TIME AND TIME AGAIN The sequel to 3037 (2 page)

Joe had taken me to the cave to hide.  Irene was living there and she hid me or otherwise I would have been put on display for everyone to see, since I had hair.  Everyone else was bald.

The cave turned out to be no ordinary cave but inside was a healing city.
  Not only that but the cave appeared to be a living thing and had grown living pods large enough to live in.

Joe and I and the few people who were lucky enough to escape the government had moved into the cave inside the city.  The cave thing took us on a long journey and we ended up on another planet
where descende
nts of Charles Manson had escaped earth centuries before.

They called themselves the
Mansonites
and were a very violent people.  Once again the cave thing helped us es
cape and rescue some of the, would be victims of the
Mansonites
e
.  We
ended up on earth in the year 1954 and were able to intercept and befriend Charles Manson before he killed Sharon Tate
, the movie star, and many others
in the 1970s.

Charles Manson was now a member of Joe’s band and we were living happily with
a
ll the families wh
o had escaped with us.

When we had landed here, the cave left and we thought we would live our life out here.  All of our children were in school and we all had
jobs and had moved our houses
that the cave had left for us, to the beach.

We had had a wonderful life here in S
t. Augustine, Florida, earth fro
m 1954 t
o 1956 and now the cave thing
was
back.

“Oh, no,
” I heard someone say and glanced over my shoulder to see
Ina, Joe’s sister, standing there with her hand over her mouth.

“I have very mixed feelings about leaving here,” she said.
 
“
I feel I owe the cave so much for saving, not only me and my family, but so many of
my people.  We are so happy here.  The children are so well adjusted and I couldn’t ask for anything more.  But I’m also feeling very excited to see what else the cave has in store for us.”

I looked up and saw Irene coming down the beach away from the cave.  When she saw us she waved and started running toward us.

“Hi,” she yelled when she got near, “How does everyone feel about this?”

I knew she was asking how we all felt about leaving this time and place and now that I had just a few minutes to think about it
, I found
I was getting excited
.

When I looked into Joe’s eyes I could see he felt the same way.

CHAPTER TWO

We had finished eating supper, sitting around the outdoor picnic tables we
had set up on the beach, and were
sitting around talking.

Most of the kids had run up the sand dune where the cave was now located.  They were excited and wanted to explore.  Some of the kids had been born since we came to earth and hadn’t
seen the cave before
, so the older ones wanted to show them around.

I knew they would be safe.  The cave was the safest place anyone could be.
  I think we all knew we would be going back into the cave, but we still needed to talk about it before we told the children.

Everyone was talking at once until Joe slapped
h
is hand on the table, “I suggest we go around the table and each be given a chance to talk.  Let’s start with Emmitt.”

Emmitt had been one of the guard
s
on Joe’
s
planet in 3037.  He and his brother Evan had joined us and kept us updated so we would know what the government was planning.

He cleared his throat, “Zoe and I didn’t see the cave land but we saw the entrance open up.  That was at around two o’clock this morning.
  We’ve been up the rest of the night talking about it.

“Zoe and I are in agreement that we’re meant to go wherever it takes us.  We talked to Evan and Zen when they got up and they agree.  The cave save
d our lives and gave us our children
.  We feel we owe it back.

“But it’s not just about obligation.  We want to go and are excited about it.  We haven’t talked to the kids yet but I think they’ll want to go after visiting the cave.”

Marion raised
her hand.  Marion and Rory was
a couple we rescued from the
Mansonites
when we were on
Korona
i
n 2637.  The
Mansonites
were de
s
cende
nts of Charles Manson and followed the book about the Manson family like it was their bible.

Joe looked at Marion and smiled, “Go ahead, Marion.  You have something to say?”

“Well, I was wondering if I can still have a modeling job if we go back into the cave.  I really like modeling.”

“Well, Marion,” Joe said, “As long as we’re in the cave, you can do anything you want to.  But I don’t know where or when we will end up.”

She smiled her beautiful smile, “That’s okay.  We still want to go. 
Tody
will love it.  She likes any kind of adventure.” 
Tody
was their five year old daughter.

Everyone had a chance to talk and in the end we all wanted to go.  The band didn’t
play on Sunday night and today
was Sun
day
.  It was the only time that we were all together.

We laughed and talked and drank wine and at around midnight the kids hadn’t come home yet.  We decided to go find them and visit the cave. 

It was like going home.  We entered through the entrance and headed down the dark passage to
the city.  The membrane wasn’t over the entrance to the city and we walked right in.
  If the cave decided that someone wasn’t ready to enter, if they didn’t have good intentions, etc, then there would be a membrane over it.

When some of the
Mansonites
had tried to enter, the membrane was in place and one of them tried to cut it with a knife.  The cave made the
Mansonites
temporarily blind.  They had not had good intentions.  They weren’t there to be heal
ed
physically, emotionally and certainly not spiritually.  They were closed minded and refused to th
ink of any other way of behaving
or believing.

As soon as we were inside the city we felt the earthquake type motion we had
always
felt every time the cave took us somewhere else.  Once we were up in the air, the cave walls became transparent
like always and started “s
wimming
”
through
space.

The cave always looked like a giant jellyfish when it was moving through space and
the ride was so smooth that we
were able to go about the business o
f
living while we traveled.

This time we only traveled for about a year before we felt the familiar movement similar to a feather floating to ground so that we gently rocked and swayed until we were very gently set down.

Once we were on the ground, the cave looked like any ordinary cave.  Now came the most exciting time of our travels, getting out and finding out what our new world was like.

CHAPTER THREE

Everyone but the kids wanted to go.  They loved living in the city and the newne
ss hadn’t worn off
for them yet. 
We left them and the mothers with babies behind and started off down the hill.

One of the things I had noticed about when we first landed at a new place was that we always landed away from the towns or populated areas.  The cave created its own hill and so we always walked down the hill and into the area where the people were.

We had over a hundred people now and we began hiking down the hill in groups, wandering off in different directions.  In our group were Joe and I, Charles Manson and his now wife Sally, Marion and Rory, Ina and Robert, and Irene.

Charles Manson, or Charlie as we now called him was holding hands with Sally and they looked
like two children gazing about in wonder.  I smiled
to myself as I remembered the Charles Manson of my first life and what a monster he had become.

Joe always said that we had changed a big part of history when we
went
back far enough in time to redirect Charlie’s life.

I had been taught about the Garden of Eden in the bible by my religious fanatical mother in my first life and now, as I looked around me, I was seeing just what I had always saw in my mind as a child.

It was similar to the city in our cave, which I always called The Garden of Eden in my mind, but it was so much more.  The grass grew lush and thick and was the color of emeralds.  There were no roads or paths cut into the grass, just endless gently rolling hills that looked like someone had thrown an emerald green blanket over
them
.

The flowers here were tiny and grew in small patches in all colors.  I noticed one patch had Texas Bluebonnets, one
Indian Paint Brushes, and I noticed one patch was covered in tiny little white daisies with bright orange centers.
  The sky was more lavender than blue.

As I was admiring the flowers, Joe nudged me and motioned with his head off to the right, “Look over there, Ashley, on that huge rock.”

It was a statue carved in marble.  She was a beautiful young wo
man of about 15 or 16 years old wearing a long flowing gown.  The gown had one shoulder strap.

She was sitting and her left leg was tucked under her.  Her left arm was stretched out and the palm of her left hand was flat on the rock so that she was leaning back and her left hand was bracing her.  Her face was turned skyward and her eyes were closed.  Her hair was down to her waist and the part of the foot I could see was barefoot.

She had attracted a large crowd of us and as we stared at her she moved.  She wasn’t a statue after all but a live girl.  It seemed impossible that she could be a living thing because everything about her was white as alabaster, including her hair, skin, eyebrows and eyelashes, and her gown was white.

The only things about her of any color were her eyes and they were aquamarine blue. 
They looked glassy. 
She had opened her eyes and was looking at us with a frown on her face, like she was confused.

She then did something that I found both endearing and shocking.  She stood up and took off her gown and dove into an aquamarine pool that I hadn’t noticed before.
  It had a white sandy bottom.

Fascinated, we walked around the boulder and watched her as she swam.
  Her movements were graceful.  When she walked onto the shore, she shook herself and her hair sprinkled us with water.

Joe handed her the gown and she smiled for the first time.  When she did, she was even more beautiful than before.

“She would make a great model,” Marion said.

I agreed and added, “I would love to design some clothes for her.”

She stood watching us discuss her and then she turned an
d walked off, motioning us to follow.  We hiked up and down rolling hills with the pink sun on our faces.  When we came to an area with tall grasses growing she looked over her shoulder and then parted the grass.

The grass had acted like a wall and when she parted it there were more white people sitting around on the ground and on large rocks in beautiful
white
gowns of different styles.  The material was soft looking and I wanted to touch it.

“Where are the men?” Joe whispered to me and then I noticed there were no men, just women.
  When they loo
ked up and saw us, our
men were immediately surrounded.

At first I thought they were just being friendly but then I noticed they were feeling their arms and
legs and nodding to each other.  They were talking another language and we didn’t know what they were saying but I could guess.

Suddenly, one of the women grabbed Joe’s arm and opened her mouth like she was going to take a bite out of it.  Before she could, someone yelled, “
Futa
,futa
!”

I looked to my left and saw the tallest woman I had ever seen coming down some crude rock steps.  As soon as she yelled at them, the women all backed off and
faced the tall woman and said,
“
Turong
,
Turong
!”

She appeared to be their leader and they made room for her to approach us.  She spread the fingers of her right hand wide and raised her hand to her face with the palm outward so that it covered most of her face.