Shift (ChronoShift Trilogy) (6 page)

Red had a small bunkhouse in back of the main house where he put Mark up for the night.  The mattress was a lumpy mess, but it had been months since Mark had slept in any kind of a bed at all, so his back groaned its thanks anyway as he laid down.

Yet, sleep evaded him.  The night ticked on as he dwelt on the oddness of his predicament.  He didn’t want to be stuck in a year he didn’t belong to.  Then again, why would he want to go home to his own time when modern society had rejected him?

There was also the fact that he was penniless in both worlds.  At least in 1890, his wages couldn’t be garnished.  Plus, no income tax.  That was definitely a bonus.

If he were honest with himself, he'd grown tired of living alone in the wild.  He was glad he'd done it though.  There was something sublimely cathartic about surviving off the land.  More importantly, it had given him time to heal.

Now that he was back around people, however, he realized just how much he’d missed the company of others.  Maybe the life of a hermit wasn’t really his cup of tea after all.

He just wished he could be around people from his own time.  It was hard to explain, but in a way he felt like these people were already dead, like he was walking around with ghosts.  Every single person he met in this time would be dead by 2011.  Unless he met a baby who lived to be a hundred and twenty years old.

It was a weird mental hang up that he would have to get past.  They weren’t the walking dead.  They were real people, flesh and blood.  They were vibrant, full of life, and waiting on life still to be lived.  Alive. 

Mark took a look at his watch.  He’d figured out that one of the tiny side buttons was just a light that illuminated the displays so they could be read in the dark.

5:07 AM.

It was amazing how the device kept pace with the movement of time in whichever “time” he was in, just like a regular watch.

The displays weren’t glowing red anymore.

That meant he could get out of here.

A sudden, hard knocking at the bunkhouse door startled him.

“Up an at’em, Carpen!  We got work to do.”

It was Red.  Spontaneously, Mark pressed the red button.

No flashing or beeping this time, just the now familiar feeling of shifting accompanied by a new and curious sliding sensation.

He was still in the bunkhouse, but now he stood several feet to the left of where he’d been a second ago.  A ruined chest-of-drawers occupied his previous position.

Was the watch smart enough to know to shift his physical position so he wouldn’t appear in the middle of a piece of furniture?  He hadn’t even considered the possibility that the space you were going to occupy in another time might already be occupied by something else.  It was potentially a very fatal, and thus disconcerting, risk.  Could this device be so well-designed that it took into account things like that?  That would mean the watch had to know with great specificity the size and shape of his body.  For that matter, he hadn’t really thought about it till now, but it always brought his clothes along with him, which was a feature he was very thankful for.

It was able to see into the target time before he arrived and detect if there was an object in the way and then adjust his landing accordingly.  Amazing. 
Who
had
designed this thing anyway?

Red’s bunkhouse was clearly much older now.  It looked like no one had been in here for at least 20 to 30 years.  The walls were full of dry-rot, and the floor was gone.  Junk and worn-out furniture was piled throughout.  It smelled of ancient must.  The roof had partially caved in and spider webs were the only adornment.  It was flat-out depressing.

Yet, joy surged at the knowledge that the watch was indeed working again.  Either he’d jiggled something back into place, or it could only perform a certain number of times before overheating.

Battling his way through the sticky webs and pieces of furniture that even Goodwill wouldn’t take, Mark climbed his way to the rickety door and got out.  Tall weeds and bushes surrounded the building.  He only thought of it as a building because just a few moments before it had been a nice little bunkhouse with a comfortable bed inside it.  In 2011, it looked like a trash heap.

He turned to face the main house.  Unlike the bunkhouse, it didn’t appear abandoned, but was definitely in bad need of paint and repair.  A screened-in porch in the back and another full room on the left side had been added by somebody over the years.  Trees took up most of the property now and grew thick on what had been cleared farmland just a few minutes ago.

He moved to the front of the house.  The dirt road was now a paved highway again.  It had been widened, moved, and now took up most of what had been Red’s front yard.

It was mid-morning and just because he was curious, Mark knocked on the front door.  He wanted to see if the people here knew about the Johnsons.

For a long time, there was no answer.  He was about to give up when the door finally cracked ajar.  An elderly woman peeked through.

“Can I he’p you,” she croaked.

“Uh, yes, ma’am.  I’m seeking information on a family that owned this house a long time ago.  Would you know anything about them?”

She squinted terribly, trying to process his request.  “No, my family has owned this house for over a hundred years,” she replied, “Nobody else has ever lived here, young man.”

He got excited.  Could she be Red’s daughter?  No, this woman was probably in her 80's and would have been born around 1920.  Too late to have been the young girl he’d met, but maybe a granddaughter?

“Is your name Johnson?”

“Name’s Burgess...Mary Burgess.  I’m sorry.”

He was taken aback a bit.  “Perhaps, there is a Johnson in your family history, somebody’s maiden name?”

She opened the door a little wider and shook her head sadly.  She could sense his disappointment.

“Nope.  Sorry I can’t be of more he'p.  This here prop’rty belonged to by father’s father, and his name was Burgess.  I come from a long line of Burgesses.”

“Ma’am, I’m sorry to be asking you all these questions out of the blue, but do you know what year your grandfather purchased this house.”

“Well, not off hand, no....but I might be able to look through some of my things and see....”  She scrutinized him, but the loneliness that pervades the lives of the elderly won out over caution for a stranger.  Anything for company.  “Come on in.  I’ll make you some tea and look through my papers.”

He stepped inside.  The difference in the interior decor was stark.  Leah had kept her home bright and cheery and clean.  Since then, it had obviously been redecorated many times and the current wall-paper was depressingly dark and faded, curling at some of its edges.  Mary apparently hadn’t been able to clean much for a while as dust covered most surfaces in these front two rooms.  Newspapers were piled on the stairs and in the floors.

She sat him down on a sagging, dusty couch.  A slender brown cat rubbed against his legs as she made the tea.  She brought him a cup of it on a little white saucer and then went upstairs and rustled around for a few minutes.  The hot tea was surprisingly good.

She returned, holding up an old, yellowed document triumphantly.

“I found the original deed to the house,” she rasped.  “I’ve kept it in my safe all these years, since father died.  Here’s your Johnson family, young man.  Grandpa Burgess bought this house from somebody named Johnson in March of 1891.”

“Really, 1891?  Was it Red Johnson who sold the house?”

“Nope.”

Mark set his teacup down.

“It was a woman.  A Leah.”

“Leah Johnson?”

“Yep.”

Gently, he took the document from her and examined it himself.  It said exactly what she said it did, and he didn’t like what that implied.

***

As fortune would have it, the White County courthouse was located just a few blocks away.  A short walk would hopefully reveal a little more about the sale of the Johnson home.

The historic courthouse was a square brick building standing two stories tall in the middle of a large, rounded median in the center of the town square.  Its facades were punctuated by four chimneys, one at each corner of the roof, and a number of white window frames resting on grey stone sills.  The city had surrounded the grounds with vibrant flowerbeds.  He was chagrined to discover it had been declared an historical landmark at some point and turned into a museum. 

He supposed he could go back in time and visit the old courthouse when it was younger and still in use.

He grinned. 
What a novelty.
   As a lover of history and historical places, the possibilities fascinated him.

            Suspecting the watch could overheat with too much use, however, meant he needed to limit the number of times he employed it for the time being.  He passed the old building by and continued a block further to the modern courthouse.  Its walls were muted with stacks of thin, whitish-grey bricks and looked to have been built in the 1960's or 70's.   The clerk who managed property records and other such items was thin, young and quiet.  His hair was a greasy dark brown, and Mark sincerely hoped the oil was from some kind of hair gel.

“1891?  Not too may records left from that time.  Whatever’s left would be over at the historical society.”  The clerk pushed his glasses back up the ridge of his nose, eyeing Mark and his clothing warily.

Uh-oh. 
His clothing.  He was back in 2011, but now his attire was hopelessly antiquated.

Mark winced at the oversight.  There were more tricks to time travel than met the eye.

The man wrinkled his nose a little.  Mark realized he must stink as well, and here he'd been judging the clerk's hygiene.

“What kind of records were you needing exactly?” The clerk asked.

“I’m not really sure....any kind of documents that might deal with the transfer of a piece of land.”

“There wouldn’t have been much in the way of documentation from that time anyway.  Deeds were sometimes kept by families, so the county might not have records of it. Even if they had, like I said, the older stuff is gone for the most part.”

“Okay, guess I’m out of luck.  Thanks anyway.”

            “You know....now, that I think about it.  We may have something after all.  An old coot by the name of Bridges from the other side of town came in here a few years ago with boxes and boxes of newspapers he’d collected over the years.  I think some of those papers might have gone back as far as that.  We threw a lot of the later stuff away because the library already had it recorded on microfiche, but we did save the older papers.  Do you want to take a look at those?”

It was a long shot, but why not?  He nodded and followed the man down into the basement.  Rows and rows of cardboard boxes and filing cabinets formed a maze in the dank, musty space.  The young clerk directed him to a specific pile of boxes in a corner.

“They’re organized by year?”

“Yup.  Not sure what the guy thought was so important about the things, but he invested a lot of time in them.”

“Thanks.  I guess I’ll start looking.”  The clerk abandoned him to the search, and he dove in.  His hopes rose greatly when he saw there were newspapers as old as 1886.  It was amazing they were still legible.

It wasn’t very long before he found the ones he was looking for.  He’d met Red on the 7
^th
of September, so he retrieved the newspaper dating Sept. 6
^th
of that year and also the next one from Sept. 13
^th
.  Nothing of interest appeared in the Sept. 6
^th
issue, but there it was, plain as day, right on the front page of the Sept. 13
^th
.

Red Johnson Killed Clearing Land

Apparently, five days after Mark met him, Red had been killed by a falling tree that toppled onto him while he was trying to cut it down.  There was nothing more in the next few issues of the paper, but about two months later, the editor made a call on all “good Christians” in the community to extend a helping hand to the Johnson family who’d “so recently fallen on hard times”.  That was all he could find.  There was no report of the house being sold, but that probably hadn’t been a news item.  Most likely, Leah had been forced to sell in 1891 since Red was no longer around to provide for her and the kids.

He did an internet search at the local library to try and scrounge up info about what had happened to the Johnsons.   John Johnson and Michael Johnson were such generic names it proved impossible to find anything pertinent.  However, when he tried Leah Johnson combined with Daisy, he stumbled on the genealogy website of a man from Santa Rosa, California.  Little Johnny Johnson had been his grandfather, which made Red his great-grandfather.

What few biographical sketches the man had on the site told Mark that Leah had become destitute a few years after Red’s death and moved up north to Chicago to try and find work.  All three children had been placed in an orphanage after she died in 1896.