Remember Me (4 page)

My mind started to race as a desperate sense of panic began to climb up the back of my spine. It was all to do with what I was observing, or better yet, not seeing. I knew this spot very well, but it was not the way that it should be. It was all wrong. The junk pile and the mower were gone! Where the grove of pine trees should have been were a cluster of white S 22 S

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ash trees instead. The field off to the north still looked the same. The large blue grain silo, so prominent on the north horizon, wasn’t there any longer. I had no immediate explanation for what I was observing. I was fairly certain that my mind wasn’t playing tricks on me. I recalled the tingling feeling of the electricity on my skin. I replayed the memory of the lightning dancing in the sky. I began to shake as I remembered the sinister, dark black space pulling at me.

I paid no attention to the weakness in my legs and tried to stand up. Unsteadily, I made it all the way to a standing position. I turned to face what I already dreaded might be true.

Some inherent instinct prepared me for what I would see or not see. It was horrifically confirmed, our house was gone! In the place of the beautiful house Amy and I shared, there was the old run-down farm house which had once occupied the land.

I’d seen it before in the pictures the realtor had once shown us.

It had been torn down sometime in the summer of nineteen ninety-four so the new owners could build their house. Amy and I would later buy it in the summer of two-thousand and eight. I had no great revelations, just an innate understanding; I was no longer where I was before the incident when whatever it was had occurred. I’d read enough books, watched my share of science fiction shows, to be fairly certain that I’d somehow been displaced in time. Where I was, I knew. When I was, I had no idea.

I sat down on the stump of some long ago cut down tree. A stump that should not be there and it wasn’t from where I just came. So where—no when was I? Maybe it was more a where?

How could I even be certain of anything? The possibilities raced through my head as I stared toward the house that shouldn’t be there. If it had been some form of time travel, then I was in the past. It was a past that had to be at least prior to nineteen ninety-four. That was a start. It could be inner-dimensional S 23 S

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travel, like the show, “Sliders,” the same time and place, just a different reality. Neither option promised me much hope. I turned and looked back towards the spot where I remembered the god-forsaking, black hole appearing.

I rose from the stump and moved towards the place the

black hole, wormhole, time tunnel, or whatever it was had appeared. I could find no evidence it had ever been here. The ground was unmarked, and even the metallic scent was beginning to fade from the air. Where I had been shot out the exit, was nearly fifteen feet from where the spot originated.

One of those funny life thoughts crossed my mind, “I had always dreamed of becoming a writer, now here I was living an amazing story line.” Then a very serious and totally non-funny notion rose from the pit of my stomach. I bent forward and retched again as my full predicament dawned on me—Amy

was gone…no I was gone! My knees buckled, and I felt her absence like nothing I’d ever felt before in my entire life. I fell hard to the ground. Like a child, I searched the heavens and implored God to send me back. I cried out to God as much for myself as for those I dearly loved. They would not understand what had happened to me, the pain and misery they would

endure in my unexplained absence. I had to somehow find my way back. A mental hand slapped me across my face. Panic and fear would not help me to understand my predicament. I needed answers. This was only the beginning of the tumultu-ous pain I knew I would surely endure.

I wiped my face, rose, and steadied myself on quivering

legs. I needed direction and I needed hope, most of all I needed answers. The answers would not be found where I was standing. I started walking up and over the slight rise. I made my way towards the dilapidated farm house. A multitude of weeds had sprouted everywhere. Where my beautiful lawn had once been a field of rough grass and weeds now thrived. A dirt lane, S 24 S

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also heavily covered by weeds and neglect, stretched off down the slope towards the gravel road. Bishop Ave was the name of the gravel road where the lane intersected it. To the west of the house there was an old barn. The roof had long collapsed in the middle. Now the barn sat silently in retrospect. Somewhere to the east there might be another me eating supper with his wife or still living at home with his parents. As for me, I am thoroughly lost and alone in another time.

I shook the cobwebs from my head and moved towards the

farm house. I needed to find shelter for the night. A broken board with a sinister looking nail almost claimed my right foot.

If I hadn’t stumbled over a concealed piece of barbed-wire, I would have surely stepped directly on the nail. As it was, I only damaged my pride when I fell, and it was my hand that missed the nail by inches. I was now more careful and watched where I was walking. After evading a few other traps and pitfalls, I made it to the back door of the house. I thought about knocking. It wasn’t because I thought there was anyone living there.

I wanted to scare away any unwanted creatures that might be calling the place home. A skunk bath would probably put me over the edge.

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A Mother’s love.

May 23rd, 1985

It had been
an uncomfortable night, full of nightmares and hopeless realizations. Now that I had made it through the night, I thought back to yesterday’s event that left me lifeless.

The black hole that sucked me through could possibly open again, only this time going back the direction I’d come from. It was more wishful than plausible. Yesterday when I stood outside the old farm house with dusk coming on, I didn’t have the foggiest notion as to where to go or what to do. I knew I should stay close to the spot where the wormhole through time had first appeared, as I came to believe that is what it was. My prospects for the night weren’t many, so it was to the old farm house that I ventured. It had never been glorious in its heyday. The best way to describe it was modest and useful.

Most of the windows were now gone. The paint had long ago faded and been chipped away by time and the elements. The front door was still mostly intact. The backdoor led into the kitchen and was splintered and askew on its hinges. I chose the lesser of efforts and pushed my way in through the backdoor. I prepared for the worst as I entered the shadows of the kitchen.

I was exhausted and unsure of anything concrete. I was

hungry, but I doubted my stomach would keep anything down.

There wasn’t any food to eat, unless I happened to find an un-opened can of beans lying around. My headache was returning with a vengeance. I hit the doorframe with my shoulder, as I S 26 S

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tried moving from the kitchen to the living room. It caused me to wince with a new pain and to nearly lose my balance.

I needed to find a place to sit down before I passed out. My vision was quickly dimming as the throbbing intensified in my head. Peering into the room at the end of the living room, I spied a stuffed, straight back chair. I headed towards it. There was a disgusting looking old mattress tossed in the corner of the room, opposite the east window. It reeked of too many smells, and “God knows what,” to attempt to use. The old arm chair was the only other piece of furniture in the room.

My best guess was that someone had picked it up alongside a dumpster and brought it out here.

I became extra cautious, thoroughly checking the chair

over for needles or razor blades, even glass shards. It was much better to be safe than sorry. By the time the sun went down the slight breeze through the broken window caused me to shiver. I considered starting a fire, but only for a brief moment. It wouldn’t be a good idea for many reasons. The house might go up in a raging blaze or someone would see the smoke and come to check it out. It was definitely something I wasn’t prepared to deal with.

I ended up tossing the mattress in front of the broken window to help block out the chill. I moved the chair out of the direct air flow, passing between the window and the living room. It helped, but during the night sleep had been a rare commodity. My mind was the culprit more than anything. It wasn’t only the pounding in my head that kept me awake. The chair was uncomfortable and I never felt warm. I sat in the chair, I tried to lie in the chair, and I tried to huddle in the chair. I prayed for any kind of sleep. Even the nightmares I would surely dream had to be better than the reality I found myself in. My mind raced with the unexplained. When desperation started to set in I thought of Amy. It was her love that S 27 S

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I held on to for warmth. Sometime in my thoughts of her, I finally found sleep.

Now in the morning light, the inside of the house was

modestly better than what the previous night’s darkness could barely reveal. It was a small, cracker-box style, two-story house. I had chosen to situate myself into the downstairs bedroom. Last night I wasn’t too sure of the dependability of the steps leading up to the second floor. Looking at them now, in the daylight, it was most definitely a good thing I hadn’t tested their resilience. I wasn’t the first or wouldn’t be the last person to pay this old house a visit. It came back to me, the conversation with the real estate agent, and her comments on the condition of the place prior to the Ervins who bought it.

Supposedly kids from the local high schools and others would come out here to drink, do drugs or whatever. It was just far enough away from the main highway and nosey neighbors.

There were no other farm houses in sight; the closest was over a mile away. Seclusion was most assuredly the run-down farm house’s best attribute.

I tried to rationalize all that I knew and suspected. Time crawled by slowly. I paced the downstairs, lost in my thoughts.

Time was something I could no longer track. I glanced at my watch. I wasn’t sure if it was showing the correct time. My cell phone had been in my pocket, but I had it shut off. When I turned it on, it still displayed four out of five bars of power. As a phone it was useless. I could access the games, but the main screen readout haunted me with a “no service” message. The clock wouldn’t change off of the blinking, “four forty-two.”

The one thing it did have was a memory card full of pictures I’d taken with the phone’s camera. I spent some time looking at the pictures. I lost it, and sobbed uncontrollably when I came across the picture of my granddaughter, Megan, in her Halloween costume.

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I shut the phone off—a notion inside my brain stabbed at me. I might need it someday and I better conserve the battery life. It just might prove to be important. All night long the theories of my plight had channeled their way into and out of my mind. “I’m not in Kansas anymore.” It was the humorous cliché I’d spent a lifetime using. Only now it wasn’t so funny.

Before I’d finally dozed, cold and contemptuous, I was swearing out loud at God. I chastised him for putting me in this place and taking away everything I loved. Then I turned around and asked for his forgiveness and for his salvation.

I rubbed the back of my neck as I walked around the interior of the farm house in the morning light. The room I slept in once had flowered wallpaper, pink tinted. Most of the wallpaper was now long gone. There were only remnants remaining here and there, some hanging in deathly strips. The walls were streaked with old glue and age. Beer cans were scattered around the room. In one corner of the room, many had been neatly stacked. From the pungent smell of them they probably hadn’t been there long. I decided that last night would be my one and only night staying in this farm house. I explored the rest of the downstairs rooms. It gave me something to do as I tried to make sense of my predicament. The writer in me wanted to speculate about the people who had once

lived here. What had their story been? Part of this tale I already knew. Marge Duitsman had lived in the house, up to the day she died in nineteen seventy-four. Her husband had preceded her in death twelve years earlier. They farmed the hundred and sixty acres the house overlooked until the day Herb died. They never had any children, and all of Herb’s family preceded him in death. Marge had a younger sister, and the farm eventually went to her. She lived in Georgia and rented the ground out until she passed away in nineteen ninety-two. Marge’s granddaughter, Nancy, was the current owner of the farm ground, S 29 S

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and she continued to rent it out. Nancy was also the one the Ervins convinced to sell them the twenty acres that Amy and I would then later buy from them with the new house.

During the time between Marge’s death and the Ervin’s

purchase, others had shown interest in buying the place. They could never seem to reach a deal. Some people wanted to turn the homestead into productive farm land; but Marge’s sister wanted it kept as acreage—for some reason. Time did the rest until the Ervins pictured a place in the country, and had the money to spend to make their vision come true.

I tried to get a writer’s sense of Marge as I walked into the kitchen. It would be even better if I could see the upstairs, but I wasn’t going to try the steps. From what I could see, in my mind’s eye, Marge must have been a simple person. The living room had been some previous shade of green. Now it had faded into a streaky, yellowish tint. The kitchen walls were four-shades of dirty white. Some areas were marked with graffiti and several places had holes punched into the wall. Linoleum covered the floor. It had a geometric pattern of squares and circles, and had probably once been white, but was now a muddy brown. Only two of the cupboards had doors on them.

I opened one. On the top shelf, an old mouse nest welcomed me. From out of the blue, a sudden thought struck me. I raced back to the room I’d slept in. I went to the stack of beer cans in the corner and picked up the first one. It was aluminum with a pop top. I turned it so I could read the bottling inscription. I located the brew date and read it in bright silver print; 1984.