Timestopper Begins Ch. 01

I have written several stories about a timestopper -- someone with the unnatural ability to stop time. This is the story of how this man came to be a timestopper, how he learnt about his power and what he did with it. It is a bit rude in parts - actually quite rude (well chapters 3-26 anyway).

Chapter 1 - Starting time

Prosaic: it was not a radioactive spider - at least I never saw it; my parents were not brutally gunned down leaving me scarred and determined - they are both still living a quiet life in a retirement home in Beaconsfield; I did not fall from the sky, the child of a planet with a red sun -- 'greetings Earthmen I come from Croydon'; I did not even find an old knarled stick or old bone and tap or twist it - I do not think I have found so much as a sixpence that was not mine; I am not some great inventor with a heart problem - be fair, I did not even get Physics GCSE.

How then did I come to be a super hero?

Super, yes: hero, well perhaps not so much the hero - though I did try. I did, I really did.

Accidental: it was certainly not of my own making. I did not set out to learn how to start time. Ha! That had you. You were thinking what fun it would be to stop time but let me assure you the greater pleasure is being able to start time... when it has stopped. And stopped it had for me.

Dramatic: I give it that. There was thunder and lightning, blackness and light, howling wind and driving rain. Great dark clouds swirling high above the darkened lonely heath as I trudged solitary, a mere speck in the immensity of that lonely place to my appointment with time.

Of course I should not have gone but you know what young love is; I would not have walked had I possessed a car then; could have avoided the anguish of the solitary walk and what came after. She was not at home when I got there; had gone out with someone who did have a car; did I wish to leave a message? No.

It was a lonely walk back to town and the railway, not that I wanted anyone with me just then, not when I was feeling so utterly miserable. She was out with him! Him, yes him! The idea of them together, laughing, holding hands, even... no, it was all too awful. And as I walked the sky darkened, yes, growing as black as my mood if you like, and the wind began to rise. Was that a portent? Was it a sign of great things? No, I think it was the weather.

Now when I say a darkened lonely heath you are, most likely, thinking of Macbeth and the Three Witches: 'How far is't call'd to Forres? What are these so wither'd and so wild in their attire.'

Probably, though, the aged hags would not have recognised the neatly mown grass, the little flags and oddly shaped patches of sand as a heath but that was what it had once been and a heath it still nominally remained, crossed by a lonely road albeit now metalled by the district council. Deserted certainly - there were no golfers there that evening: not with a sky like that. They were not stupid. A warm Nineteenth and the important knowledge that the last place you want to be in a thunderstorm is on a golf course (OK, fair enough, or on a mountain top, or on the roof of a very tall building or... but you know what I mean).

I should have taken more notice of the gathering storm, should not have been caught like that, should have accepted the kindly offered lift from a stranger in a car, but caught I was. Caught by the rain, caught by the wind and, coming to my senses, caught by the lightning as, rather too late, I realised for a split second that a very strange pressure was building and knew with a surprising clarity of thought that static electricity, truly millions of volts, was building to use me as a conduit from the sky to Earth and that the Earth was reaching through me to the sky. You can imagine the thought which went through my head - 'oh, that's really such a deuced shame' or, at least, sort of words to that effect...

It was, suddenly, very, very quiet; there was no great thunderclap, no fizz of sparking electricity like Franklin and his kite borne key, no explosion of me changing from man to over-cooked kebab, no nothing - just a remarkable and immediate lack of sound. There was not even the sound of rain falling - yet rain was falling because as I moved it felt wet on my face.

Perhaps, I reasoned, I had been deafened by the lightning strike even if, or so it appeared, it had singularly failed to hurt me in any other way. I could not feel anything wrong with me as my hands roamed over my apparently uncrispy body. It was just at about that moment I noticed something particularly curious - the rain was not actually falling. It was in the air: it just was not moving. Nothing was moving. The wind, which seconds before had been blowing the branches of the trees this way and that, was not even moving so much as a leaf. A car's headlights in the distance were not getting any closer. Nothing but me was moving.

Unnerved? Would you not have been if you thought you were dead? And that is exactly what came to mind. I looked around for the body, yeah - my body, but saw not even a heap of gently smouldering clothes. It certainly put the disappointment of not going out with Katherine that evening into perspective! But on the positive side, if I had prematurely passed on there was, at least, the good news that I had indeed passed on: not simply ended. Cue jolly music and 'Always look on the bright side of...' well death really.

Probably I walked on in some sort of a daze. Was I now a ghost in a silent world? The more I walked, the odder it all seemed. Why had time seemingly stopped around me? Surely ghosts move through a world of time? To see people in a car and, walking past the car, notice, whilst the car and the people were not moving, the speedometer read 33 m.p.h.; to see someone suspended in the air in the act of running through the rain but with neither foot touching the ground; or see a crow suspended unmoving in the sky was not what I would have expected a spirit to see. It was as if I was walking through a picture, a three dimensional world of a photograph, a man displaced from a moving film into a snapshot.

The more I walked, the more I really did not think I was actually dead: OK, let me be honest, hoped I was not dead, but it just did not seem right. I was sure I had cheated death but was not at all clear how I had done it. Surely the lightning would have got me?

Was I trapped in a timeless world, doomed to walk forever in a single moment in time, not able even to relive a Groundhog Day? If time had stopped for me, how was I to restart it? What was the key to restarting time?

Turning, I walked back. Standing there under a tree, so I had not seen them earlier on, were an elderly couple pointing - pointing at where I had been when I sensed the lightning strike. Frozen in the act of pointing. I stood by them. What had they seen that I had not? If only I could ask them.

Flash, bang. Light, sound, movement, rain -- action!

"Did you see that, one moment the glow?"

"Yes the blue glow..."

"The flash..."

"Poor man..."

"We must..."

We were running towards the spot where I had been, all three of us but I am not sure they had seen me.

There was nothing there.

"Did you see?" They were asking me.

"No, I... didn't. What?"

"A man in the rain, glowing, then struck by the lightning..."

"Such a flash..."

"I saw the flash," I admitted.

"But where is he?"

I was not really listening any more. I walked away. The beautiful sound of sound was back, time had restarted and I was alive, I was not dead, I was not stuck in a silent world. The joy of time starting once more, the sheer pleasure of reality, the happy feel of moving rain on my face, the sound of people's voices, the... I stepped out into the road.

You know how it is said your life flashes before your eyes at the moment of your violent death? Well it did not so much do that as sort of stopped for me...

It was the car, the car travelling at 33 m.p.h., I heard the horn and saw the lights - too late. Too late except that the world went silent again and the lights did not move. With a heartbeat of probably two hundred a minute I stepped back off the road and the car flashed past - only to suddenly stop with a remarkable squeal of brakes and a skid on the wet road.

The woman screamed and the elderly man clutched at my arm.

"Whoops," I said, "That was a near one." Dramatic words for a dramatic moment.

The man looked at me curiously, "Be careful," he said. "Time and tide wait for no man... usually."

Clearly good, if somewhat enigmatic, advice but a trifle late for me that evening.

Shivering as much with fright as cold I made my way home.

What had happened - twice?