Flights of Fancy

On the inside of the room and next to the door was an identical hole to the one outside. Switching on his torch and stepping out, he withdrew the prism and stepped back into the room; within seconds, the door slid smoothly sideways and back into position sealing the room off completely. That was when Mark had his first panic attack. 'What the fuck had he just done? What if this didn't work?' He was thinking. Just like the outside, there was no lock, no handle. How did he get out of there? No one was going to hear him if he shouted and without the prism, they couldn't open the door anyway.

It was with trembling fingers that he placed the glass ornament in the internal hole and cried out in relief as the door slid silently open. 'Shit! Don't be so fucking stupid next time,' he scolded himself.

Glancing at his watch, he had been down here longer than he'd anticipated; his friends would be here shortly, and his mother would come and shout for him when they arrived. Retrieving the prism, he stepped smartly through the door and watched as the lights went out and it closed. 'Plenty of time to explore again tomorrow,' he thought to himself.

Snow had fallen that night, the gardens covered in a blanket of white. His father was at work and his mother was going out for last-minute essentials. Taking his torch and the prism, Mark made his way down to the secret room ensuring this time that when he stepped inside, he had the glass crystal in his pocket. He had pondered it in bed last night; what would happen if the door closed and the prism was still outside, the prospect of being entombed, chilling him to the bone?

He inspected the walls again, unable to make head or tail of what the engravings meant, and then inspected the chair. In essence, it was just a seat, albeit a fancy one with a seatbelt system. It was a puzzle. Who had built the room? And what was it for? He took a seat, surprised at how comfortable the chair was as he relaxed back into it. Part of the arm was padded, but where his hands rested, there was a metal plate on each one. He had been so busy looking around him that he hadn't noticed the hole in front of the right-hand plate. It was the same shape as the external and internal entrance holes; the prism was still in the internal one, keeping the door open. He had learned that after his last visit.

Standing, he went over to the door and looked back at the chair. Did he dare take the chance? His imagination had given him nightmares, fears of being entombed in this room with no way of escaping.

Mark took a breath and steadied himself before slowly extracting the glass prism, watching as the door slid back into position and closed firmly. His hands and legs shook as he reinserted it, letting out a huge sigh of relief as the door opened. He did it several more times until he was convinced that so long as he had this key in his possession, he could re-open the door.

Sitting back in the chair, he stared at the hole, the glass key grasped firmly in his hand. Mark had to use his left hand to steady his right, as he lined the two up and slid the prism into the hole. It only went in an inch and then stopped. He could feel a faint vibration; the key seemed to want to go in further as he exerted a bit more force. Suddenly, it slid home and several things happened all at once. The engravings on the wall seemed to get brighter before starting to pulse with light, flickering as they strobed from one element to another. The two tablets came to life, some kind of program on each showing numbers, graphs, and pulsing power meters.

The chair began to move, slowly at first, turning right to left through three hundred and sixty degrees, and then just to confuse his eyes, the room itself began to turn, but it moved left to right. Mark felt queasy and light-headed as the wall speeded up, wondering if he was going to be sick and not sure now which direction he was facing when the motion finally slowed and stopped. But at least the door managed to line up with the chair again.

It was just a primal instinct, as he grabbed the prism and extracted it, clambering to his feet on legs which felt like jelly and were refusing to support him. He jammed it into the slot by the door, waited for it to open, and then rushed through. As the door closed behind him, everything went dark, and for a second he felt his fear rise as he fumbled for his torch. The beam lit up the passage and the stone steps; the door in the panelling was closed. Mark was convinced he had left it open.

He tried to dash up the steps, but his head and legs wouldn't allow it, and he had to stop halfway until the world stopped spinning. At the top, he pushed the lever, hearing the soft click as the panel door popped open, and then he was in the long gallery. Closing it behind him, he dashed for the main house and the front door. It felt like he was going to be sick, and he needed fresh air.

At the end of the gallery, he opened the door and came to an abrupt stop. He was in a large room with lofty ceilings from which hung huge chandeliers. The fancy coving and corniches looked old and dull, the wood panelling which ran at waist height all around it was marked in places, and the wallpaper, if that was what it was, had faded to the extent that barely any pattern remained.

There was another door opposite, and that was where Mark headed, throwing it open to be confronted by a large hallway, an ornate staircase, and the main entrance. He just kept going, feeling the bile start to rise. He managed to get out of the door, down the front steps, and onto a gravel driveway with massive lawns on either side before he collapsed on the grass and closed his eyes.

He could feel the sun on his face warming him, but that was impossible. Minutes earlier, everything in sight had been covered by snow and a chilling wind was blowing; now, it felt like late spring or the start of summer.

When Mark's equilibrium returned, he opened his eyes and sat up. He felt queasy all over again. He was staring at a house, not his house, some kind of old stately home, the stonework now badly discoloured. He found that he was talking to himself.

'Where the fuck am I, and what has happened?' He remembered the room spinning and then dashing out. The stone steps and the panel door had been there; the long gallery had been there. But where was the rest of his house, and what was this place?

The sound of a girl's laughter and then voices, carried on the slight breeze as he hoisted himself to his feet and followed them, along the front of the house and down the side. As he reached the corner, he started to recognise elements that he knew, this was the rear of his home. On one of the lawns, a table was set up beneath the shade of a tree, and a lone man sat there, sipping from a glass.

Mark stepped onto the grass.

'Hello. Are you lost?'

He turned at the sound of the young girl's voice, staring at her like a madman for a second before his legs went again, refusing to support him any longer as his body hit the ground with a thud. He never heard her shriek, or the call for her grandfather as she rushed towards him. When he opened his eyes, a wizened, kindly-faced old gentleman was kneeling on one side of him and the young girl on the other.

'Help me get him up Beatrice, and then go and ask Cook for a pot of tea.'

Mark managed to make it across the lawn and into the shade of the old tree. 'Sit down, sit down, my boy.' He plonked himself into one of the chairs.

He was having trouble speaking because, firstly, his mind was refusing to process this reality, and secondly, looking at the man and the young girl, and the way they were dressed, he didn't trust himself to say anything without every other word being an expletive.

While they waited for the tea to arrive, the old gentleman spoke. 'Who are you? Where did you come from? I don't recognise your mode of dress; have you been in foreign parts?'

Mark just gave him a puzzled look and reached across to the table for a glass and the jug of water. His mouth and throat were parched, and what he needed was a drink. Emptying the glass in one fell swoop, he placed it back on the table and felt something fall from his trouser pocket. Looking down, by his side, the prism sparkled in the light.

'Ah,' the old man said, 'you must be the new pilot.'

Mark looked at him, puzzled. 'Pilot? No! I'm still at school.' At last, he had found his voice.

The old chap pointed to the prism as Mark picked it up. 'You're the pilot; you have the key.' With that, he reached into his own pocket and produced an identical one.

'You have one as well?' Mark asked. The old chap shook his head. 'No, this is the same one; the only one; there is no other, which is how I know you must be the pilot. And judging by the way you are dressed; you must be from the future.'

The tea arrived, which was a perfect interruption because Mark did not have a clue what the old chap was rambling on about; his mind was numb and currently unable to accept that this wasn't some kind of joke or that he was dreaming.

With the cup of tea inside him and feeling slightly better, the old man asked a question. 'What is your year?'

'Twenty-sixteen' Mark replied. 'Why, what year is this?'

The old chap looked astonished. 'This is the year of our Lord, eighteen sixty-five.'

'How the hell did I get here?' The words had just slipped out and he put his hand over his mouth as he apologised.

''In the time machine, young fella, you must have used the time machine.'

Mark was panicking now, 'What time machine, I haven't got a time machine. They don't exist, only in films and comics and on television. I was in this secret room in my house, and then suddenly I was here.'

The old chap nodded sagely. 'That isn't a room; it is a time machine. It has been there for many hundreds of years and each pilot trains and hands the key on to the next one; that's how it's always been as far as I know.

Mark quickly explained how no one had trained him, how he had discovered the room, and how the prism had been an ornament in his sister's bedroom. The old chap looked troubled. 'You have been extremely fortunate, you could have ended up anywhere, in the past, in the future, and with no idea how to get back.'

It might have been a summer's day, but an icy chill ran up and down Mark's spine. 'Then how the "blooming heck" am I supposed to get back to my family?' He'd managed at the last moment, not to swear.

The two of them were deep in conversation, Beatrice sitting quietly as she listened to what her grandfather and this young man spoke of. Truth be told, she was quite enamoured of him and especially his strange garb.

'If you say that each pilot trains the next, why haven't you done so as yet?' Mark asked.

'There has been no opportunity,' the old man explained. 'I only had a daughter. Beatrice's mother. I thought there was lots of time; sadly, there was not. Both she and her husband were taken by the flu, and so I have brought Beatrice up, but she is too young yet to be trusted with something as powerful as the machine.'

Mark looked at the young girl; she must have been about twelve or thirteen years old, a few years younger than he was, and a strikingly beautiful child.

As the afternoon wore on, Mark was still at a loss as to how he was to return to his own time. The old chap, who he now knew was called Mr Blandford explained. 'Please call me Isaac. It is easy, I will take you back and explain how the machine works. It would be sensible if you visited some more because it is impossible to show you everything at once. I will show you how to do that.'

When Mark was eventually ready, Isaac escorted him back to the house. 'You must excuse my home. But I haven't the money anymore to try and keep it going. So many things need doing, it is never ending.'

Indoors, the disrepair was even more evident now that Mark had the time to look properly. They retraced his steps until they reached the corridor he instantly recognised. Pushing the flower, the panel opened, Mark switching on his torch and ready to descend only for Isaac to grab it from him to inspect, his face filled with amazement.

He did exactly what Mark had previously done, using his prism to open the door, extracting it from the hole, and entering the room. It looked no different to the room in his house, which in effect, it was. Isaac sat in the chair and dropped the crystal into the hole.

'You put the key in the slot, but only until you feel the first resistance, this activates the machine.' Mark watched as the screens came alive.

Isaac pointed to the right-hand panel. 'I realise it may seem odd to you, but all you have to do is touch the glass; there are no mechanical parts. I've no idea how it does that, very strange. Now here, you input where you are at the moment, and then below, where you wish to go. So, time, day, month, and year. What are the settings for where you came from?'

'Twenty-second of December, twenty-sixteen,' Mark told him, 'about ten-thirty in the morning.

'Good, I put in my settings, first of June, eighteen sixty-five, and the time is,' Isaac pulled a fob watch from his pocket and checked the time. 'Ah, three-fifteen in the PM.'

'Now, here, my young friend,' he said, turning to the left-hand panel, which was divided into four segments. 'This is the longitude and latitude of this room, and if we were going somewhere else in the world, we would change the one next to it to that location. But as we are going and returning to the same spot, both of those can be left identical.'

Mark asked what the lower two segments were for, surprised when Isaac told him he was not sure.

'I've studied it over the years and as far as I can fathom, the bottom left is the position of the Earth in space. I presume if we had the coordinates of another inhabitable planet, we could perhaps go there. I have never messed with that, and the pilot who trained me advised that I leave it well alone.'

'Who was your trainer?' Mark asked.

'My uncle, the man who owned this house before me. He started me quite young when I was no more than ten. Of course, he would not let me go off on my own; he kept the key well hidden. When he died, I inherited the house and the key.'

Mark didn't have the heart to tell the old chap that in the present, nearly everything worked by touchscreen.

'Once it is all set and you are ready, you can slide the crystal in the rest of the way. Ready? Hold on to the back of the chair tightly.'

Mark watched fascinated as the prism slid completely home and the seat started to move, the walls completing their merry dance in the opposite direction. He closed his eyes because he felt nauseous, mere seconds passing.

'Here we are. You can use your key to open the door and step out. Wait a few seconds, and then I will have returned to my own time. It has been nice meeting you, Mark. I hope we speak again.'

The door opened, and the beam of his torch lit the steps leading back up to the corridor above and the house. He withdrew the key and exited as the door closed behind him, and through the soles of his feet felt the faintest of vibrations. Reinserting the key into the mechanism, the door opened once more, the room now dark, quiet, and empty.

In his bedroom, Mark pondered what had happened; it was only fifteen minutes later than when he had headed downstairs, and yet, he had been at the original house for hours. What he had discovered felt exciting but scared the hell out of him. He had been lucky, from what Isaac had told him, he could have ended up anywhere, never to return. What would his parents have thought, they would have been destroyed, their only son disappearing and never seen again.

As it was, two years passed before he ventured down to the room once more. That one journey he had accidentally made, scared him. Yes! The promise of being able to travel through time excited him, but the prospect of becoming stuck made him fearful. He had considered just trying to go back in time by one day but suddenly realised there could be implications. It was something that had never entered his head previously, and he'd missed the chance to ask Isaac. If he went back to yesterday, was there a possibility of meeting himself?

When he finally ventured forth once more, he took his time. Familiarising himself by bringing the screens to life, but never fully inserting the key. His idea was to revisit the old man and his granddaughter. Carefully, he set his current date and time, and then advanced Isaac's date by one day.

With everything set, he took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and slid the key completely home. He kept them closed until he sensed that the chair had finally stopped moving. The door opened and closed as Mark climbed the stone steps and then opened the panelling door. It seemed no different than the last time he had been here. In a way, if he had gotten everything correct, it shouldn't be. For Isaac and his granddaughter, it would be one day; for him, it would be two years.

Along the gallery, into the large room and then onto the hallway. Mark opened the main entrance and went outside, walking around to the back of the house. There was no one out on the lawn today as he poked his head into an open doorway. He didn't want to shout, it felt right, but at the moment he had no idea if he had returned at the correct date and time.

The house was quiet as he wandered around, one empty room after another. And then he heard voices, convinced that one of them was Beatrice. Putting his ear to the door, he listened before turning the knob and entering. She was up and out of her chair with a beaming smile as he entered, her grandfather turning his head to stare at him.

'Ah, you visit us again. But for you, I think it has been quite a while.'

'Yeah, after my first trip here, it took a while to summon the courage again. I listened to what you told me and was afraid of making a mistake. If I've got it correct, for you, I was here yesterday, for me, it has been two years and I am now eighteen.

The old man nodded proudly. 'Tea?' He asked. When Mark nodded, he turned to Beatrice. 'Would you be so kind, my dear, as to ask Cook for a pot of tea?'

Mark spent hours with them discussing the machine, with Isaac answering his questions to the best of his ability, and he also did a tour of the gardens with Beatrice hanging off his arm. When he left them, he felt sad, but it was with the promise of a return before too long.

Back in the present and as time passed, the urge to try and go somewhere different intensified. Mark had not got a clue where to pick; he just needed somewhere that felt comfortable and safe.

It was an overheard conversation that tempted him. His sister Elizabeth had been visiting and she and their mother had been talking. Mark had been about to enter the room but held back as he listened to them.

'I'd have been about the same age as Mark, and it was the annual fair and fete in town. It was before I met your father and there was this rather dishy boy there that I met.' Both women laughed as his mother lowered her voice and whispered something to his sister.

'Anyway, if it hadn't been for the fact that he had to move away, I might never have met your father and got married.'

Mark wondered; did he dare? The annual club day was held on the same weekend each year, and Mark knew his mother's birthday, which made it easy to work out a date when the incident she spoke of may have happened.

Remembering what Isaac had told him, he waited until an opportunity arose before making his way down to the room. 'First things first,' he thought to himself, inserting the prism partway into its slot after sitting in the chair and waiting for the instrumentation to come to life. Today's date and time were inserted, and then the date and year that the fair would be in town and his mother would be eighteen. He could walk into town from here and so left everything else as it was, no need to change any coordinates.