

 

What do you think of this series that you’ve read in 2018? And Happy New Year, everyone!