Ella
A time travel story
The limousine that collected Scott Grier was the most beautiful, elegant space he’d ever been in—as spacious as his Queens, New York apartment. The car smelled like roses.
Locksmiths like Scott never rode in limos, though occasionally, they helped people get back into one. Of all the times he’d helped a driver re-enter their Lincoln Town Car or Mercedes-Benz 600 Pullman, nobody had ever invited him inside. Once, he tried, but the driver pointed to the grease stain on his pants and shook his head.
The thick leather seat was comfortable, too, soothing his back muscles, which ached from bending over to fix countless sinks and toilets. Down and up, up and down, contorting pipes with heavy wrenches wrenched his muscles and spine. “Even without the event, the ride is a prize,” he mused.
An hour later, he arrived at his destination, Gansevoort and Washington Streets, the start of the Manhattan High Line, a 1.45-mile-long elevated park and trail that let New Yorkers stretch their legs and escape the city’s noise and traffic.
Rather, he arrived where the High Line had been before the Eons Company had persuaded the New York City government to demolish it so they could build the Eons Passage, a 1.45-mile-long above-ground tunnel made of a unique, transparent material developed by the company’s scientists.
The Eons Passage cost over two hundred billion dollars (a price that included tearing down the High Line and associated bribes to city and state officials for permits), but despite being the most expensive private project in the world, the Eons Company assured itself that they’d recoup this incredible sum—and more—through the sale of tickets.
Today was the grand unveiling. Along with seven other lucky lottery winners—chosen from over 200 million entries—Scott would be the first to walk through the tunnel.
Scott’s heart pounded as he stepped out of the limo.
Cameras flashed, reporters swarmed, and the president of the Eons Company, Marianne O’Donnell, shook his hand.
A broad smile illuminated his face.
He was about to travel back in time.
O’Donnell escorted Scott a dozen steps from the limousine along a red carpet to the tunnel’s horseshoe-shaped entrance. The tunnel’s exterior was composed of approximately half-inch thick translucent material along the inside and impervious to light on the outside. The entrance towered ten feet tall and was adorned in gold that reflected the mid-afternoon sunlight, dazzling and shimmering, casting fireworks of iridescence across the crowd, as if the Eons Company had manipulated the sun to shine exactly so for the best light show ever.
If they can build a time tunnel, why couldn’t they also control the sun? Scott thought.
“From inside the tunnel,” O’Donnell said to the assembled eight while a thousand reporters aimed their microphones her way and video cameras recorded this historic day, “you will see into the past that surrounds you. Look around as you walk. Look to the sides, and be sure to look up, too. With each step, you’ll view a more distant past. During your first few steps, you'll observe what transpired the day before, last week, and last month, but a few strides later, you’ll witness the previous year, a decade ago, and at about the quarter-mile mark you’ll see Manhattan as it was a century before. Keep walking to the time before Europeans came to America, to the time mastodons roamed this land, and back to when dinosaurs, not skyscrapers, cast enormous shadows. History won’t be able to see you; you won’t interact with anyone or anything from the past, and you don’t have to worry about accidentally landing in an era before flush toilets.”
The reporters, guests, Eons executives, and the eight winners laughed.
“What happens if the tunnel breaks?” one of the lottery winners asked, a man in his late fifties with black bifocals. “Does the past come rushing in? Could a dinosaur eat me?”
“No. The past is not physically outside the tunnel. What you’re seeing are images of the past projected through gravitational lensing. The past can’t touch you any more than the characters in a movie can harm you. Or kiss you, if it’s that kind of movie.”
More laughter rippled through the crowd.
“A few things to note. Please don’t touch the glass; we don’t want hand smudges. Also, you will only see this part of Manhattan Island because the tunnel travels through time, not space. In the future, the Eons Company plans to build a tunnel that can show the world as it was everywhere, but for now, I think this is pretty good.”
Scott and all the ticket winners nodded.
“Unless there are any questions, enjoy the stroll through time and I’ll see you on the other side, back in 2028.”
Everyone held their breath; nobody had any more questions.
Scott took a tentative step into the tunnel. Two rows of subdued LED floor lighting provided the only illumination, other than the light that passed through from the eons before. He felt heavier, then lighter than he should be, as if gravity were an ocean wave ebbing and rising. There was a streetscape identical to one today—people hustling and bustling, wearing Nike sneakers, sporting black nylon backpacks, their hair cut like a person in 2028—except the leaves on the trees were purple, red, and yellow. He gasped.
Autumn 2027?
Don’t touch the glass, Scott remembered, willing himself to stay upright and steady. He spread his legs and pressed his feet hard against the floor. This is yesterday all around. It’s like…it’s like…There was no “it’s like.”
He said, “Wow.”
The other time-tourists also released wows.
Scott proceeded forward. As they moved deeper into the time tunnel the lottery winners separated, traveling at their own pace until Scott couldn’t see anyone else.
Inside the tunnel, invisible speakers piped in a barely perceptible windscape like you might hear at the top of a snowy alpine peak.
With each step, the world outside the tunnel changed. After a minute, men and women with distinctive 1980 puffy hairstyles appeared, and after that, bell-bottomed pedestrians with psychedelic shirts and blouses populated the sidewalk.
It was the same street, but the world around him metamorphosed so rapidly that he felt like he was moving through time and space.
This is real, Scott thought. This isn’t a movie or projection.
He didn’t doubt it, but on the other hand, how could he not? How was such a technology possible?
Scott glided through the 1950s, 1940s—tanks rolled by, some kind of World War II military parade, Scott guessed—and into the 1930s. That’s when everything became gray, dark, and dusty, and Scott knew he was passing by the Great Depression.
So sad, dim, everyone in tattered clothes, gaunt, cheeks caved inward.
Men in threadbare suits huddled around a burning barrel and two ragged children rummaged through a pile of trash from an overturned garbage can. A handful of strides later, Scott left the Great Depression, or rather exited before it began.
The vibrant 1920s whirred into view. Women in colorful, low-cut flapper dresses and men wearing baggy pants and Oxford sweaters. Boxy cars on tall wheels. Darting around the tops of skyscrapers, a biplane.
A woman standing on the sidewalk adjacent to the tunnel waved toward Scott. She had short blonde hair and wore a yellow knee-length pleated dress, a silvery V-neck blouse, and a matching silver jacket. She looked to be about his age, twenty-nine. Pretty, too.
The wave was a random event in the past that looked like it was directed toward the future. Still, he tapped his chest with his forefinger and mouthed, “Me?”
She nodded.
What? She can see me from the past? How can that be?
Scott nudged his nose against the transparent tunnel wall and mouthed, “Who are you?” in return.
The woman blinked and tilted her head sideways.
What does she see? Does she see me? The tunnel?
The woman retrieved a notepad and pen from her purse. She twisted her head left and right and then wrote hastily. Her blouse fluttered as she took rapid breaths. After a few dozen seconds, she pressed the paper to the glass.
She sees a tunnel. She knows I’m behind some kind of glass barrier.
“I’m Ella. I live at 201 Grand Street, apartment 2E. I don’t know who or where you are, but please help me. Eugene, my husband, beats me. I’m afraid.”
She blinked again and wiped tears from her cheeks. She wrote again on the pad. “Have to go. Please be here tomorrow, same time. Help me.”
Scott nodded and said, “Yes,” but Ella had already turned away.
She stuffed the pad back into her bag a second before a large man, maybe six feet two inches tall with thick arms and an equally muscular neck, grabbed Ella’s arm and yanked her across the street, her legs barely keeping up with his pace. The man had thinning blond hair and a pencil mustache.
A big, black Model T rumbled by, blocking Scott’s line view of Ella and the man. A moment later, they rounded the corner behind a brownstone.
The rest of the tunnel tour was a blur as he tried to reconcile two irreconcilable facts: You can’t interact with the past, but I have interacted with it.
When he emerged in 2028, he felt dizzy. Except for Ella, whose face was the epitome of clarity in his mind’s eye, the past was a mismatched blur of incongruent images: a dinosaur holding a bow and arrow, a man in a three-piece suit and yellow paisley tie on horseback, a locomotive pulling a farm plow, a wall of ice with the Empire State Building perched atop, Woolly mammoths riding streetcars.
By the time he arrived home, Scott wasn’t sure what had happened, what was real, and what wasn’t. His stomach churned, and his head felt like he'd whipped around a rollercoaster all day.
He knew one thing, though: He needed to return to the tunnel, to Ella. Not only to help her, but also to help himself by figuring out if what he saw was real. Did something about the tunnel cause hallucinations? Did the strange physics of creating a visual passage through time affect his brain? Scott wondered if the other travelers hallucinated, but he had no way of contacting them. Asking the Eons Company was premature because the last thing Scott wanted was to be branded crazy.
Scott called the VIP number the Eons Company gave him when he won the lottery visit. He hadn’t expected them to okay his revisit the tunnel tomorrow, but he was grateful they did.
He fast-walked through the first decades. He would have preferred to run, but that might have caused unwarranted attention. When he reached the view where he had seen Ella—sometime in the early 1920s—he stopped. He glanced at his Timex. It was 10:12 a.m., the same time as yesterday.
And he waited.
Ten minutes later, he spotted Ella walking down Eleventh Avenue. She was wearing a dark blue flapper dress, sunglasses, and a cap pulled down over her head. She pivoted rapidly from side to side and stopped inside a clothing store halfway down the first block for a few minutes.
She’s hiding from him.
Ella emerged from the store and continued walking toward Scott, keeping close to the shadow-shrouded buildings.
Scott scanned the surrounding area for Ella’s husband.
When Ella reached the tunnel, she took a piece of paper from her bag and pressed it against its exterior. “Who are you?”
Scott wrote quickly on his notepad. “I’m Scott. What is today’s date?”
“May 22.”
He scribbled again, doing his best to keep his hand steady and handwriting readable. “What year is it?”
Ella scrunched her face as she wrote, “1921. Where are you?”
“I live in 2028 in New York City. I’m inside a time portal that lets me look into the past. But you’re not supposed to be able to see me.”
“I do see you. And a whirl of lights like a Ferris wheel at night around you, with you as the center of that wheel. Like you’re an angel.”
Ella rubbed her head through her hat. “Are those lights from H.G. Wells' time machine?”
“Something like that.”
Nothing like that, Scott thought. Or maybe the Eons Passage was a creation of H.G. Wells, who, despite time’s passage, is still alive.
“You believe me?”
“I have to believe you because I want to believe you can save me from Eugene,” she wrote. A few tears fell from her eyes, landing on the transparent barrier that separated them in time. “Can you help me?”
An usher in a beige and gold outfit that resembled a Star Trek uniform walked briskly toward Scott. Please keep moving so that others may enjoy the past read signs posted at regular intervals. Scott suspected the usher was heading his way to tell him not to linger.
“I have to go.”
“Please help me, Scott. I’m afraid of Eugene, afraid he might murder me in my sleep.”
“I will.”
Somehow, I will.
Scott strode ahead of the usher, and before Ella had wiped her eyes and mouthed thank you, Scott was already watching the first shells fall on Fort Sumter in the predawn darkness of April 12, 1861. Dozens of fires consumed the Union fort.
Once again, the rest of the time-walk was a blur, his feet on automatic pilot. He passed by two gray and brown Herrerasaurus from 230 million years ago, six-meter tall dinosaurs with razor-sharp teeth and set-back eyes that tracked him closely, and exited the Eons Passage into the bright afternoon sun.
Scott sat on one of the benches outside the tunnel, along with dozens of other people who had just witnessed hundreds of millions of years of history, letting time catch up with him. He clutched the bench as the world swirled, Manhattan’s skyscrapers bending and bowing, the light reflecting off the glass and steel, stinging his eyes. He closed them, but that only amplified his dizziness.
“I need to think.”
“Excuse me?” the woman sitting on the bench beside Scott replied.
“Sorry, I was talking to myself.”
Maybe that’s my problem. I’ve been talking to myself too long. Next week is the sixth anniversary of Zoe’s death. And who have I spoken to over those six years? Only people with leaking sinks and clogged toilets.
Scott rested his elbows on his legs and his face on his hands.
Ella needs my help. But can I? Should I? I need Ella’s help, too. I need it badly.
A vague plan formed, but the plan’s foundation rested on an impossibility: passing through the tunnel’s wall.
It’s not possible. Ella seeing me isn’t possible, either.
Scott massaged his forehead in a failed effort to end his growing headache.
When Scott arrived home, he made a reservation for the Eons Passages for the next day, hoping that because he was a firster, they’d let him go through again, which they did.
As quickly as he could without attracting attention, Scott fast-walked through the decades to 1921. He glanced at his watch: 10:12 a.m.
Where is Ella? Will she be here today? Can she?
Scott’s hands trembled as he imagined all the terrible things and the one especially terrible thing that might have felled her.
Ella appeared minutes later, limping. She wore a broad-brimmed black hat and large sunglasses, but those accessories and the thick makeup she had applied could not hide the large bruise on her left cheek.
“I’m sorry,” Scott wrote. “He did this to you again.”
“Yes.” Ella paused, looked at Scott for a long minute, and wrote again, “But you being here makes me feel better.”
“I think I can come to you.”
“It’s okay. I understand you can’t. You’re in the future. I’m one hundred seven years in the past.”
“I’m going to try.”
Why? Why am I going to try to save a woman whom I barely know? Scott asked, only to answer himself a moment later: Because I have nothing and no one here. Twenty-twenty-eight is dead to me, as it has been every year since. Unless I do this. I have to. This is why Ella can see me.
Scott shuffled even closer to the tunnel’s wall. Static electricity raced across his skin, sparking and tingling every nerve ending.
“What can you do?”
Scott considered whether to tell her his plan because doing so might jinx it. But what was the harm? Maybe she had an idea to make it work better.
He wrote quickly with his Bic. “You’re not supposed to be able to see me. That’s what they said. But you can, which makes me think I can break through the glass that separates us with a hammer or something.”
“It’s that simple?”
Scott nodded.
I hope so, or they’ll arrest me for trying to destroy the Eons Passages, and if that happens, they’ll never let me back in the tunnel and I’ll never see her again. But what do I have to lose?
“Yes, it’s that simple. But I also think it’s more complicated than that. No, complicated is the wrong word. It’s more incomprehensible than just smashing the wall with a hammer.”
His mind raced toward an analogy. He hoped he had the decades right, because although he’d now walked through history three times, he still understood very little of the 1920s.
“You know the radio? It works, but how does it work? It doesn’t matter if we understand something to be able to use it; it just matters that we can.”
Ella winced as her smile reached the bruise on her cheek. She nodded.
“I’m sorry it hurts. I won’t let Eugene hit you anymore. I will be back tomorrow with a hammer, with hope.”
The other guests, numbering in the dozens now that the Eons Passages was open to the general public, caught up with Scott.
“I have to go,” he wrote.
On his way home, Scott stopped at a coin and stamp shop and bought nine hundred dollars of turn-of-the-century currency, his entire savings.
Next stop, a hardware store, where he purchased an Estwing E3-16C hammer. Its thirteen-inch length would allow him to tape it to his leg, and the hammer’s grippy rubber-coated handle would ensure he transferred as much power as possible to the wall. He was strong, but didn’t know how much force it would take to break the tunnel’s wall because he didn’t know what it was made from. But he was certain he’d only get one shot.
Scott secured the first tour of the morning and, as before, hurried to 1921, sweat accumulating under his shirt and on his face with each step into the past. By the time he reached Ella’s year, he was a soggy mess; his heart raced so fast it threatened to escape his rib cage, and his pupils filled his eyes.
He scanned the street. Steam wafted two stories up from a pipe protruding from the sidewalk. A large, black truck with lettering on its side that read: “United States Trucking Company Armored Car Department” rumbled by on an asphalt street. Nearby, pedestrians weaved in and out of the cars in a synchronized dance. At an intersection a block away, a uniformed cop blew a shrill whistle as he guided traffic with white-gloved hands.
A whistle. I can hear the past now. I shouldn’t be able to, but I can, just like Ella should not have been able to see me.
Car horns, groaning engines. And something else: mooing. Cattle?
I hear them. The past isn’t in the past; it’s here with me in the present, too.
Scott pressed his hands against the transparent material that separated him from 1921. His hands warmed as if sunlight from the other side touched his skin.
Where’s Ella?
A murmur of tourists swelled behind him; they would be on him in seconds.
It’s now or never. I’ll find Ella. I have her address—201 Grand Street, apartment 2E—and I’ll come to her.
Scott shivered.
Hurry, he commanded his muscles.
He reached under his pants leg, and in one continuous motion, extracted the hammer from the makeshift sheaf, spun three-hundred-sixty degrees to acquire as much momentum as possible, and smashed the hammer into the wall.
The hammer impacted the glass with the force of a meteor striking the Earth, causing the transparent material to shatter into a rain of crystal pellets that fell on top of and all around Scott.
A six-foot diameter opening appeared before him.
A time-tourist approaching Scott yelled, “Help!” but he ignored her.
A gale swept toward Scott like air streaming out of an airplane that had lost a window. But even still, Scott stepped through the opening and into the past.
Ella screamed.
Eugene, her husband, punched her in the stomach a second time, knocking her onto the wooden ice box and then onto the kitchen floor. The hand-cranked flour grinder perched atop the icebox wobbled, threatening to crash to the ground.
Blood trickled from her mouth.
Eugene loomed over her, silhouetted by a bare light bulb hanging from the ceiling. He raised his steel-tipped boot above her head, and contracted his leg muscles in preparation to crush her skull.
Fear froze Ella’s vocal cords.
Then the door to their second-floor apartment rattled, and the inside door knob turned as if under the thrall of a ghost.
Eugene lowered his foot to the floor and stepped back as far as he could, which was not far in the tiny kitchen.
Ella rolled to her side, pushed herself to her knees, and stood. She could breathe again.
The door exploded open. An old man entered, holding a pistol in his hand. Although he appeared so frail that his bones would collapse under their weight, he strode swiftly past Ella, his eyes sharply focused on Eugene, at whom he pointed the gun. “Lay on the floor face down and don’t move, or I will shoot you dead.”
Eugene looked down at the wet spot growing around his crotch.
The pistol-cocking click echoed off the kitchen walls.
Eugene laid on the floor.
The old man turned to Ella and passed her a leather satchel, wincing as he raised it above his shoulder. “Take it. Go now. You’re free. He’s not going to hurt you ever again.”
“What do you mean? Who are you?”
“There’s a million dollars in cash in that bag and another five million dollars in a safety deposit box at the Bank of New York’s main branch. The box’s key is in the bag, too. You’re free, Ella, free to live the life you want.”
“I still don’t know who you are.”
“I’m Scott. When I entered the past, I thought I was walking into today to save you, but”—Scott shrugged—“I guess time travel doesn’t work that way. I traveled to 1864, fifty-seven years ago. I willed myself to last until now because I knew you’d be here today and that you were in trouble.”
Scott coughed, a spasm of loud coughs and gasps that went on for a minute. “I’m eighty-six, and my days are few. I wish we met when I was young, but traveling so far into the past gave me time to build this fortune for you.”
“It is you.”
“Yes.”
Ella wrapped her arms around Scott and kissed his cheek. “I don’t know what to say except thank you.”
“Go now, Ella.”
Scott waited until she exited and then turned to Eugene. He stood silently until Ella was out of earshot, and pulled the trigger.
If you enjoyed this story, I think you’ll also like my story, Life.
What a heartbreak of a story. Beautifully done, Bill.
What a story!!
Lucky Ella