[Space Time 02.0] A Stranger From Time Read online

  A Stranger From Time

  by ATRI KUNDU

  The Space Time Saga

  Book 2

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  Disclaimer:

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, or the author has used them fictitiously.

  To my Eternal Best Friend,

  Table of contents

  A Stranger From Time- a short story

  Acknowledgement

  About the author

  More from Atri Kundu

  A Stranger From Time

  “When two hearts meet, time becomes an irrelevant dimension.”

  I had done this before, maybe a thousand times since childhood. Yet, every night I come here with the same hope and inspiration. Looking above, I could see hundreds and thousands of them, dazzling like the diamonds in a tiara. Rising and setting, playing hide and seek with the clouds, twinkling and unveiling a new one every minute. Everything is in such a harmony like the melody of a song written by God some billions of years ago. They are so beautiful, and yet so mysterious — each one holding a piece of that jigsaw, that every physics-lover like me wishes to decipher.

  I heaved a long sigh. Philosophizing on space and stars wouldn't help me with my thesis paper. I backed away from the balcony into my room and turned my head at the last instant to get one last view of the night sky. And my timing couldn't have been any better. Near the horizon, a vigorous ball of fire descended at the speed of some several kilometers per second.

  A shooting star!

  I’d seen many shooting stars, but something about this one made it different.

  It disappeared into the horizon before I could make a wish. Shit! I really needed some miraculous power to help me write something in my research project.

  I stepped inside my room, taking a sideways glance at my study-table which was stacked with physics books but I shied away. I leapt up in the air and let gravity throw me on the bouncy surface of my bed. I stretched out my left arm to switch off the lights.

  The clock ticked along. I turned, rolled over and made all sorts of crazy positions of my body but my eyes didn't close for a moment and sleep wasn't easy to come. Maybe I feared that if I sleep ghosts of equations will haunt me and then—

  A low blunt thump of some heavy object hitting the ground came from very near. I blinked; my senses immediately at high alert.

  I sprang out of my bed and lit the lights with a whip of my hand; the switch made a noise which I thought would raise everyone. Luckily, nothing of that sort happened. My bedside window overlooked our small garden, I peeped out. The moonless darkness was shrouding everything, making it impossible for me make out anything out there.

  Now a low dragging sound came from the garden.

  A thief! It had to be.

  I looked around; the torch was easily locatable as it still hung from the plug socket. And now, what I needed was something to beat the hell out of that thief, which certainly wasn't an easy task.

  Minutes later, I tiptoed out of my room with a torch and an antique half-broken baseball bat in my grasp. With quick, light steps I descended the stairs and crossed the hallway. Though I feared the main door to open with a creek but it didn't.

  Now that I was outside I didn't have to worry about waking up my mother anymore. I turned round my house and entered the backyard lawn. The torch was still unlit and the baseball bat poised like a sword, though I doubted which one would break first — the thief or the bat?

  Never mind that.

  Standing in the garden, I felt the necessity to light the torch. Its bright white beam swept over the grass bed. Nothing suspicious. A drop of water fell on my cheek. Rain. I hastened. I let the torchlight run over every object and finally it traced out something.

  A big object was lying half-embedded in the grass, near the door of our store house.

  Few more drops of rain touched my skin. I jogged my way to the store house, the torch still focused at it. The object didn’t move an inch. Standing beside it, I took a closer look.

  Lying before me was a human body. Still and lifeless.

  I shuddered. A sudden terror filled me. Immediately I fell on my knees and turned the body over. It was a girl, near my age with a face young and unfamiliar. Her eyes were shut tight and she didn’t seem to take a notice of me at all.

  I placed my fingers beneath her nose. Soft, warm and slow breaths caressed my fingers. I heaved another deep sigh, now of relief. I let the torchlight run a scan on her, she was injured. There were deep wounds on her forehead and right arm and other small bruises too. She was in some kind of a black uniform, torn at places.

  For moments, I sat there clueless. The rain was now coming down in torrents. Water dripped from my hair and clothes and even then she was not awake. I threw a helpless gaze around me. I couldn’t wake my mother nor leave her like this here. In front of me was the storehouse.

  I must carry her there.

  ***

  “Even though the future seems far away, it is actually beginning right now.” —Mattie Stepanek.

  Light struck my eyelids. I squinted. I opened one eye, the other one stayed glued.

  One eyed, I tried to get a look of my surroundings. As I moved my head, it started buzzing and feeling light as if stuffed with cotton balls. In a flash, I remembered everything and found my light-headedness to be justified. Last night I hardly had any sleep.

  I blinked and opened my other eye and saw her. She was sleeping on an old piece of red cloth which was the most I could manage last night. Through a little crack on the door, fresh sunlight hit her face, lighting up a beauty I’d never seen before.

  Her hair was a shade of tinted gold, wavy and gorgeous. It looked like an ornament to her glowing, porcelain skin. She had a straight nose and curvy lips, everything so perfect like a painting of goddess brought to life. Even as she was asleep, a nice touch of innocence and tranquility gleamed on her face.

  I stood up, and under the influence of some unknown, never-felt feelings I moved towards her as if pulled by a magnet. I paused a foot away from her, blocking the sunlight from hitting her and my eyes affixed at her.

  The dazzling ageless skin of her face wrinkled and she squinted, gently opening her eyes. Two blue eyes stared at me, cascading down a glimmering ocean of tranquility, wonder and a complex mixture of so many emotions.

  A surge of electricity filled my veins. My heart beat faster. Was I imagining things? Something must be terribly wrong with me.

  Slowly she got up, wincing and gritting her teeth and I could see the pain in her eyes. I wanted to help her but I held myself back, I didn’t know her and yet, I felt a strange connection. I bit my lower lip, this couldn’t be happening to me.

  Finally when she comforted herself by leaning against the wall, she took another good look at me. “Hello Stranger. Where am I?” she asked, in a voice as sweet as her but her dialect strong and foreign.

  Her face, her appearance and her voice seemed to have a magical enchan
tment on me. So only when she repeated her question thrice that I really heard it. “Inside a storeroom,” I replied.

  She frowned. “How? Who are you?”

  Then it took me quite a while to describe to her the events of last night. When I found her, it had begun to rain and she was senseless and injured. So, I carried her inside in the shelter and laid her on the floor. I also treated her external injuries and dressed the wounds as good as a student seeking PhD in physics as me could.

  She looked at the bandage on her right elbow, where I had found a small piece of metal wedged into her skin and with much difficulty I managed to pull it out.

  “How did you come here?” Now it was my turn to question her.

  “What day is it?” she quickly moved on to the next question, without even bothering about mine. There was a sudden haste and eagerness in her expressions.

  “Tuesday,” I replied grumpily.

  “No, not just that. What date?”

  “Are you testing your memory or what?”

  “Just answer what I asked,” she let out a soft bellow.

  Though she was in my house and hardly in the position to order me, I didn't feel like getting scolded by her once again. “Twenty third November.”

  “And year?”

  “What’s the point in asking that? 2015,” I replied.

  A mysterious smile squeezed out of her parched lips. A triumphant look gleamed on her eyes. I wondered what it was for.

  She raised her left hand and proffered it to me. “Thank you,” she said. Hesitating for a moment, I lifted my hand to shake hers. The moment her soft skin touched mine, I felt butterflies flying inside my stomach. Now I couldn’t breathe, I paused, staring at my hand where I could feel the ghost of her touch even after she took away her hand.

  I sighed. For a few minutes, no one spoke and the hollow silence made me uncomfortable, more because the sunlight directly hit my face from the broken window panes now.

  She broke the silence at last. "I...umm...I am hungry," she said, looking away from me and I felt her cheeks turning red.

  Now that was an unusual change in the topic. "It's okay," I said, trying to sound assuring. "I will see what I can find in the freeze."

  Almost fifteen minutes later, I managed to escape my mother's gaze and flee out of the back door. As I scurried towards the store room, my heart hammered fast. I started fearing that when I would fling open the door, I would only see huge cardboard boxes and broken tools and piles of dust but not her. Suddenly, I felt a lump forming inside my throat. I tried to swallow it but it wouldn't disappear.

  I paused before the huge door and with my trembling finger, I pulled the handle.

  The room was dark. With the sunlight filling in slowly, the heaps of cardboard boxes, a broken nightstand and an old TV set became visible. And huddled in one corner was she. She stared at me with void eyes. What were they thinking, I wish I knew.

  "The freeze had nothing eatable. So, here are some cheese sandwiches I made right now," I stepped inside, and stretched out the plate of sandwiches towards her. "They are not great, but edible. Try them."

  She took the plate from my hand, staring at the sandwiches suspiciously, making me believe that she had never tasted them in her life. I was about to say something when she raised one from the plate and took a small bite.

  The muscles of her cheek twitched and the deep frown of her eyebrows turned back to normal. Then she took another bite. Within minutes, the four sandwiches were gone. I passed the water bottle to her and she finished it.

  Then her brittle, glittering eyes turned to me and a smile formed on her lips. "Thank you, whatever your name is."

  "I'm Raymond. Raymond Dreyar and its nice to meet you," I reciprocated the smile and proffered my hand forward.

  Slowly she raised her arm and touched mine. A wrinkled, hardworking yet a paper-like soft skin wrapped around my fingers. The same surge of electricity flew down my veins. My breaths came in short rasps. “My name is Ameline Johnston,” she said.

  She drew away her hand and a sudden void filled me. I swallowed hard. “So, Ameline‒”

  “I prefer Miss Johnston,” she intervened flatly and she was no more looking at me directly.

  I bit my lower lip. “Okay. Miss Johnson is good enough,” I tried to smile but it came out weird. "How are you feeling now?"

  She stared at the floor. “I'm good. Better than expected.” The last few words trailed off into a gloomy silence. She raised her right arm and let out a groan and dropped it instinctively. Then with her left hand, she took the wall as a support and tried to lift her body only to tremble and fall. I sprang up and got a hold of her and slowly made her sit.

  “Take it easy. You have injuries all over your body,” I softened my voice as much as I could, infusing it with care and concern. "You are not in the condition to move."

  She winced. “I have to go. I won’t have another chance.”

  "But I really want you to stay here and not make much noise," I tried sounding commanding, though my voice lacked the graveness. "I don't want mom to see you and certainly not after being grounded for a week, for well, you know, too much bear and girls. Do you understand?"

  "No,” she acted like the stubborn five-year girl who wants her teddy bear at any cost. “I don’t think you will understand my situation.”

  “Try me.”

  “You live in a world where you can’t even dream of the place I’ve come from. Besides I’m a stranger to you.”

  Her words were already taking a strange turn but I didn’t express any disbelief. For reasons unknown, my heart urged me to believe her. “Try me,” I repeated.

  ***

  “We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.” —Martin Luther King Jr.

  “So, now where?” I said, as we walked out of the office of BBC news. We had spent an entire day at this place waiting for the news that didn’t come. Just a step out in the open street and a chill wind blew past me, giving the perfect feel of a November evening.

  Miss Johnston walked up to me but gave no reply. She took a quick glance of me and lowered her eyes.

  “I’m not tired or something, just tell me what you want us to do now?” I said soothingly. “We got nothing here. What’s our next step?”

  She shook her head desperately. “I don’t know. I just want to find him,” she said. The muscles in her cheek twitched. She looked up in the starless cloudy sky. “Oh Steve — ” she left the words hanging in her lips and her pain, frustration looming in the air.

  “Don’t worry; the world is a pretty large place to locate a stranger in just one day,” I said. But her words had changed the look on my face. Steve — her brother, can we ever trace him? This world is indeed big enough for one man.

  Today morning, I did have to press her a little to get her story out. Story — an improbable fiction as it appeared to me back then, but now not anymore.

  She had showed me the vehicle which brought her here; she had showed me his picture.

  And I believed her.

  But it was hard at the first time. So when she said, “I’m from future, from 2921 AD” I thought the accident must have given her serious injuries, in her head, I mean and yet, I found her eyes too compelling to be taken as fake.

  Then she began explaining her job back in her world. She was a scientist and specialized in the fields of space and time, which in her world was common at the age of twenty-three while I was still looking for a PhD here. After three years of hard work, she had built a machine that could travel back and forth in time. His brother was testing it and ended up somewhere in the middle of year 2015. And she followed him here, a day before he would appear so that she could take him back.

  So far, her words sounded nothing more than crazy mumblings to me but then she said, “I can show you my machine,” she paused, “but I need you to help me. Help me find my brother. He will be here today.”

  I couldn’t even forget what I found lying beside her the pre
vious night. It looked like a gun, as I have seen in the sci-fi movies. And yet, something inside me asked me to trust her.

  I agreed, partly because I was curious and partly because I failed to restrain my growing compassion for her.

  She stayed hidden in the storehouse until mother left for work. Then she showed it to me, in a way that could only be regarded as a magic trick.

  She took out a mobile-like device from the bag that was slinging from her right shoulder all this time and pressed a key and before my eyes was a small vehicle. It looked almost like a zorbing ball, upper half transparent and showing the huge set of switches and circuits inside. Its base area was flat where four small legs protruded out to keep it in position.

  My eyes gaped wide, almost to the point of my eyeballs coming out. She was showing me something that can travel through time and now, it popped before my eyes out of nowhere. That was enough for me and I could hardly think. She had no look of surprise on her face as she said that in her world minimizing a meter wide thing to a millimeter was very common, that helped in transportation.

  By now the words surprise and disbelief was gone from my dictionary as well.

  “Help me find my brother,” she repeated, lowering her gaze to the ground and I felt she could break down any moment. So I took a step towards her and placed my hands on her shoulders, gripping them strongly and keeping her steady. “I will do anything for you,” I replied.

  My eyes drifted to her dress — a black skin tight suit. It seemed to be made of an elastic material. A blue border ran down from her neck, branched into the arms and continued to her legs. The blue border was glowing under the sun rays. People in our world do not wear dresses like that and we couldn’t go out like this.

  So I gave her a blue top of my mother and black jeans to go with it. And since then, we were here in BBC office. Brian Conner was my mother’s best friend and now the editor-in-chief of this channel. So, asking for his help was the first thing that came into my head.