Shadows Out of Time

But it’s not so simple. I don’t want to give the impression that this is some goddamn fairy story about how a boy blundered into a realm of enchantment where he found a mysterious mentor and they became good buddies, master and student, father and stepson or something like that, and their lives were filled with wonder until the time came for the boy to go out on a quest and confront the Big Bad Big Bad and save the universe. It wasn’t like that. Thomas, Tommy Brooks, had read stories like that, but he knew that they were crap.

He never stopped being afraid. He was afraid when, right after breakfast, Big Thomas took him back to the twin windows through which he had observed the full moon, but now it was day, only the trees were bare of any leaves and there was snow on the ground.

“But it’s July,” he objected.

“It was July and will be again,” said Big Thomas, “but never the same July.”

That didn’t explain anything. Too many of the answers were like that. Like fortune-cookie fortunes, he decided. They sounded wise and profound but they didn’t say anything, not really.

He was afraid when he realized that he and Big Thomas were not alone in the house, that there were others. Once, in a room full of ticking clocks of all descriptions, he came face to face with a dark-haired, bearded man in a black robe who should have been Big Thomas and looked very much like him, but somehow wasn’t, and he turned and fled.

Once he looked out a window over a blasted landscape, where there was only mud and burning vapors, and the sky itself was red and seemed on fire. He could feel the heat of the burning as he touched the glass.

He had his lessons. There was a great deal of study. He would find Big Thomas seated at a table, with books open before him, and it would be time to begin or resume. First, languages. Now in the seventh grade, he’d had beginner’s Spanish, and was fairly good at it, but this was harder, a lot harder: Latin, Greek, and languages he hadn’t even known existed. But somehow they came to him, as if he’d already known them and was remembering. These enabled him to read at least a few passages from the strange books in the vast library that seemed to be everywhere and nowhere. Sometimes a shelf would seem empty, but Big Thomas would reach up and there would be the book he wanted. Or sometimes a book was just on the table before them. Sometimes Big Thomas would lead him into vast rooms filled with books, tier upon tier of galleries disappearing into the gloom above. Later, he wouldn’t be able to find such rooms by himself.

By candlelight, or by the light of an oil lamp, they would read together, and Big Thomas explained much to him, particularly about the nature of time, which he said flowed backwards and forwards at equal rates, so that the future could spill into the past or the past into the future, blending together, like paint mixing. The house itself, he said, was like a pendulum, swinging through thousands of centuries, back and forth, back and forth. Indeed, sometimes he took Small Thomas to the window and showed him a jungle filled with dinosaurs, where black stone cities rose in the distance. Another time, there was a bare, ashen landscape with the sun grown huge and red. Here a race of gigantic beetles rode across the world on machines like enormous spiders that spat out fire.

At times they were not alone with their studies, when others seemed to gather around them, black-robed figures emerging partially from the shadows, looking on expectantly.

Small Thomas considered the possibility that he had gone insane, or that he was dead, or that he had been abducted by aliens.

There was nothing to do but go on.

Once he came to a round room high in a tower. On every side, round windows like portholes revealed only stars. In one, a pair of brilliant stars, one green, one a bloody red, burned so brightly that it was hard to look on them. There was something strange about the gravity in the room. His body felt heavy. He struggled to breathe the thick air. Nevertheless he turned his back to block out the light of the too-bright stars and made his way to the center of the room. There, in a glass coffin set on a pedestal, lay a boy in a black robe, who looked very much like himself only maybe a little older, and who, he came to understand as he became that boy, was dreaming the house, the whole situation, his life and memories and predicament into existence. His mind could not sort that all out, but somehow he knew that it began here, with the boy in the glass coffin, who dreamed that the house swung back in time to a hillside in Maine in 1964, where it picked up Tommy Brooks, who became the boy dreaming, and so on and so on until he became Big Thomas too, and all the others, each of them gradually getting older, like looking at himself in an infinite hall of mirrors into the future.

Sometimes he dreamed of the white underwing moth, fluttering in the dark.