Somewhere in Time (34 page)

I stared at the door as I started to pull off my coat. He was neither breaking in nor pounding for admittance. Why? Because he knew what her reaction would be? I looked down suddenly as I felt something hard and circular below the right side pocket of the coat. A hole, I thought. One of the coins I'd gotten in change from the drugstore had fallen through to the lining.

I knew it wasn't important; that fact will haunt me to the end. Yet something made me reach into the pocket, feel around with shaking fingers until I'd found the tear, then, with the other trembling hand, work the coin up until it touched my fingertips. Taking hold of it, I drew it out and looked at it.

It was a 1971 penny.

In that instant, something dark and horrible started gathering inside me. Sensing what it was, I tried to fling the penny from me but, as though it had some ghastly magnetism, I could not release it. I stared at it with mounting dread as it stuck to my fingers with a nightmarish adhesion I could neither understand nor break. I felt myself begin to gasp and tremble as a cloud of aching coldness flooded over me. My heart kept pounding slowly and tremendously as I tried, in vain, to cry out, all sound clutched and frozen in my throat. I screamed, but only in my mind.

There was nothing I could do. That was the most hideous part. I was helpless, knowing even as I stood there, mute and palsied, that connective tissues were being slashed away, cutting me loose from 1896 and her. I tried, with all my will, to remove my unblinking stare from those numbers on the penny but I couldn't. They seemed to pulse into my eyes and brain like waves of negative energy: 1971. 1971. I felt my grasp begin to fail. 1971. No, I pleaded, paralyzed with sick dismay No, please, no! But who was there to hear me? I had brought myself back by this very method of concentrated mental inculcation and now, in one hellish sequence of moments, I was forcing myself back again by staring at that coin, that number. 1971. 1971. Desperately, I tried to force myself to know that it was 1896, November 21, 1896. But I couldn't hold it, there was no way I could hold it. Not with that penny sticking to my fingers, driving that other year into my consciousness. 1971. 1971. 1971 .Why couldn't I get rid of it? I didn't want to go back! I didn't!

Now a kind of shimmering darkness hung around me like a living vapor. Frozen, made of stone, I was barely able to turn my head toward the bed. No; oh, God, dear God! I could barely see her! She was like a figure seen through mist. A groan of anguish sounded in my chest. I tried to move, to reach her, but I couldn't stir; a monstrous, black weight settled on me. No! I tried to fight it off. I wouldn't be driven away from her! With every bit of strength I had remaining, I tried to rid myself of that malevolent coin. It wasn't 1971! It was 1896! 1896!

In vain. The penny remained on my hand like some hideous growth. Defeated, I raised my stricken gaze to look at her again. A cry of terror wrenched my soul. She had almost vanished in the darkness that was swirling all around me, drawing me into itself like some appalling vacuum. For some reason I will never know, I thought in that moment of a woman who once told me about the feeling of a mental breakdown coming on. She had described it as "something" building up inside; something immune to reason and will; something dark and restless and expanding constantly like a spider growing deep inside, weaving a terrible, icy web which, soon, would smother brain and body It was precisely how I felt, impotent, waiting, helpless, feeling its inexorable growth inside me, knowing that I couldn't stop it.

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I opened my eyes. I was lying on the floor. Outside, I heard the distant rumble of the surf.

I sat up slowly and looked around the dark room that had, once, been hers. The bed was empty. Moving infirmly,

I stood and looked at my right hand. The penny was still in it. With a cry of revulsion, I flung it away from me and heard it bounce off the floor. Now you leave me! I thought in dazed hatred. Now that you have forced me back.

I don't know how long I stood there, lifeless, will-less. It might have been hours, though I suspect that it was little more than ten or fifteen minutes. At last, I trudged across the room, unlocked the door, and went into the corridor. There was no one in sight. I looked at myself and saw the suit. I shuddered. The costume, you mean, my mind corrected bitterly.

As I started to walk, all I could think was that because a penny had fallen, unseen, into the lining of the coat and gone back with me, I had lost Elise. The other shocks I could have coped with; it had been the penny, finally, which had forced me back. Like a slow, faulty machine, my brain kept going over that again and again, trying to analyze the horror of it. It hadn't even been my penny but had, obviously, belonged to the man who'd worn this costume last. And because of that-of that!-I'd lost Elise. I'd been with her only minutes ago; the feel and smell of her body were still with me. If I'd remained in bed with her, this wouldn't have happened. In attempting to assure my hold on 1896,1 had broken it completely. And all because of a penny fallen into the lining of a coat. Again and again, my mind went over that, stumblingly, always without result. I couldn't understand it.

I will never understand it.

I'd walked all the way to my room-my 1971 room-before it came to me that I had no key to open the door with. I stared at the door for a long time. The experience of being driven back to 1971 seemed to have drained me of all comprehension. It took a long while before I could assemble enough pieces in my mind to make myself turn away and start downstairs again. I knew I couldn't go to the front desk, couldn't speak, explain; couldn't function as a thinking person. Dazed and empty, I went down the stairs and headed for the back door. Minutes ago, I'd been with her. Yet now it was seventy-five years later. Elise was dead.

And I was dead. That much I comprehended. I went down the porch steps, thinking that I'd walk into the ocean, drown myself, destroy the body as the mind had been destroyed. But I didn't have the strength or will. I walked around the parking lot in aimless patterns. It was raining so faintly I could barely feel the sprinkling on my face; it looked more like descending mist than rain.

I stopped beside a car and looked at it a long time before I realized it was mine. I felt in my pockets with clumsy fingers. At last, I realized that the keys could not possibly be in my pockets and, falling to my knees, reached beneath the body of the car until my fingers came in contact with the small, metal box stuck magnetically to the frame. Pulling it loose, I used the door handle to pull myself up. The knees of my trousers were soaked through but I didn't care. With slow movements, I slid back the top of the box and removed the key.

The car was cold, its windows steamed up. I felt around with the key until I found the ignition-switch opening, then slid it in. I started to turn the key, then slumped back in exhaustion. I didn't have the strength to drive to the bridge and off of it. Didn't have the strength to drive across the parking lot or even start the motor. My head slumped forward and I closed my eyes. Done, I thought. The word repeated itself in my mind, an endless, afflicting awareness. Done. Elise was gone. I had found her but now she was lost. Done. What I had read in those books was true. Done. None of them would be rewritten now. Done. What I had dreaded doing from the start. What I had sworn that I would never do. Done. Her heart unlocked only to be broken.

Done!

I opened my eyes and saw the watch chain looped across my vest. Reaching down, I slipped the watch from its pocket and looked at it. After a while, I thumbed in the stem and gazed at the watch's face. Illumination from a nearby lightpole filtered through the windows, enabling me to see. It was just past four o'clock. In the silence of the car, I could hear the bright, methodical ticking of the watch. As I stared at its face, a grotesque thought scarred my mind. A flipped penny had brought me to San Diego in the first place. A penny had taken me to her. A penny had taken me away: from my love, my only love, my lost love.

My Elise.

Postscript by Robert Collier

Richard came home on Monday morning. November 22, 1971. He was pale and quiet and refused to tell us where he'd been or what had happened to him. As soon as he arrived, he lay down on his bed and never rose again.

His decline was rapid. In a month's time, he was in the hospital. There, as at home, he lay all day in silence, staring at the ceiling, the gold watch in his hand. Once, a nurse attempted to remove it and Richard spoke the only words anyone heard from him in the last months of his life. "Don't touch it."

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It is not surprising that Richard evolved the delusion that he had traveled back through time to meet Elise McKenna. He knew he faced imminent death. There was no question about it and the shock must have been tremendous to him. He was only thirty-six years old, and had to feel betrayed. Never in his life had he achieved emotional fulfillment, and now that life was being terminated prematurely. He had to seek escape from this betrayal-and what more natural haven could there be than the past? Too aware to successfully regress to his own past, he elected to flee to another.

This election is evident in his manuscript from the beginning when he visited the Queen Mary and allowed his consciousness to be permeated by feelings of what had been.

When he accidentally came across the Coronado Hotel, the process was crystallized. Soon the past came to exist, in his mind, as a viable force in the hotel, his emotions gravitating toward the conviction that things no longer in existence somehow did exist in some approachable way.

Little wonder that his entire being concentrated toward Elise McKenna, a perfect symbol of his need to find, at once, escape from the untenable present and fulfillment through love. I have that photograph he framed and she was everything he claims-a hauntingly beautiful woman. It takes no imagination to understand his obsession that, if he tried hard enough, he could actually reach her. It takes no imagination to understand why his research into her life would be interpreted, by him, as signifying that he actually had reached her. Obviously, his mind was in a state of ferment, stunned by fear and unresolved needs. Under the circumstances, is it strange that he came to believe what he did? Dr. Crosswell's words complete the picture. He told me that the sort of tumor Richard had could cause "dreaming states" and "hallucinations of sight, taste, and smell."

Who knows how many disparate elements contribute to the making of a hallucination? How many threads of circumstance must intertwine before an imagined tapestry is woven? All I know is that Richard wanted desperately to escape his lot and did escape it, at least for a day and a half. Lying in his room, in a state of self-hypnosis probably, he experienced his 1896 sojourn in vivid detail.

This detail, which he carefully recounts in his manuscript, was achieved, no doubt, through research, his subconscious mind feeding back to him the facts he had installed there through his "crash course" on the past. (Bizarre that the convention which was being held in the hotel at that time 'was a Crash Convention.) Slowly, surely, he developed the illusion in his mind. Proof of this lies in the fact that, after speaking to me on the telephone, he lost it temporarily as his mind came into a "head-on collision with reality." (His own words.)

Reviving the self-deception-as he had to-he "discovered" his name in the 1896 hotel register and proceeded to accelerate his fantasy by repeated mental suggestion that he was no longer in 1971 but in 1896. It is revealing that, as he did this, he listened to the music of a composer who. as he wrote, "took him to another world."

In keeping with the purity of his delusion, he rented an outfit suitable to 1896, acquired money of the period to carry in his pocket, had stationery printed duplicating that of the hotel in the 1890s, and even wrote himself two letters ostensibly from Elise McKenna; he must have expended immense care to achieve such perfect penmanship. The watch he doubtless purchased from some jewelry store. It does seem rather new for such an item but I'm sure watches of all kinds are still sold today and can be acquired if one searches enough. As Dr. Crosswell put it, there is no limit to the incredible patience and precision of a subconscious mind intent on constructing a delusion.

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When it was obvious that Richard was close to death, I did something that neither the hospital nor Dr. Crosswell cared for. I had Richard brought home and put him to bed in his own house, set the framed photograph of Elise McKenna on the table near him, put the watch in his hand, and saw to it that his Mahler symphonies were played twenty-four hours a day. It was not a coincidence, I feel, that he died during the playing of the adagio movement from the Ninth Symphony which he believed had helped to bring him to her. I was sitting by his bed at the time and can attest- thank God-to the, at least physical, serenity of his passing.

What more is there to say? Yes, Elise McKenna was at Stephens College in 1953. Yes, she did die of a heart attack one night after attending a party and her last -words were "and love most sweet." Yes, Richard was in Columbia, Missouri, at the time. Yes, she did burn those papers and that fragment of poem was found. Yes, there remains the enigma about the alteration in her personality which took place after 1896.

Why do I mention these things? Perhaps because, despite what I've written, I would like to believe, for Richard's sake if no other, that all of it actually happened. Want to believe it so much, in fact, that I will never go to that hotel and ask to see that register for fear his name would not be written in it.

It would make my grief for my brother's passing immeasurably lighter if I could convince myself that he really went back and met her. Part of me wants very much to believe that it was not a delusion at all. That Richard and Elise were together as he said they were.

That, God willing, they are, even now, together somewhere.

The End.