Timelines: Stories Inspired by H.G. Wells' the Time Machine by Jw Schnarr

stylus on a piece of paper. Then, as I was stuffing it into my shirt pocket, he said, “Don’t you need the combination to the lock on the door?”
    I frowned, not quite sure what he meant.
    “ Or did Constance give it to you?”
    I could never remember it after the afternoon we snuck down there. Nor did I care to know.
    “ You know about that?”
    “ She told me,” he said, “the time I caught her down there.”
    I suspected immediately that there was more to that story and that it had something to do with Connie’s mysterious disappearance.
    “ After that,” he said, “I got a new lock.”
    He gave me the combination and then his eyes closed. I gave a start but soon realized that he wasn’t dead but only sleeping. His breathing, however, was barely perceptible.
    I went out and asked the nurse to check him. I was worried that perhaps he had slipped into a coma. She hurried back to his room with me and started to check him over. At one point, she opened his eyes and shined a small penlight in them. He squirmed momentarily, groaned.
    “ He’s alright,” she said. “Sleeping.”
    “ Do you think it would be alright for me to leave him for the night?” I asked. “Get a good night’s sleep?”
    She gave me a kind smile and said that was a good idea. There was nothing I could do here. You never knew with a stroke victim. They could last a day or a year or ten. Of course, if anything happened, she’d call. I gave her my number and left.
    An hour later, the nurse called to tell me that my father had passed away in his sleep.
     
     
    II
    The Stylus
     
    The next morning, I woke early and went down to Costanza’s Funeral Home to make arrangements for my father’s burial. I decided against a viewing, since I knew of no living friends or relatives. I selected a modest casket, ordered a large basket of flowers, and placed a short obituary. His priest, Father Tobias, from the local Greek Orthodox cathedral, agreed to do the funeral mass even though the old man hadn’t been to church in years.
    It was almost eleven by the time I emerged from the stuffy funeral home into a low, dull November sun. The leaves had long fallen from the trees and were scuttled about by the wind. I craved apples at that time of year and had to stop at a local grocery to buy a half dozen on my way out to my father’s house, the old homestead, built ninety years ago by my grandfather, out in the middle of nowhere.
    After pulling into the long gravel driveway and coming to a stop in front of the sprawling, silent white-frame house, I remained in the car for a time trying to get my mind around the idea of a human being living in suspended animation within the stone tomb. It was unsettling to realize that for a hundred years, the stone sarcophagus had been the driving force in the lives of my father and his father and, I supposed, before that his father’s father, and apparently, a long line of fathers before them. How far back into the family history it went (my father had said ten thousand years!), I had no idea. And, now, that legacy had fallen onto my lap. If, of course, all of it was true and not some delusion of eccentric men.
    Feeling the weight of those long years, and the long night before, I got out of the car with a yawn and entered the old house like a somnambulist. The last time I had been there, only last week just before I left for San Antonio (how long ago that now seemed), father had been very much alive. He had been walking up the stairs from the basement, after spending some time in the secret room, no doubt, tending to that damned stone coffin. During that visit, he had dropped another odd hint of something we had to talk about soon, something that I needed to know. But for some reason, he never got around to it then, and instead waited until the last moments of his life last night to tell me.
    After pausing on the landing for a time, I took a deep breath before heading down the narrow cellar stairs. I had to duck under