A selection from "The Time Traveler" by Vincent L. Scarsella

The Time Traveler

by Vincent L. Scarsella

I

Late October, 2004:  A Deathbed Revelation

O

n his deathbed, my father finally revealed the secret of the stone sarcophagus.

For ninety years, the hulking tomb had lain against the far wall of a locked chamber in the low, dank cellar of our family’s sprawling five-bedroom country home. My grandfather had built the place in a rural hamlet about forty miles southeast of Buffalo, New York after immigrating to America in 1914 from his ancestral home in Macedonia. It was his plan to grow grapes and raise goats on the gentle rolling hills on which the house was built. When it was finished, he sent for my grandmother, and his four young children (two boys and two girls, excluding my father, who wasn’t born until 1925). They took a steamship on a three-week journey across the Atlantic Ocean to join him.

Shipped with them, at considerable expense, was the stone tomb.

Long after his older brothers and sisters had left home, father remained behind to take care of his parents as they grew old and sick. Grandmother died in 1947, three years after Grandfather had passed, and father naturally inherited the house. 

And years later, even after my older sister, Constance, and I had grown up and left home, father stubbornly refused to sell the house although it was clearly too big for mother and him.

I knew this steadfast refusal to leave was because of the stone tomb.

I was at a conference in San Antonio when a secretary from my firm left a grim message on my hotel room telephone that my father had suffered another stroke. Reaching his doctor, I was given little hope. He might be gone by the time I made it back home.

I booked the next available flight and arrived at the hospital around midnight.

“He’s been asking for you,” said the plump matronly RN at the nurse’s station with a tired smile. The ward was eerily quiet.

“How’s he doing?” 

She shook her head, not good, then pointed down a long hallway.

I hurried to his room but stood back in the doorway for a time. There was no one at his bedside. Mother had died three years ago and my older sister, Constance, had left for parts unknown twenty years before that. All my father’s brothers and sisters were long dead, and whatever family remained in the old country had grown estranged from their American kin.

Finally, I stepped into the room. At his bedside, I found him awake, his eyes wide open. Seeing me, he smiled.

“Damie,” he whispered.

“Hi, Dad.” I kissed his forehead. He was cold as ice. His gaunt, pale appearance made it obvious that he was weak, close to death.

“I must tell you something,” he whispered with sudden urgency.  “A secret. Before I die. Something I should have told you years ago.” 

“Father, please,” I said to him. “Save your strength.”

“The tomb,” he went on, “in the cellar.”

I nodded.

“I must tell you what it is,” he said, then sighed. “I have not been given enough time to complete my duty. And I fear that Constance…”  He trailed off momentarily, remembering something. “I fear she is never coming back.”

I edged closer to him, frowning.

“The tomb,” he said, swallowing, his gaunt eyes boring down upon me now, “what it is, Damie, is a time machine.”

It took a moment for what he said to register.

“Time machine?”

“Yes, Damie,” he said. “Not like the kind in science fiction movies. The tomb is a vessel for transporting a person through time–day-by-day.”  Father swallowed, drew in a breath, then continued in a raspy, tired voice: “Inside it, there is a substance, a kind of gel that stops you from aging. It is programmed to awaken the time traveler every seventy-three years, the length of a generation.”

I was about to say something to stop my father’s bizarre narrative. But he never gave me an opening:

“The tomb was invented ten thousand years ago, Damie, by a civilization that was far more advanced, more magical, than ours. That civilization was what is now called Atlantis.”

Frowning, I gazed down at him, not knowing what to say. Surely, this delusion, whatever he was telling me, must be the result of some kind of dementia, a symptom of his latest stroke.

“There is more, Damie,” father continued, “we are descendants of that race. Like so many others in our family the past ten thousand years, I inherited the duty of becoming caretaker for the time traveler once he finally awakens from his long sleep.

“That is to occur, Damie, only six months from now. For seventy-three years I have waited to perform that duty.” Father sighed and anguish filled his eyes. “But the Almighty has not granted me time enough.”

He drew a breath and grasped my hand.

“That duty, Damie, must now fall to you. As it will be your duty to pass that task onto someone else. A son, perhaps.”

Duty? A son? I knew nothing of this duty, and I did not have a son. I wasn’t even married anymore. Karen and I had been divorced ten years already.

“At least,” father continued, gasping momentarily,  “I saw him, Damie. The time traveler. I met him. I was only six years old.” He chuckled to himself, marveling, and it caused a brief coughing fit. “Seventy-three years ago.

“He had just awakened,” he went on, gazing forward, lost in recollection. “Your grandfather took me downstairs into the vault which only the day before had been a place forbidden to me. But that morning, in the dim light of that dark, secret room, I finally saw it, Damie–the tomb. And it was open, Damie. The lid was up.

“Finally, I gazed upon the time traveler himself. He was a shadow hunched over on your great-grandmother’s old rocking chair next to the tomb. One of her shawls was draped over him.  At long last, he looked up at me with kind blue eyes that sparkled even in the dim light. His hair was a thick wave, and his jaw was square and handsome. And his skin, Damie, it was bronze. Bronze! He looked no more than thirty-five–and he was built like some Greek warrior from the old epics, Hector or Achilles.

“This is my son, the next caretaker, grandpa introduced me, and I crept forward and stood before him. The time traveler’s smile was gentle, kind. He put his hand upon my shoulder and asked my name. I noted a foreign edge to his voice, an utterly strange accent. Kosta, I told him. The time traveler patted my head. I am Romal, he said. I think you and I shall become friends.

“But he did not stay with us long enough so that we might truly become friends–only a week. He had last awakened in 1858, in Macedonia, and had stayed awake only three days back then.” Father sighed, deep in memory. “I saw him every day that week,” he finally went on.  “We talked about the present times and the times he had seen.” Then father again sighed. “I remember how sad it was on the day when he reentered the vessel, and was sucked up into the purplish gel. Then, the stone lid lowered, shutting him off from us for a lifetime, not to be awakened again for another seventy-three years.”

Father swallowed and seemed close to tears. After a breath, he continued: “As he went back into the vessel, I remember him smiling and  and telling me that when he next awoke and would see me again, I would be an old man. He hoped that I could tell him that I had led a good and happy life.”

I tried without much success to imagine a man sleeping in the stone tomb in that secret, dark room in the basement of the old house.

“So you must promise me, Damie,” father whispered with some urgency, “that you will be here when the vessel opens six months from now, on the first of May. He will be weak after his long sleep and will need your help. He will also need you to guide his way in this age.”

Doubtless, in the throes of his impending death, father had become delusional. That this odd fantasy must have  settled in his mind to help him make sense of his eccentric father’s incredible waste of money in transporting the massive, gray stone across the ocean all the way from Macedonia and then tending to it so secretively in the long years ever since. I speculated that father had snuck down there one afternoon as a six year old and, in the darkness, fell into a dream in which he had met an imaginary time traveler upon his imaginary exit from the tomb.

“I promise, father,” I said, deciding to humor a dying man his last wish. “I will be here.”

Having revealed the secret at long last, father closed his eyes and fell fast asleep.

While father slept, I sat on a chair at the foot of his bed recalling that Saturday afternoon many years ago when Connie and I had entered the forbidden chamber after mother and father had left for the day to visit her sick cousin in Rochester. It had been Connie’s bold idea to defy the ancient family decree and sneak downstairs to have a look at the stone tomb, or whatever it was, that had been locked up all these years in that secret room. We had, in truth, always been drawn to it like children are always drawn to forbidden things.

“How can we get inside?” I had chided Connie after she proposed the mission.  She was seventeen, five years my senior, and a constant source of annoyance.

There was a heavy combination lock looped through the steel bolt of the room’s thick metal door. No hammer would break it open, and, anyway, to do that would surely doom us, sure to bring our father’s wrath down upon our heads.

“I watched him opening the lock,” Connie said. “I was downstairs last week when Daddy went inside.  I pretended to help mother with laundry but all the while I snuck up and secretly watched him him opening the lock. Somehow, he did not notice me and by sheer luck, I was able to  figure out the combination: 44 to the right, 17 to the left, and 25 to the right again. And after two more complete turns—the lock opens.”

“How do you know you got it right?” I snickered.

“Because it worked, Damie” she answered defiantly. “I opened it.”

“You’ve been inside the room?”

Constance shook her head. Long, ravenous hair, sashayed momentarily across her shoulders while her dark, brown eyes bore upon me. Though I would never admit it to anyone, I was proud to have such a darkly beautiful sister. “No,” she said. “I only opened the door and peeked inside. I did not go in. I–I decided to be nice and wait for you so that we could both go inside together.”

That was bull, and we both knew it. She had not gone further than opening the door a few inches and peering inside that dark, secret room out of pure fear. The room held a stone coffin, or so the family story went. Father’s eldest brother, Dominic, who was a boy of nine back then, had seen it loaded onto the steamship for the trip across the ocean to America. Why had grandfather gone through all the trouble and expense of transporting such a hideous thing  half way around the world to America, and then, after he had deposited it in the basement of his home, never spoken of it again? 

Even more mysterious than that, of course, was what possibly might be in it.

Our cousin, Mikal, had whispered to us during some holiday gathering a couple years ago that the stone tomb was not such a great thing after all, though not explaining how he had come to form such an opinion.

“A big, cold rock,” he had boasted indifferently, then added with a laugh: “Like a giant oyster shell.”

But Mikal’s description had not diminished the tomb’s mystery.  In fact, it served only to heighten our interest in determining what had compelled our grandfather, who was remembered as a deep and serious man, to bring the stone tomb all the way to America if it was nothing more than a big, cold rock. Nor did it answer why there had been such a concerted effort to keep anyone except himself, and later, our father, from its custody and care. Last but not least, Mikal’s story did not answer the seminal question as to what the big, stone tomb might contain.

So Constance and I snuck downstairs that gloomy October afternoon like pirates after some forbidden and cursed treasure. And I remember how she hesitated for a time at the door.

“Open it,” I hissed, daring her. “Open it.”

She rolled the combination, and as the thick lock fell open, we looked at each other like expectant children on Christmas morning.

“The door,” I whispered. “Open it.”

She unclasped the bolt and, with a breath, pushed open the door. It squeaked and revealed nothing but darkness.

“The flashlight,” she said, nodding to the one in my hand. I turned it on and gave it to her.

Connie swallowed as she took it and looked inside the dark room.

“C’mon,” she said and stepped inside.

After we were both fully within the dark chamber, Constance swiveled the narrow beam of the flashlight around until it finally settled upon the stone tomb.

“It is ugly,” Constance commented, and in that, she was right. It had a wet, rough surface and did look like a gigantic oyster, just as cousin Mikal had claimed.

The room was small, and was made even smaller by the foreboding bulk of its stone inhabitant. Suddenly, Constance stepped toward it.

“Careful,” I whispered, and held back. In fact, I reached behind and felt for the cold, steel door.

Constance took four or five furtive steps toward the tomb and then just stood there. Finally, as if on impulse, she stuck out her right hand and touched its rough, gray shell. I let out something like a laugh. She let her fingertips linger there for a time. All I could do was stare, wide-eyed.

“What’s it feel like?” I finally gasped.

After a few seconds, she pulled back her hand.

“There’s, there’s something inside,” she said. “I–I can feel it; something alive in there.”

Constance turned to me, and in the darkness I could see a look of distress and wonder in her eyes. At last, she was able to move, and suddenly walked past me.

“C’mon,” she said.

I scrambled  out of there right on her heels. The door creaked as she closed it shut with a thud and fastened the bolt. Then, she quickly secured the lock.

Upstairs, a few minutes later, Constance tried to explain what she had felt. A presence, a being. A soul. “I could feel it breathing,” she whispered. “It’s thoughts.”

“I want to touch it,” I pleaded.

“No,” she said, “Daddy’s right. We must keep away from it. It was right for them, grandpa and Dad, to keep it locked up from us. Safe.”

I shrugged, not really wanting to sneak down there again and touch that dreadful stone thing.

Never again did I dare try to do it.

Father woke me from this memory with the raspy statement:

“He kept a journal.” When I looked up, he added: “The time traveler.”

He explained that a small safe had been cut into the rough concrete wall behind the stone vessel. In it was the time traveler’s journal, written on something called a stylus, a magical gadget which recorded sound waves–speech, and then played whatever was said in printed words on a dull screen made up of a kind of crystal sand. Another command preserved the words for posterity.

The stylus responded to direction by speech. You told it what to do. “Just say, ‘Next entry’,” father said, and sucked some air into his lungs–he was clearly growing tired now–“and it takes you there.”

“Voice recognition software,” I told him. “We have that. In our computers.”

“The stylus,” father continued, his voice a dry rasp, “contains a record of the time traveler’s experiences each time he has awakened.”

Father made me write down the combination to the safe containing the stylus on a piece of paper. Then, as I was stuffing it into my shirt pocket, he said, “Don’t you need the combination to the lock on the door?”

I frowned, not quite sure what he meant.

“Or did Constance give it to you?”

I could never remember it after the afternoon we snuck down there. Nor did I care to know.

“You know about that?”

“She told me,” he said, “the time I caught her down there.”

I suspected immediately that there was more to that story and that it had something to do with Connie’s mysterious disappearance.

“After that,” he said, “I got a new lock.”

He gave me the combination and then his eyes closed. I gave a start but soon realized that he wasn’t dead but only sleeping. His breathing, however, was barely perceptible.

I went out and asked the nurse to check him. I was worried that perhaps he had slipped into a coma. She hurried back to his room with me and started to check him over. At one point, she opened his eyes and shined a small penlight in them. He squirmed momentarily, groaned.

“He’s alright,” she said. “Sleeping.”

 “Do you think it would be alright for me to leave him for the night?” I asked. “Get a good night’s sleep?”

She gave me a kind smile and said that was a good idea. There was nothing I could do here. You never knew with a stroke victim. They could last a day or a year or ten. Of course, if anything happened, she’d call. I gave her my number and left.

An hour later, the nurse called to tell me that my father had passed away in his sleep.