Grandpa's Journal (2 page)

              I don’t know.

              I couldn’t sleep last night. Not well. Around 5 in the morning I left the house and headed to Grandpa’s. It was a long walk but I got there near 6. At least it felt like 6. He was up but he was as alert as I’ve ever seen him. I knocked once on the door and the thing flew open, he snatched me in, slamming the door behind him.

              I tried to explain who I was but he knew already. I was named after him after all.

And He was waiting for me.

“You’ve arrived.” Drawing me inside, passed all the junk laying around, he needed help moving some chicken wire, and a stack of wooden barrels that he claimed were full of dragon’s teeth. I think he was joking but after what I saw next I’m not so sure.

Behind all this was the basement door, I didn’t even think this place had a basement. It didn’t seem like it. The stairs were covered in dust, just layers of it.

The floor above us was barely high enough for me, seeing him crotch at his age must have been murder. Unlike the rest of his house though, the basement was completely empty.

Almost.

In the corner was

This is crazy.

Maybe describing it will help? Just writing this makes it all so unreal.

It was a bucket seat they have on those oversized Ferris wheels. Sort of. There was a lot of exposed wires, Grandpa claims it’s not supposed to be like that but years of disrepair tends to show something’s true colors.. There were knobs, switches, an dials all over the inside of the thing. He opened the car door, motioning me to step in.

When I didn’t he got in first and started powering the thing up. It wasn’t loud. It was just a low buzzing sound and a few flickering colors. I thought it’d sound like a worn out diesel powered derby engine from the looks of it. By the time I stepped in, he shoved the door closed.

Like that it happened.

No warning.

No lapse in time.

Poof. Just poof and we were there.

We were no longer in the basement.

We were now outside, surrounded by trees, birds, plats everywhere, and a rush of a river just off a sloping waterfall juts to our right.

“Welcome to July 1
st
1615, my boy.”

It had to be a trick, you don’t just show up in a forest and

Across from us bushes shifted just enough that Grandpa pointed my attention to it. There, three native Americans crotched as if in shock and awe. Grandpa called to them, in some language I’ve never heard before.

They didn’t seem to like that too much. Instead of awe, they raised their weapons, and rushed at us. Yelling war cries all the while. “Oops. Used a rival tribe’s dialect.” A few switches were flipped and we had returned to the basement.

“What just…what???” What could I say? It all happened so fast. A blink and it was gone.

“Jason. I’m a time traveler. I have many unexplained things I must share with you and I have very little time to show them to you.”

“This is impossible!” I thing I screamed in his face or something close to it. “Time travel is science fiction. You can’t just do it.”

“So what we saw was teleportation which is equally believable. Like the Philadelphia project.”

He had a point. Taking me away from the machine, we went back upstairs to his dining room. “It is not a perfect science that’s for sure. There are multiple ways to travel through time and all of them are dangerous.” He explained. “We always leave a footprint behind. There are pictures and cave drawings all over to prove it. Heck, I even made a few. Now some of them are in museums being glorified as some sort of human achievement.”

He was laughing, he was so lively that it was surreal to see him be anything but a bump on a log after all these years.

“If you’re ever  in a bind and need to repair something head to the ten years before or ten years after the year 2000.”

“Why?” I had asked, sitting in a chair across from him.

He winked at me. “Cause technology was new and fresh in that period and far FAR less regulated. Today and after everything needs to be connected to some sort of network before it’ll even turn on for you.”    

I wanted to tell him he was wrong but I was just not with it with all that had happened.

He continued. “Also a word of advice: Never go back to kill Hitler.”

That got my attention. “He’s the most evil man in history! Why would you want to keep that waste of human being alive!?”

Grandpa sighed. “Cause I tried. Early on time travel was just a thing I could do. SO, I went back the moment he was rejected from art school. I held a gun to his head. I had no idea what he was saying but I think he was pleading for his life. I pulled the trigger. I swear I did. Multiple times. Yet every time my finger bared down on the trigger I felt a wave of nausea. Stars just decorated my vision and a feeling of weightless nothingness. It scared the pants off me. But I did steal all his money he had on him that day. I went to several other periods in his life time both as a child and when he was a heartless dictator. All the same. Sickness and fear plagued my very soul. It wasn’t till much later I realized what that was.”

“What?”

“Jason. Major events in history are there for a reason. Even if they are the most terrible people in existence. If I had shot Hitler, what would our world be like if World War 2 didn’t happen like it did or at all?”

I tried to imagine it but I wasn’t ever really good at history so I just shrugged.

Grandpa shook his head. “Not only would it have been a paradox but life as we know it would cease to existence. I would no longer exist if I did it.”

He sent me on my way home after that. Said he needed to rest up for tomorrow. When I got home I locked myself in my room and started writing everything down here.

What does this all mean?

Could I change history?

As long as it’s not an important event could I change the outcome of something? Like a baseball game? Invent something before they are invented?

There’s too many possibilities to this!

8/13/16

I can’t believe Mom took my phone away!

All yesterday after work she went on and on wanting to know where I went yesterday morning.  I told her it was none of her business! So she’s been making me do chores all day. It was SO HOT and rainy all freak’n day!!

Then she took my phone and said I’d get it back once I told her where I went.

THAT’S NOT FAIR!

It’s none of her business what I do on my own time. I asked where Dad was all day but she kept dodging the question by shoving whatever my next task was in my face. I had to have cleaned the whole house twenty times over by the time Dad came home for dinner.

I finally told her I went to see Max cause of the tough time she’s been going though. Mom said she didn’t realize I even saw her anymore after she ‘broke my heart’.

Dad didn’t talk much at dinner or the rest of the night. All he told Mom was “It’s done.”

I hope Grandpa is okay.

If I’d had my phone I’d texted him but does he even have a cell phone or anything not connected to the wall?

8/13/16 NIGHT

Slipped into my parent’s room to get my phone back. It was in my Mom’s top dresser. She always hides my stuff there if she’s trying to keep it away from me. Dad’s snoring helped.

There was a text already on it from Grandpa!

It says:
Hide journal someplace other than your mattress. Delete this message.

How did he know that’s where I hid it???

I deleted the message. Now I got to think of a new spot that’s easy to reach…..

8/14/16

Grandpa had no idea who I was at first. The moment I walked in he was at the table of junk, eating oatmeal. It wasn’t till he finished his bowl that he had some semblance of an opinion of who I was. Wow. He tried to laugh it off but it sounded forced and very unnatural.

“Take me to the 40’s. I’ve always wanted to see what it was like.” I told him. He has a time machine, might as well use it right?

“What? You want to see the blitz, Normandy, Battle of the Budge?”

“No. late 40’s. I just want to know what it was like.”

Grandpa paused at that. “Huh.” He finally said. “I wanted to go to the 70’s for the same reason.”

But he refused to go down to the basement again. Said there was too many tachyons in the air. Whatever those are! I told him if he won’t take me then I juts would steal it. He wasn’t even phased by that. Told me I could try but all I’d get was a really nasty shock.

“It’s keyed so I have to be at the console for it to work. A little time traveler trick so no one up and takes it for a joy ride from under your nose.”

He went and got me a bowl of oatmeal. It was over filled with milk and nasty tasting.

“It’s a little trick your Grandmother taught me.” At first I thought he was talking about the oatmeal. Man, Grandma couldn’t cook.

No, he was talking about the joy ride. He started going off on this rabble about boring the truth behind the 7 wonders were before he said he landed in Victorian England. He only wondered a good hour before a woman just snatched him off the street, yelling at him that he stuck out too much.

“Actually I’d argue everyone else stuck out too much.” Grandpa waved his hand in front of his nose. “One thing they don’t tell ya in all time travel stories is the smell. Boy does the past smell like a sewer. It doesn’t help there’s no pluming either so it’s usually all in the street.”

She clothed and dressed him before he knew what was happening. When she was done lecturing him on the importance of period appropriate attire he said they locked eyes for the first time. He knew from that moment on she was the one and only for his heart.

I brought up what Dad said the other day and Grandpa just rolled his eyes. “Your Father was spoiled. Got everything he wanted. I was the only one who ever told him ‘No.’” After that he just recounted all of his time with Grandma. Far too much for me to remember.

I think he mentioned a guy they knew that he found dead in 1900 Peru? His name was Kip and Grandpa hated him for some reason but he jumped away from him before I could ask.

As it turned out she was a time traveler too. She had seen WAY more than Grandpa ever did and done twice as much. He recalled sharing an evening at the Library of Alexandria before it burnt down the first time (I had no idea it burnt down more than once!).

“She was a clever one.” He added. “Could talk her way into the secured presidential bunker if she wanted. Which she did.” Apparently Grandma knew just enough of the language for saying hello, goodbye, ask for their name, and to ask where the bathroom was. The guard on duty was so confused they slipped right in without a second thought. Grandpa was chuckling at the memory.

And it got worse. With no idea what a lot of the scrolls said, both of them just started picking stuff off the shelves. The diagrams and mathematics made more sense to them, so they focused on those. It wasn’t till they had a nice stack of them that someone caught them they were s spooked by the man’s outbursts that they had knocked over a lantern and, according to Grandpa, that’s how it burnt down the first time. On the upside, they kept the scrolls.

Too bad neither of them could read most of them.

There was also the time they met Vlad the Impaler! “There’s no way you’ve met Dracula.” I doubted him and he instantly smacked me across the head.

When I asked what that was for he responded “He hated Bram Stoker for mottling his legacy. He would have done a LOT worse to you.”

As it turned out some time in 1456, Vlad was a companion on a few time trips after some very convincing spike like arguments to have him along. He was the one person he and Grandma couldn’t talk their way out of trouble. He loved the dark ages apparently. Also Las Vegas. Loved those slot machines and won a good number of times. It wasn’t till he killed Jimmy Hoffa through the throat with a pen knife that Grandma finally sent him back home. Grandpa had to get rid of the body. And he wouldn’t tell me where!

BUT I asked him what she was like and he just smiled. “Marla was a firecracker that never went out. A breath of pure life and bliss.” His first meeting with her was something that always stuck with him. She taught him the era’s customs and expectations of gentlemen. Coning their way into a ball and danced the night away, to music none has heard before or since. “Pianist wasn’t very good. Actually he was downright terrible but I’ll always remember it. Always.”

Dad had it all wrong. Grandma got sick. Very sick. “She refused to seek treatment.” Grandpa was starring off into the distance at this point. Afraid if he even moved an inch the whole world would shatter around him. “To save her I had to let her go. Everything I said that day was a lie.” He was crying but still was blankly staring. “I wish I could have gone with her. But she had to go home without me.”