Picture frames rattled across the wall, the door’s closing echoed across the room. Benjamin attempted to get out of his heavy overcoat before giving up half way—he didn’t have time. The list of essentials that he had meticulously calculated on the rushed drive flashed across his mind in a jumbled mess. Did he need a flashlight? Was he supposed to take his credit cards? Was he supposed to burn them? He ran through it all, he wasn’t even sure any more, the conflicting realities were dizzying. He just knew he need to get to the clockwork.
Benjamin’s pocket vibrated, the familiar sequence told him it was Jo, he had to tell her to get Scot and Rudy. With his hand half down the sleeve, he struggled his way into the pocket, knocking over the faux houseplant that Jo had placed near the entrance. He pulled out the vibrating device just as the jug shattered across the floor.
The plant’s presence gave him pause; had he seen it this morning? Part of his mind didn’t recognize it at all, another whimsically recalled Scot’s teasing when Jo acquired it last July. The phone buzzed in her hand, cementing his thoughts back to the present world. No time to worry about it now.
The clockwork was in his room. In the safe. Twenty-three right, fourteen left, eight right—that much hadn’t rattled through the cracks in his mind yet. He rounded the corner of the entryway to the hall just as he brought the phone up to answer. An instant later, a rippling thunderous boom resounded in the house, dwarfing the sound of the door’s slam. Benjamin’s air escaped his lungs as he was knocked off his feet.
Falling backwards, Benjamin saw the ceiling, and the back of his head, and the back of his head, and the back of his head. The image must have repeated nearly a dozen times, each one from a different angle closer to the floor. The final perspective had his body suspended half an inch from the ground, then the falling stopped and he was trapped.
As if caught in a nightmarish hall of mirrors, Benjamin’s mind was shattered—even more than it had been—as his body was torn across several moments of less than a second. It was if someone had taken a series of pictures of him falling, and overlaid them into a single image.
In each shattered moment, Benjamin attempted to catch his breath, but it was impossible; his lungs refused to expand, his heart refused to beat. They too were held prisoner in this fractured second. All he could do was feel the impending pain of his chest collapsing. It was as if he had been punched by Cassius Clay, Jr. No, not Clay. What’d he go by here? Mohamand Ali? He supposed it didn’t matter.
Sound rattled from down the hall: plastic crackling. Benjamin was able to shift the eyes from the uppermost moments, and beheld the horrifying sight he had feared. A tall lanky man whose hair had been dark at some earlier point in his life. He wore a suit, his grey-blue eyes seemed tired, as if they had seen too much of the world. The eyes were transfixed on the small package in his hands, and he visibly struggled to tear it open. Once successful, he extracted an ice-cream cookie. He crumpled the wrapper in his hand and searched the hall for something, with a chagrinned look, he deposited the trash into his pocket.
Benjamin wanted to scream, but just as his lungs refused to breathe, they refused to give him the air to speak. He was forced to silent protests as the man gave him a despondent pout of disappointment and took a bite of his frozen treat.
“Benny,” he practically whispered as he approached Benjamin. “You shouldn’t have ran, Benny.” He stood next to the temporal shattered replicas of Benjamin, seeming to inspect them all in a single glance. “Or, you should have at least done a better job.”
Benjamin could feel time ebbing at the edges of his realities, coaxing him to unconsciousness, but the void refused to come, no matter how much Benjamin’s burning mind begged it to.
“Now look at you, Benny.” He took another bite. “What’s worse? The crashing of alternate histories in that head of yours, or knowing what’s going to happen next?”
With his free hand, the man pressed a finger to the forehead of Benjamin’s first fragment: the moment when he was still standing upright.
“I didn’t want to be here. But, you know how these things go.” He pushed hard, the fragment’s body unfroze and Benjamin could feel the shattered moment freely fall until it collided into the next moment. When the two divisions in time careened into each other, Benjamin’s collective consciousness felt as if a freight train had crashed into his skull. Benjamin had seen it done a thousand times—or had he seen it at all?—but he had never imagined how horrendous it actually was. He knew he wouldn’t be able to withstand every moment forced back into unity.
“Benny, Benny, Benny. You really messed up this time.” The man’s eyes scanned over each doppelgänger as he knelt down next to the moment that held Benjamin inches from the carpet. “Pun not intended, of course.”
The man placed a hand on the chest of Benjamin’s final moment, the touch embedded enough of the cohesive present into the body that he could feel the hole that had once been his sternum. Benjamin stared at the man, begging for the death that the bullet in his chest had sentenced him to, but the sadistic temporal tear refused to grant him.
“This will go a lot faster for both of us, if you give me a little bit of help here. Let this end!” He stood back up and placed a threatening hand on the fragment that already conjoined with the first. The man’s eyes stared intently into Benjamin’s. “Three things: Where is your clockwork? Who have you told?” He pushed the fragment into the next, Benjamin felt a tidal wave of pain that made the first collision so insignificant he almost didn’t think it had happened at all. “And when is Calbourne?!”
* * *
Yup, been a while since I posted a story thing, but it seemed appropriate today. This was an idea that popped into my head a while back. Conceptually, it has a lot of room for me to work with, so I’ll probably make the rounds back to it someday.
In other news, the devotion project I’ve been working on is finally coming to its end, so I’m very excited about that—hopefully, I can make an announcement about it in the next couple weeks. I look forward to applying the writing disciplines I’ve learned doing this project and make some progress on my own works. Fingers crossed, maybe I’ll get that book store page open!