Clockwiser (2 page)

“Leave me alone.”

I couldn’t believe he would do drugs. Even the mild stuff could tempt a stupid guy like Tim into trying something worse. I was furious.

“Who’s giving you drugs?”

I reached his car just as he started the engine. The window was down and I grabbed onto the door frame. Tim’s hair had grown and constantly fell into his eyes now. He flicked his head so he could see and that’s when I noticed his black eye.

“What happened to you?”

He narrowed his good eye at me. “Nothing. Let go of my car.”

My heart raced. Why did Tim have to go off the deep end, just when things looked like they might get back to normal for our family?

“Drugs
and
fighting?” I spat out.

Tim revved the engine. “I said, let go of my car.”

“Not until you answer me. Who’s dealing?”

Tim grabbed my arm to push me out of the way, but I refused to let go.

It was a bad idea.

A dizzy spell and a flash of light later, I fell to the ground on my butt beside my brother. We were surrounded by mature, leafy deciduous trees. Small birds rustled away from a nest nearby. I breathed in deeply the scents of the warm earth and unpolluted air.

Tim shifted back and forth, taking in his new surroundings, his eyes bugging out like he was on a bad trip.

“Wh-what just happened? Where are we?”

I groaned because I knew where we were. We were in the middle of a forest in Cambridge Massachusetts in the year 1862.

Chapter Three

CASEY

Stress was my biggest trigger. My sophomore year was majorly stressful, and I’d tripped back in time so often I’d lost count. My parents had split up and Tim had started this rebellious stage he was obviously still in and well, there was Nate. I also happened to be madly in love with him, and then he’d asked me to dance. I’d never dreamed in a million years I’d actually get to talk to him, much less touch him.

But now that Nate and I were a couple, things had sort of normalized. Nate went to college, I finished my junior year, and we fell into a routine that included a lot of time on the phone and dates on the weekends.

Dad moved back home, which I thought was great, but Tim resented. I think he enjoyed how he could get away with things when only mom was around. But besides the odd misdemeanor and the permanent cloud around his head, things more or less ran smoothly.

Until this moment.

My mouth fell open as I stared at my brother who was on his butt on the grass, leaning back on his hands, taut as a startled cat.

Oh, no. Oh, no, oh no.

Tim’s good eye-lid flickered madly. “Casey? What’s going on? What happened to my car?

I’d been traveling back to the nineteenth century off and on since I was nine. I’d brought my best friend Lucinda back once. That was how I found out I could bring people back if I happened to be touching their skin when I tripped.

I’d managed to go a whole eight years without bringing a family member back. This was new territory.

I jumped up and down a little, and gritted my teeth. What was I going to do
now
?

“Casey?” Tim’s voice shook. “What the...”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll explain. Um, I’m not sure how to say this, but we’ve traveled back in time.”

I waited for Tim to say something. No words came out of his mouth but he was breathing heavily.

“I’m a time-traveler.” I waved my hands a bit as if that would help him to understand. “It’s this odd gift I have.”

His face twisted in unbelief. “Are you on drugs, man?”

I huffed. “No.”

He leaned forward and studied his hands, “Am I?”

“I wouldn’t know the answer to that.” I crossed my arms. “But we did trip. Just not that kind of trip.”

I extended an arm. “Get up.”

To my surprise, Tim took my hand without remark. I pulled him off the ground and he stood. We were the same height, nearing five-eleven. I used to hate that I was so tall, but I’m fine with it now.

I pulled my loose curly mane off of my face and tied it back with a hair band I had on my wrist.

“Let’s go,” I said.

Tim was sixteen months younger than me, and people often thought we were twins until I had my first growth spurt. I’d kept a steady six inches ahead of him for about five years. Then he spent a year being taller than me until I caught up again. Even though we were the same height, I still thought of him as my little brother. Now that we were in the past, the hard, tough guy edge he’d been carrying for the last couple years had melted away, at least temporarily. He looked like a lost little puppy. I almost felt like hugging him.

Almost.

“This is so messed,” he said. He spun around to take in our surroundings. Pure unadulterated forest. Not a Colonial or Victorian style home in sight. “Where are we going?”

“Follow me. I have a stash near here.”

Tim trailed me like a zombie. In fact, with that black eye, his bad posture, and his propensity to drool, he actually looked like a zombie. Maybe I should’ve been frightened.

I snuck a peek over my shoulder. Nah. Just the regular, messed up Timothy Donovan that I’d known and loved my whole life.

I had to dodge and whack a path for us through new summer growth. I was always amazed how loud the wild was, with a zillion birds chirping and squawking, and I wondered what they’d think if they knew how humans would invade and demolish much of it over the next hundred and fifty years.

I spotted the lilacs in the distance and let out a comforting sigh. A little bit of respite waited for me there. It’d give me time to think about our next move.

The lilac patch concealed the entrance to a secluded patch of grass. A fallen log, half rotten and moss-covered, lay along a cold fire pit. The space was about twenty-five feet in circumference and completely closed in by heavy brush, new growth pressing inward making it feel smaller. Long ago I’d dug a hole in the ground near the back with a “borrowed” shovel to store my belongings. It was covered with a thatch of branches.

Tim slunk to the log, and stared blankly into space. I supposed he was in shock. I couldn’t help but compare the difference between him and Nate the first time Nate came back with me. Where Tim seemed to believe my every word and was completely dazed out by the experience, Nate had been convinced I’d participated in some kind of prank with his friends. He hadn’t believed my story until well into the second day.

Tim’s legs were jumping with nerves. His good eye settled on me. “But, how? When?”

I knew what he wanted to know. How did it work, and when did it start happening. I gave him the short version, telling him the story of how it happened for the first time when I was nine, after Mom had tucked me in bed. I’d watched a scary-movie on the sly and night-time frights were enough to trigger a trip. I was only gone a couple of days, but I was scared out of my wits. Plus it had poured rain, soaking me through my pyjamas to the bone.

“And when I came back,” I said, like I was recounting a perfectly normal childhood memory, “I was in bed again at exactly the same time I’d left, wearing dry pyjamas.”

Time in the past went by at the same rate as the future. If there were two weeks between trips in the present, those same two weeks went by in the past. It worked differently the other way around. I could spend two weeks in the past, but I always returned to the same moment I left in the present.

Tim shook his head. “This is so crazy.”

“Yeah, it is.”

“Do Mom and Dad know?”

I gave him a sideways glance, “No, and don’t you dare tell them.”

“Does anyone else know?”

“Lucinda. I brought her once by accident, too. And Nate.”

Tim’s eyebrows shot up. “Nate Knows? And he still wants to go out with you?”

“Shut up.”

I sat on the log beside Tim. I wasn’t sure what to do now. I’d double checked the hole and there wasn’t any food in there. I hadn’t had a chance to re-stock it last time. The jar of water had been sitting unpreserved for almost two months.

“Where is the rest of civilization?” Tim said, looking around. “What year is it anyway?”

“It’s 1862.”

“Get out! The Civil War?”

I nodded.

“That is so cool.”

“You’re an idiot.” I stood up, and stared hard at him. “The Civil War era was a terrible, barbaric time. Over 600,000 Americans died.”

Tim shrugged. “People die in wars.”

I worried about Tim, that all those war games he played on his computer had warped his sense of reality, numbed his conscience. “This isn’t a game.”

He blew me off. “I never said it was.”

I went to the hole and pulled out a burlap sack.

“So now what?” Tim said behind me. “Do we just wait it out? How long does it usually take for you to go back?

“I don’t know.” I tugged on the fabric in the bag and pulled it out. “Could be one day, could be ten.”

“How do you know when it’s going to happen?”

I shook out the dress I’d stored there in the spring. It smelled a little moldy. “Unlike the trip from the present to the past, where I’m totally caught off guard,” I started, “I get a little warning when I’m about to go back to the present. I feel dizzy and the world goes opaque. I’ll have a few minutes to warn you, so you can grab my arm. Just make sure you’re touching my skin.”

Tim finally noticed what I was doing. “What’s that?”

“It’s a dress suitable for this time period. I can’t go out there dressed like I just arrived from the twenty-first century. I’d get arrested.”

“You’re really going to wear that thing?”

“Yes, I’m really going to wear it, now turn around.”

Tim complied and I slipped out of my t-shirt and jeans, and pulled the dress on over my head. I did the buttons up on the back as far as I could reach; thankful for my long arms.

There was still plenty of daylight and the thought of hanging around here making subpar conversation with Tim as we grew increasingly hungrier and thirstier didn’t appeal to me.

Besides, I missed the Watsons. I wondered how Sara was doing with that houseful of younger siblings, and if they’d heard from her brother Willie since he’d enlisted.

I gave Tim’s clothing a cursory glance. He wore a plain back t-shirt long enough to cover the zipper of his jeans. He wouldn’t exactly blend in, but he could pass as a poor farm hand. I found myself grinning at the thought of Tim actually chucking a bale of hay or attempting to milk a cow.

I motioned with my head. “Let’s go.”

Tim fell into step behind me without a word.

I could hear them marching before they came into view. I crouched into the ditch waving with my hand for Tim to do the same. Unlike Nate who blabbered aloud and bumbled about on his first trip (to be fair, he acted normally for someone in denial), Tim seemed to have an intrinsic sense of stealth.

We watched as a group of soldiers dressed in grey and blue Union Army attire marched by in alignment. I figured they were new recruits on their way to Boston.

We held our breath until they were almost out of range. We only needed a couple more minutes before it would be safe to follow the same road to the Watsons.

Then Tim did another stupid thing. He jumped up from our hiding spot and yelled, “Hey wait for me,” and sprinted down the road after them.

Chapter Four

TIM

Casey picked up her wrinkled, ankle-length skirt and ran after me.

“No! Tim, stop!”

A part of my brain somewhere deep and in the back knew I was acting irrationally. Again.

My parents were pushing me to see a shrink. They wanted to know the one answer I couldn’t give them. Why? Why the rebellious, destructive, careless behaviour?

But I didn’t know.

Maybe I was just tired of life. School bored me, my parents bored me, and my friends bored me. Everyone thought my “near death” experience would’ve changed me, made me a nicer, sweeter person.

I wondered myself why it hadn’t. Maybe there was a dark spot in my soul that wished I hadn’t been saved.

But, hey, I was in the past now and that didn’t happen every day. This was my chance to do something exciting and my dad was nowhere around to tell me what me what I could and couldn’t do.

Unfortunately, there was still my sister.

“Are you crazy?” Casey shouted after me. “What are you doing?”

When she finally reached me, she was puffing like an old dog, like she never took PE or anything. Oh, right, she didn’t do sports. She left that job to her uberjock boyfriend. Her face was as red as a tomato and her expression was so bloated and stern, I thought she might combust. I almost laughed.

By the time she got her breath back, it was too late to stop me. The group of soldiers had spotted us and parted, so the guy in charge could come for a chat.