Hexad: The Factory (Time Travel Thriller) Book 1 (2 page)

"I think you had more than me, I don't feel too bad now. Nice cuppa, thanks." Dale put his mug down on the grass and thought back to the night before. "I remember that before you went off to bed I said that if it did happen then I'd travel to the past and leave proof that it was real. I'd bury something in a tin under the apple tree."

"You're right, I remember. And I said that's silly as then the ground would be all disturbed so it wouldn't be proof as one of us could have just got up in the night and played a trick. Is that what you're doing, playing a trick on me? Because how do I know that you haven't just buried something there before I got up?"

"First, I didn't, and secondly, you can see that I haven't got far yet and the ground is pretty solid. No loose soil."

"Whatever, we're just being silly anyway. But I remember that I said if we really wanted to prove it then we should come back to a year before today and bury something, so the ground would be hard and there definitely wouldn't be any funny business."

"So that's what I'm doing. Stupid, but I had to look. I know that if I don't then every time I come out here I'll be looking at the damn tree and thinking, what if?"

Amanda finished her coffee and put her mug down next to Dale's. "Go on then. I'm feeling ridiculous but now I know I'll be itching to dig up the lawn too if you don't."

Dale picked up the trowel, winked at Amanda, and stood up. "Two steps to the right of the tree and one back, that's where I said we'd put it, right?"

"Maybe. I think I was only half listening by then; I was done for."

"Here goes nothing then." Dale got onto his knees and began to dig.

Amanda cast a shadow as she stood watching him down on all fours, her long blond hair falling forward over her face, her features lost beneath her pride and joy. She loved her hair, hadn't cut it for over a decade, and annoyed Dale no end with the time she spent washing it, conditioning it, and who knew what else that made her spend way too long in the bathroom every morning.

Clunk.

"No. Way."

"What? What is it? Let me see. If you are messing with me Dale Ando then I will rip off your willy and post it back to you in the second class mail."

"I'm not messin', and you leave my member out of this." Dale rapped on the top of something metal, then brushed away the soil with a muddy hand. "There's something here, there really is. Unbelievable."

"Could just be something from the previous owners."

"What, in the exact spot I'm digging in? Doubt it."

"Well get the bloody thing out then!" cried Amanda. "Come on, hurry up."

"Okay, okay, no need to shout." Dale used the trowel to dig around the prize: a tin of Quality Street, Amanda's favorite chocolates. There was always a tin hanging about the house and when they were empty she used them to store seed in that she collected from the flowers in the autumn. He worked it loose and pulled it out, sitting back on the grass, sweat blurring his eyes, not from the heat, but from the excitement. "Quality Street. Look familiar?"

"I can't believe this, this is totally surreal. We get drunk and talk about time travel and burying messages and now there really is a sign. What's in it?"

Dale shook the tin. It had felt empty but he heard a slight rustling as he rattled it harder. "Let's find out. You ready?"

Amanda sat down with a bump next to Dale. "You betcha." She smiled excitedly, eyes gleaming with manic curiosity.

Dale prised open the lid of the tin, mumbling to himself as he always did about them being a right bugger to open.

Inside was a piece of paper, just ripped from a notepad by the looks of it. He unfolded it and read, "Welcome to the Hexad experience. You guys are in for a busy day. Dale. p.s. How's the hangover? If I remember right then it was a bit of a mad night. Drink some more coffee, trust me, you're gonna need it."

Dale passed the paper to Amanda; she read it slowly, eyes scanning left to right as if looking for hidden clues.

"What's a Hexad?"

"Who knows? But sod that, I just sent us a message from the future, that I went into the past to bury, so we'd find it today. This is nuts."

"I'm gonna put the kettle on."

"What!? Now?"

"You read the message, you said we should have coffee."

"I know, but now? We just discovered time travel."

"No Dale, we didn't. But somebody did, at some point in the future, and we got to do it, so I think we should have some coffee."

How can she be so calm?

Amanda got to her feet, picked up the mugs then promptly fell flat on her face, out cold.

Thought she was taking it a little too well.

Dale heard the words on the message ring around his head as he got up to make sure Amanda was all right.

Welcome to the Hexad.

Burying

1 Year Past

"Ssh, you'll wake us up," said Dale, putting a finger to his lips, shining the torch on the ground where Amanda was trying to put the tin in, refusing to acknowledge the hole she'd dug wasn't big enough yet.

"Don't be daft, we don't even live here yet. Shine that torch a little to the left will you?"

Dale adjusted the position of the light. "Oh yeah, I forgot. This stuff is still so confusing it makes my head hurt at times. So, this is a year before we dig it up, right?"

"Of course it is, what's the matter with you?"

"Me? I'm not the one that can't even dig a simple hole."

"At least I know where I am, when I am. There, it's done." Amanda got to her feet, admiring her handiwork.

Dale helped to kick the soil back into the hole then Amanda replaced the clumps of turf. She stamped down on it hard and kicked the excess soil around with her feet, spreading it so it looked fairly innocuous.

"Don't worry too much about that, we don't move in for another two months and the place is empty until then."

"So why are we doing it in the dark then?"

"Because, what if we got it wrong and somehow came to the wrong date? We can't be going around meeting ourselves, you know what would happen then. So don't look into the bushes."

"Oh, you and your paradoxes. That's rubbish. If we met ourselves then we'd just say hi, probably freak out quite a lot, then be on our way." Dale cast a glance into the bushes; he couldn't help himself.

"Well, maybe, but I'm not about to find out. If you're wrong then we could cause the entire history of everything to collapse in on itself, and I'm not being responsible for that."

"Okay, done. Ready?"

"Ready." Dale made a strange sound through pursed lips, looking like he was doing a bad impression of a goldfish, the pitch rising and rising, getting faster and faster.

"Will you stop doing that, it's so stupid. I've told you so many times already. Idiot," said Amanda crossly.

"What? Look, if I'm going to disappear and hurtle through the gaps in space and time then it's going to be dramatic all right? And for that you have to have some kind of cool sound as it happens, everyone knows that."

"Fine. You're going to always do this, aren't you?"

"I have so far, haven't I? Whooooooooooooooooooosh."

Dale and Amanda vanished. All that was left was a trowel that Amanda had rested against the tree and forgotten about.

It didn't matter, when she moved in she would find it and put it in the shed. Well, she already had, but that was in the future.

She thought about it as she saw it before she vanished. Time travel really was confusing — the best thing she'd found to do was absolutely just not think about it, it could seriously drive you nuts if you did.

Visitors

Present Day

Dale felt kind of deflated and could tell that Amanda felt the same way. It didn't feel right to be just sipping coffee in the living room when you'd just discovered that you'd sent a message back in time for yourself, or was it forward in time as they'd put it there in the past?

Surely something should be happening? Something epic, mind-boggling and totally weird should be going on right now. They certainly shouldn't just be sat on the sofa not really knowing what to do, staring at an empty tin of Quality Street on their Ercol coffee table. Amanda loved that table; Dale was amazed she hadn't rubbed it away to nothing but a pair of legs, the amount she polished it.

He knew just how out of sorts she was as under normal circumstances she would never allow a mud-covered tin to desecrate the surface of such a prized possession — she hadn't even noticed.

Dale got up and paced around the room, their new carpet still feeling luxurious under his feet after the bare boards they'd debated whether to strip and stain for so many months. In the end they'd gone for comfort over style; Dale was glad they had.

"Will you stop pacing about, you're making me dizzy. And nervous." Amanda stared at the tin, then tutted as she realized there was dirt on the table. She went out into the kitchen then returned almost at a jog with polish and two cloths, so eager was she to have found a task to occupy herself with. She busied herself cleaning.

"Look at this. It could have ruined it."

Dale watched while she cleaned the table then took everything, including the tin, into the kitchen, returning a few minutes later with a sparkling clean tin that she put back down. She resumed her staring; so did Dale.

Leaning forward suddenly, as if she had all the answers, Amanda prized off the lid — somehow she never struggled with them like Dale did — and pulled out the strange message, reading it, freckled face frowning in annoyance, before she put it back, mumbling about what a stupid message it was. She was a beautiful woman, almost thirty now, a year older than him, and her slender features always reminded him of an almond. She was going a lovely golden color from all the sunbathing — the summer actually doing what everyone wished it would: offering up beautiful days full of light and warmth, which was rather unusual for the normally eccentric British climate.

The light of the clear blue sky poured in through the expansive living room windows, encouraging them to catch up on chores out in their multi-colored garden.

"Shouldn't something be happening?" said Dale, finally sitting back down on the sofa next to Amanda. "And why the hell did I write such a cryptic note for us? Ugh, this is too weird, it can't really be true anyway, can it?"

"What other answer is there? Unless one of us is playing the worst joke ever on the other, then we really do learn how to travel in time at some point and come back and bury the tin and the note." Amanda looked at it again, shaking her head, hair shifting off a shoulder as she turned to him and said, "You aren't, are you? Playing a cruel joke?"

"Honestly, I'm not. And I know you aren't, so it must be true. But why such a weird message? Hexad. What the hell's that?"

"I don't know, but I guess the note is so strange as you have to write it. I think that's right." Amanda was lost in thought for a second, trying to get things straight in her head.

"What? Waddya mean?"

"Well, now we have the note, it means that at some point in the future we have to travel back in time and leave it for us, right?"

"Um, yeah, I guess. But I could write something that explained things a little better, couldn't I?"

Amanda shook her head. "No, you can't. Look, we dug up the tin this morning, read the note, yes?"

"Well, duh."

What's she getting at?

"So, it's happened. It means that this has happened, we just experienced it. So when you do write the note you have to write it exactly as it was written, as that's what we found."

"Ugh, this is making my brain hurt. But what if, whenever we do make the note, I write something different? Then we would have a better idea of what the hell is going on."

"But you don't, do you?"

"Why not?"

Amanda let out an exasperated sigh. "Dale, you don't because you didn't, won't. If you did then we would have read something different and not be having this conversation, so whatever you write in the future and we read is exactly this. So when you do it you have to write what is on the note. There's no other choice. It's already happened and obviously it leads to whatever allows us to eventually travel back and tell us this." Amanda waved the piece of paper about.

"My head hurts. Time travel is really confusing, and we haven't even done it yet."

"Not us, not yet, but we will. How cool is that?"

Dale got up, suddenly animated again. "Yeah, you're right. Totally freaking amazing. But when? And how?"

"I don't know, but it's going to be pretty exciting isn't it? Imagine, you and me off doing something totally mad. I bet our lives will never be the same again."

"You and me against the world eh?"

Dale sat back down, going over the morning in his head, trying to make sense of it all, finally realizing that you simply cannot make sense of such things — that way lies madness.

~~~

They sat in the living room for half an hour more, both expecting something to happen, something mind-bending and absolutely awe-inspiring. Nothing. The sun rose higher in the sky, the day got warmer, so Dale opened up a window, the scent of summer blowing in with a gentle breeze — nothing unusual happened at all.

It was a real anti-climax.

Dale's stomach gurgled loudly; he suddenly realized just how hungry he was. Maybe some breakfast would take their minds off things? It was always like that after drinking a little too much on a Friday night.

"Breakfast?"

"Ooh, yes please? Can we have the works?"

"You got it baby? How many sausages?"

"Two please. And two toast, three bacon and two eggs."

"You are hungry," laughed Dale.

"I know, it must be the excitement. Hash browns too. Four."

"Which is it? Two or four?"

"No, hash brown too. And I want four. Please."