The Deep End of Your Dreams Ch. 05

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And death casts a shadow.
1.4k words
4.6
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Part 5 of the 14 part series

Updated 06/08/2023
Created 06/21/2017
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Her hands hurt; of that much she was sure. She looked at her fingers, and the joints in her hands now came to her as the roots of a gnarled oak might - if pushing up through the dry grass of late summer.

"Can this be me," she gulped, the sight tearing at her mastery of the moment. "These can't be my hands...can they?"

Yet, when she moved her fingers she felt overwhelming pain, and that searing sense of immediacy pushed aside all other awareness of the moment. She had been on the ship one moment, yet seconds later she had been with Charles in a train - but now...this? She was in a small compartment, at least it looked somewhat like a sleeping compartment, yet she was certain this was no train, and certainly not the ship she'd been on with her father. She sensed no movement here, nothing at all save for a distant humming, and the vaguest impression that air was being pumped into this small space.

Then, she felt more than heard a faint hissing sound - and as she watched a doorway slid open.

A man. She saw a man - in a wheelchair. He seemed familiar too, yet not quite - then she saw a naval officer was pushing the wheelchair, and, oddly enough, he looked familiar to her as well. She remembered the patch on his shoulder...

"Doctor Aubuchon?" the old man in the wheelchair said, his voice rheumy, tired and full of deep sorrow. "Claire? Is that you?"

"Do I...do we know one another, sir?" she asked, now completely taken aback by the man in the chair, and then the naval officer coughed gently before he looked away - as if she had said something embarrassingly untoward.

"Claire? It's me...Franklin?"

"Franklin?"

"Roosevelt? You don't recall anything?"

She drifted for a moment, reaching for a lost memory, then: "You were the president, weren't you? I remember something about that now." She paused and looked around the room again. "Where are we?"

The old man wheeled himself over to a porthole on the near wall, but there were no dogs on this port to keep a raging sea from pouring in, just a smooth oval of glass perhaps a foot wide, at most nine inches tall. She followed the old man, President Roosevelt, to the window and looked out...

...and fell away when she saw the planet spread out below. The surface that arced away beneath this ship, or whatever it was, was a mottled sea of flowing tans and mauves, and there was a vast ring encircling the orb, the sandy ring casting an immense, oblate shadow on the pulsing world below.

"What is this?" she gasped, "Saturn?"

"Yes, that's right - or so they tell me - but I'm still not sure I believe them."

"Them? Who's..."

She then felt an inrushing, overwhelming pressure gripping her skin, the unexpected force pushing in from every direction - yet within the pressure she felt entombed in pure, icy silence.

Then she saw the mountain. A vast horn in twilight, dark gray rock in swirling streaks of mist, and she saw an old man watching her - seemingly from within the mist. His eyes glowing with anger, the old man was looking right at her now.

"Where have you been?" the old man asked. "I was expecting you hours ago..."

Yet she didn't recognize the man, and before she knew what was happening she felt the relentless pressure on her skin again, then she was standing beside lookouts overlooking a vast deck - and she saw the iceberg, heard the forlorn cry: "Iceberg, dead ahead! Mister Lightoller..."

But this time the rudder bit into the sea and held; the great ship leaned perilously to starboard and then, suddenly, it seemed immediately clear to her that the ship was going to miss the iceberg entirely this time. She leaned with the ship and looked down into the sea, and she could see the great white spur beneath the rail as they passed- and again, she knew they'd escaped this time - that somehow the Titanic had escaped her certain fate, that somehow History had come undone...

She was breathing deeply now, and one of the men standing watch heard her and turned to face the sound of her fear.

"'Ere now, lass, what be the likes of you standing up 'ere now, and in your night clothes and all, eh...?"

She looked down at her hands and bare feet - and recognized her seven-year-old-self, then she felt the biting cold air nipping at her arms and legs...

"Did we miss it?" she asked, not really sure what to make of this disrupted night just now.

"Looks like it, Missy. Now, it's best we get you back to your stateroom..."

One of the lookouts called out and an officer from the wheelhouse came for her, then a steward walked her back to her father's stateroom...

The kind-faced man knocked on the stateroom door and she heard her father rousing, then coming to the door - yet when the door opened she saw someone else. Someone she'd never seen before, yet even so this other man smiled when he saw her standing there.

"Claire, have you been out exploring again? And...look at you - with no shoes again?"

"She was up with the lookouts, sir," the steward said. "Don't quite know how she got there, but the Captain asked that you try to keep her with you after hours."

"Of course, of course," the man said sternly, looking down at her with scarcely concealed scorn in his eyes. "I'll see to that."

And she wondered who he was, and why he was here. And - where was her father?

The man held out his hand and without knowing why she took it, and she let him guide her into the stateroom. When the door closed she turned to the man and stared - then: "Where's my father?"

"Your father? Claire? Don't you remember?"

"Remember? Remember what?" She said, but she felt the words more than she understood their meaning, and she fought to accept what little she understood of this new place - even as she struggled to find her way inside the moment.

"Who are you?" she said after a long moment studying the man's oddly recognizable features.

"I'm your grandfather, Claire. I came for you - and for the funeral. You don't remember?"

She shook her head slowly... "No-o-o," she sighed, then she thought about all she'd seen in the last few minutes and she intuitively understood she needed to keep these things to herself - lest the people here think there was something wrong with her. "I think I should go to bed now, Grandfather."

"Right. Well, yes, but I think you need a hot bath first," he said as he went to ring a bell for the maid. "Don't you think so, too?"

"Yes, you're correct, Grandfather."

He turned and looked at her again - but shook his head after a moment - as if he had been confused by something. "Are you sure you're alright," he asked.

She nodded her head. "Yes, Grandfather," but in the next instant she was standing in a vast mist - only now the air smelled strange. Like oil...burning oil - only sharper - and her eyes started to burn, then water. A moment later she heard an immense whining roar building in the near distance, and suddenly bright lights split the night so she turned from her quivering shadow and faced the glare, recoiled from the sight of a great winged machine hurtling down a concrete road of some sort, then she fell away when the machine leapt into the sky. Acrid smoke fell on her and she watched in horror as the thing rose from the earth and disappeared in the deepening gloom.

"I've lost my mind," she sighed. "I've gone crazy. This is what it means to be mad...to see things such as this that have never existed..."

She closed her eyes and shook her head, tried to squeeze all these twisted images from her mind...then she felt the swaying motion again, the clickety-clack-clickety-clack of the rails below and she opened her eyes again...

Charles was staring at her now, sniffing at the stuffy air in the compartment.

"What is that smell?" he asked. "Like something burning...?"

She shook her head as echoes of a man named Franklin Roosevelt danced in her mind's eye, then she remembered the naval officer standing behind the president. A patch on his shoulder? She could see it now, more clearly than she imagined possible.

Something about time? A timeshadow...whatever that meant.

Why did that sound so familiar?

© 2017 adrian leverkühn | abw | fiction, of course...

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  • COMMENTS
3 Comments
rightbankrightbankover 6 years ago
I keep hearing

Music weaving patterns of simple yet haunting melodies

Crusader235Crusader235over 6 years ago
Hmmm

Hmmm, me tinks Adrian has been into the special brownies again! Maybe his mind will be clearer for the next chapter.

Freddog6601Freddog6601over 6 years ago
A very incoherent follow on

AL, shouldn't this be in SciFi or Fantasy?

So far the romance portion of this difficult to follow story is zero.

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