Allergic To Time (15 page)

A horrible feeling crept into my stomach. Was I responsible for what had happened to Connie?
 

Brad pursed his lips and shrugged. “And what happened to her?”

“She was hit by a car and killed earlier today.”

“Sounds like an accident to me.”

Martin snorted. “An accident. Yeah, right. You and I both know what you do to people who find out...” he glanced over at me and trailed off.

My father switched his gaze and frowned at Robert, who was over at the window staring at the coastal view with a faraway look in his eyes. He seemed to be avoiding looking at my father. “I see you brought a friend with you. Where did you meet this delightful fellow?”

“You know perfectly well where we met him,” Martin snarled.
 

“As I said, I don’t know anything.”

“Yeah right,” Martin said. “You knew we were coming.”

A smiled snaked onto Brad’s lips. “Alright, alright, you’ve got me: I know everything. I knew you’d be back.”

Back?
I thought.
 

He gave Martin a long slow look. “I know more than you do Dr. Anderson. Always have, always will.”

Martin shook his head. “No, you don’t.”

“Oh really?” Brad arched his eyebrows in either mock — or real — surprise, I couldn’t quite tell. “So what is it that you know, exactly?”

“I know all about you,” Martin said simply.
 

“Do you just?” Brad pursed his lips. “And how is your little time travel detective business going these day?”
 

Martin didn’t dignify that with a response. I thought back to the folder Martin had shown me less than 24 hours earlier. It had been pretty huge, but I couldn’t remember any research about
my father
being in there.
 

Then I suddenly remembered something else Martin had mentioned the previous day: a file he had
on me.
One that he had, conveniently, never gotten around to showing me, but which he had needed to urgently access the morning before. I remembered something else strange — that my file was kept on Martin’s computer. Even though — when he had shown me the other files — the paper ones, he had mentioned that it was too dangerous to keep electronic copies. Why was my file on the computer?

I stared at the two best male authority figures I had in my life. Maybe, I thought, when Martin had said he had a file on me, what he had really meant was, he had file on
my father.
 

“My god!” I gasped, finding the strength to stand up. I stared down at my father, who had gotten way too comfortable in
 
one of his ugly yet expensive lounge chairs. I’d had a realisation. “You really
are
behind all this.” And I wasn’t just talking about Connie’s death, or Robert’s sudden appearance in our lives. I was talking about something far more sinister: my father had been driving my obsession with time travel all along.
 

It had all started so long ago...

Chapter Seventeen.
 

“Where is it?” Martin repeated, his voice firm. “Come on — show me! It’s here in this house somewhere.”

When Brad refused to respond —
 
to either of us, he seemed to have taken a sudden vow of silence – I asked Martin what the hell he was talking about, although I suspected I already knew. More likely than not, he was referring to the house’s secret, underground room — the one that I casually referred to as ‘the lair’. I’d become more than familiar with it during my childhood in that godforsaken beach cottage.

Martin’s look softened slightly as he looked at me. “Anna, do you...know?”

“Know what exactly?” I asked, pretending I had no clue what he was talking about.
 

Martin quickly glanced at my father with distrust in his eyes before he turned back to me. “Know about what goes on in this house.”

I figured there was only really one thing he could have been referring to. There was no point in me feigning ignorance. “Okay, fine,” I said, standing up. “Do you mean...the lair?”
 

Martin moved closer to me. “Yes. I suppose you could call it that.”

I turned to give my father a slow, steady glare. “Of course I know about it. I was allowed to run around down there when I was younger. I thought it was just a work shed, you know, like other normal fathers had. I didn’t know it was basically a house of horrors.” I stopped to see if this provoked a reaction on my father’s face. No, it hadn’t. He stared blankly at the wall.

“Of course there were secret bits that I wasn’t supposed to venture into,” I continued. “The locked parts. But the rest of it was hardly normal either, was it?” I stopped in front of my father, still waiting for a response that didn’t come. “Was it?” I repeated.

Martin was running out of patience with my spiel. “So you do know where it is — fine! Take me to it.” He broke in between Brad and I to get my attention.

“Fine,” I said icily, as I gave one last withering look to Brad, then pushed past him and started to make for the back of the house, where I knew I would find a row of stairs. “Follow me,” I called back over my shoulder. Martin did as he was told and ran after me, with Robert following hot on our trail.
 

“Hold up!” A deep cold voice called out. Brad strode towards us and grabbed me by the shoulders. He looked deep into my eyes. “You don’t think I’m really going to let you go down there, do you?”
 

***

As the three of us sat huddled inside the locked dungeon we had been thrown into, I considered the situation.
 

“Well, at least he hasn’t killed us...” I glanced slowly around at our dark surroundings. We had made it to the lair alive, at least we could say that. Just not the ideal way — the ideal way wouldn’t have involved us all having our hands tied behind our backs.
 

“Yeah,” Robert pipped up. “Things are looking really rosy for us.”
 

“As long as we’re alive things are okay,” I said.

Martin sighed, “Well he was hardly going to kill
you,
was he? He’s your freaking father!”

I let out a snort. “I honestly don’t think that would have stopped him.”

“Yeah,” Rob said. “You two don’t exactly seem close. Or was that just an act?”
 

I shook my head, even though it would have been too dark for him to have seen the gesture. “Nope. And believe me, him killing me would come as little to no surprise.”

Besides me, Martin murmured something so low that it was barely audible. “He might do something worse than kill us...”
 

Robert continued to probe me about my family situation. “So what happened to you mum?”

“Ha,” I responded. “That’s another story altogether.” But I didn’t elaborate. I sat there in silence for a moment, wondering whether I should tell him.

A warm breeze of some sort swept against us all, blowing out from a duct. It felt like a heater. That damn lair was always so hot, like an old person’s home. The crazy amount of electricity he must have used, just to keep an underground dungeon warm.

“So are you gonna tell us?” Rob asked. “About your mum?”

I let out a tiny little laugh, mostly because I was disbelief about the words I was about to utter. “My mum.” I said, leaning my head back against the flat concrete, which was cool in comparison to the heat of the air. “My father killed her.”

Silence.
 

“
What?”
Martin asked.
 

I nodded, feeling the stifling warm breeze in my face, and becoming dimly aware of something buzzing in the background. “Yep. At least, I am pretty sure that is what happened.”

Before the other two could ask any further questions, the distant buzzing noise became much louder. The sound gradually intensified until the vibration of it filled the entire room, shaking the walls of the cage we were all trapped in.
 

“What the hell is that?” Martin asked.
 

“Oh my god,”
Robert mumbled. “
Bloody hell. Not again.”
 
I felt him scrabbling around, trying to stand up.
 

“WHAT?” I yelled, over the buzzing, which was growing louder by the second. But by that stage it was so loud I couldn’t hear his response, if there even was one.
 

A sudden bolt of blue light flashed, briefly illuminated the room, and I saw it — for a split second, before it was gone, before the light went away - I saw the entire room disappear before my eyes.
 

The next thing I remembered was being outside in the glaring white sun, heat beating down on the steaming hot asphalt below me as I fell to my knees, gasping for air, unable to breathe.

PART TWO

(3 Months/3 Days Later)

Chapter Eighteen.
 

I woke up to a bright blue light, in a darkened hospital room

Around me I heard the sounds of hospital machinery: a beeping noise, a buzzing noise. There was something whirling. I reached my hand up: there was a mask over my face. I tried to pull it off, as I started to panic - I managed to get it an inch away from my mouth, but it was still attached to me. I let it go and it fixed back around my nose and mouth. Even with the mask back on I was struggling for air, each laboured breath a fight for oxygen.
 

A billion thoughts hit me at once. I struggled to turn my head around in the bed, to get a better look at the room. Even the effort of lifting my body up with my elbows was too much — my lungs were ragged, unable to carry out any task beyond what which was absolutely necessary. I let my body fall back onto the bed and shut my eyes. I squeezed them shut and tried to block out the pain in my lungs, whilst trying to clear my head. I had to think properly.

Where were the others? I was the only one in the otherwise empty room. Had they survived? Would I survive? I cursed myself for not realising that this would be the inevitable outcome of our trip to Nelson Bay: what else could I have possibly expected to happen when we decided to visit the lair?
 

Then one other thought hit me like a ton of bricks:
WHAT TIME WAS IT?
 

If my breathing wasn’t already strained by that stage, it would have been anyway as the gravity of that question hit me. I opened my eyes and looked around the room again, this time more frantically. There were no obvious clues: if I didn’t know better I would have sworn that I was in the same hospital bed that Robert Smith had been in earlier that week. The same familiar blue light bathed me. Oh God, I thought, catching myself: earlier
which
week? What if I’d been sent forward in time, years, decades even? Exiled to a time whereI didn’t know anyone, just like Robert had been, where my friends and family were dead, having died with the mystery of my disappearance haunting them forever.
 

But the room. I tried to calm myself down and looked around me. If I had gone too far forward in time, the room would look different.
 

...Wouldn't it?

***

I must have lost consciousness for a while, because the next thing I knew I was waking up again. I felt a lot calmer this time, and thankfully, each new breath I took didn’t feel make my lungs feel as though they were about to burst apart. I was able to move my head slightly, so I turned it towards the window on my left hand side, to see the old familiar blue-tinged panes of glass.
 

Shit,
I thought.
I need to get out of here.
 

***

There were heavy footsteps coming from down the hallway, towards my room. I stiffened in my bed, prepared for the worst. The door opened, and a slither of light peeked in, leaving a rectangle of yellow to appear for just a moment before the door was hurriedly shut again. The heavy footsteps began to head towards my bed. I couldn’t see properly in the dark, but a dim fear crept into my stomach.

I tried to move in my bed, to free myself from the machines that were keeping me breathing, and quite possibly, alive. I prayed for some superhuman strength to allow me to pull myself up, so that I could leap off the bed and kick whoever it was right in the head. It was probably Nurse Bianca, ready to murder me. The man in black wouldn’t be far behind. They would never let me escape to tell everyone the truth, the awful truth, the one that, for some reason, no one was allowed to know about: that time travel was not only theoretically possible, but that it happened all the time. The secret that they killed people for — not just people,
time travellers.
And now I was a time traveler.
 

The dark figure headed straight towards my bed in a quick blur of purple. I only had seconds left to live. The tubes that allowed the oxygen flow to my lungs didn’t allow me to scream.
 

I began to twist and turn, trying to break free, still trying to scream out through the oxygen mask. “HELP!” I called, although only a muffled sound came out. I started to kick my legs out, trying to hit the person in the face —
 

“Anna!” a deep, British-inflected voice called out to me.
 
“Jesus, stop kicking!”
 

Robert?

I had never been so pleased to see anyone in my entire life. My racing heart beat began to settle, and I felt a smile creep onto my lips. I pointed at my mouth, towards the mask, and shook my head at Robert, trying to let him know that I couldn’t speak.
 

“I know you can’t talk in an oxygen mask you idiot! I’ve been there, remember?” He took a seat next to my bed and grabbed my hand.
 

I cursed the fact that I had no way of speaking to him: I needed to ask if he was alright. And if he was alright, why was he alright? Why was he walking around, able to breath to air just fine? A second trip through time ought to have killed him. I wasn’t sure how he was still upright and breathing.
 

“Anna,” he said, gripping my hand tighter. “Thank god you’re alive.”