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By Jemma Foster
Just as every country has its own peculiar smell, so does each year, and it was with this method that Hector Arco often located himself in time. As he woke, he inhaled the air around him and was disturbed to find it odourless - heralding his descent into unfamiliar territory and travel into an unknown age.
His bones, weakened from the journey, creaked as he shifted his weight in the chair and prised open his eyes. Garish and jagged objects glared back at him with vulgar exhibitionism, curiously foreign. Hector was aware, from the unmistakeable slope of the ceiling and the gracefully unchanged view across the delta that he was inside the house that he had himself built, yet its contents were awkward and remote. His head reeled and the lights danced before him, yawning against the glass of the windowpane. The furious beat of a song, its erratic tempo projected from an unseen radio to plague his ears, taunted him with its waves. Casting his anchor out into the past, it fell against the rocky ground of an uncertain era: the future.
Hector felt his heart jar against his chest as he held his hands before him, clawed and trembling. They were wretched beings, mottled and crippled with age, sketched with the contours of a landscape eroded by the decades and marred with bulging rivers that flooded the grey skin of decay. He held the shrivelled beasts to his face and was met with the rough and sallow cheeks of an old man. Gone was the amber glow of agile youth and instead his body, stretched and sagged, wrinkled and brittle, had been transformed into a callous reminder of mortality. He staggered to the mirror and saw a man whose face had done its living and was preparing to let go of its world, but did not recognise himself in its reflection. Teeth gnarled and stained, lips pursed together in desiccated unison, eyes bloodshot and jaundiced. Tufts of hair grew from the forests of his ears and the silver hair on his head had made a shameful retreat to his crown, as if to pardon the eyes from witnessing its pitiful demise.
This brutal call to the savagery of age reminded Hector of his own time and of the present. He searched for his pocket watch but found that it was gone, the chain too having disappeared. It was a grave thing for a time traveller to be without his timepiece and a sense of dread simmered in the pit of his bowels. As he padded himself down, growing increasingly distressed at the prospect of being trapped in the future, he felt his shirt catch against his wrist. He pulled up his sleeve to reveal a wristwatch, round with a large gold-rimmed face and a sturdy black leather strap. Hector had certainly never come across it before and could only conclude that a bizarre glitch of his journey to the future had caused not just his body to accelerate with the times, but also his watch.
Hector was rare in that he himself was a portal and able to control his travels with his watch. Though of late he had begun to time slip involuntarily, the repercussions of which could be catastrophic. He believed that his abilities had been triggered when he was just a young boy. Riding his bicycle down the hill at an enthusiastic speed, he had gripped the brakes as he approached a turn, but continued to accelerate. Fear had prevented him from swerving and he had vanished over the cliff edge, convinced of his impending death. His survival, and the loss of time he experienced before he was rescued hours later, he put down to a combination of velocity and flight that created within him a temporal gate, projecting him mid-air into a time slide.
Hector moved cautiously through the sitting room, trying to orientate himself, observing the various ornaments, paintings and contraptions that he found at once intriguing in their purpose and hideous in design. The hands of clocks tapped their fingers against their glass cages, dials whirled and machines hummed as he passed through the rooms. Instinctively he pushed buttons, causing the objects to spring into action, spinning and pumping. He fingered the spines of books penned by alien authors and records performed by unheard musicians. Flicking through the album sleeves, he felt the familiar feel of the vinyl against his fingers and his mind floated off to the smoky bars and sultry singers of the present, before returning to the brazen performers splashed across the covers of the future. The wallpaper and carpet were vibrant and obnoxious creatures and the kitchen was an eruption of colour and appliances that with each hum, ping and tick mocked him with their mystery. A desk calendar told him that the date was 11th July 1962 and that he had time-slipped by three decades.
Disorientated and eager to return to the familiarity of the present and ease of his youthful physique, he was preparing to leave when he caught sight of that same frame, poised in a handstand on the shore, tanned and athletic. So vivid and curious was the light of the photograph that he felt as if he were actually there in the scene, diving into the green waves and blinded by the speckled reflection on the water, its colour deep and pure. He could not remember it being taken and presumed, from his appearance, that it was yet to come but he would not have long to wait. As he stared back at his future self in the photograph, he searched his face but there was a remoteness in his expression with which he could not connect. Intrigued as to what other traces of himself - relics of the past that he had not yet lived - he might find, he climbed the steps to the attic. As he reached the top, a thin shard of light pierced through the roof and bathed the intricate weaves of a cobweb that stretched across his path.
Hector peered through the delicate spirals that separated his vision into segments and recognised pieces of his present now masked with dust, remnants of an expired age. As he pulled apart the curtains of the web, he caught the glass eyes of an owl, clouded and chipped, its feathers moth-eaten and fur balding. A thread of recollection knitted its way through his mind and he recognised from the missing claw that it was the same owl that he was working on in the present, his maiden experiment with taxidermy. He removed his handkerchief from his breast pocket and dusted it down but, from the state of it, he wondered if he should bother at all, in this age or the present. A further inspection of the space produced obscure artefacts lifted from ancient times, fragments unearthed during explorations and other less historically significant items. A melancholy lingered in the air, the mourning of redundant articles of the past, forgotten and banished to gather the dusts of time. It disturbed him to think that this was what was to come of the life that he still inhabited and he thought of his wife, Maria, who was due to give birth to their first child any day now and he was consumed with a desire to return to the present.
Fearing that he might have lost time during his travels, he fought with his mind to remember where he had been before he had time-slipped, but failed to retrieve a clear image. Hector was aware that in recent times his memory had begun to deteriorate and the blanks become more frequent, but it was a common side effect of time travel and a largely unavoidable hazard of his profession. Reminded of his obligations to the present as an investigative time historian, scouring the past to disclose mysteries and uncover truths with his colleague Milton, his thoughts began to run over their latest mission when he was interrupted by the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. Aware of the risks of being exposed as a time tourist and the alarm it may cause to a non-traveller, he stepped back into the shadows.
‘Is there someone up there?’
The voice was female but Hector struggled to place the accent, for it was not a region he knew of, nor an impediment, but a distant bell resonated in him and it tolled of the Time Travel Watch. As flashes of memory fired at random in his brain, he knew that he had been to this place and time before. The Watch was a malicious group existing in the future that worked to control time travel and the fiction written into history. They despised rogue travellers, but, more crucially, they would want to capture him and use his rare abilities as a portal for their own corrupt benefit.
‘Ah there you are,’ she sighed. ‘What are you doing up here?’
Though Hector was sure he had never set eyes on her before, she had addressed him with a familiar tone, a known tactic of the Watch. It was a real threat that he might be arrested as an illegal time immigrant, but just as she began to advance further, he remembered his wristwatch and turned its hands back to the present.
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The unforgiving and unnatural light of the hospital bulbs sliced through his eyes as he crashed to the floor, landing on the tiles with a crack to the skull. He lay there a moment as his body adjusted and he felt a cold shiver devouring his flesh and making its way to the marrow of his bones. He was relieved to find that he had been restored to his youthful self and that the wristwatch of the future had been replaced with his old pocket watch, safely attached to its chain. The smell was distinctly of the present, yet it was corrupted with a chemical stench. He felt his pocket for his handkerchief to cover his mouth, but it was missing. Another unavoidable flaw of time travel was the slipping of objects into portals unannounced, and much to Hector’s irritation things were constantly disappearing and getting lost. The ringing in his ears was joined by the pounding of his heart as he stood, the soles of his shoes skidding against the floor. Staring at the rows of feet protruding from white sheets, stiff toes saluting the ceiling, he realised that he was surrounded by the Dead.
The morgue could accommodate no more than eight bodies, which was fitting of the island hospital. The grey walls and metal beds stacked side by side reminded Hector of a tin of sardines. He was grateful that none of the deceased were exposed and could only imagine what lay beneath from the abstract bloodstains and peculiar silhouettes. With no windows to guess the time, and his watch having stopped, Hector began to wind it up and search the room for another timepiece. His eyes cruelly led him to a wrist that had escaped its cloth house, still ticking as if unaware of the departure of its master. Hector felt his neck stiffen and muscles contort. He knew the face well, the same that now leered back at him, clapping its hands aggressively to the seconds. He felt earth’s wavering support beneath his feet as he stumbled forward with stilted, jerky movements and lifted the tag that dangled from the toe with twisted innocence.
Milton Lopez. Deceased. 10th July 1932
Hector forced himself to lift the sheet, and as he peeled back the shroud, he sensed a greater horror beside him. When he turned, his mind having already processed the tragedy of the sight, he saw the delicate arch of her feet. As he was sucked backwards, his legs crumpling beneath him, his eyes fixed on the bump that told of a life that would not be lived. The lights flickered and he disappeared into himself, hearing his screams in the distance as they merged with the voices in his head until there was just a static that clawed at his heart. His mind travelled through time, to past memories and future ones that he had created out of the things that could have been, all of which were now relegated to live on in his memories alone. He could feel each moment of the present falling onto him, crashing through him and into the past, regressing steadily away from the future, from their lives ahead, until time left him with no reality, just illusions, disjointed images that he doubted even came from his own memories.
Flitting through a patchwork of heartache, he rode the carousel - Maria’s hands cold against his; poppies growing tall and dancing for them as he sunk to one knee; the beacon of the lighthouse competing with the moon to illuminate the water as oars plunged into the dark; sliding the plaster across her belly to cast the progress of their unborn child; the times he had stared down the end of a bottle when he should have been with her; pillows wet with tears; sun grazing her hair as she first appeared to him; her voice calling to him as he disappeared into times long gone; all the spectres of the past dancing to the music of the lost; and he saw their faces before him as they turned to stone, their names and dates written across their cheeks, and he reached out but they crumbled to ash in his embrace.
Hector gasped for air as he surfaced from the tide of delirium. Anger and disbelief momentarily suspended his grief and he was consumed with vengeance that barricaded the tears and forced him to his feet. He had allowed time to take him and in losing a day had lost what was his life, for without them he was nothing and it was his nothingness - his absence - that had sacrificed them. He wandered through the fog of his mind, arms outstretched as he staggered blindly forward clutching at splinters of memory, searching for the past, for an explanation. He drifted through the corridors of the hospital, passing ghosts of the recently departed as they left on their journeys, souls travelling through a timeless universe. He saw their reflections in each of them, and began to wind back the hands of his watch, in search of the truth.
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‘Hector?’
‘Maria?’
‘That’s all in the past now Hector. You’re here with us, in the present.’
Hector retreated into his thoughts, willing himself back, cursing the odourless air that told him he had slipped into the future again. Fear swam inside him and as the distorted curtains of his mind drew back, he knew that he had fallen into the hands of the Watch.
‘Hector?’
The voice was cold and mechanical.
‘Are you with me?’
He opened his eyes to a large white room, windowless and empty except for a bare bulb that hung from the ceiling and the bed that he lay in. He asked his body to move but it was unresponsive. A man dressed in white overalls stood over him and bent his head to face Hector, his eyes dark and indifferent.
He began to answer but his voice croaked, his throat dry and calling for whisky.
‘We’ve had your watch engraved for you,’ the man continued.
Hector saw that he was dangling the wristwatch that Maria had given him for their last anniversary, gold-rimmed with a black leather strap, and the memory pierced his heart and forced the air from his lungs.
HECTOR ARCO
1135706163
He had been tagged by the Watch and the only chance of survival was to escape or he would be forever at their service.
‘It’s just so we can keep an eye on you, in case you disappear so someone will be able to bring you back home.’
‘This is not home,’ Hector growled as he struggled to lift himself up and felt a firm hand pushing him back onto the pillows, his aged body unable to fight. He thought it wise not to mention his time travelling or anything that might incriminate him, there was a chance at least that they did not yet know that he was a portal himself.
‘No need to get yourself worked up,’ he said in a patronising tone. ‘They’ll be coming to get you soon, just rest for now.’
Hector listened to the soles of the man’s shoes as they smacked against the floor and the door closed, the key grating against the lock as it turned. Knowing there would not be much time before they came again, he took the watch in his hands and wound it back.
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Hector spat out dirt from his mouth and expelled the dust from his lungs, relieved to smell the salt in the air. As he walked towards the lights of the town he spoke to his heavy heart and asked it to stave its grief a while so that he could place one foot in front of the other. He asked his legs, riddled with the ache of loss, to carry him just a little further, so that he could be with them again. Dust swirled in his tracks and the wind tugged at his shirt as night’s blindness set in.
With each step he thought of her, with each breath of their unborn child and of his betrayal in not guarding them against the unknown evil that had taken them. Milton, his only friend, faithful and constant, a man banished from a life that he deserved to live. Hector prayed that they might be together, and that one day, soon, he would find them on the other side. He drifted into his mind and the hands of their memories led him away to the desert moonscape of the south, with its ancient turrets and fish bones, to wander the crypts and labyrinths that they once were guests in. They swam through the island’s rivers, his fingertips brushing the reeds beneath as they tangled with his toes, entwining theirs with his and he felt their icy bloodlessness and he gave his warmth to them but they grew colder still, until the cracks appeared and they shattered in his hands, melting into the muddy water. Hector watched as they struggled onto the shore, dragging themselves up on their bellies, crawling on their knees, running on the stumps of their legs and he burned with shame and prayed to the gods that they would cut off his own feet so that he might run alongside them and share in their pain, but when he opened his eyes, they were already lost to the horizon. Instead he saw himself, a young boy, staring back at him, before he too turned and disappeared.
He surfaced from his delirium, face stained with tears, the lights of the town loud and blinding. Time was running away, but with a regretful heart he knew where he would find himself. Through the windowpane of the inn he saw a man, cowered in a corner, head bowed and hands clasped tightly to a glass; eyes vacant and hollow. It was the same position he had occupied for many years. He, the ghost of the man inside, watched the man who was himself also a ghost, a half-man with half-thoughts. Immersed in the alcoholic abyss that had poisoned him all his life, he drained glass after glass with a thirst sustained only by those that have fallen prey to the unforgiving and unfaithful elixir. He had only ever drunk rum, he could never stand anything else, but Hector saw that the man inside was drinking from a bottle of whisky, and he felt an uneasy distance. Images flitted through him of broken glass, leaves falling, the faces of strangers, eyes red and swollen, and he felt that he would be here again one day, that in witnessing the man before him he had been shown his future, and the darkness within it. The man slipped through time and life, allowing its sands to trickle through his fingers while the woman who had his heart had her ear pressed to the door, eyes fixed on the window, willing him to return. He was not a husband deserving of a wife, nor a father of a child or worthy of a partner so devoted. A man of these things would have been with them now, guarding their safety. The marked rim of the glass, the sticky stains across the wooden table, cramp in his hands and the hiss of a cigarette as it raced to its end, these all seemed to belong to another past, to a distant, buried age that he could no longer connect with himself.
Hector watched as the man checked the time and reluctantly set aside his glass. When he emerged through the door, Hector hurled himself at him, punching his fist into his chest, desperate for him to wake up to his wrongs, but he slipped through him. As if a ghost, a voyeur, his body had no weight and his voice no sound. Perhaps it was too recent a past, that he could not enter into it completely, or perhaps they were unable to share the same physical space, for they were made of the same parts. The night was crisp, but the inebriated Hector stripped off his jacket and flung it across his shoulder, removing the hipflask from its pocket in the process and bringing it to his lips. Hector walked noiselessly behind himself, quietly preparing his heart for what would come next, though what, he did not yet know. They turned a corner, and, at the sight of his car and himself scrambling for the keys in the dust, Hector knew the truth. What followed was not as before, he was no longer there with himself but in some timeless, unknown place within, where only he existed and the images before him. He watched as a series of slides were projected onto his mind. The round silhouette of his wife, hand cupped under her bump, black hair merging with the night; Milton tall and willowy easing into the passenger seat; himself puffing on a cigarette, the amber ash separating in the wind. Husky voices and frenzied drumming yelling from the radio, a burst of light ahead, wheels skidding then a pause, silence, before screams as metal scratches rock, rubber tearing, glass shattering and footsteps running against gravel.
The driver’s seat was empty. Just like his eight-year-old self, the velocity and drop had caused him to time slip before impact, unjustly saving the culprit. Only the gentle hiss of the steam from the engine and the drip, drip, of blood and oil could be heard. Milton’s body was crumpled across the bonnet, shards of glass sticking up from his skin like stalagmites glinting in the moonlight, his scalp torn from the crown to the neck, revealing not the mind of a friend but the brain of a mortal - a being of flesh and blood that bore no resemblance to the soul that had inhabited the man. Hector caught an arm in the reflection of the glass but dared not look back. It was enough to see the strands of hair that dangled from the window, tangled together with a crimson sheen, wrapping themselves around his heart and squeezing the life from inside. He wanted to take his mind to another place but it forced him to bear witness to his crimes and as if to offer up his punishment, the door to the glove compartment was expelled by the heat to reveal his revolver. His cowardly instinct was to hold it to his head but it would not save them, only serve his selfish desire. Instead, he placed it in his pocket, for now he understood what he had to do.
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Hector slipped back and forth in time, tracing the guilt of the past, now foreign and tainted. He searched for himself and for them, but the hands of the time ghosts dragged him down, and he felt the eyes of the Watch upon him, calling him into the future as he drowned in the vortex of memories, shards of the past raining down on his flesh with daggers that pierced his skin. Each time he surfaced for air he found himself at the accident, stiff limbs, flesh crumbling and disappearing with the wind; Milton’s eyes open as he spoke with silent words. A confused pastiche of images fought against one another and Hector ran towards these false memories, as they lay in bed with the truth, abstract and distorted until he could not tell them apart and could not know what was real, each time reaching out for the past and returning to the cliff. He saw himself as a boy, darting across his thoughts and he ran after him, calling after the innocence of his youth that crushed Hector’s heart against his chest, but he did not answer. He wound his watch round and round until the hands turned on their own, ever faster, against him. He held it in his fist, its face grimacing as its lashes batted against the seconds, winking at the minutes and he brought it down onto the rock, for he had no need for time anymore.
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Hector inhaled the odourless future and felt the damp sea air cling to his skin. He pulled his coat around him and eased himself upright on the bench, his muscles resistant and bones grating at the joints, once again imprisoned in the body of an old man. The derelict pier creaked as its splintered wood fought to hold its weight, weak and rotten after years of exploitation, candyfloss summers and star-struck lovers, only to be rewarded with neglect and abandonment. Across the water, his comrade coughed weak strobes of light at the ships as the waves crashed against his stone legs. The loyal pier had supported the traffic of its passengers and the rides in which they escaped from their lives for a fleeting moment, witnessed kisses that would mark a lifetime and squared its shoulders firm against the waves to protect their ungrateful souls. With quiet patience and unwavering determination, it had held strong and watched the landscape around him grow and warp, in a constant state of flux, while he, forgotten in the middle of it all, remained himself, alone and battered by the tides of time.
Holding his wrist to the light, Hector saw that the hands were dead again, leaving him neglected by time and abandoned by the past. As the boats meandered through the delta, navigating the misty waters that were as grey as the sky, he could not guess at which point the day was at, for even the natural light of time was gone. After struggling to remove the strap, he held the watch up and tapped the glass with his finger. Turning it over, he saw his name engraved in bold and a number beneath, which he did not recognise nor understand its relevance.
‘What are you doing?’
Hector turned to see a young boy carrying a milk crate filled with empty bottles he had gathered from the beach.
‘Do you know what this number is for?’ he asked, holding up the watch.
The boy inspected it as the rain began to fall.
‘It’s a phone number,’ he replied, pointing to the telephone box. ‘Local.’
Hector thanked the boy and pivoted himself off the bench and to his feet. He was grateful for the shelter of the box and took out his handkerchief, curiously with him again, to wipe the rain from the back to reveal the number. Carefully, with his numb and cramped fingers, he began to dial.
‘You need coins,’ the boy said, standing next to him.
‘Oh.’ Hector replied, fumbling his pockets and finding them empty.
The boy extended his hand to Hector, a silver coin resting on his open palm.
Hector held up the coin and inspected it, the face was familiar but its weight and size were strange. Smiling gratefully at the boy, he handed him the watch.
‘Does it work?’
‘Not so well, but you just need to wind it up at the side.’
‘That’s for changing the time,’ the boy said as he set off down the beach. ‘It needs batteries.’
Hector did not hear the boy, only a muffled ringtone.
‘Hello?’ a voice answered.
The line was distorted, Hector turned against the wind and cupped his hand over the receiver to make his voice clearer.
‘Whom may I ask is speaking?’ he said.
‘Hector, where are you?’ replied the voice on the other end.
Suspicious that a stranger should recognise his voice, Hector remained silent.
‘What can you see?’ the voice barked. ‘Stay where you are, we’ll come and find you. Do you understand?’
The Watch. They were coming to get him, to force him to live in their future. He would not allow them to capture him, to abuse his powers and destroy his memories.
‘Hector?’
He left the phone dangling, the voice on the end still calling after him as he walked away. The black clouds of the storm were rushing in from the horizon, the rain coming in sheets that cut horizontally across the pier and he began to walk towards the shore, stumbling across the sand as he hurried away from his pursuers, the wind carrying to him the sound of the phone ringing again, calling him to a future that he had no place in.
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The waves crashed against his mind, drowning everything to silence as he walked along the shore, the colour of the clouds and sea as one, rain blurring the landscape with oily strokes, grey ghosts dancing in the wind. The house, towering above the water on its stilt legs, appeared fragile and brittle, its green paint peeling back to reveal the bare wood beneath. Standing at its feet, Hector could make out the silhouette of his pregnant wife at the window, her head resting against the curtains and her belly round and full. As his younger self, just days before the accident, came running from the porch towards him, he knew what he had to do to save them and give them back their lives. He raised the revolver and gripped his hands around the trigger. Aiming at himself, he waited until the figure was within range, arms outstretched in protest, unaware of his sacrifice and ignorant of the future that he deserved no mercy from. The shot fired, muffled by the rain, and he watched himself buckle and fall to the sand. Then he waited to disappear.
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NEWSPAPER ARTICLE
**** Thursday, July 12, 1962
Pioneering psychiatrist and local resident Dr Hector Milton Arco was yesterday shot dead by his father, Hector Arco, while celebrating his birthday at the family home in Playa de Lágrimas. Police investigating the incident have ruled out a murder inquiry on mental health grounds. Archaeologist Hector Arco, 60, famed in the area for his discovery of ancient remains buried in Isla Pajarito, has battled with acute Alzheimer’s for a number of years and is believed to have been suffering from hallucinations at the time.
Dr Arco, 30, dedicated his life to working with dementia patients such as his father and was known for his groundbreaking research into cognitive therapy. He leaves behind an expectant wife and the legacy of a family wrought with tragedy. Three decades earlier to the day, Arco and his father were the only survivors of a motoring accident that killed his then pregnant mother and his father’s colleague, Milton Lopez. The driver of the car, Hector Arco senior, fled the scene of the crime and served a six-year sentence for driving under the influence and manslaughter.
Just as every country has its own peculiar smell, so does each year, and it was with this method that Hector Arco often located himself in time. As he woke, he inhaled the air around him and was disturbed to find it odourless - heralding his descent into unfamiliar territory and travel into an unknown age.
His bones, weakened from the journey, creaked as he shifted his weight in the chair and prised open his eyes. Garish and jagged objects glared back at him with vulgar exhibitionism, curiously foreign. Hector was aware, from the unmistakeable slope of the ceiling and the gracefully unchanged view across the delta that he was inside the house that he had himself built, yet its contents were awkward and remote. His head reeled and the lights danced before him, yawning against the glass of the windowpane. The furious beat of a song, its erratic tempo projected from an unseen radio to plague his ears, taunted him with its waves. Casting his anchor out into the past, it fell against the rocky ground of an uncertain era: the future.
Hector felt his heart jar against his chest as he held his hands before him, clawed and trembling. They were wretched beings, mottled and crippled with age, sketched with the contours of a landscape eroded by the decades and marred with bulging rivers that flooded the grey skin of decay. He held the shrivelled beasts to his face and was met with the rough and sallow cheeks of an old man. Gone was the amber glow of agile youth and instead his body, stretched and sagged, wrinkled and brittle, had been transformed into a callous reminder of mortality. He staggered to the mirror and saw a man whose face had done its living and was preparing to let go of its world, but did not recognise himself in its reflection. Teeth gnarled and stained, lips pursed together in desiccated unison, eyes bloodshot and jaundiced. Tufts of hair grew from the forests of his ears and the silver hair on his head had made a shameful retreat to his crown, as if to pardon the eyes from witnessing its pitiful demise.
This brutal call to the savagery of age reminded Hector of his own time and of the present. He searched for his pocket watch but found that it was gone, the chain too having disappeared. It was a grave thing for a time traveller to be without his timepiece and a sense of dread simmered in the pit of his bowels. As he padded himself down, growing increasingly distressed at the prospect of being trapped in the future, he felt his shirt catch against his wrist. He pulled up his sleeve to reveal a wristwatch, round with a large gold-rimmed face and a sturdy black leather strap. Hector had certainly never come across it before and could only conclude that a bizarre glitch of his journey to the future had caused not just his body to accelerate with the times, but also his watch.
Hector was rare in that he himself was a portal and able to control his travels with his watch. Though of late he had begun to time slip involuntarily, the repercussions of which could be catastrophic. He believed that his abilities had been triggered when he was just a young boy. Riding his bicycle down the hill at an enthusiastic speed, he had gripped the brakes as he approached a turn, but continued to accelerate. Fear had prevented him from swerving and he had vanished over the cliff edge, convinced of his impending death. His survival, and the loss of time he experienced before he was rescued hours later, he put down to a combination of velocity and flight that created within him a temporal gate, projecting him mid-air into a time slide.
Hector moved cautiously through the sitting room, trying to orientate himself, observing the various ornaments, paintings and contraptions that he found at once intriguing in their purpose and hideous in design. The hands of clocks tapped their fingers against their glass cages, dials whirled and machines hummed as he passed through the rooms. Instinctively he pushed buttons, causing the objects to spring into action, spinning and pumping. He fingered the spines of books penned by alien authors and records performed by unheard musicians. Flicking through the album sleeves, he felt the familiar feel of the vinyl against his fingers and his mind floated off to the smoky bars and sultry singers of the present, before returning to the brazen performers splashed across the covers of the future. The wallpaper and carpet were vibrant and obnoxious creatures and the kitchen was an eruption of colour and appliances that with each hum, ping and tick mocked him with their mystery. A desk calendar told him that the date was 11th July 1962 and that he had time-slipped by three decades.
Disorientated and eager to return to the familiarity of the present and ease of his youthful physique, he was preparing to leave when he caught sight of that same frame, poised in a handstand on the shore, tanned and athletic. So vivid and curious was the light of the photograph that he felt as if he were actually there in the scene, diving into the green waves and blinded by the speckled reflection on the water, its colour deep and pure. He could not remember it being taken and presumed, from his appearance, that it was yet to come but he would not have long to wait. As he stared back at his future self in the photograph, he searched his face but there was a remoteness in his expression with which he could not connect. Intrigued as to what other traces of himself - relics of the past that he had not yet lived - he might find, he climbed the steps to the attic. As he reached the top, a thin shard of light pierced through the roof and bathed the intricate weaves of a cobweb that stretched across his path.
Hector peered through the delicate spirals that separated his vision into segments and recognised pieces of his present now masked with dust, remnants of an expired age. As he pulled apart the curtains of the web, he caught the glass eyes of an owl, clouded and chipped, its feathers moth-eaten and fur balding. A thread of recollection knitted its way through his mind and he recognised from the missing claw that it was the same owl that he was working on in the present, his maiden experiment with taxidermy. He removed his handkerchief from his breast pocket and dusted it down but, from the state of it, he wondered if he should bother at all, in this age or the present. A further inspection of the space produced obscure artefacts lifted from ancient times, fragments unearthed during explorations and other less historically significant items. A melancholy lingered in the air, the mourning of redundant articles of the past, forgotten and banished to gather the dusts of time. It disturbed him to think that this was what was to come of the life that he still inhabited and he thought of his wife, Maria, who was due to give birth to their first child any day now and he was consumed with a desire to return to the present.
Fearing that he might have lost time during his travels, he fought with his mind to remember where he had been before he had time-slipped, but failed to retrieve a clear image. Hector was aware that in recent times his memory had begun to deteriorate and the blanks become more frequent, but it was a common side effect of time travel and a largely unavoidable hazard of his profession. Reminded of his obligations to the present as an investigative time historian, scouring the past to disclose mysteries and uncover truths with his colleague Milton, his thoughts began to run over their latest mission when he was interrupted by the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. Aware of the risks of being exposed as a time tourist and the alarm it may cause to a non-traveller, he stepped back into the shadows.
‘Is there someone up there?’
The voice was female but Hector struggled to place the accent, for it was not a region he knew of, nor an impediment, but a distant bell resonated in him and it tolled of the Time Travel Watch. As flashes of memory fired at random in his brain, he knew that he had been to this place and time before. The Watch was a malicious group existing in the future that worked to control time travel and the fiction written into history. They despised rogue travellers, but, more crucially, they would want to capture him and use his rare abilities as a portal for their own corrupt benefit.
‘Ah there you are,’ she sighed. ‘What are you doing up here?’
Though Hector was sure he had never set eyes on her before, she had addressed him with a familiar tone, a known tactic of the Watch. It was a real threat that he might be arrested as an illegal time immigrant, but just as she began to advance further, he remembered his wristwatch and turned its hands back to the present.
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The unforgiving and unnatural light of the hospital bulbs sliced through his eyes as he crashed to the floor, landing on the tiles with a crack to the skull. He lay there a moment as his body adjusted and he felt a cold shiver devouring his flesh and making its way to the marrow of his bones. He was relieved to find that he had been restored to his youthful self and that the wristwatch of the future had been replaced with his old pocket watch, safely attached to its chain. The smell was distinctly of the present, yet it was corrupted with a chemical stench. He felt his pocket for his handkerchief to cover his mouth, but it was missing. Another unavoidable flaw of time travel was the slipping of objects into portals unannounced, and much to Hector’s irritation things were constantly disappearing and getting lost. The ringing in his ears was joined by the pounding of his heart as he stood, the soles of his shoes skidding against the floor. Staring at the rows of feet protruding from white sheets, stiff toes saluting the ceiling, he realised that he was surrounded by the Dead.
The morgue could accommodate no more than eight bodies, which was fitting of the island hospital. The grey walls and metal beds stacked side by side reminded Hector of a tin of sardines. He was grateful that none of the deceased were exposed and could only imagine what lay beneath from the abstract bloodstains and peculiar silhouettes. With no windows to guess the time, and his watch having stopped, Hector began to wind it up and search the room for another timepiece. His eyes cruelly led him to a wrist that had escaped its cloth house, still ticking as if unaware of the departure of its master. Hector felt his neck stiffen and muscles contort. He knew the face well, the same that now leered back at him, clapping its hands aggressively to the seconds. He felt earth’s wavering support beneath his feet as he stumbled forward with stilted, jerky movements and lifted the tag that dangled from the toe with twisted innocence.
Milton Lopez. Deceased. 10th July 1932
Hector forced himself to lift the sheet, and as he peeled back the shroud, he sensed a greater horror beside him. When he turned, his mind having already processed the tragedy of the sight, he saw the delicate arch of her feet. As he was sucked backwards, his legs crumpling beneath him, his eyes fixed on the bump that told of a life that would not be lived. The lights flickered and he disappeared into himself, hearing his screams in the distance as they merged with the voices in his head until there was just a static that clawed at his heart. His mind travelled through time, to past memories and future ones that he had created out of the things that could have been, all of which were now relegated to live on in his memories alone. He could feel each moment of the present falling onto him, crashing through him and into the past, regressing steadily away from the future, from their lives ahead, until time left him with no reality, just illusions, disjointed images that he doubted even came from his own memories.
Flitting through a patchwork of heartache, he rode the carousel - Maria’s hands cold against his; poppies growing tall and dancing for them as he sunk to one knee; the beacon of the lighthouse competing with the moon to illuminate the water as oars plunged into the dark; sliding the plaster across her belly to cast the progress of their unborn child; the times he had stared down the end of a bottle when he should have been with her; pillows wet with tears; sun grazing her hair as she first appeared to him; her voice calling to him as he disappeared into times long gone; all the spectres of the past dancing to the music of the lost; and he saw their faces before him as they turned to stone, their names and dates written across their cheeks, and he reached out but they crumbled to ash in his embrace.
Hector gasped for air as he surfaced from the tide of delirium. Anger and disbelief momentarily suspended his grief and he was consumed with vengeance that barricaded the tears and forced him to his feet. He had allowed time to take him and in losing a day had lost what was his life, for without them he was nothing and it was his nothingness - his absence - that had sacrificed them. He wandered through the fog of his mind, arms outstretched as he staggered blindly forward clutching at splinters of memory, searching for the past, for an explanation. He drifted through the corridors of the hospital, passing ghosts of the recently departed as they left on their journeys, souls travelling through a timeless universe. He saw their reflections in each of them, and began to wind back the hands of his watch, in search of the truth.
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‘Hector?’
‘Maria?’
‘That’s all in the past now Hector. You’re here with us, in the present.’
Hector retreated into his thoughts, willing himself back, cursing the odourless air that told him he had slipped into the future again. Fear swam inside him and as the distorted curtains of his mind drew back, he knew that he had fallen into the hands of the Watch.
‘Hector?’
The voice was cold and mechanical.
‘Are you with me?’
He opened his eyes to a large white room, windowless and empty except for a bare bulb that hung from the ceiling and the bed that he lay in. He asked his body to move but it was unresponsive. A man dressed in white overalls stood over him and bent his head to face Hector, his eyes dark and indifferent.
He began to answer but his voice croaked, his throat dry and calling for whisky.
‘We’ve had your watch engraved for you,’ the man continued.
Hector saw that he was dangling the wristwatch that Maria had given him for their last anniversary, gold-rimmed with a black leather strap, and the memory pierced his heart and forced the air from his lungs.
HECTOR ARCO
1135706163
He had been tagged by the Watch and the only chance of survival was to escape or he would be forever at their service.
‘It’s just so we can keep an eye on you, in case you disappear so someone will be able to bring you back home.’
‘This is not home,’ Hector growled as he struggled to lift himself up and felt a firm hand pushing him back onto the pillows, his aged body unable to fight. He thought it wise not to mention his time travelling or anything that might incriminate him, there was a chance at least that they did not yet know that he was a portal himself.
‘No need to get yourself worked up,’ he said in a patronising tone. ‘They’ll be coming to get you soon, just rest for now.’
Hector listened to the soles of the man’s shoes as they smacked against the floor and the door closed, the key grating against the lock as it turned. Knowing there would not be much time before they came again, he took the watch in his hands and wound it back.
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Hector spat out dirt from his mouth and expelled the dust from his lungs, relieved to smell the salt in the air. As he walked towards the lights of the town he spoke to his heavy heart and asked it to stave its grief a while so that he could place one foot in front of the other. He asked his legs, riddled with the ache of loss, to carry him just a little further, so that he could be with them again. Dust swirled in his tracks and the wind tugged at his shirt as night’s blindness set in.
With each step he thought of her, with each breath of their unborn child and of his betrayal in not guarding them against the unknown evil that had taken them. Milton, his only friend, faithful and constant, a man banished from a life that he deserved to live. Hector prayed that they might be together, and that one day, soon, he would find them on the other side. He drifted into his mind and the hands of their memories led him away to the desert moonscape of the south, with its ancient turrets and fish bones, to wander the crypts and labyrinths that they once were guests in. They swam through the island’s rivers, his fingertips brushing the reeds beneath as they tangled with his toes, entwining theirs with his and he felt their icy bloodlessness and he gave his warmth to them but they grew colder still, until the cracks appeared and they shattered in his hands, melting into the muddy water. Hector watched as they struggled onto the shore, dragging themselves up on their bellies, crawling on their knees, running on the stumps of their legs and he burned with shame and prayed to the gods that they would cut off his own feet so that he might run alongside them and share in their pain, but when he opened his eyes, they were already lost to the horizon. Instead he saw himself, a young boy, staring back at him, before he too turned and disappeared.
He surfaced from his delirium, face stained with tears, the lights of the town loud and blinding. Time was running away, but with a regretful heart he knew where he would find himself. Through the windowpane of the inn he saw a man, cowered in a corner, head bowed and hands clasped tightly to a glass; eyes vacant and hollow. It was the same position he had occupied for many years. He, the ghost of the man inside, watched the man who was himself also a ghost, a half-man with half-thoughts. Immersed in the alcoholic abyss that had poisoned him all his life, he drained glass after glass with a thirst sustained only by those that have fallen prey to the unforgiving and unfaithful elixir. He had only ever drunk rum, he could never stand anything else, but Hector saw that the man inside was drinking from a bottle of whisky, and he felt an uneasy distance. Images flitted through him of broken glass, leaves falling, the faces of strangers, eyes red and swollen, and he felt that he would be here again one day, that in witnessing the man before him he had been shown his future, and the darkness within it. The man slipped through time and life, allowing its sands to trickle through his fingers while the woman who had his heart had her ear pressed to the door, eyes fixed on the window, willing him to return. He was not a husband deserving of a wife, nor a father of a child or worthy of a partner so devoted. A man of these things would have been with them now, guarding their safety. The marked rim of the glass, the sticky stains across the wooden table, cramp in his hands and the hiss of a cigarette as it raced to its end, these all seemed to belong to another past, to a distant, buried age that he could no longer connect with himself.
Hector watched as the man checked the time and reluctantly set aside his glass. When he emerged through the door, Hector hurled himself at him, punching his fist into his chest, desperate for him to wake up to his wrongs, but he slipped through him. As if a ghost, a voyeur, his body had no weight and his voice no sound. Perhaps it was too recent a past, that he could not enter into it completely, or perhaps they were unable to share the same physical space, for they were made of the same parts. The night was crisp, but the inebriated Hector stripped off his jacket and flung it across his shoulder, removing the hipflask from its pocket in the process and bringing it to his lips. Hector walked noiselessly behind himself, quietly preparing his heart for what would come next, though what, he did not yet know. They turned a corner, and, at the sight of his car and himself scrambling for the keys in the dust, Hector knew the truth. What followed was not as before, he was no longer there with himself but in some timeless, unknown place within, where only he existed and the images before him. He watched as a series of slides were projected onto his mind. The round silhouette of his wife, hand cupped under her bump, black hair merging with the night; Milton tall and willowy easing into the passenger seat; himself puffing on a cigarette, the amber ash separating in the wind. Husky voices and frenzied drumming yelling from the radio, a burst of light ahead, wheels skidding then a pause, silence, before screams as metal scratches rock, rubber tearing, glass shattering and footsteps running against gravel.
The driver’s seat was empty. Just like his eight-year-old self, the velocity and drop had caused him to time slip before impact, unjustly saving the culprit. Only the gentle hiss of the steam from the engine and the drip, drip, of blood and oil could be heard. Milton’s body was crumpled across the bonnet, shards of glass sticking up from his skin like stalagmites glinting in the moonlight, his scalp torn from the crown to the neck, revealing not the mind of a friend but the brain of a mortal - a being of flesh and blood that bore no resemblance to the soul that had inhabited the man. Hector caught an arm in the reflection of the glass but dared not look back. It was enough to see the strands of hair that dangled from the window, tangled together with a crimson sheen, wrapping themselves around his heart and squeezing the life from inside. He wanted to take his mind to another place but it forced him to bear witness to his crimes and as if to offer up his punishment, the door to the glove compartment was expelled by the heat to reveal his revolver. His cowardly instinct was to hold it to his head but it would not save them, only serve his selfish desire. Instead, he placed it in his pocket, for now he understood what he had to do.
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Hector slipped back and forth in time, tracing the guilt of the past, now foreign and tainted. He searched for himself and for them, but the hands of the time ghosts dragged him down, and he felt the eyes of the Watch upon him, calling him into the future as he drowned in the vortex of memories, shards of the past raining down on his flesh with daggers that pierced his skin. Each time he surfaced for air he found himself at the accident, stiff limbs, flesh crumbling and disappearing with the wind; Milton’s eyes open as he spoke with silent words. A confused pastiche of images fought against one another and Hector ran towards these false memories, as they lay in bed with the truth, abstract and distorted until he could not tell them apart and could not know what was real, each time reaching out for the past and returning to the cliff. He saw himself as a boy, darting across his thoughts and he ran after him, calling after the innocence of his youth that crushed Hector’s heart against his chest, but he did not answer. He wound his watch round and round until the hands turned on their own, ever faster, against him. He held it in his fist, its face grimacing as its lashes batted against the seconds, winking at the minutes and he brought it down onto the rock, for he had no need for time anymore.
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Hector inhaled the odourless future and felt the damp sea air cling to his skin. He pulled his coat around him and eased himself upright on the bench, his muscles resistant and bones grating at the joints, once again imprisoned in the body of an old man. The derelict pier creaked as its splintered wood fought to hold its weight, weak and rotten after years of exploitation, candyfloss summers and star-struck lovers, only to be rewarded with neglect and abandonment. Across the water, his comrade coughed weak strobes of light at the ships as the waves crashed against his stone legs. The loyal pier had supported the traffic of its passengers and the rides in which they escaped from their lives for a fleeting moment, witnessed kisses that would mark a lifetime and squared its shoulders firm against the waves to protect their ungrateful souls. With quiet patience and unwavering determination, it had held strong and watched the landscape around him grow and warp, in a constant state of flux, while he, forgotten in the middle of it all, remained himself, alone and battered by the tides of time.
Holding his wrist to the light, Hector saw that the hands were dead again, leaving him neglected by time and abandoned by the past. As the boats meandered through the delta, navigating the misty waters that were as grey as the sky, he could not guess at which point the day was at, for even the natural light of time was gone. After struggling to remove the strap, he held the watch up and tapped the glass with his finger. Turning it over, he saw his name engraved in bold and a number beneath, which he did not recognise nor understand its relevance.
‘What are you doing?’
Hector turned to see a young boy carrying a milk crate filled with empty bottles he had gathered from the beach.
‘Do you know what this number is for?’ he asked, holding up the watch.
The boy inspected it as the rain began to fall.
‘It’s a phone number,’ he replied, pointing to the telephone box. ‘Local.’
Hector thanked the boy and pivoted himself off the bench and to his feet. He was grateful for the shelter of the box and took out his handkerchief, curiously with him again, to wipe the rain from the back to reveal the number. Carefully, with his numb and cramped fingers, he began to dial.
‘You need coins,’ the boy said, standing next to him.
‘Oh.’ Hector replied, fumbling his pockets and finding them empty.
The boy extended his hand to Hector, a silver coin resting on his open palm.
Hector held up the coin and inspected it, the face was familiar but its weight and size were strange. Smiling gratefully at the boy, he handed him the watch.
‘Does it work?’
‘Not so well, but you just need to wind it up at the side.’
‘That’s for changing the time,’ the boy said as he set off down the beach. ‘It needs batteries.’
Hector did not hear the boy, only a muffled ringtone.
‘Hello?’ a voice answered.
The line was distorted, Hector turned against the wind and cupped his hand over the receiver to make his voice clearer.
‘Whom may I ask is speaking?’ he said.
‘Hector, where are you?’ replied the voice on the other end.
Suspicious that a stranger should recognise his voice, Hector remained silent.
‘What can you see?’ the voice barked. ‘Stay where you are, we’ll come and find you. Do you understand?’
The Watch. They were coming to get him, to force him to live in their future. He would not allow them to capture him, to abuse his powers and destroy his memories.
‘Hector?’
He left the phone dangling, the voice on the end still calling after him as he walked away. The black clouds of the storm were rushing in from the horizon, the rain coming in sheets that cut horizontally across the pier and he began to walk towards the shore, stumbling across the sand as he hurried away from his pursuers, the wind carrying to him the sound of the phone ringing again, calling him to a future that he had no place in.
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The waves crashed against his mind, drowning everything to silence as he walked along the shore, the colour of the clouds and sea as one, rain blurring the landscape with oily strokes, grey ghosts dancing in the wind. The house, towering above the water on its stilt legs, appeared fragile and brittle, its green paint peeling back to reveal the bare wood beneath. Standing at its feet, Hector could make out the silhouette of his pregnant wife at the window, her head resting against the curtains and her belly round and full. As his younger self, just days before the accident, came running from the porch towards him, he knew what he had to do to save them and give them back their lives. He raised the revolver and gripped his hands around the trigger. Aiming at himself, he waited until the figure was within range, arms outstretched in protest, unaware of his sacrifice and ignorant of the future that he deserved no mercy from. The shot fired, muffled by the rain, and he watched himself buckle and fall to the sand. Then he waited to disappear.
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NEWSPAPER ARTICLE
**** Thursday, July 12, 1962
Pioneering psychiatrist and local resident Dr Hector Milton Arco was yesterday shot dead by his father, Hector Arco, while celebrating his birthday at the family home in Playa de Lágrimas. Police investigating the incident have ruled out a murder inquiry on mental health grounds. Archaeologist Hector Arco, 60, famed in the area for his discovery of ancient remains buried in Isla Pajarito, has battled with acute Alzheimer’s for a number of years and is believed to have been suffering from hallucinations at the time.
Dr Arco, 30, dedicated his life to working with dementia patients such as his father and was known for his groundbreaking research into cognitive therapy. He leaves behind an expectant wife and the legacy of a family wrought with tragedy. Three decades earlier to the day, Arco and his father were the only survivors of a motoring accident that killed his then pregnant mother and his father’s colleague, Milton Lopez. The driver of the car, Hector Arco senior, fled the scene of the crime and served a six-year sentence for driving under the influence and manslaughter.
Jemma Foster is a writer and artist, founder of Wild Alchemy Lab, Mama Xanadu and Semantica Productions.
The Watch is one of a series of twelve short stories published in 2010 as The Cardboard Book Project.
By Jemma Foster
Just as every country has its own peculiar smell, so does each year, and it was with this method that Hector Arco often located himself in time. As he woke, he inhaled the air around him and was disturbed to find it odourless - heralding his descent into unfamiliar territory and travel into an unknown age.
His bones, weakened from the journey, creaked as he shifted his weight in the chair and prised open his eyes. Garish and jagged objects glared back at him with vulgar exhibitionism, curiously foreign. Hector was aware, from the unmistakeable slope of the ceiling and the gracefully unchanged view across the delta that he was inside the house that he had himself built, yet its contents were awkward and remote. His head reeled and the lights danced before him, yawning against the glass of the windowpane. The furious beat of a song, its erratic tempo projected from an unseen radio to plague his ears, taunted him with its waves. Casting his anchor out into the past, it fell against the rocky ground of an uncertain era: the future.
Hector felt his heart jar against his chest as he held his hands before him, clawed and trembling. They were wretched beings, mottled and crippled with age, sketched with the contours of a landscape eroded by the decades and marred with bulging rivers that flooded the grey skin of decay. He held the shrivelled beasts to his face and was met with the rough and sallow cheeks of an old man. Gone was the amber glow of agile youth and instead his body, stretched and sagged, wrinkled and brittle, had been transformed into a callous reminder of mortality. He staggered to the mirror and saw a man whose face had done its living and was preparing to let go of its world, but did not recognise himself in its reflection. Teeth gnarled and stained, lips pursed together in desiccated unison, eyes bloodshot and jaundiced. Tufts of hair grew from the forests of his ears and the silver hair on his head had made a shameful retreat to his crown, as if to pardon the eyes from witnessing its pitiful demise.
This brutal call to the savagery of age reminded Hector of his own time and of the present. He searched for his pocket watch but found that it was gone, the chain too having disappeared. It was a grave thing for a time traveller to be without his timepiece and a sense of dread simmered in the pit of his bowels. As he padded himself down, growing increasingly distressed at the prospect of being trapped in the future, he felt his shirt catch against his wrist. He pulled up his sleeve to reveal a wristwatch, round with a large gold-rimmed face and a sturdy black leather strap. Hector had certainly never come across it before and could only conclude that a bizarre glitch of his journey to the future had caused not just his body to accelerate with the times, but also his watch.
Hector was rare in that he himself was a portal and able to control his travels with his watch. Though of late he had begun to time slip involuntarily, the repercussions of which could be catastrophic. He believed that his abilities had been triggered when he was just a young boy. Riding his bicycle down the hill at an enthusiastic speed, he had gripped the brakes as he approached a turn, but continued to accelerate. Fear had prevented him from swerving and he had vanished over the cliff edge, convinced of his impending death. His survival, and the loss of time he experienced before he was rescued hours later, he put down to a combination of velocity and flight that created within him a temporal gate, projecting him mid-air into a time slide.
Hector moved cautiously through the sitting room, trying to orientate himself, observing the various ornaments, paintings and contraptions that he found at once intriguing in their purpose and hideous in design. The hands of clocks tapped their fingers against their glass cages, dials whirled and machines hummed as he passed through the rooms. Instinctively he pushed buttons, causing the objects to spring into action, spinning and pumping. He fingered the spines of books penned by alien authors and records performed by unheard musicians. Flicking through the album sleeves, he felt the familiar feel of the vinyl against his fingers and his mind floated off to the smoky bars and sultry singers of the present, before returning to the brazen performers splashed across the covers of the future. The wallpaper and carpet were vibrant and obnoxious creatures and the kitchen was an eruption of colour and appliances that with each hum, ping and tick mocked him with their mystery. A desk calendar told him that the date was 11th July 1962 and that he had time-slipped by three decades.
Disorientated and eager to return to the familiarity of the present and ease of his youthful physique, he was preparing to leave when he caught sight of that same frame, poised in a handstand on the shore, tanned and athletic. So vivid and curious was the light of the photograph that he felt as if he were actually there in the scene, diving into the green waves and blinded by the speckled reflection on the water, its colour deep and pure. He could not remember it being taken and presumed, from his appearance, that it was yet to come but he would not have long to wait. As he stared back at his future self in the photograph, he searched his face but there was a remoteness in his expression with which he could not connect. Intrigued as to what other traces of himself - relics of the past that he had not yet lived - he might find, he climbed the steps to the attic. As he reached the top, a thin shard of light pierced through the roof and bathed the intricate weaves of a cobweb that stretched across his path.
Hector peered through the delicate spirals that separated his vision into segments and recognised pieces of his present now masked with dust, remnants of an expired age. As he pulled apart the curtains of the web, he caught the glass eyes of an owl, clouded and chipped, its feathers moth-eaten and fur balding. A thread of recollection knitted its way through his mind and he recognised from the missing claw that it was the same owl that he was working on in the present, his maiden experiment with taxidermy. He removed his handkerchief from his breast pocket and dusted it down but, from the state of it, he wondered if he should bother at all, in this age or the present. A further inspection of the space produced obscure artefacts lifted from ancient times, fragments unearthed during explorations and other less historically significant items. A melancholy lingered in the air, the mourning of redundant articles of the past, forgotten and banished to gather the dusts of time. It disturbed him to think that this was what was to come of the life that he still inhabited and he thought of his wife, Maria, who was due to give birth to their first child any day now and he was consumed with a desire to return to the present.
Fearing that he might have lost time during his travels, he fought with his mind to remember where he had been before he had time-slipped, but failed to retrieve a clear image. Hector was aware that in recent times his memory had begun to deteriorate and the blanks become more frequent, but it was a common side effect of time travel and a largely unavoidable hazard of his profession. Reminded of his obligations to the present as an investigative time historian, scouring the past to disclose mysteries and uncover truths with his colleague Milton, his thoughts began to run over their latest mission when he was interrupted by the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. Aware of the risks of being exposed as a time tourist and the alarm it may cause to a non-traveller, he stepped back into the shadows.
‘Is there someone up there?’
The voice was female but Hector struggled to place the accent, for it was not a region he knew of, nor an impediment, but a distant bell resonated in him and it tolled of the Time Travel Watch. As flashes of memory fired at random in his brain, he knew that he had been to this place and time before. The Watch was a malicious group existing in the future that worked to control time travel and the fiction written into history. They despised rogue travellers, but, more crucially, they would want to capture him and use his rare abilities as a portal for their own corrupt benefit.
‘Ah there you are,’ she sighed. ‘What are you doing up here?’
Though Hector was sure he had never set eyes on her before, she had addressed him with a familiar tone, a known tactic of the Watch. It was a real threat that he might be arrested as an illegal time immigrant, but just as she began to advance further, he remembered his wristwatch and turned its hands back to the present.
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The unforgiving and unnatural light of the hospital bulbs sliced through his eyes as he crashed to the floor, landing on the tiles with a crack to the skull. He lay there a moment as his body adjusted and he felt a cold shiver devouring his flesh and making its way to the marrow of his bones. He was relieved to find that he had been restored to his youthful self and that the wristwatch of the future had been replaced with his old pocket watch, safely attached to its chain. The smell was distinctly of the present, yet it was corrupted with a chemical stench. He felt his pocket for his handkerchief to cover his mouth, but it was missing. Another unavoidable flaw of time travel was the slipping of objects into portals unannounced, and much to Hector’s irritation things were constantly disappearing and getting lost. The ringing in his ears was joined by the pounding of his heart as he stood, the soles of his shoes skidding against the floor. Staring at the rows of feet protruding from white sheets, stiff toes saluting the ceiling, he realised that he was surrounded by the Dead.
The morgue could accommodate no more than eight bodies, which was fitting of the island hospital. The grey walls and metal beds stacked side by side reminded Hector of a tin of sardines. He was grateful that none of the deceased were exposed and could only imagine what lay beneath from the abstract bloodstains and peculiar silhouettes. With no windows to guess the time, and his watch having stopped, Hector began to wind it up and search the room for another timepiece. His eyes cruelly led him to a wrist that had escaped its cloth house, still ticking as if unaware of the departure of its master. Hector felt his neck stiffen and muscles contort. He knew the face well, the same that now leered back at him, clapping its hands aggressively to the seconds. He felt earth’s wavering support beneath his feet as he stumbled forward with stilted, jerky movements and lifted the tag that dangled from the toe with twisted innocence.
Milton Lopez. Deceased. 10th July 1932
Hector forced himself to lift the sheet, and as he peeled back the shroud, he sensed a greater horror beside him. When he turned, his mind having already processed the tragedy of the sight, he saw the delicate arch of her feet. As he was sucked backwards, his legs crumpling beneath him, his eyes fixed on the bump that told of a life that would not be lived. The lights flickered and he disappeared into himself, hearing his screams in the distance as they merged with the voices in his head until there was just a static that clawed at his heart. His mind travelled through time, to past memories and future ones that he had created out of the things that could have been, all of which were now relegated to live on in his memories alone. He could feel each moment of the present falling onto him, crashing through him and into the past, regressing steadily away from the future, from their lives ahead, until time left him with no reality, just illusions, disjointed images that he doubted even came from his own memories.
Flitting through a patchwork of heartache, he rode the carousel - Maria’s hands cold against his; poppies growing tall and dancing for them as he sunk to one knee; the beacon of the lighthouse competing with the moon to illuminate the water as oars plunged into the dark; sliding the plaster across her belly to cast the progress of their unborn child; the times he had stared down the end of a bottle when he should have been with her; pillows wet with tears; sun grazing her hair as she first appeared to him; her voice calling to him as he disappeared into times long gone; all the spectres of the past dancing to the music of the lost; and he saw their faces before him as they turned to stone, their names and dates written across their cheeks, and he reached out but they crumbled to ash in his embrace.
Hector gasped for air as he surfaced from the tide of delirium. Anger and disbelief momentarily suspended his grief and he was consumed with vengeance that barricaded the tears and forced him to his feet. He had allowed time to take him and in losing a day had lost what was his life, for without them he was nothing and it was his nothingness - his absence - that had sacrificed them. He wandered through the fog of his mind, arms outstretched as he staggered blindly forward clutching at splinters of memory, searching for the past, for an explanation. He drifted through the corridors of the hospital, passing ghosts of the recently departed as they left on their journeys, souls travelling through a timeless universe. He saw their reflections in each of them, and began to wind back the hands of his watch, in search of the truth.
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‘Hector?’
‘Maria?’
‘That’s all in the past now Hector. You’re here with us, in the present.’
Hector retreated into his thoughts, willing himself back, cursing the odourless air that told him he had slipped into the future again. Fear swam inside him and as the distorted curtains of his mind drew back, he knew that he had fallen into the hands of the Watch.
‘Hector?’
The voice was cold and mechanical.
‘Are you with me?’
He opened his eyes to a large white room, windowless and empty except for a bare bulb that hung from the ceiling and the bed that he lay in. He asked his body to move but it was unresponsive. A man dressed in white overalls stood over him and bent his head to face Hector, his eyes dark and indifferent.
He began to answer but his voice croaked, his throat dry and calling for whisky.
‘We’ve had your watch engraved for you,’ the man continued.
Hector saw that he was dangling the wristwatch that Maria had given him for their last anniversary, gold-rimmed with a black leather strap, and the memory pierced his heart and forced the air from his lungs.
HECTOR ARCO
1135706163
He had been tagged by the Watch and the only chance of survival was to escape or he would be forever at their service.
‘It’s just so we can keep an eye on you, in case you disappear so someone will be able to bring you back home.’
‘This is not home,’ Hector growled as he struggled to lift himself up and felt a firm hand pushing him back onto the pillows, his aged body unable to fight. He thought it wise not to mention his time travelling or anything that might incriminate him, there was a chance at least that they did not yet know that he was a portal himself.
‘No need to get yourself worked up,’ he said in a patronising tone. ‘They’ll be coming to get you soon, just rest for now.’
Hector listened to the soles of the man’s shoes as they smacked against the floor and the door closed, the key grating against the lock as it turned. Knowing there would not be much time before they came again, he took the watch in his hands and wound it back.
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Hector spat out dirt from his mouth and expelled the dust from his lungs, relieved to smell the salt in the air. As he walked towards the lights of the town he spoke to his heavy heart and asked it to stave its grief a while so that he could place one foot in front of the other. He asked his legs, riddled with the ache of loss, to carry him just a little further, so that he could be with them again. Dust swirled in his tracks and the wind tugged at his shirt as night’s blindness set in.
With each step he thought of her, with each breath of their unborn child and of his betrayal in not guarding them against the unknown evil that had taken them. Milton, his only friend, faithful and constant, a man banished from a life that he deserved to live. Hector prayed that they might be together, and that one day, soon, he would find them on the other side. He drifted into his mind and the hands of their memories led him away to the desert moonscape of the south, with its ancient turrets and fish bones, to wander the crypts and labyrinths that they once were guests in. They swam through the island’s rivers, his fingertips brushing the reeds beneath as they tangled with his toes, entwining theirs with his and he felt their icy bloodlessness and he gave his warmth to them but they grew colder still, until the cracks appeared and they shattered in his hands, melting into the muddy water. Hector watched as they struggled onto the shore, dragging themselves up on their bellies, crawling on their knees, running on the stumps of their legs and he burned with shame and prayed to the gods that they would cut off his own feet so that he might run alongside them and share in their pain, but when he opened his eyes, they were already lost to the horizon. Instead he saw himself, a young boy, staring back at him, before he too turned and disappeared.
He surfaced from his delirium, face stained with tears, the lights of the town loud and blinding. Time was running away, but with a regretful heart he knew where he would find himself. Through the windowpane of the inn he saw a man, cowered in a corner, head bowed and hands clasped tightly to a glass; eyes vacant and hollow. It was the same position he had occupied for many years. He, the ghost of the man inside, watched the man who was himself also a ghost, a half-man with half-thoughts. Immersed in the alcoholic abyss that had poisoned him all his life, he drained glass after glass with a thirst sustained only by those that have fallen prey to the unforgiving and unfaithful elixir. He had only ever drunk rum, he could never stand anything else, but Hector saw that the man inside was drinking from a bottle of whisky, and he felt an uneasy distance. Images flitted through him of broken glass, leaves falling, the faces of strangers, eyes red and swollen, and he felt that he would be here again one day, that in witnessing the man before him he had been shown his future, and the darkness within it. The man slipped through time and life, allowing its sands to trickle through his fingers while the woman who had his heart had her ear pressed to the door, eyes fixed on the window, willing him to return. He was not a husband deserving of a wife, nor a father of a child or worthy of a partner so devoted. A man of these things would have been with them now, guarding their safety. The marked rim of the glass, the sticky stains across the wooden table, cramp in his hands and the hiss of a cigarette as it raced to its end, these all seemed to belong to another past, to a distant, buried age that he could no longer connect with himself.
Hector watched as the man checked the time and reluctantly set aside his glass. When he emerged through the door, Hector hurled himself at him, punching his fist into his chest, desperate for him to wake up to his wrongs, but he slipped through him. As if a ghost, a voyeur, his body had no weight and his voice no sound. Perhaps it was too recent a past, that he could not enter into it completely, or perhaps they were unable to share the same physical space, for they were made of the same parts. The night was crisp, but the inebriated Hector stripped off his jacket and flung it across his shoulder, removing the hipflask from its pocket in the process and bringing it to his lips. Hector walked noiselessly behind himself, quietly preparing his heart for what would come next, though what, he did not yet know. They turned a corner, and, at the sight of his car and himself scrambling for the keys in the dust, Hector knew the truth. What followed was not as before, he was no longer there with himself but in some timeless, unknown place within, where only he existed and the images before him. He watched as a series of slides were projected onto his mind. The round silhouette of his wife, hand cupped under her bump, black hair merging with the night; Milton tall and willowy easing into the passenger seat; himself puffing on a cigarette, the amber ash separating in the wind. Husky voices and frenzied drumming yelling from the radio, a burst of light ahead, wheels skidding then a pause, silence, before screams as metal scratches rock, rubber tearing, glass shattering and footsteps running against gravel.
The driver’s seat was empty. Just like his eight-year-old self, the velocity and drop had caused him to time slip before impact, unjustly saving the culprit. Only the gentle hiss of the steam from the engine and the drip, drip, of blood and oil could be heard. Milton’s body was crumpled across the bonnet, shards of glass sticking up from his skin like stalagmites glinting in the moonlight, his scalp torn from the crown to the neck, revealing not the mind of a friend but the brain of a mortal - a being of flesh and blood that bore no resemblance to the soul that had inhabited the man. Hector caught an arm in the reflection of the glass but dared not look back. It was enough to see the strands of hair that dangled from the window, tangled together with a crimson sheen, wrapping themselves around his heart and squeezing the life from inside. He wanted to take his mind to another place but it forced him to bear witness to his crimes and as if to offer up his punishment, the door to the glove compartment was expelled by the heat to reveal his revolver. His cowardly instinct was to hold it to his head but it would not save them, only serve his selfish desire. Instead, he placed it in his pocket, for now he understood what he had to do.
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Hector slipped back and forth in time, tracing the guilt of the past, now foreign and tainted. He searched for himself and for them, but the hands of the time ghosts dragged him down, and he felt the eyes of the Watch upon him, calling him into the future as he drowned in the vortex of memories, shards of the past raining down on his flesh with daggers that pierced his skin. Each time he surfaced for air he found himself at the accident, stiff limbs, flesh crumbling and disappearing with the wind; Milton’s eyes open as he spoke with silent words. A confused pastiche of images fought against one another and Hector ran towards these false memories, as they lay in bed with the truth, abstract and distorted until he could not tell them apart and could not know what was real, each time reaching out for the past and returning to the cliff. He saw himself as a boy, darting across his thoughts and he ran after him, calling after the innocence of his youth that crushed Hector’s heart against his chest, but he did not answer. He wound his watch round and round until the hands turned on their own, ever faster, against him. He held it in his fist, its face grimacing as its lashes batted against the seconds, winking at the minutes and he brought it down onto the rock, for he had no need for time anymore.
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Hector inhaled the odourless future and felt the damp sea air cling to his skin. He pulled his coat around him and eased himself upright on the bench, his muscles resistant and bones grating at the joints, once again imprisoned in the body of an old man. The derelict pier creaked as its splintered wood fought to hold its weight, weak and rotten after years of exploitation, candyfloss summers and star-struck lovers, only to be rewarded with neglect and abandonment. Across the water, his comrade coughed weak strobes of light at the ships as the waves crashed against his stone legs. The loyal pier had supported the traffic of its passengers and the rides in which they escaped from their lives for a fleeting moment, witnessed kisses that would mark a lifetime and squared its shoulders firm against the waves to protect their ungrateful souls. With quiet patience and unwavering determination, it had held strong and watched the landscape around him grow and warp, in a constant state of flux, while he, forgotten in the middle of it all, remained himself, alone and battered by the tides of time.
Holding his wrist to the light, Hector saw that the hands were dead again, leaving him neglected by time and abandoned by the past. As the boats meandered through the delta, navigating the misty waters that were as grey as the sky, he could not guess at which point the day was at, for even the natural light of time was gone. After struggling to remove the strap, he held the watch up and tapped the glass with his finger. Turning it over, he saw his name engraved in bold and a number beneath, which he did not recognise nor understand its relevance.
‘What are you doing?’
Hector turned to see a young boy carrying a milk crate filled with empty bottles he had gathered from the beach.
‘Do you know what this number is for?’ he asked, holding up the watch.
The boy inspected it as the rain began to fall.
‘It’s a phone number,’ he replied, pointing to the telephone box. ‘Local.’
Hector thanked the boy and pivoted himself off the bench and to his feet. He was grateful for the shelter of the box and took out his handkerchief, curiously with him again, to wipe the rain from the back to reveal the number. Carefully, with his numb and cramped fingers, he began to dial.
‘You need coins,’ the boy said, standing next to him.
‘Oh.’ Hector replied, fumbling his pockets and finding them empty.
The boy extended his hand to Hector, a silver coin resting on his open palm.
Hector held up the coin and inspected it, the face was familiar but its weight and size were strange. Smiling gratefully at the boy, he handed him the watch.
‘Does it work?’
‘Not so well, but you just need to wind it up at the side.’
‘That’s for changing the time,’ the boy said as he set off down the beach. ‘It needs batteries.’
Hector did not hear the boy, only a muffled ringtone.
‘Hello?’ a voice answered.
The line was distorted, Hector turned against the wind and cupped his hand over the receiver to make his voice clearer.
‘Whom may I ask is speaking?’ he said.
‘Hector, where are you?’ replied the voice on the other end.
Suspicious that a stranger should recognise his voice, Hector remained silent.
‘What can you see?’ the voice barked. ‘Stay where you are, we’ll come and find you. Do you understand?’
The Watch. They were coming to get him, to force him to live in their future. He would not allow them to capture him, to abuse his powers and destroy his memories.
‘Hector?’
He left the phone dangling, the voice on the end still calling after him as he walked away. The black clouds of the storm were rushing in from the horizon, the rain coming in sheets that cut horizontally across the pier and he began to walk towards the shore, stumbling across the sand as he hurried away from his pursuers, the wind carrying to him the sound of the phone ringing again, calling him to a future that he had no place in.
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The waves crashed against his mind, drowning everything to silence as he walked along the shore, the colour of the clouds and sea as one, rain blurring the landscape with oily strokes, grey ghosts dancing in the wind. The house, towering above the water on its stilt legs, appeared fragile and brittle, its green paint peeling back to reveal the bare wood beneath. Standing at its feet, Hector could make out the silhouette of his pregnant wife at the window, her head resting against the curtains and her belly round and full. As his younger self, just days before the accident, came running from the porch towards him, he knew what he had to do to save them and give them back their lives. He raised the revolver and gripped his hands around the trigger. Aiming at himself, he waited until the figure was within range, arms outstretched in protest, unaware of his sacrifice and ignorant of the future that he deserved no mercy from. The shot fired, muffled by the rain, and he watched himself buckle and fall to the sand. Then he waited to disappear.
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NEWSPAPER ARTICLE
**** Thursday, July 12, 1962
Pioneering psychiatrist and local resident Dr Hector Milton Arco was yesterday shot dead by his father, Hector Arco, while celebrating his birthday at the family home in Playa de Lágrimas. Police investigating the incident have ruled out a murder inquiry on mental health grounds. Archaeologist Hector Arco, 60, famed in the area for his discovery of ancient remains buried in Isla Pajarito, has battled with acute Alzheimer’s for a number of years and is believed to have been suffering from hallucinations at the time.
Dr Arco, 30, dedicated his life to working with dementia patients such as his father and was known for his groundbreaking research into cognitive therapy. He leaves behind an expectant wife and the legacy of a family wrought with tragedy. Three decades earlier to the day, Arco and his father were the only survivors of a motoring accident that killed his then pregnant mother and his father’s colleague, Milton Lopez. The driver of the car, Hector Arco senior, fled the scene of the crime and served a six-year sentence for driving under the influence and manslaughter.
Just as every country has its own peculiar smell, so does each year, and it was with this method that Hector Arco often located himself in time. As he woke, he inhaled the air around him and was disturbed to find it odourless - heralding his descent into unfamiliar territory and travel into an unknown age.
His bones, weakened from the journey, creaked as he shifted his weight in the chair and prised open his eyes. Garish and jagged objects glared back at him with vulgar exhibitionism, curiously foreign. Hector was aware, from the unmistakeable slope of the ceiling and the gracefully unchanged view across the delta that he was inside the house that he had himself built, yet its contents were awkward and remote. His head reeled and the lights danced before him, yawning against the glass of the windowpane. The furious beat of a song, its erratic tempo projected from an unseen radio to plague his ears, taunted him with its waves. Casting his anchor out into the past, it fell against the rocky ground of an uncertain era: the future.
Hector felt his heart jar against his chest as he held his hands before him, clawed and trembling. They were wretched beings, mottled and crippled with age, sketched with the contours of a landscape eroded by the decades and marred with bulging rivers that flooded the grey skin of decay. He held the shrivelled beasts to his face and was met with the rough and sallow cheeks of an old man. Gone was the amber glow of agile youth and instead his body, stretched and sagged, wrinkled and brittle, had been transformed into a callous reminder of mortality. He staggered to the mirror and saw a man whose face had done its living and was preparing to let go of its world, but did not recognise himself in its reflection. Teeth gnarled and stained, lips pursed together in desiccated unison, eyes bloodshot and jaundiced. Tufts of hair grew from the forests of his ears and the silver hair on his head had made a shameful retreat to his crown, as if to pardon the eyes from witnessing its pitiful demise.
This brutal call to the savagery of age reminded Hector of his own time and of the present. He searched for his pocket watch but found that it was gone, the chain too having disappeared. It was a grave thing for a time traveller to be without his timepiece and a sense of dread simmered in the pit of his bowels. As he padded himself down, growing increasingly distressed at the prospect of being trapped in the future, he felt his shirt catch against his wrist. He pulled up his sleeve to reveal a wristwatch, round with a large gold-rimmed face and a sturdy black leather strap. Hector had certainly never come across it before and could only conclude that a bizarre glitch of his journey to the future had caused not just his body to accelerate with the times, but also his watch.
Hector was rare in that he himself was a portal and able to control his travels with his watch. Though of late he had begun to time slip involuntarily, the repercussions of which could be catastrophic. He believed that his abilities had been triggered when he was just a young boy. Riding his bicycle down the hill at an enthusiastic speed, he had gripped the brakes as he approached a turn, but continued to accelerate. Fear had prevented him from swerving and he had vanished over the cliff edge, convinced of his impending death. His survival, and the loss of time he experienced before he was rescued hours later, he put down to a combination of velocity and flight that created within him a temporal gate, projecting him mid-air into a time slide.
Hector moved cautiously through the sitting room, trying to orientate himself, observing the various ornaments, paintings and contraptions that he found at once intriguing in their purpose and hideous in design. The hands of clocks tapped their fingers against their glass cages, dials whirled and machines hummed as he passed through the rooms. Instinctively he pushed buttons, causing the objects to spring into action, spinning and pumping. He fingered the spines of books penned by alien authors and records performed by unheard musicians. Flicking through the album sleeves, he felt the familiar feel of the vinyl against his fingers and his mind floated off to the smoky bars and sultry singers of the present, before returning to the brazen performers splashed across the covers of the future. The wallpaper and carpet were vibrant and obnoxious creatures and the kitchen was an eruption of colour and appliances that with each hum, ping and tick mocked him with their mystery. A desk calendar told him that the date was 11th July 1962 and that he had time-slipped by three decades.
Disorientated and eager to return to the familiarity of the present and ease of his youthful physique, he was preparing to leave when he caught sight of that same frame, poised in a handstand on the shore, tanned and athletic. So vivid and curious was the light of the photograph that he felt as if he were actually there in the scene, diving into the green waves and blinded by the speckled reflection on the water, its colour deep and pure. He could not remember it being taken and presumed, from his appearance, that it was yet to come but he would not have long to wait. As he stared back at his future self in the photograph, he searched his face but there was a remoteness in his expression with which he could not connect. Intrigued as to what other traces of himself - relics of the past that he had not yet lived - he might find, he climbed the steps to the attic. As he reached the top, a thin shard of light pierced through the roof and bathed the intricate weaves of a cobweb that stretched across his path.
Hector peered through the delicate spirals that separated his vision into segments and recognised pieces of his present now masked with dust, remnants of an expired age. As he pulled apart the curtains of the web, he caught the glass eyes of an owl, clouded and chipped, its feathers moth-eaten and fur balding. A thread of recollection knitted its way through his mind and he recognised from the missing claw that it was the same owl that he was working on in the present, his maiden experiment with taxidermy. He removed his handkerchief from his breast pocket and dusted it down but, from the state of it, he wondered if he should bother at all, in this age or the present. A further inspection of the space produced obscure artefacts lifted from ancient times, fragments unearthed during explorations and other less historically significant items. A melancholy lingered in the air, the mourning of redundant articles of the past, forgotten and banished to gather the dusts of time. It disturbed him to think that this was what was to come of the life that he still inhabited and he thought of his wife, Maria, who was due to give birth to their first child any day now and he was consumed with a desire to return to the present.
Fearing that he might have lost time during his travels, he fought with his mind to remember where he had been before he had time-slipped, but failed to retrieve a clear image. Hector was aware that in recent times his memory had begun to deteriorate and the blanks become more frequent, but it was a common side effect of time travel and a largely unavoidable hazard of his profession. Reminded of his obligations to the present as an investigative time historian, scouring the past to disclose mysteries and uncover truths with his colleague Milton, his thoughts began to run over their latest mission when he was interrupted by the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. Aware of the risks of being exposed as a time tourist and the alarm it may cause to a non-traveller, he stepped back into the shadows.
‘Is there someone up there?’
The voice was female but Hector struggled to place the accent, for it was not a region he knew of, nor an impediment, but a distant bell resonated in him and it tolled of the Time Travel Watch. As flashes of memory fired at random in his brain, he knew that he had been to this place and time before. The Watch was a malicious group existing in the future that worked to control time travel and the fiction written into history. They despised rogue travellers, but, more crucially, they would want to capture him and use his rare abilities as a portal for their own corrupt benefit.
‘Ah there you are,’ she sighed. ‘What are you doing up here?’
Though Hector was sure he had never set eyes on her before, she had addressed him with a familiar tone, a known tactic of the Watch. It was a real threat that he might be arrested as an illegal time immigrant, but just as she began to advance further, he remembered his wristwatch and turned its hands back to the present.
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The unforgiving and unnatural light of the hospital bulbs sliced through his eyes as he crashed to the floor, landing on the tiles with a crack to the skull. He lay there a moment as his body adjusted and he felt a cold shiver devouring his flesh and making its way to the marrow of his bones. He was relieved to find that he had been restored to his youthful self and that the wristwatch of the future had been replaced with his old pocket watch, safely attached to its chain. The smell was distinctly of the present, yet it was corrupted with a chemical stench. He felt his pocket for his handkerchief to cover his mouth, but it was missing. Another unavoidable flaw of time travel was the slipping of objects into portals unannounced, and much to Hector’s irritation things were constantly disappearing and getting lost. The ringing in his ears was joined by the pounding of his heart as he stood, the soles of his shoes skidding against the floor. Staring at the rows of feet protruding from white sheets, stiff toes saluting the ceiling, he realised that he was surrounded by the Dead.
The morgue could accommodate no more than eight bodies, which was fitting of the island hospital. The grey walls and metal beds stacked side by side reminded Hector of a tin of sardines. He was grateful that none of the deceased were exposed and could only imagine what lay beneath from the abstract bloodstains and peculiar silhouettes. With no windows to guess the time, and his watch having stopped, Hector began to wind it up and search the room for another timepiece. His eyes cruelly led him to a wrist that had escaped its cloth house, still ticking as if unaware of the departure of its master. Hector felt his neck stiffen and muscles contort. He knew the face well, the same that now leered back at him, clapping its hands aggressively to the seconds. He felt earth’s wavering support beneath his feet as he stumbled forward with stilted, jerky movements and lifted the tag that dangled from the toe with twisted innocence.
Milton Lopez. Deceased. 10th July 1932
Hector forced himself to lift the sheet, and as he peeled back the shroud, he sensed a greater horror beside him. When he turned, his mind having already processed the tragedy of the sight, he saw the delicate arch of her feet. As he was sucked backwards, his legs crumpling beneath him, his eyes fixed on the bump that told of a life that would not be lived. The lights flickered and he disappeared into himself, hearing his screams in the distance as they merged with the voices in his head until there was just a static that clawed at his heart. His mind travelled through time, to past memories and future ones that he had created out of the things that could have been, all of which were now relegated to live on in his memories alone. He could feel each moment of the present falling onto him, crashing through him and into the past, regressing steadily away from the future, from their lives ahead, until time left him with no reality, just illusions, disjointed images that he doubted even came from his own memories.
Flitting through a patchwork of heartache, he rode the carousel - Maria’s hands cold against his; poppies growing tall and dancing for them as he sunk to one knee; the beacon of the lighthouse competing with the moon to illuminate the water as oars plunged into the dark; sliding the plaster across her belly to cast the progress of their unborn child; the times he had stared down the end of a bottle when he should have been with her; pillows wet with tears; sun grazing her hair as she first appeared to him; her voice calling to him as he disappeared into times long gone; all the spectres of the past dancing to the music of the lost; and he saw their faces before him as they turned to stone, their names and dates written across their cheeks, and he reached out but they crumbled to ash in his embrace.
Hector gasped for air as he surfaced from the tide of delirium. Anger and disbelief momentarily suspended his grief and he was consumed with vengeance that barricaded the tears and forced him to his feet. He had allowed time to take him and in losing a day had lost what was his life, for without them he was nothing and it was his nothingness - his absence - that had sacrificed them. He wandered through the fog of his mind, arms outstretched as he staggered blindly forward clutching at splinters of memory, searching for the past, for an explanation. He drifted through the corridors of the hospital, passing ghosts of the recently departed as they left on their journeys, souls travelling through a timeless universe. He saw their reflections in each of them, and began to wind back the hands of his watch, in search of the truth.
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‘Hector?’
‘Maria?’
‘That’s all in the past now Hector. You’re here with us, in the present.’
Hector retreated into his thoughts, willing himself back, cursing the odourless air that told him he had slipped into the future again. Fear swam inside him and as the distorted curtains of his mind drew back, he knew that he had fallen into the hands of the Watch.
‘Hector?’
The voice was cold and mechanical.
‘Are you with me?’
He opened his eyes to a large white room, windowless and empty except for a bare bulb that hung from the ceiling and the bed that he lay in. He asked his body to move but it was unresponsive. A man dressed in white overalls stood over him and bent his head to face Hector, his eyes dark and indifferent.
He began to answer but his voice croaked, his throat dry and calling for whisky.
‘We’ve had your watch engraved for you,’ the man continued.
Hector saw that he was dangling the wristwatch that Maria had given him for their last anniversary, gold-rimmed with a black leather strap, and the memory pierced his heart and forced the air from his lungs.
HECTOR ARCO
1135706163
He had been tagged by the Watch and the only chance of survival was to escape or he would be forever at their service.
‘It’s just so we can keep an eye on you, in case you disappear so someone will be able to bring you back home.’
‘This is not home,’ Hector growled as he struggled to lift himself up and felt a firm hand pushing him back onto the pillows, his aged body unable to fight. He thought it wise not to mention his time travelling or anything that might incriminate him, there was a chance at least that they did not yet know that he was a portal himself.
‘No need to get yourself worked up,’ he said in a patronising tone. ‘They’ll be coming to get you soon, just rest for now.’
Hector listened to the soles of the man’s shoes as they smacked against the floor and the door closed, the key grating against the lock as it turned. Knowing there would not be much time before they came again, he took the watch in his hands and wound it back.
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Hector spat out dirt from his mouth and expelled the dust from his lungs, relieved to smell the salt in the air. As he walked towards the lights of the town he spoke to his heavy heart and asked it to stave its grief a while so that he could place one foot in front of the other. He asked his legs, riddled with the ache of loss, to carry him just a little further, so that he could be with them again. Dust swirled in his tracks and the wind tugged at his shirt as night’s blindness set in.
With each step he thought of her, with each breath of their unborn child and of his betrayal in not guarding them against the unknown evil that had taken them. Milton, his only friend, faithful and constant, a man banished from a life that he deserved to live. Hector prayed that they might be together, and that one day, soon, he would find them on the other side. He drifted into his mind and the hands of their memories led him away to the desert moonscape of the south, with its ancient turrets and fish bones, to wander the crypts and labyrinths that they once were guests in. They swam through the island’s rivers, his fingertips brushing the reeds beneath as they tangled with his toes, entwining theirs with his and he felt their icy bloodlessness and he gave his warmth to them but they grew colder still, until the cracks appeared and they shattered in his hands, melting into the muddy water. Hector watched as they struggled onto the shore, dragging themselves up on their bellies, crawling on their knees, running on the stumps of their legs and he burned with shame and prayed to the gods that they would cut off his own feet so that he might run alongside them and share in their pain, but when he opened his eyes, they were already lost to the horizon. Instead he saw himself, a young boy, staring back at him, before he too turned and disappeared.
He surfaced from his delirium, face stained with tears, the lights of the town loud and blinding. Time was running away, but with a regretful heart he knew where he would find himself. Through the windowpane of the inn he saw a man, cowered in a corner, head bowed and hands clasped tightly to a glass; eyes vacant and hollow. It was the same position he had occupied for many years. He, the ghost of the man inside, watched the man who was himself also a ghost, a half-man with half-thoughts. Immersed in the alcoholic abyss that had poisoned him all his life, he drained glass after glass with a thirst sustained only by those that have fallen prey to the unforgiving and unfaithful elixir. He had only ever drunk rum, he could never stand anything else, but Hector saw that the man inside was drinking from a bottle of whisky, and he felt an uneasy distance. Images flitted through him of broken glass, leaves falling, the faces of strangers, eyes red and swollen, and he felt that he would be here again one day, that in witnessing the man before him he had been shown his future, and the darkness within it. The man slipped through time and life, allowing its sands to trickle through his fingers while the woman who had his heart had her ear pressed to the door, eyes fixed on the window, willing him to return. He was not a husband deserving of a wife, nor a father of a child or worthy of a partner so devoted. A man of these things would have been with them now, guarding their safety. The marked rim of the glass, the sticky stains across the wooden table, cramp in his hands and the hiss of a cigarette as it raced to its end, these all seemed to belong to another past, to a distant, buried age that he could no longer connect with himself.
Hector watched as the man checked the time and reluctantly set aside his glass. When he emerged through the door, Hector hurled himself at him, punching his fist into his chest, desperate for him to wake up to his wrongs, but he slipped through him. As if a ghost, a voyeur, his body had no weight and his voice no sound. Perhaps it was too recent a past, that he could not enter into it completely, or perhaps they were unable to share the same physical space, for they were made of the same parts. The night was crisp, but the inebriated Hector stripped off his jacket and flung it across his shoulder, removing the hipflask from its pocket in the process and bringing it to his lips. Hector walked noiselessly behind himself, quietly preparing his heart for what would come next, though what, he did not yet know. They turned a corner, and, at the sight of his car and himself scrambling for the keys in the dust, Hector knew the truth. What followed was not as before, he was no longer there with himself but in some timeless, unknown place within, where only he existed and the images before him. He watched as a series of slides were projected onto his mind. The round silhouette of his wife, hand cupped under her bump, black hair merging with the night; Milton tall and willowy easing into the passenger seat; himself puffing on a cigarette, the amber ash separating in the wind. Husky voices and frenzied drumming yelling from the radio, a burst of light ahead, wheels skidding then a pause, silence, before screams as metal scratches rock, rubber tearing, glass shattering and footsteps running against gravel.
The driver’s seat was empty. Just like his eight-year-old self, the velocity and drop had caused him to time slip before impact, unjustly saving the culprit. Only the gentle hiss of the steam from the engine and the drip, drip, of blood and oil could be heard. Milton’s body was crumpled across the bonnet, shards of glass sticking up from his skin like stalagmites glinting in the moonlight, his scalp torn from the crown to the neck, revealing not the mind of a friend but the brain of a mortal - a being of flesh and blood that bore no resemblance to the soul that had inhabited the man. Hector caught an arm in the reflection of the glass but dared not look back. It was enough to see the strands of hair that dangled from the window, tangled together with a crimson sheen, wrapping themselves around his heart and squeezing the life from inside. He wanted to take his mind to another place but it forced him to bear witness to his crimes and as if to offer up his punishment, the door to the glove compartment was expelled by the heat to reveal his revolver. His cowardly instinct was to hold it to his head but it would not save them, only serve his selfish desire. Instead, he placed it in his pocket, for now he understood what he had to do.
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Hector slipped back and forth in time, tracing the guilt of the past, now foreign and tainted. He searched for himself and for them, but the hands of the time ghosts dragged him down, and he felt the eyes of the Watch upon him, calling him into the future as he drowned in the vortex of memories, shards of the past raining down on his flesh with daggers that pierced his skin. Each time he surfaced for air he found himself at the accident, stiff limbs, flesh crumbling and disappearing with the wind; Milton’s eyes open as he spoke with silent words. A confused pastiche of images fought against one another and Hector ran towards these false memories, as they lay in bed with the truth, abstract and distorted until he could not tell them apart and could not know what was real, each time reaching out for the past and returning to the cliff. He saw himself as a boy, darting across his thoughts and he ran after him, calling after the innocence of his youth that crushed Hector’s heart against his chest, but he did not answer. He wound his watch round and round until the hands turned on their own, ever faster, against him. He held it in his fist, its face grimacing as its lashes batted against the seconds, winking at the minutes and he brought it down onto the rock, for he had no need for time anymore.
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Hector inhaled the odourless future and felt the damp sea air cling to his skin. He pulled his coat around him and eased himself upright on the bench, his muscles resistant and bones grating at the joints, once again imprisoned in the body of an old man. The derelict pier creaked as its splintered wood fought to hold its weight, weak and rotten after years of exploitation, candyfloss summers and star-struck lovers, only to be rewarded with neglect and abandonment. Across the water, his comrade coughed weak strobes of light at the ships as the waves crashed against his stone legs. The loyal pier had supported the traffic of its passengers and the rides in which they escaped from their lives for a fleeting moment, witnessed kisses that would mark a lifetime and squared its shoulders firm against the waves to protect their ungrateful souls. With quiet patience and unwavering determination, it had held strong and watched the landscape around him grow and warp, in a constant state of flux, while he, forgotten in the middle of it all, remained himself, alone and battered by the tides of time.
Holding his wrist to the light, Hector saw that the hands were dead again, leaving him neglected by time and abandoned by the past. As the boats meandered through the delta, navigating the misty waters that were as grey as the sky, he could not guess at which point the day was at, for even the natural light of time was gone. After struggling to remove the strap, he held the watch up and tapped the glass with his finger. Turning it over, he saw his name engraved in bold and a number beneath, which he did not recognise nor understand its relevance.
‘What are you doing?’
Hector turned to see a young boy carrying a milk crate filled with empty bottles he had gathered from the beach.
‘Do you know what this number is for?’ he asked, holding up the watch.
The boy inspected it as the rain began to fall.
‘It’s a phone number,’ he replied, pointing to the telephone box. ‘Local.’
Hector thanked the boy and pivoted himself off the bench and to his feet. He was grateful for the shelter of the box and took out his handkerchief, curiously with him again, to wipe the rain from the back to reveal the number. Carefully, with his numb and cramped fingers, he began to dial.
‘You need coins,’ the boy said, standing next to him.
‘Oh.’ Hector replied, fumbling his pockets and finding them empty.
The boy extended his hand to Hector, a silver coin resting on his open palm.
Hector held up the coin and inspected it, the face was familiar but its weight and size were strange. Smiling gratefully at the boy, he handed him the watch.
‘Does it work?’
‘Not so well, but you just need to wind it up at the side.’
‘That’s for changing the time,’ the boy said as he set off down the beach. ‘It needs batteries.’
Hector did not hear the boy, only a muffled ringtone.
‘Hello?’ a voice answered.
The line was distorted, Hector turned against the wind and cupped his hand over the receiver to make his voice clearer.
‘Whom may I ask is speaking?’ he said.
‘Hector, where are you?’ replied the voice on the other end.
Suspicious that a stranger should recognise his voice, Hector remained silent.
‘What can you see?’ the voice barked. ‘Stay where you are, we’ll come and find you. Do you understand?’
The Watch. They were coming to get him, to force him to live in their future. He would not allow them to capture him, to abuse his powers and destroy his memories.
‘Hector?’
He left the phone dangling, the voice on the end still calling after him as he walked away. The black clouds of the storm were rushing in from the horizon, the rain coming in sheets that cut horizontally across the pier and he began to walk towards the shore, stumbling across the sand as he hurried away from his pursuers, the wind carrying to him the sound of the phone ringing again, calling him to a future that he had no place in.
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The waves crashed against his mind, drowning everything to silence as he walked along the shore, the colour of the clouds and sea as one, rain blurring the landscape with oily strokes, grey ghosts dancing in the wind. The house, towering above the water on its stilt legs, appeared fragile and brittle, its green paint peeling back to reveal the bare wood beneath. Standing at its feet, Hector could make out the silhouette of his pregnant wife at the window, her head resting against the curtains and her belly round and full. As his younger self, just days before the accident, came running from the porch towards him, he knew what he had to do to save them and give them back their lives. He raised the revolver and gripped his hands around the trigger. Aiming at himself, he waited until the figure was within range, arms outstretched in protest, unaware of his sacrifice and ignorant of the future that he deserved no mercy from. The shot fired, muffled by the rain, and he watched himself buckle and fall to the sand. Then he waited to disappear.
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NEWSPAPER ARTICLE
**** Thursday, July 12, 1962
Pioneering psychiatrist and local resident Dr Hector Milton Arco was yesterday shot dead by his father, Hector Arco, while celebrating his birthday at the family home in Playa de Lágrimas. Police investigating the incident have ruled out a murder inquiry on mental health grounds. Archaeologist Hector Arco, 60, famed in the area for his discovery of ancient remains buried in Isla Pajarito, has battled with acute Alzheimer’s for a number of years and is believed to have been suffering from hallucinations at the time.
Dr Arco, 30, dedicated his life to working with dementia patients such as his father and was known for his groundbreaking research into cognitive therapy. He leaves behind an expectant wife and the legacy of a family wrought with tragedy. Three decades earlier to the day, Arco and his father were the only survivors of a motoring accident that killed his then pregnant mother and his father’s colleague, Milton Lopez. The driver of the car, Hector Arco senior, fled the scene of the crime and served a six-year sentence for driving under the influence and manslaughter.
Jemma Foster is a writer and artist, founder of Wild Alchemy Lab, Mama Xanadu and Semantica Productions.
The Watch is one of a series of twelve short stories published in 2010 as The Cardboard Book Project.
By Jemma Foster
Just as every country has its own peculiar smell, so does each year, and it was with this method that Hector Arco often located himself in time. As he woke, he inhaled the air around him and was disturbed to find it odourless - heralding his descent into unfamiliar territory and travel into an unknown age.
His bones, weakened from the journey, creaked as he shifted his weight in the chair and prised open his eyes. Garish and jagged objects glared back at him with vulgar exhibitionism, curiously foreign. Hector was aware, from the unmistakeable slope of the ceiling and the gracefully unchanged view across the delta that he was inside the house that he had himself built, yet its contents were awkward and remote. His head reeled and the lights danced before him, yawning against the glass of the windowpane. The furious beat of a song, its erratic tempo projected from an unseen radio to plague his ears, taunted him with its waves. Casting his anchor out into the past, it fell against the rocky ground of an uncertain era: the future.
Hector felt his heart jar against his chest as he held his hands before him, clawed and trembling. They were wretched beings, mottled and crippled with age, sketched with the contours of a landscape eroded by the decades and marred with bulging rivers that flooded the grey skin of decay. He held the shrivelled beasts to his face and was met with the rough and sallow cheeks of an old man. Gone was the amber glow of agile youth and instead his body, stretched and sagged, wrinkled and brittle, had been transformed into a callous reminder of mortality. He staggered to the mirror and saw a man whose face had done its living and was preparing to let go of its world, but did not recognise himself in its reflection. Teeth gnarled and stained, lips pursed together in desiccated unison, eyes bloodshot and jaundiced. Tufts of hair grew from the forests of his ears and the silver hair on his head had made a shameful retreat to his crown, as if to pardon the eyes from witnessing its pitiful demise.
This brutal call to the savagery of age reminded Hector of his own time and of the present. He searched for his pocket watch but found that it was gone, the chain too having disappeared. It was a grave thing for a time traveller to be without his timepiece and a sense of dread simmered in the pit of his bowels. As he padded himself down, growing increasingly distressed at the prospect of being trapped in the future, he felt his shirt catch against his wrist. He pulled up his sleeve to reveal a wristwatch, round with a large gold-rimmed face and a sturdy black leather strap. Hector had certainly never come across it before and could only conclude that a bizarre glitch of his journey to the future had caused not just his body to accelerate with the times, but also his watch.
Hector was rare in that he himself was a portal and able to control his travels with his watch. Though of late he had begun to time slip involuntarily, the repercussions of which could be catastrophic. He believed that his abilities had been triggered when he was just a young boy. Riding his bicycle down the hill at an enthusiastic speed, he had gripped the brakes as he approached a turn, but continued to accelerate. Fear had prevented him from swerving and he had vanished over the cliff edge, convinced of his impending death. His survival, and the loss of time he experienced before he was rescued hours later, he put down to a combination of velocity and flight that created within him a temporal gate, projecting him mid-air into a time slide.
Hector moved cautiously through the sitting room, trying to orientate himself, observing the various ornaments, paintings and contraptions that he found at once intriguing in their purpose and hideous in design. The hands of clocks tapped their fingers against their glass cages, dials whirled and machines hummed as he passed through the rooms. Instinctively he pushed buttons, causing the objects to spring into action, spinning and pumping. He fingered the spines of books penned by alien authors and records performed by unheard musicians. Flicking through the album sleeves, he felt the familiar feel of the vinyl against his fingers and his mind floated off to the smoky bars and sultry singers of the present, before returning to the brazen performers splashed across the covers of the future. The wallpaper and carpet were vibrant and obnoxious creatures and the kitchen was an eruption of colour and appliances that with each hum, ping and tick mocked him with their mystery. A desk calendar told him that the date was 11th July 1962 and that he had time-slipped by three decades.
Disorientated and eager to return to the familiarity of the present and ease of his youthful physique, he was preparing to leave when he caught sight of that same frame, poised in a handstand on the shore, tanned and athletic. So vivid and curious was the light of the photograph that he felt as if he were actually there in the scene, diving into the green waves and blinded by the speckled reflection on the water, its colour deep and pure. He could not remember it being taken and presumed, from his appearance, that it was yet to come but he would not have long to wait. As he stared back at his future self in the photograph, he searched his face but there was a remoteness in his expression with which he could not connect. Intrigued as to what other traces of himself - relics of the past that he had not yet lived - he might find, he climbed the steps to the attic. As he reached the top, a thin shard of light pierced through the roof and bathed the intricate weaves of a cobweb that stretched across his path.
Hector peered through the delicate spirals that separated his vision into segments and recognised pieces of his present now masked with dust, remnants of an expired age. As he pulled apart the curtains of the web, he caught the glass eyes of an owl, clouded and chipped, its feathers moth-eaten and fur balding. A thread of recollection knitted its way through his mind and he recognised from the missing claw that it was the same owl that he was working on in the present, his maiden experiment with taxidermy. He removed his handkerchief from his breast pocket and dusted it down but, from the state of it, he wondered if he should bother at all, in this age or the present. A further inspection of the space produced obscure artefacts lifted from ancient times, fragments unearthed during explorations and other less historically significant items. A melancholy lingered in the air, the mourning of redundant articles of the past, forgotten and banished to gather the dusts of time. It disturbed him to think that this was what was to come of the life that he still inhabited and he thought of his wife, Maria, who was due to give birth to their first child any day now and he was consumed with a desire to return to the present.
Fearing that he might have lost time during his travels, he fought with his mind to remember where he had been before he had time-slipped, but failed to retrieve a clear image. Hector was aware that in recent times his memory had begun to deteriorate and the blanks become more frequent, but it was a common side effect of time travel and a largely unavoidable hazard of his profession. Reminded of his obligations to the present as an investigative time historian, scouring the past to disclose mysteries and uncover truths with his colleague Milton, his thoughts began to run over their latest mission when he was interrupted by the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. Aware of the risks of being exposed as a time tourist and the alarm it may cause to a non-traveller, he stepped back into the shadows.
‘Is there someone up there?’
The voice was female but Hector struggled to place the accent, for it was not a region he knew of, nor an impediment, but a distant bell resonated in him and it tolled of the Time Travel Watch. As flashes of memory fired at random in his brain, he knew that he had been to this place and time before. The Watch was a malicious group existing in the future that worked to control time travel and the fiction written into history. They despised rogue travellers, but, more crucially, they would want to capture him and use his rare abilities as a portal for their own corrupt benefit.
‘Ah there you are,’ she sighed. ‘What are you doing up here?’
Though Hector was sure he had never set eyes on her before, she had addressed him with a familiar tone, a known tactic of the Watch. It was a real threat that he might be arrested as an illegal time immigrant, but just as she began to advance further, he remembered his wristwatch and turned its hands back to the present.
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The unforgiving and unnatural light of the hospital bulbs sliced through his eyes as he crashed to the floor, landing on the tiles with a crack to the skull. He lay there a moment as his body adjusted and he felt a cold shiver devouring his flesh and making its way to the marrow of his bones. He was relieved to find that he had been restored to his youthful self and that the wristwatch of the future had been replaced with his old pocket watch, safely attached to its chain. The smell was distinctly of the present, yet it was corrupted with a chemical stench. He felt his pocket for his handkerchief to cover his mouth, but it was missing. Another unavoidable flaw of time travel was the slipping of objects into portals unannounced, and much to Hector’s irritation things were constantly disappearing and getting lost. The ringing in his ears was joined by the pounding of his heart as he stood, the soles of his shoes skidding against the floor. Staring at the rows of feet protruding from white sheets, stiff toes saluting the ceiling, he realised that he was surrounded by the Dead.
The morgue could accommodate no more than eight bodies, which was fitting of the island hospital. The grey walls and metal beds stacked side by side reminded Hector of a tin of sardines. He was grateful that none of the deceased were exposed and could only imagine what lay beneath from the abstract bloodstains and peculiar silhouettes. With no windows to guess the time, and his watch having stopped, Hector began to wind it up and search the room for another timepiece. His eyes cruelly led him to a wrist that had escaped its cloth house, still ticking as if unaware of the departure of its master. Hector felt his neck stiffen and muscles contort. He knew the face well, the same that now leered back at him, clapping its hands aggressively to the seconds. He felt earth’s wavering support beneath his feet as he stumbled forward with stilted, jerky movements and lifted the tag that dangled from the toe with twisted innocence.
Milton Lopez. Deceased. 10th July 1932
Hector forced himself to lift the sheet, and as he peeled back the shroud, he sensed a greater horror beside him. When he turned, his mind having already processed the tragedy of the sight, he saw the delicate arch of her feet. As he was sucked backwards, his legs crumpling beneath him, his eyes fixed on the bump that told of a life that would not be lived. The lights flickered and he disappeared into himself, hearing his screams in the distance as they merged with the voices in his head until there was just a static that clawed at his heart. His mind travelled through time, to past memories and future ones that he had created out of the things that could have been, all of which were now relegated to live on in his memories alone. He could feel each moment of the present falling onto him, crashing through him and into the past, regressing steadily away from the future, from their lives ahead, until time left him with no reality, just illusions, disjointed images that he doubted even came from his own memories.
Flitting through a patchwork of heartache, he rode the carousel - Maria’s hands cold against his; poppies growing tall and dancing for them as he sunk to one knee; the beacon of the lighthouse competing with the moon to illuminate the water as oars plunged into the dark; sliding the plaster across her belly to cast the progress of their unborn child; the times he had stared down the end of a bottle when he should have been with her; pillows wet with tears; sun grazing her hair as she first appeared to him; her voice calling to him as he disappeared into times long gone; all the spectres of the past dancing to the music of the lost; and he saw their faces before him as they turned to stone, their names and dates written across their cheeks, and he reached out but they crumbled to ash in his embrace.
Hector gasped for air as he surfaced from the tide of delirium. Anger and disbelief momentarily suspended his grief and he was consumed with vengeance that barricaded the tears and forced him to his feet. He had allowed time to take him and in losing a day had lost what was his life, for without them he was nothing and it was his nothingness - his absence - that had sacrificed them. He wandered through the fog of his mind, arms outstretched as he staggered blindly forward clutching at splinters of memory, searching for the past, for an explanation. He drifted through the corridors of the hospital, passing ghosts of the recently departed as they left on their journeys, souls travelling through a timeless universe. He saw their reflections in each of them, and began to wind back the hands of his watch, in search of the truth.
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‘Hector?’
‘Maria?’
‘That’s all in the past now Hector. You’re here with us, in the present.’
Hector retreated into his thoughts, willing himself back, cursing the odourless air that told him he had slipped into the future again. Fear swam inside him and as the distorted curtains of his mind drew back, he knew that he had fallen into the hands of the Watch.
‘Hector?’
The voice was cold and mechanical.
‘Are you with me?’
He opened his eyes to a large white room, windowless and empty except for a bare bulb that hung from the ceiling and the bed that he lay in. He asked his body to move but it was unresponsive. A man dressed in white overalls stood over him and bent his head to face Hector, his eyes dark and indifferent.
He began to answer but his voice croaked, his throat dry and calling for whisky.
‘We’ve had your watch engraved for you,’ the man continued.
Hector saw that he was dangling the wristwatch that Maria had given him for their last anniversary, gold-rimmed with a black leather strap, and the memory pierced his heart and forced the air from his lungs.
HECTOR ARCO
1135706163
He had been tagged by the Watch and the only chance of survival was to escape or he would be forever at their service.
‘It’s just so we can keep an eye on you, in case you disappear so someone will be able to bring you back home.’
‘This is not home,’ Hector growled as he struggled to lift himself up and felt a firm hand pushing him back onto the pillows, his aged body unable to fight. He thought it wise not to mention his time travelling or anything that might incriminate him, there was a chance at least that they did not yet know that he was a portal himself.
‘No need to get yourself worked up,’ he said in a patronising tone. ‘They’ll be coming to get you soon, just rest for now.’
Hector listened to the soles of the man’s shoes as they smacked against the floor and the door closed, the key grating against the lock as it turned. Knowing there would not be much time before they came again, he took the watch in his hands and wound it back.
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Hector spat out dirt from his mouth and expelled the dust from his lungs, relieved to smell the salt in the air. As he walked towards the lights of the town he spoke to his heavy heart and asked it to stave its grief a while so that he could place one foot in front of the other. He asked his legs, riddled with the ache of loss, to carry him just a little further, so that he could be with them again. Dust swirled in his tracks and the wind tugged at his shirt as night’s blindness set in.
With each step he thought of her, with each breath of their unborn child and of his betrayal in not guarding them against the unknown evil that had taken them. Milton, his only friend, faithful and constant, a man banished from a life that he deserved to live. Hector prayed that they might be together, and that one day, soon, he would find them on the other side. He drifted into his mind and the hands of their memories led him away to the desert moonscape of the south, with its ancient turrets and fish bones, to wander the crypts and labyrinths that they once were guests in. They swam through the island’s rivers, his fingertips brushing the reeds beneath as they tangled with his toes, entwining theirs with his and he felt their icy bloodlessness and he gave his warmth to them but they grew colder still, until the cracks appeared and they shattered in his hands, melting into the muddy water. Hector watched as they struggled onto the shore, dragging themselves up on their bellies, crawling on their knees, running on the stumps of their legs and he burned with shame and prayed to the gods that they would cut off his own feet so that he might run alongside them and share in their pain, but when he opened his eyes, they were already lost to the horizon. Instead he saw himself, a young boy, staring back at him, before he too turned and disappeared.
He surfaced from his delirium, face stained with tears, the lights of the town loud and blinding. Time was running away, but with a regretful heart he knew where he would find himself. Through the windowpane of the inn he saw a man, cowered in a corner, head bowed and hands clasped tightly to a glass; eyes vacant and hollow. It was the same position he had occupied for many years. He, the ghost of the man inside, watched the man who was himself also a ghost, a half-man with half-thoughts. Immersed in the alcoholic abyss that had poisoned him all his life, he drained glass after glass with a thirst sustained only by those that have fallen prey to the unforgiving and unfaithful elixir. He had only ever drunk rum, he could never stand anything else, but Hector saw that the man inside was drinking from a bottle of whisky, and he felt an uneasy distance. Images flitted through him of broken glass, leaves falling, the faces of strangers, eyes red and swollen, and he felt that he would be here again one day, that in witnessing the man before him he had been shown his future, and the darkness within it. The man slipped through time and life, allowing its sands to trickle through his fingers while the woman who had his heart had her ear pressed to the door, eyes fixed on the window, willing him to return. He was not a husband deserving of a wife, nor a father of a child or worthy of a partner so devoted. A man of these things would have been with them now, guarding their safety. The marked rim of the glass, the sticky stains across the wooden table, cramp in his hands and the hiss of a cigarette as it raced to its end, these all seemed to belong to another past, to a distant, buried age that he could no longer connect with himself.
Hector watched as the man checked the time and reluctantly set aside his glass. When he emerged through the door, Hector hurled himself at him, punching his fist into his chest, desperate for him to wake up to his wrongs, but he slipped through him. As if a ghost, a voyeur, his body had no weight and his voice no sound. Perhaps it was too recent a past, that he could not enter into it completely, or perhaps they were unable to share the same physical space, for they were made of the same parts. The night was crisp, but the inebriated Hector stripped off his jacket and flung it across his shoulder, removing the hipflask from its pocket in the process and bringing it to his lips. Hector walked noiselessly behind himself, quietly preparing his heart for what would come next, though what, he did not yet know. They turned a corner, and, at the sight of his car and himself scrambling for the keys in the dust, Hector knew the truth. What followed was not as before, he was no longer there with himself but in some timeless, unknown place within, where only he existed and the images before him. He watched as a series of slides were projected onto his mind. The round silhouette of his wife, hand cupped under her bump, black hair merging with the night; Milton tall and willowy easing into the passenger seat; himself puffing on a cigarette, the amber ash separating in the wind. Husky voices and frenzied drumming yelling from the radio, a burst of light ahead, wheels skidding then a pause, silence, before screams as metal scratches rock, rubber tearing, glass shattering and footsteps running against gravel.
The driver’s seat was empty. Just like his eight-year-old self, the velocity and drop had caused him to time slip before impact, unjustly saving the culprit. Only the gentle hiss of the steam from the engine and the drip, drip, of blood and oil could be heard. Milton’s body was crumpled across the bonnet, shards of glass sticking up from his skin like stalagmites glinting in the moonlight, his scalp torn from the crown to the neck, revealing not the mind of a friend but the brain of a mortal - a being of flesh and blood that bore no resemblance to the soul that had inhabited the man. Hector caught an arm in the reflection of the glass but dared not look back. It was enough to see the strands of hair that dangled from the window, tangled together with a crimson sheen, wrapping themselves around his heart and squeezing the life from inside. He wanted to take his mind to another place but it forced him to bear witness to his crimes and as if to offer up his punishment, the door to the glove compartment was expelled by the heat to reveal his revolver. His cowardly instinct was to hold it to his head but it would not save them, only serve his selfish desire. Instead, he placed it in his pocket, for now he understood what he had to do.
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Hector slipped back and forth in time, tracing the guilt of the past, now foreign and tainted. He searched for himself and for them, but the hands of the time ghosts dragged him down, and he felt the eyes of the Watch upon him, calling him into the future as he drowned in the vortex of memories, shards of the past raining down on his flesh with daggers that pierced his skin. Each time he surfaced for air he found himself at the accident, stiff limbs, flesh crumbling and disappearing with the wind; Milton’s eyes open as he spoke with silent words. A confused pastiche of images fought against one another and Hector ran towards these false memories, as they lay in bed with the truth, abstract and distorted until he could not tell them apart and could not know what was real, each time reaching out for the past and returning to the cliff. He saw himself as a boy, darting across his thoughts and he ran after him, calling after the innocence of his youth that crushed Hector’s heart against his chest, but he did not answer. He wound his watch round and round until the hands turned on their own, ever faster, against him. He held it in his fist, its face grimacing as its lashes batted against the seconds, winking at the minutes and he brought it down onto the rock, for he had no need for time anymore.
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Hector inhaled the odourless future and felt the damp sea air cling to his skin. He pulled his coat around him and eased himself upright on the bench, his muscles resistant and bones grating at the joints, once again imprisoned in the body of an old man. The derelict pier creaked as its splintered wood fought to hold its weight, weak and rotten after years of exploitation, candyfloss summers and star-struck lovers, only to be rewarded with neglect and abandonment. Across the water, his comrade coughed weak strobes of light at the ships as the waves crashed against his stone legs. The loyal pier had supported the traffic of its passengers and the rides in which they escaped from their lives for a fleeting moment, witnessed kisses that would mark a lifetime and squared its shoulders firm against the waves to protect their ungrateful souls. With quiet patience and unwavering determination, it had held strong and watched the landscape around him grow and warp, in a constant state of flux, while he, forgotten in the middle of it all, remained himself, alone and battered by the tides of time.
Holding his wrist to the light, Hector saw that the hands were dead again, leaving him neglected by time and abandoned by the past. As the boats meandered through the delta, navigating the misty waters that were as grey as the sky, he could not guess at which point the day was at, for even the natural light of time was gone. After struggling to remove the strap, he held the watch up and tapped the glass with his finger. Turning it over, he saw his name engraved in bold and a number beneath, which he did not recognise nor understand its relevance.
‘What are you doing?’
Hector turned to see a young boy carrying a milk crate filled with empty bottles he had gathered from the beach.
‘Do you know what this number is for?’ he asked, holding up the watch.
The boy inspected it as the rain began to fall.
‘It’s a phone number,’ he replied, pointing to the telephone box. ‘Local.’
Hector thanked the boy and pivoted himself off the bench and to his feet. He was grateful for the shelter of the box and took out his handkerchief, curiously with him again, to wipe the rain from the back to reveal the number. Carefully, with his numb and cramped fingers, he began to dial.
‘You need coins,’ the boy said, standing next to him.
‘Oh.’ Hector replied, fumbling his pockets and finding them empty.
The boy extended his hand to Hector, a silver coin resting on his open palm.
Hector held up the coin and inspected it, the face was familiar but its weight and size were strange. Smiling gratefully at the boy, he handed him the watch.
‘Does it work?’
‘Not so well, but you just need to wind it up at the side.’
‘That’s for changing the time,’ the boy said as he set off down the beach. ‘It needs batteries.’
Hector did not hear the boy, only a muffled ringtone.
‘Hello?’ a voice answered.
The line was distorted, Hector turned against the wind and cupped his hand over the receiver to make his voice clearer.
‘Whom may I ask is speaking?’ he said.
‘Hector, where are you?’ replied the voice on the other end.
Suspicious that a stranger should recognise his voice, Hector remained silent.
‘What can you see?’ the voice barked. ‘Stay where you are, we’ll come and find you. Do you understand?’
The Watch. They were coming to get him, to force him to live in their future. He would not allow them to capture him, to abuse his powers and destroy his memories.
‘Hector?’
He left the phone dangling, the voice on the end still calling after him as he walked away. The black clouds of the storm were rushing in from the horizon, the rain coming in sheets that cut horizontally across the pier and he began to walk towards the shore, stumbling across the sand as he hurried away from his pursuers, the wind carrying to him the sound of the phone ringing again, calling him to a future that he had no place in.
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The waves crashed against his mind, drowning everything to silence as he walked along the shore, the colour of the clouds and sea as one, rain blurring the landscape with oily strokes, grey ghosts dancing in the wind. The house, towering above the water on its stilt legs, appeared fragile and brittle, its green paint peeling back to reveal the bare wood beneath. Standing at its feet, Hector could make out the silhouette of his pregnant wife at the window, her head resting against the curtains and her belly round and full. As his younger self, just days before the accident, came running from the porch towards him, he knew what he had to do to save them and give them back their lives. He raised the revolver and gripped his hands around the trigger. Aiming at himself, he waited until the figure was within range, arms outstretched in protest, unaware of his sacrifice and ignorant of the future that he deserved no mercy from. The shot fired, muffled by the rain, and he watched himself buckle and fall to the sand. Then he waited to disappear.
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NEWSPAPER ARTICLE
**** Thursday, July 12, 1962
Pioneering psychiatrist and local resident Dr Hector Milton Arco was yesterday shot dead by his father, Hector Arco, while celebrating his birthday at the family home in Playa de Lágrimas. Police investigating the incident have ruled out a murder inquiry on mental health grounds. Archaeologist Hector Arco, 60, famed in the area for his discovery of ancient remains buried in Isla Pajarito, has battled with acute Alzheimer’s for a number of years and is believed to have been suffering from hallucinations at the time.
Dr Arco, 30, dedicated his life to working with dementia patients such as his father and was known for his groundbreaking research into cognitive therapy. He leaves behind an expectant wife and the legacy of a family wrought with tragedy. Three decades earlier to the day, Arco and his father were the only survivors of a motoring accident that killed his then pregnant mother and his father’s colleague, Milton Lopez. The driver of the car, Hector Arco senior, fled the scene of the crime and served a six-year sentence for driving under the influence and manslaughter.
Just as every country has its own peculiar smell, so does each year, and it was with this method that Hector Arco often located himself in time. As he woke, he inhaled the air around him and was disturbed to find it odourless - heralding his descent into unfamiliar territory and travel into an unknown age.
His bones, weakened from the journey, creaked as he shifted his weight in the chair and prised open his eyes. Garish and jagged objects glared back at him with vulgar exhibitionism, curiously foreign. Hector was aware, from the unmistakeable slope of the ceiling and the gracefully unchanged view across the delta that he was inside the house that he had himself built, yet its contents were awkward and remote. His head reeled and the lights danced before him, yawning against the glass of the windowpane. The furious beat of a song, its erratic tempo projected from an unseen radio to plague his ears, taunted him with its waves. Casting his anchor out into the past, it fell against the rocky ground of an uncertain era: the future.
Hector felt his heart jar against his chest as he held his hands before him, clawed and trembling. They were wretched beings, mottled and crippled with age, sketched with the contours of a landscape eroded by the decades and marred with bulging rivers that flooded the grey skin of decay. He held the shrivelled beasts to his face and was met with the rough and sallow cheeks of an old man. Gone was the amber glow of agile youth and instead his body, stretched and sagged, wrinkled and brittle, had been transformed into a callous reminder of mortality. He staggered to the mirror and saw a man whose face had done its living and was preparing to let go of its world, but did not recognise himself in its reflection. Teeth gnarled and stained, lips pursed together in desiccated unison, eyes bloodshot and jaundiced. Tufts of hair grew from the forests of his ears and the silver hair on his head had made a shameful retreat to his crown, as if to pardon the eyes from witnessing its pitiful demise.
This brutal call to the savagery of age reminded Hector of his own time and of the present. He searched for his pocket watch but found that it was gone, the chain too having disappeared. It was a grave thing for a time traveller to be without his timepiece and a sense of dread simmered in the pit of his bowels. As he padded himself down, growing increasingly distressed at the prospect of being trapped in the future, he felt his shirt catch against his wrist. He pulled up his sleeve to reveal a wristwatch, round with a large gold-rimmed face and a sturdy black leather strap. Hector had certainly never come across it before and could only conclude that a bizarre glitch of his journey to the future had caused not just his body to accelerate with the times, but also his watch.
Hector was rare in that he himself was a portal and able to control his travels with his watch. Though of late he had begun to time slip involuntarily, the repercussions of which could be catastrophic. He believed that his abilities had been triggered when he was just a young boy. Riding his bicycle down the hill at an enthusiastic speed, he had gripped the brakes as he approached a turn, but continued to accelerate. Fear had prevented him from swerving and he had vanished over the cliff edge, convinced of his impending death. His survival, and the loss of time he experienced before he was rescued hours later, he put down to a combination of velocity and flight that created within him a temporal gate, projecting him mid-air into a time slide.
Hector moved cautiously through the sitting room, trying to orientate himself, observing the various ornaments, paintings and contraptions that he found at once intriguing in their purpose and hideous in design. The hands of clocks tapped their fingers against their glass cages, dials whirled and machines hummed as he passed through the rooms. Instinctively he pushed buttons, causing the objects to spring into action, spinning and pumping. He fingered the spines of books penned by alien authors and records performed by unheard musicians. Flicking through the album sleeves, he felt the familiar feel of the vinyl against his fingers and his mind floated off to the smoky bars and sultry singers of the present, before returning to the brazen performers splashed across the covers of the future. The wallpaper and carpet were vibrant and obnoxious creatures and the kitchen was an eruption of colour and appliances that with each hum, ping and tick mocked him with their mystery. A desk calendar told him that the date was 11th July 1962 and that he had time-slipped by three decades.
Disorientated and eager to return to the familiarity of the present and ease of his youthful physique, he was preparing to leave when he caught sight of that same frame, poised in a handstand on the shore, tanned and athletic. So vivid and curious was the light of the photograph that he felt as if he were actually there in the scene, diving into the green waves and blinded by the speckled reflection on the water, its colour deep and pure. He could not remember it being taken and presumed, from his appearance, that it was yet to come but he would not have long to wait. As he stared back at his future self in the photograph, he searched his face but there was a remoteness in his expression with which he could not connect. Intrigued as to what other traces of himself - relics of the past that he had not yet lived - he might find, he climbed the steps to the attic. As he reached the top, a thin shard of light pierced through the roof and bathed the intricate weaves of a cobweb that stretched across his path.
Hector peered through the delicate spirals that separated his vision into segments and recognised pieces of his present now masked with dust, remnants of an expired age. As he pulled apart the curtains of the web, he caught the glass eyes of an owl, clouded and chipped, its feathers moth-eaten and fur balding. A thread of recollection knitted its way through his mind and he recognised from the missing claw that it was the same owl that he was working on in the present, his maiden experiment with taxidermy. He removed his handkerchief from his breast pocket and dusted it down but, from the state of it, he wondered if he should bother at all, in this age or the present. A further inspection of the space produced obscure artefacts lifted from ancient times, fragments unearthed during explorations and other less historically significant items. A melancholy lingered in the air, the mourning of redundant articles of the past, forgotten and banished to gather the dusts of time. It disturbed him to think that this was what was to come of the life that he still inhabited and he thought of his wife, Maria, who was due to give birth to their first child any day now and he was consumed with a desire to return to the present.
Fearing that he might have lost time during his travels, he fought with his mind to remember where he had been before he had time-slipped, but failed to retrieve a clear image. Hector was aware that in recent times his memory had begun to deteriorate and the blanks become more frequent, but it was a common side effect of time travel and a largely unavoidable hazard of his profession. Reminded of his obligations to the present as an investigative time historian, scouring the past to disclose mysteries and uncover truths with his colleague Milton, his thoughts began to run over their latest mission when he was interrupted by the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. Aware of the risks of being exposed as a time tourist and the alarm it may cause to a non-traveller, he stepped back into the shadows.
‘Is there someone up there?’
The voice was female but Hector struggled to place the accent, for it was not a region he knew of, nor an impediment, but a distant bell resonated in him and it tolled of the Time Travel Watch. As flashes of memory fired at random in his brain, he knew that he had been to this place and time before. The Watch was a malicious group existing in the future that worked to control time travel and the fiction written into history. They despised rogue travellers, but, more crucially, they would want to capture him and use his rare abilities as a portal for their own corrupt benefit.
‘Ah there you are,’ she sighed. ‘What are you doing up here?’
Though Hector was sure he had never set eyes on her before, she had addressed him with a familiar tone, a known tactic of the Watch. It was a real threat that he might be arrested as an illegal time immigrant, but just as she began to advance further, he remembered his wristwatch and turned its hands back to the present.
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The unforgiving and unnatural light of the hospital bulbs sliced through his eyes as he crashed to the floor, landing on the tiles with a crack to the skull. He lay there a moment as his body adjusted and he felt a cold shiver devouring his flesh and making its way to the marrow of his bones. He was relieved to find that he had been restored to his youthful self and that the wristwatch of the future had been replaced with his old pocket watch, safely attached to its chain. The smell was distinctly of the present, yet it was corrupted with a chemical stench. He felt his pocket for his handkerchief to cover his mouth, but it was missing. Another unavoidable flaw of time travel was the slipping of objects into portals unannounced, and much to Hector’s irritation things were constantly disappearing and getting lost. The ringing in his ears was joined by the pounding of his heart as he stood, the soles of his shoes skidding against the floor. Staring at the rows of feet protruding from white sheets, stiff toes saluting the ceiling, he realised that he was surrounded by the Dead.
The morgue could accommodate no more than eight bodies, which was fitting of the island hospital. The grey walls and metal beds stacked side by side reminded Hector of a tin of sardines. He was grateful that none of the deceased were exposed and could only imagine what lay beneath from the abstract bloodstains and peculiar silhouettes. With no windows to guess the time, and his watch having stopped, Hector began to wind it up and search the room for another timepiece. His eyes cruelly led him to a wrist that had escaped its cloth house, still ticking as if unaware of the departure of its master. Hector felt his neck stiffen and muscles contort. He knew the face well, the same that now leered back at him, clapping its hands aggressively to the seconds. He felt earth’s wavering support beneath his feet as he stumbled forward with stilted, jerky movements and lifted the tag that dangled from the toe with twisted innocence.
Milton Lopez. Deceased. 10th July 1932
Hector forced himself to lift the sheet, and as he peeled back the shroud, he sensed a greater horror beside him. When he turned, his mind having already processed the tragedy of the sight, he saw the delicate arch of her feet. As he was sucked backwards, his legs crumpling beneath him, his eyes fixed on the bump that told of a life that would not be lived. The lights flickered and he disappeared into himself, hearing his screams in the distance as they merged with the voices in his head until there was just a static that clawed at his heart. His mind travelled through time, to past memories and future ones that he had created out of the things that could have been, all of which were now relegated to live on in his memories alone. He could feel each moment of the present falling onto him, crashing through him and into the past, regressing steadily away from the future, from their lives ahead, until time left him with no reality, just illusions, disjointed images that he doubted even came from his own memories.
Flitting through a patchwork of heartache, he rode the carousel - Maria’s hands cold against his; poppies growing tall and dancing for them as he sunk to one knee; the beacon of the lighthouse competing with the moon to illuminate the water as oars plunged into the dark; sliding the plaster across her belly to cast the progress of their unborn child; the times he had stared down the end of a bottle when he should have been with her; pillows wet with tears; sun grazing her hair as she first appeared to him; her voice calling to him as he disappeared into times long gone; all the spectres of the past dancing to the music of the lost; and he saw their faces before him as they turned to stone, their names and dates written across their cheeks, and he reached out but they crumbled to ash in his embrace.
Hector gasped for air as he surfaced from the tide of delirium. Anger and disbelief momentarily suspended his grief and he was consumed with vengeance that barricaded the tears and forced him to his feet. He had allowed time to take him and in losing a day had lost what was his life, for without them he was nothing and it was his nothingness - his absence - that had sacrificed them. He wandered through the fog of his mind, arms outstretched as he staggered blindly forward clutching at splinters of memory, searching for the past, for an explanation. He drifted through the corridors of the hospital, passing ghosts of the recently departed as they left on their journeys, souls travelling through a timeless universe. He saw their reflections in each of them, and began to wind back the hands of his watch, in search of the truth.
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‘Hector?’
‘Maria?’
‘That’s all in the past now Hector. You’re here with us, in the present.’
Hector retreated into his thoughts, willing himself back, cursing the odourless air that told him he had slipped into the future again. Fear swam inside him and as the distorted curtains of his mind drew back, he knew that he had fallen into the hands of the Watch.
‘Hector?’
The voice was cold and mechanical.
‘Are you with me?’
He opened his eyes to a large white room, windowless and empty except for a bare bulb that hung from the ceiling and the bed that he lay in. He asked his body to move but it was unresponsive. A man dressed in white overalls stood over him and bent his head to face Hector, his eyes dark and indifferent.
He began to answer but his voice croaked, his throat dry and calling for whisky.
‘We’ve had your watch engraved for you,’ the man continued.
Hector saw that he was dangling the wristwatch that Maria had given him for their last anniversary, gold-rimmed with a black leather strap, and the memory pierced his heart and forced the air from his lungs.
HECTOR ARCO
1135706163
He had been tagged by the Watch and the only chance of survival was to escape or he would be forever at their service.
‘It’s just so we can keep an eye on you, in case you disappear so someone will be able to bring you back home.’
‘This is not home,’ Hector growled as he struggled to lift himself up and felt a firm hand pushing him back onto the pillows, his aged body unable to fight. He thought it wise not to mention his time travelling or anything that might incriminate him, there was a chance at least that they did not yet know that he was a portal himself.
‘No need to get yourself worked up,’ he said in a patronising tone. ‘They’ll be coming to get you soon, just rest for now.’
Hector listened to the soles of the man’s shoes as they smacked against the floor and the door closed, the key grating against the lock as it turned. Knowing there would not be much time before they came again, he took the watch in his hands and wound it back.
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Hector spat out dirt from his mouth and expelled the dust from his lungs, relieved to smell the salt in the air. As he walked towards the lights of the town he spoke to his heavy heart and asked it to stave its grief a while so that he could place one foot in front of the other. He asked his legs, riddled with the ache of loss, to carry him just a little further, so that he could be with them again. Dust swirled in his tracks and the wind tugged at his shirt as night’s blindness set in.
With each step he thought of her, with each breath of their unborn child and of his betrayal in not guarding them against the unknown evil that had taken them. Milton, his only friend, faithful and constant, a man banished from a life that he deserved to live. Hector prayed that they might be together, and that one day, soon, he would find them on the other side. He drifted into his mind and the hands of their memories led him away to the desert moonscape of the south, with its ancient turrets and fish bones, to wander the crypts and labyrinths that they once were guests in. They swam through the island’s rivers, his fingertips brushing the reeds beneath as they tangled with his toes, entwining theirs with his and he felt their icy bloodlessness and he gave his warmth to them but they grew colder still, until the cracks appeared and they shattered in his hands, melting into the muddy water. Hector watched as they struggled onto the shore, dragging themselves up on their bellies, crawling on their knees, running on the stumps of their legs and he burned with shame and prayed to the gods that they would cut off his own feet so that he might run alongside them and share in their pain, but when he opened his eyes, they were already lost to the horizon. Instead he saw himself, a young boy, staring back at him, before he too turned and disappeared.
He surfaced from his delirium, face stained with tears, the lights of the town loud and blinding. Time was running away, but with a regretful heart he knew where he would find himself. Through the windowpane of the inn he saw a man, cowered in a corner, head bowed and hands clasped tightly to a glass; eyes vacant and hollow. It was the same position he had occupied for many years. He, the ghost of the man inside, watched the man who was himself also a ghost, a half-man with half-thoughts. Immersed in the alcoholic abyss that had poisoned him all his life, he drained glass after glass with a thirst sustained only by those that have fallen prey to the unforgiving and unfaithful elixir. He had only ever drunk rum, he could never stand anything else, but Hector saw that the man inside was drinking from a bottle of whisky, and he felt an uneasy distance. Images flitted through him of broken glass, leaves falling, the faces of strangers, eyes red and swollen, and he felt that he would be here again one day, that in witnessing the man before him he had been shown his future, and the darkness within it. The man slipped through time and life, allowing its sands to trickle through his fingers while the woman who had his heart had her ear pressed to the door, eyes fixed on the window, willing him to return. He was not a husband deserving of a wife, nor a father of a child or worthy of a partner so devoted. A man of these things would have been with them now, guarding their safety. The marked rim of the glass, the sticky stains across the wooden table, cramp in his hands and the hiss of a cigarette as it raced to its end, these all seemed to belong to another past, to a distant, buried age that he could no longer connect with himself.
Hector watched as the man checked the time and reluctantly set aside his glass. When he emerged through the door, Hector hurled himself at him, punching his fist into his chest, desperate for him to wake up to his wrongs, but he slipped through him. As if a ghost, a voyeur, his body had no weight and his voice no sound. Perhaps it was too recent a past, that he could not enter into it completely, or perhaps they were unable to share the same physical space, for they were made of the same parts. The night was crisp, but the inebriated Hector stripped off his jacket and flung it across his shoulder, removing the hipflask from its pocket in the process and bringing it to his lips. Hector walked noiselessly behind himself, quietly preparing his heart for what would come next, though what, he did not yet know. They turned a corner, and, at the sight of his car and himself scrambling for the keys in the dust, Hector knew the truth. What followed was not as before, he was no longer there with himself but in some timeless, unknown place within, where only he existed and the images before him. He watched as a series of slides were projected onto his mind. The round silhouette of his wife, hand cupped under her bump, black hair merging with the night; Milton tall and willowy easing into the passenger seat; himself puffing on a cigarette, the amber ash separating in the wind. Husky voices and frenzied drumming yelling from the radio, a burst of light ahead, wheels skidding then a pause, silence, before screams as metal scratches rock, rubber tearing, glass shattering and footsteps running against gravel.
The driver’s seat was empty. Just like his eight-year-old self, the velocity and drop had caused him to time slip before impact, unjustly saving the culprit. Only the gentle hiss of the steam from the engine and the drip, drip, of blood and oil could be heard. Milton’s body was crumpled across the bonnet, shards of glass sticking up from his skin like stalagmites glinting in the moonlight, his scalp torn from the crown to the neck, revealing not the mind of a friend but the brain of a mortal - a being of flesh and blood that bore no resemblance to the soul that had inhabited the man. Hector caught an arm in the reflection of the glass but dared not look back. It was enough to see the strands of hair that dangled from the window, tangled together with a crimson sheen, wrapping themselves around his heart and squeezing the life from inside. He wanted to take his mind to another place but it forced him to bear witness to his crimes and as if to offer up his punishment, the door to the glove compartment was expelled by the heat to reveal his revolver. His cowardly instinct was to hold it to his head but it would not save them, only serve his selfish desire. Instead, he placed it in his pocket, for now he understood what he had to do.
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Hector slipped back and forth in time, tracing the guilt of the past, now foreign and tainted. He searched for himself and for them, but the hands of the time ghosts dragged him down, and he felt the eyes of the Watch upon him, calling him into the future as he drowned in the vortex of memories, shards of the past raining down on his flesh with daggers that pierced his skin. Each time he surfaced for air he found himself at the accident, stiff limbs, flesh crumbling and disappearing with the wind; Milton’s eyes open as he spoke with silent words. A confused pastiche of images fought against one another and Hector ran towards these false memories, as they lay in bed with the truth, abstract and distorted until he could not tell them apart and could not know what was real, each time reaching out for the past and returning to the cliff. He saw himself as a boy, darting across his thoughts and he ran after him, calling after the innocence of his youth that crushed Hector’s heart against his chest, but he did not answer. He wound his watch round and round until the hands turned on their own, ever faster, against him. He held it in his fist, its face grimacing as its lashes batted against the seconds, winking at the minutes and he brought it down onto the rock, for he had no need for time anymore.
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Hector inhaled the odourless future and felt the damp sea air cling to his skin. He pulled his coat around him and eased himself upright on the bench, his muscles resistant and bones grating at the joints, once again imprisoned in the body of an old man. The derelict pier creaked as its splintered wood fought to hold its weight, weak and rotten after years of exploitation, candyfloss summers and star-struck lovers, only to be rewarded with neglect and abandonment. Across the water, his comrade coughed weak strobes of light at the ships as the waves crashed against his stone legs. The loyal pier had supported the traffic of its passengers and the rides in which they escaped from their lives for a fleeting moment, witnessed kisses that would mark a lifetime and squared its shoulders firm against the waves to protect their ungrateful souls. With quiet patience and unwavering determination, it had held strong and watched the landscape around him grow and warp, in a constant state of flux, while he, forgotten in the middle of it all, remained himself, alone and battered by the tides of time.
Holding his wrist to the light, Hector saw that the hands were dead again, leaving him neglected by time and abandoned by the past. As the boats meandered through the delta, navigating the misty waters that were as grey as the sky, he could not guess at which point the day was at, for even the natural light of time was gone. After struggling to remove the strap, he held the watch up and tapped the glass with his finger. Turning it over, he saw his name engraved in bold and a number beneath, which he did not recognise nor understand its relevance.
‘What are you doing?’
Hector turned to see a young boy carrying a milk crate filled with empty bottles he had gathered from the beach.
‘Do you know what this number is for?’ he asked, holding up the watch.
The boy inspected it as the rain began to fall.
‘It’s a phone number,’ he replied, pointing to the telephone box. ‘Local.’
Hector thanked the boy and pivoted himself off the bench and to his feet. He was grateful for the shelter of the box and took out his handkerchief, curiously with him again, to wipe the rain from the back to reveal the number. Carefully, with his numb and cramped fingers, he began to dial.
‘You need coins,’ the boy said, standing next to him.
‘Oh.’ Hector replied, fumbling his pockets and finding them empty.
The boy extended his hand to Hector, a silver coin resting on his open palm.
Hector held up the coin and inspected it, the face was familiar but its weight and size were strange. Smiling gratefully at the boy, he handed him the watch.
‘Does it work?’
‘Not so well, but you just need to wind it up at the side.’
‘That’s for changing the time,’ the boy said as he set off down the beach. ‘It needs batteries.’
Hector did not hear the boy, only a muffled ringtone.
‘Hello?’ a voice answered.
The line was distorted, Hector turned against the wind and cupped his hand over the receiver to make his voice clearer.
‘Whom may I ask is speaking?’ he said.
‘Hector, where are you?’ replied the voice on the other end.
Suspicious that a stranger should recognise his voice, Hector remained silent.
‘What can you see?’ the voice barked. ‘Stay where you are, we’ll come and find you. Do you understand?’
The Watch. They were coming to get him, to force him to live in their future. He would not allow them to capture him, to abuse his powers and destroy his memories.
‘Hector?’
He left the phone dangling, the voice on the end still calling after him as he walked away. The black clouds of the storm were rushing in from the horizon, the rain coming in sheets that cut horizontally across the pier and he began to walk towards the shore, stumbling across the sand as he hurried away from his pursuers, the wind carrying to him the sound of the phone ringing again, calling him to a future that he had no place in.
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The waves crashed against his mind, drowning everything to silence as he walked along the shore, the colour of the clouds and sea as one, rain blurring the landscape with oily strokes, grey ghosts dancing in the wind. The house, towering above the water on its stilt legs, appeared fragile and brittle, its green paint peeling back to reveal the bare wood beneath. Standing at its feet, Hector could make out the silhouette of his pregnant wife at the window, her head resting against the curtains and her belly round and full. As his younger self, just days before the accident, came running from the porch towards him, he knew what he had to do to save them and give them back their lives. He raised the revolver and gripped his hands around the trigger. Aiming at himself, he waited until the figure was within range, arms outstretched in protest, unaware of his sacrifice and ignorant of the future that he deserved no mercy from. The shot fired, muffled by the rain, and he watched himself buckle and fall to the sand. Then he waited to disappear.
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NEWSPAPER ARTICLE
**** Thursday, July 12, 1962
Pioneering psychiatrist and local resident Dr Hector Milton Arco was yesterday shot dead by his father, Hector Arco, while celebrating his birthday at the family home in Playa de Lágrimas. Police investigating the incident have ruled out a murder inquiry on mental health grounds. Archaeologist Hector Arco, 60, famed in the area for his discovery of ancient remains buried in Isla Pajarito, has battled with acute Alzheimer’s for a number of years and is believed to have been suffering from hallucinations at the time.
Dr Arco, 30, dedicated his life to working with dementia patients such as his father and was known for his groundbreaking research into cognitive therapy. He leaves behind an expectant wife and the legacy of a family wrought with tragedy. Three decades earlier to the day, Arco and his father were the only survivors of a motoring accident that killed his then pregnant mother and his father’s colleague, Milton Lopez. The driver of the car, Hector Arco senior, fled the scene of the crime and served a six-year sentence for driving under the influence and manslaughter.
Jemma Foster is a writer and artist, founder of Wild Alchemy Lab, Mama Xanadu and Semantica Productions.
The Watch is one of a series of twelve short stories published in 2010 as The Cardboard Book Project.
By Jemma Foster
Just as every country has its own peculiar smell, so does each year, and it was with this method that Hector Arco often located himself in time. As he woke, he inhaled the air around him and was disturbed to find it odourless - heralding his descent into unfamiliar territory and travel into an unknown age.
His bones, weakened from the journey, creaked as he shifted his weight in the chair and prised open his eyes. Garish and jagged objects glared back at him with vulgar exhibitionism, curiously foreign. Hector was aware, from the unmistakeable slope of the ceiling and the gracefully unchanged view across the delta that he was inside the house that he had himself built, yet its contents were awkward and remote. His head reeled and the lights danced before him, yawning against the glass of the windowpane. The furious beat of a song, its erratic tempo projected from an unseen radio to plague his ears, taunted him with its waves. Casting his anchor out into the past, it fell against the rocky ground of an uncertain era: the future.
Hector felt his heart jar against his chest as he held his hands before him, clawed and trembling. They were wretched beings, mottled and crippled with age, sketched with the contours of a landscape eroded by the decades and marred with bulging rivers that flooded the grey skin of decay. He held the shrivelled beasts to his face and was met with the rough and sallow cheeks of an old man. Gone was the amber glow of agile youth and instead his body, stretched and sagged, wrinkled and brittle, had been transformed into a callous reminder of mortality. He staggered to the mirror and saw a man whose face had done its living and was preparing to let go of its world, but did not recognise himself in its reflection. Teeth gnarled and stained, lips pursed together in desiccated unison, eyes bloodshot and jaundiced. Tufts of hair grew from the forests of his ears and the silver hair on his head had made a shameful retreat to his crown, as if to pardon the eyes from witnessing its pitiful demise.
This brutal call to the savagery of age reminded Hector of his own time and of the present. He searched for his pocket watch but found that it was gone, the chain too having disappeared. It was a grave thing for a time traveller to be without his timepiece and a sense of dread simmered in the pit of his bowels. As he padded himself down, growing increasingly distressed at the prospect of being trapped in the future, he felt his shirt catch against his wrist. He pulled up his sleeve to reveal a wristwatch, round with a large gold-rimmed face and a sturdy black leather strap. Hector had certainly never come across it before and could only conclude that a bizarre glitch of his journey to the future had caused not just his body to accelerate with the times, but also his watch.
Hector was rare in that he himself was a portal and able to control his travels with his watch. Though of late he had begun to time slip involuntarily, the repercussions of which could be catastrophic. He believed that his abilities had been triggered when he was just a young boy. Riding his bicycle down the hill at an enthusiastic speed, he had gripped the brakes as he approached a turn, but continued to accelerate. Fear had prevented him from swerving and he had vanished over the cliff edge, convinced of his impending death. His survival, and the loss of time he experienced before he was rescued hours later, he put down to a combination of velocity and flight that created within him a temporal gate, projecting him mid-air into a time slide.
Hector moved cautiously through the sitting room, trying to orientate himself, observing the various ornaments, paintings and contraptions that he found at once intriguing in their purpose and hideous in design. The hands of clocks tapped their fingers against their glass cages, dials whirled and machines hummed as he passed through the rooms. Instinctively he pushed buttons, causing the objects to spring into action, spinning and pumping. He fingered the spines of books penned by alien authors and records performed by unheard musicians. Flicking through the album sleeves, he felt the familiar feel of the vinyl against his fingers and his mind floated off to the smoky bars and sultry singers of the present, before returning to the brazen performers splashed across the covers of the future. The wallpaper and carpet were vibrant and obnoxious creatures and the kitchen was an eruption of colour and appliances that with each hum, ping and tick mocked him with their mystery. A desk calendar told him that the date was 11th July 1962 and that he had time-slipped by three decades.
Disorientated and eager to return to the familiarity of the present and ease of his youthful physique, he was preparing to leave when he caught sight of that same frame, poised in a handstand on the shore, tanned and athletic. So vivid and curious was the light of the photograph that he felt as if he were actually there in the scene, diving into the green waves and blinded by the speckled reflection on the water, its colour deep and pure. He could not remember it being taken and presumed, from his appearance, that it was yet to come but he would not have long to wait. As he stared back at his future self in the photograph, he searched his face but there was a remoteness in his expression with which he could not connect. Intrigued as to what other traces of himself - relics of the past that he had not yet lived - he might find, he climbed the steps to the attic. As he reached the top, a thin shard of light pierced through the roof and bathed the intricate weaves of a cobweb that stretched across his path.
Hector peered through the delicate spirals that separated his vision into segments and recognised pieces of his present now masked with dust, remnants of an expired age. As he pulled apart the curtains of the web, he caught the glass eyes of an owl, clouded and chipped, its feathers moth-eaten and fur balding. A thread of recollection knitted its way through his mind and he recognised from the missing claw that it was the same owl that he was working on in the present, his maiden experiment with taxidermy. He removed his handkerchief from his breast pocket and dusted it down but, from the state of it, he wondered if he should bother at all, in this age or the present. A further inspection of the space produced obscure artefacts lifted from ancient times, fragments unearthed during explorations and other less historically significant items. A melancholy lingered in the air, the mourning of redundant articles of the past, forgotten and banished to gather the dusts of time. It disturbed him to think that this was what was to come of the life that he still inhabited and he thought of his wife, Maria, who was due to give birth to their first child any day now and he was consumed with a desire to return to the present.
Fearing that he might have lost time during his travels, he fought with his mind to remember where he had been before he had time-slipped, but failed to retrieve a clear image. Hector was aware that in recent times his memory had begun to deteriorate and the blanks become more frequent, but it was a common side effect of time travel and a largely unavoidable hazard of his profession. Reminded of his obligations to the present as an investigative time historian, scouring the past to disclose mysteries and uncover truths with his colleague Milton, his thoughts began to run over their latest mission when he was interrupted by the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. Aware of the risks of being exposed as a time tourist and the alarm it may cause to a non-traveller, he stepped back into the shadows.
‘Is there someone up there?’
The voice was female but Hector struggled to place the accent, for it was not a region he knew of, nor an impediment, but a distant bell resonated in him and it tolled of the Time Travel Watch. As flashes of memory fired at random in his brain, he knew that he had been to this place and time before. The Watch was a malicious group existing in the future that worked to control time travel and the fiction written into history. They despised rogue travellers, but, more crucially, they would want to capture him and use his rare abilities as a portal for their own corrupt benefit.
‘Ah there you are,’ she sighed. ‘What are you doing up here?’
Though Hector was sure he had never set eyes on her before, she had addressed him with a familiar tone, a known tactic of the Watch. It was a real threat that he might be arrested as an illegal time immigrant, but just as she began to advance further, he remembered his wristwatch and turned its hands back to the present.
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The unforgiving and unnatural light of the hospital bulbs sliced through his eyes as he crashed to the floor, landing on the tiles with a crack to the skull. He lay there a moment as his body adjusted and he felt a cold shiver devouring his flesh and making its way to the marrow of his bones. He was relieved to find that he had been restored to his youthful self and that the wristwatch of the future had been replaced with his old pocket watch, safely attached to its chain. The smell was distinctly of the present, yet it was corrupted with a chemical stench. He felt his pocket for his handkerchief to cover his mouth, but it was missing. Another unavoidable flaw of time travel was the slipping of objects into portals unannounced, and much to Hector’s irritation things were constantly disappearing and getting lost. The ringing in his ears was joined by the pounding of his heart as he stood, the soles of his shoes skidding against the floor. Staring at the rows of feet protruding from white sheets, stiff toes saluting the ceiling, he realised that he was surrounded by the Dead.
The morgue could accommodate no more than eight bodies, which was fitting of the island hospital. The grey walls and metal beds stacked side by side reminded Hector of a tin of sardines. He was grateful that none of the deceased were exposed and could only imagine what lay beneath from the abstract bloodstains and peculiar silhouettes. With no windows to guess the time, and his watch having stopped, Hector began to wind it up and search the room for another timepiece. His eyes cruelly led him to a wrist that had escaped its cloth house, still ticking as if unaware of the departure of its master. Hector felt his neck stiffen and muscles contort. He knew the face well, the same that now leered back at him, clapping its hands aggressively to the seconds. He felt earth’s wavering support beneath his feet as he stumbled forward with stilted, jerky movements and lifted the tag that dangled from the toe with twisted innocence.
Milton Lopez. Deceased. 10th July 1932
Hector forced himself to lift the sheet, and as he peeled back the shroud, he sensed a greater horror beside him. When he turned, his mind having already processed the tragedy of the sight, he saw the delicate arch of her feet. As he was sucked backwards, his legs crumpling beneath him, his eyes fixed on the bump that told of a life that would not be lived. The lights flickered and he disappeared into himself, hearing his screams in the distance as they merged with the voices in his head until there was just a static that clawed at his heart. His mind travelled through time, to past memories and future ones that he had created out of the things that could have been, all of which were now relegated to live on in his memories alone. He could feel each moment of the present falling onto him, crashing through him and into the past, regressing steadily away from the future, from their lives ahead, until time left him with no reality, just illusions, disjointed images that he doubted even came from his own memories.
Flitting through a patchwork of heartache, he rode the carousel - Maria’s hands cold against his; poppies growing tall and dancing for them as he sunk to one knee; the beacon of the lighthouse competing with the moon to illuminate the water as oars plunged into the dark; sliding the plaster across her belly to cast the progress of their unborn child; the times he had stared down the end of a bottle when he should have been with her; pillows wet with tears; sun grazing her hair as she first appeared to him; her voice calling to him as he disappeared into times long gone; all the spectres of the past dancing to the music of the lost; and he saw their faces before him as they turned to stone, their names and dates written across their cheeks, and he reached out but they crumbled to ash in his embrace.
Hector gasped for air as he surfaced from the tide of delirium. Anger and disbelief momentarily suspended his grief and he was consumed with vengeance that barricaded the tears and forced him to his feet. He had allowed time to take him and in losing a day had lost what was his life, for without them he was nothing and it was his nothingness - his absence - that had sacrificed them. He wandered through the fog of his mind, arms outstretched as he staggered blindly forward clutching at splinters of memory, searching for the past, for an explanation. He drifted through the corridors of the hospital, passing ghosts of the recently departed as they left on their journeys, souls travelling through a timeless universe. He saw their reflections in each of them, and began to wind back the hands of his watch, in search of the truth.
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‘Hector?’
‘Maria?’
‘That’s all in the past now Hector. You’re here with us, in the present.’
Hector retreated into his thoughts, willing himself back, cursing the odourless air that told him he had slipped into the future again. Fear swam inside him and as the distorted curtains of his mind drew back, he knew that he had fallen into the hands of the Watch.
‘Hector?’
The voice was cold and mechanical.
‘Are you with me?’
He opened his eyes to a large white room, windowless and empty except for a bare bulb that hung from the ceiling and the bed that he lay in. He asked his body to move but it was unresponsive. A man dressed in white overalls stood over him and bent his head to face Hector, his eyes dark and indifferent.
He began to answer but his voice croaked, his throat dry and calling for whisky.
‘We’ve had your watch engraved for you,’ the man continued.
Hector saw that he was dangling the wristwatch that Maria had given him for their last anniversary, gold-rimmed with a black leather strap, and the memory pierced his heart and forced the air from his lungs.
HECTOR ARCO
1135706163
He had been tagged by the Watch and the only chance of survival was to escape or he would be forever at their service.
‘It’s just so we can keep an eye on you, in case you disappear so someone will be able to bring you back home.’
‘This is not home,’ Hector growled as he struggled to lift himself up and felt a firm hand pushing him back onto the pillows, his aged body unable to fight. He thought it wise not to mention his time travelling or anything that might incriminate him, there was a chance at least that they did not yet know that he was a portal himself.
‘No need to get yourself worked up,’ he said in a patronising tone. ‘They’ll be coming to get you soon, just rest for now.’
Hector listened to the soles of the man’s shoes as they smacked against the floor and the door closed, the key grating against the lock as it turned. Knowing there would not be much time before they came again, he took the watch in his hands and wound it back.
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Hector spat out dirt from his mouth and expelled the dust from his lungs, relieved to smell the salt in the air. As he walked towards the lights of the town he spoke to his heavy heart and asked it to stave its grief a while so that he could place one foot in front of the other. He asked his legs, riddled with the ache of loss, to carry him just a little further, so that he could be with them again. Dust swirled in his tracks and the wind tugged at his shirt as night’s blindness set in.
With each step he thought of her, with each breath of their unborn child and of his betrayal in not guarding them against the unknown evil that had taken them. Milton, his only friend, faithful and constant, a man banished from a life that he deserved to live. Hector prayed that they might be together, and that one day, soon, he would find them on the other side. He drifted into his mind and the hands of their memories led him away to the desert moonscape of the south, with its ancient turrets and fish bones, to wander the crypts and labyrinths that they once were guests in. They swam through the island’s rivers, his fingertips brushing the reeds beneath as they tangled with his toes, entwining theirs with his and he felt their icy bloodlessness and he gave his warmth to them but they grew colder still, until the cracks appeared and they shattered in his hands, melting into the muddy water. Hector watched as they struggled onto the shore, dragging themselves up on their bellies, crawling on their knees, running on the stumps of their legs and he burned with shame and prayed to the gods that they would cut off his own feet so that he might run alongside them and share in their pain, but when he opened his eyes, they were already lost to the horizon. Instead he saw himself, a young boy, staring back at him, before he too turned and disappeared.
He surfaced from his delirium, face stained with tears, the lights of the town loud and blinding. Time was running away, but with a regretful heart he knew where he would find himself. Through the windowpane of the inn he saw a man, cowered in a corner, head bowed and hands clasped tightly to a glass; eyes vacant and hollow. It was the same position he had occupied for many years. He, the ghost of the man inside, watched the man who was himself also a ghost, a half-man with half-thoughts. Immersed in the alcoholic abyss that had poisoned him all his life, he drained glass after glass with a thirst sustained only by those that have fallen prey to the unforgiving and unfaithful elixir. He had only ever drunk rum, he could never stand anything else, but Hector saw that the man inside was drinking from a bottle of whisky, and he felt an uneasy distance. Images flitted through him of broken glass, leaves falling, the faces of strangers, eyes red and swollen, and he felt that he would be here again one day, that in witnessing the man before him he had been shown his future, and the darkness within it. The man slipped through time and life, allowing its sands to trickle through his fingers while the woman who had his heart had her ear pressed to the door, eyes fixed on the window, willing him to return. He was not a husband deserving of a wife, nor a father of a child or worthy of a partner so devoted. A man of these things would have been with them now, guarding their safety. The marked rim of the glass, the sticky stains across the wooden table, cramp in his hands and the hiss of a cigarette as it raced to its end, these all seemed to belong to another past, to a distant, buried age that he could no longer connect with himself.
Hector watched as the man checked the time and reluctantly set aside his glass. When he emerged through the door, Hector hurled himself at him, punching his fist into his chest, desperate for him to wake up to his wrongs, but he slipped through him. As if a ghost, a voyeur, his body had no weight and his voice no sound. Perhaps it was too recent a past, that he could not enter into it completely, or perhaps they were unable to share the same physical space, for they were made of the same parts. The night was crisp, but the inebriated Hector stripped off his jacket and flung it across his shoulder, removing the hipflask from its pocket in the process and bringing it to his lips. Hector walked noiselessly behind himself, quietly preparing his heart for what would come next, though what, he did not yet know. They turned a corner, and, at the sight of his car and himself scrambling for the keys in the dust, Hector knew the truth. What followed was not as before, he was no longer there with himself but in some timeless, unknown place within, where only he existed and the images before him. He watched as a series of slides were projected onto his mind. The round silhouette of his wife, hand cupped under her bump, black hair merging with the night; Milton tall and willowy easing into the passenger seat; himself puffing on a cigarette, the amber ash separating in the wind. Husky voices and frenzied drumming yelling from the radio, a burst of light ahead, wheels skidding then a pause, silence, before screams as metal scratches rock, rubber tearing, glass shattering and footsteps running against gravel.
The driver’s seat was empty. Just like his eight-year-old self, the velocity and drop had caused him to time slip before impact, unjustly saving the culprit. Only the gentle hiss of the steam from the engine and the drip, drip, of blood and oil could be heard. Milton’s body was crumpled across the bonnet, shards of glass sticking up from his skin like stalagmites glinting in the moonlight, his scalp torn from the crown to the neck, revealing not the mind of a friend but the brain of a mortal - a being of flesh and blood that bore no resemblance to the soul that had inhabited the man. Hector caught an arm in the reflection of the glass but dared not look back. It was enough to see the strands of hair that dangled from the window, tangled together with a crimson sheen, wrapping themselves around his heart and squeezing the life from inside. He wanted to take his mind to another place but it forced him to bear witness to his crimes and as if to offer up his punishment, the door to the glove compartment was expelled by the heat to reveal his revolver. His cowardly instinct was to hold it to his head but it would not save them, only serve his selfish desire. Instead, he placed it in his pocket, for now he understood what he had to do.
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Hector slipped back and forth in time, tracing the guilt of the past, now foreign and tainted. He searched for himself and for them, but the hands of the time ghosts dragged him down, and he felt the eyes of the Watch upon him, calling him into the future as he drowned in the vortex of memories, shards of the past raining down on his flesh with daggers that pierced his skin. Each time he surfaced for air he found himself at the accident, stiff limbs, flesh crumbling and disappearing with the wind; Milton’s eyes open as he spoke with silent words. A confused pastiche of images fought against one another and Hector ran towards these false memories, as they lay in bed with the truth, abstract and distorted until he could not tell them apart and could not know what was real, each time reaching out for the past and returning to the cliff. He saw himself as a boy, darting across his thoughts and he ran after him, calling after the innocence of his youth that crushed Hector’s heart against his chest, but he did not answer. He wound his watch round and round until the hands turned on their own, ever faster, against him. He held it in his fist, its face grimacing as its lashes batted against the seconds, winking at the minutes and he brought it down onto the rock, for he had no need for time anymore.
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Hector inhaled the odourless future and felt the damp sea air cling to his skin. He pulled his coat around him and eased himself upright on the bench, his muscles resistant and bones grating at the joints, once again imprisoned in the body of an old man. The derelict pier creaked as its splintered wood fought to hold its weight, weak and rotten after years of exploitation, candyfloss summers and star-struck lovers, only to be rewarded with neglect and abandonment. Across the water, his comrade coughed weak strobes of light at the ships as the waves crashed against his stone legs. The loyal pier had supported the traffic of its passengers and the rides in which they escaped from their lives for a fleeting moment, witnessed kisses that would mark a lifetime and squared its shoulders firm against the waves to protect their ungrateful souls. With quiet patience and unwavering determination, it had held strong and watched the landscape around him grow and warp, in a constant state of flux, while he, forgotten in the middle of it all, remained himself, alone and battered by the tides of time.
Holding his wrist to the light, Hector saw that the hands were dead again, leaving him neglected by time and abandoned by the past. As the boats meandered through the delta, navigating the misty waters that were as grey as the sky, he could not guess at which point the day was at, for even the natural light of time was gone. After struggling to remove the strap, he held the watch up and tapped the glass with his finger. Turning it over, he saw his name engraved in bold and a number beneath, which he did not recognise nor understand its relevance.
‘What are you doing?’
Hector turned to see a young boy carrying a milk crate filled with empty bottles he had gathered from the beach.
‘Do you know what this number is for?’ he asked, holding up the watch.
The boy inspected it as the rain began to fall.
‘It’s a phone number,’ he replied, pointing to the telephone box. ‘Local.’
Hector thanked the boy and pivoted himself off the bench and to his feet. He was grateful for the shelter of the box and took out his handkerchief, curiously with him again, to wipe the rain from the back to reveal the number. Carefully, with his numb and cramped fingers, he began to dial.
‘You need coins,’ the boy said, standing next to him.
‘Oh.’ Hector replied, fumbling his pockets and finding them empty.
The boy extended his hand to Hector, a silver coin resting on his open palm.
Hector held up the coin and inspected it, the face was familiar but its weight and size were strange. Smiling gratefully at the boy, he handed him the watch.
‘Does it work?’
‘Not so well, but you just need to wind it up at the side.’
‘That’s for changing the time,’ the boy said as he set off down the beach. ‘It needs batteries.’
Hector did not hear the boy, only a muffled ringtone.
‘Hello?’ a voice answered.
The line was distorted, Hector turned against the wind and cupped his hand over the receiver to make his voice clearer.
‘Whom may I ask is speaking?’ he said.
‘Hector, where are you?’ replied the voice on the other end.
Suspicious that a stranger should recognise his voice, Hector remained silent.
‘What can you see?’ the voice barked. ‘Stay where you are, we’ll come and find you. Do you understand?’
The Watch. They were coming to get him, to force him to live in their future. He would not allow them to capture him, to abuse his powers and destroy his memories.
‘Hector?’
He left the phone dangling, the voice on the end still calling after him as he walked away. The black clouds of the storm were rushing in from the horizon, the rain coming in sheets that cut horizontally across the pier and he began to walk towards the shore, stumbling across the sand as he hurried away from his pursuers, the wind carrying to him the sound of the phone ringing again, calling him to a future that he had no place in.
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The waves crashed against his mind, drowning everything to silence as he walked along the shore, the colour of the clouds and sea as one, rain blurring the landscape with oily strokes, grey ghosts dancing in the wind. The house, towering above the water on its stilt legs, appeared fragile and brittle, its green paint peeling back to reveal the bare wood beneath. Standing at its feet, Hector could make out the silhouette of his pregnant wife at the window, her head resting against the curtains and her belly round and full. As his younger self, just days before the accident, came running from the porch towards him, he knew what he had to do to save them and give them back their lives. He raised the revolver and gripped his hands around the trigger. Aiming at himself, he waited until the figure was within range, arms outstretched in protest, unaware of his sacrifice and ignorant of the future that he deserved no mercy from. The shot fired, muffled by the rain, and he watched himself buckle and fall to the sand. Then he waited to disappear.
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NEWSPAPER ARTICLE
**** Thursday, July 12, 1962
Pioneering psychiatrist and local resident Dr Hector Milton Arco was yesterday shot dead by his father, Hector Arco, while celebrating his birthday at the family home in Playa de Lágrimas. Police investigating the incident have ruled out a murder inquiry on mental health grounds. Archaeologist Hector Arco, 60, famed in the area for his discovery of ancient remains buried in Isla Pajarito, has battled with acute Alzheimer’s for a number of years and is believed to have been suffering from hallucinations at the time.
Dr Arco, 30, dedicated his life to working with dementia patients such as his father and was known for his groundbreaking research into cognitive therapy. He leaves behind an expectant wife and the legacy of a family wrought with tragedy. Three decades earlier to the day, Arco and his father were the only survivors of a motoring accident that killed his then pregnant mother and his father’s colleague, Milton Lopez. The driver of the car, Hector Arco senior, fled the scene of the crime and served a six-year sentence for driving under the influence and manslaughter.
Just as every country has its own peculiar smell, so does each year, and it was with this method that Hector Arco often located himself in time. As he woke, he inhaled the air around him and was disturbed to find it odourless - heralding his descent into unfamiliar territory and travel into an unknown age.
His bones, weakened from the journey, creaked as he shifted his weight in the chair and prised open his eyes. Garish and jagged objects glared back at him with vulgar exhibitionism, curiously foreign. Hector was aware, from the unmistakeable slope of the ceiling and the gracefully unchanged view across the delta that he was inside the house that he had himself built, yet its contents were awkward and remote. His head reeled and the lights danced before him, yawning against the glass of the windowpane. The furious beat of a song, its erratic tempo projected from an unseen radio to plague his ears, taunted him with its waves. Casting his anchor out into the past, it fell against the rocky ground of an uncertain era: the future.
Hector felt his heart jar against his chest as he held his hands before him, clawed and trembling. They were wretched beings, mottled and crippled with age, sketched with the contours of a landscape eroded by the decades and marred with bulging rivers that flooded the grey skin of decay. He held the shrivelled beasts to his face and was met with the rough and sallow cheeks of an old man. Gone was the amber glow of agile youth and instead his body, stretched and sagged, wrinkled and brittle, had been transformed into a callous reminder of mortality. He staggered to the mirror and saw a man whose face had done its living and was preparing to let go of its world, but did not recognise himself in its reflection. Teeth gnarled and stained, lips pursed together in desiccated unison, eyes bloodshot and jaundiced. Tufts of hair grew from the forests of his ears and the silver hair on his head had made a shameful retreat to his crown, as if to pardon the eyes from witnessing its pitiful demise.
This brutal call to the savagery of age reminded Hector of his own time and of the present. He searched for his pocket watch but found that it was gone, the chain too having disappeared. It was a grave thing for a time traveller to be without his timepiece and a sense of dread simmered in the pit of his bowels. As he padded himself down, growing increasingly distressed at the prospect of being trapped in the future, he felt his shirt catch against his wrist. He pulled up his sleeve to reveal a wristwatch, round with a large gold-rimmed face and a sturdy black leather strap. Hector had certainly never come across it before and could only conclude that a bizarre glitch of his journey to the future had caused not just his body to accelerate with the times, but also his watch.
Hector was rare in that he himself was a portal and able to control his travels with his watch. Though of late he had begun to time slip involuntarily, the repercussions of which could be catastrophic. He believed that his abilities had been triggered when he was just a young boy. Riding his bicycle down the hill at an enthusiastic speed, he had gripped the brakes as he approached a turn, but continued to accelerate. Fear had prevented him from swerving and he had vanished over the cliff edge, convinced of his impending death. His survival, and the loss of time he experienced before he was rescued hours later, he put down to a combination of velocity and flight that created within him a temporal gate, projecting him mid-air into a time slide.
Hector moved cautiously through the sitting room, trying to orientate himself, observing the various ornaments, paintings and contraptions that he found at once intriguing in their purpose and hideous in design. The hands of clocks tapped their fingers against their glass cages, dials whirled and machines hummed as he passed through the rooms. Instinctively he pushed buttons, causing the objects to spring into action, spinning and pumping. He fingered the spines of books penned by alien authors and records performed by unheard musicians. Flicking through the album sleeves, he felt the familiar feel of the vinyl against his fingers and his mind floated off to the smoky bars and sultry singers of the present, before returning to the brazen performers splashed across the covers of the future. The wallpaper and carpet were vibrant and obnoxious creatures and the kitchen was an eruption of colour and appliances that with each hum, ping and tick mocked him with their mystery. A desk calendar told him that the date was 11th July 1962 and that he had time-slipped by three decades.
Disorientated and eager to return to the familiarity of the present and ease of his youthful physique, he was preparing to leave when he caught sight of that same frame, poised in a handstand on the shore, tanned and athletic. So vivid and curious was the light of the photograph that he felt as if he were actually there in the scene, diving into the green waves and blinded by the speckled reflection on the water, its colour deep and pure. He could not remember it being taken and presumed, from his appearance, that it was yet to come but he would not have long to wait. As he stared back at his future self in the photograph, he searched his face but there was a remoteness in his expression with which he could not connect. Intrigued as to what other traces of himself - relics of the past that he had not yet lived - he might find, he climbed the steps to the attic. As he reached the top, a thin shard of light pierced through the roof and bathed the intricate weaves of a cobweb that stretched across his path.
Hector peered through the delicate spirals that separated his vision into segments and recognised pieces of his present now masked with dust, remnants of an expired age. As he pulled apart the curtains of the web, he caught the glass eyes of an owl, clouded and chipped, its feathers moth-eaten and fur balding. A thread of recollection knitted its way through his mind and he recognised from the missing claw that it was the same owl that he was working on in the present, his maiden experiment with taxidermy. He removed his handkerchief from his breast pocket and dusted it down but, from the state of it, he wondered if he should bother at all, in this age or the present. A further inspection of the space produced obscure artefacts lifted from ancient times, fragments unearthed during explorations and other less historically significant items. A melancholy lingered in the air, the mourning of redundant articles of the past, forgotten and banished to gather the dusts of time. It disturbed him to think that this was what was to come of the life that he still inhabited and he thought of his wife, Maria, who was due to give birth to their first child any day now and he was consumed with a desire to return to the present.
Fearing that he might have lost time during his travels, he fought with his mind to remember where he had been before he had time-slipped, but failed to retrieve a clear image. Hector was aware that in recent times his memory had begun to deteriorate and the blanks become more frequent, but it was a common side effect of time travel and a largely unavoidable hazard of his profession. Reminded of his obligations to the present as an investigative time historian, scouring the past to disclose mysteries and uncover truths with his colleague Milton, his thoughts began to run over their latest mission when he was interrupted by the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs. Aware of the risks of being exposed as a time tourist and the alarm it may cause to a non-traveller, he stepped back into the shadows.
‘Is there someone up there?’
The voice was female but Hector struggled to place the accent, for it was not a region he knew of, nor an impediment, but a distant bell resonated in him and it tolled of the Time Travel Watch. As flashes of memory fired at random in his brain, he knew that he had been to this place and time before. The Watch was a malicious group existing in the future that worked to control time travel and the fiction written into history. They despised rogue travellers, but, more crucially, they would want to capture him and use his rare abilities as a portal for their own corrupt benefit.
‘Ah there you are,’ she sighed. ‘What are you doing up here?’
Though Hector was sure he had never set eyes on her before, she had addressed him with a familiar tone, a known tactic of the Watch. It was a real threat that he might be arrested as an illegal time immigrant, but just as she began to advance further, he remembered his wristwatch and turned its hands back to the present.
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The unforgiving and unnatural light of the hospital bulbs sliced through his eyes as he crashed to the floor, landing on the tiles with a crack to the skull. He lay there a moment as his body adjusted and he felt a cold shiver devouring his flesh and making its way to the marrow of his bones. He was relieved to find that he had been restored to his youthful self and that the wristwatch of the future had been replaced with his old pocket watch, safely attached to its chain. The smell was distinctly of the present, yet it was corrupted with a chemical stench. He felt his pocket for his handkerchief to cover his mouth, but it was missing. Another unavoidable flaw of time travel was the slipping of objects into portals unannounced, and much to Hector’s irritation things were constantly disappearing and getting lost. The ringing in his ears was joined by the pounding of his heart as he stood, the soles of his shoes skidding against the floor. Staring at the rows of feet protruding from white sheets, stiff toes saluting the ceiling, he realised that he was surrounded by the Dead.
The morgue could accommodate no more than eight bodies, which was fitting of the island hospital. The grey walls and metal beds stacked side by side reminded Hector of a tin of sardines. He was grateful that none of the deceased were exposed and could only imagine what lay beneath from the abstract bloodstains and peculiar silhouettes. With no windows to guess the time, and his watch having stopped, Hector began to wind it up and search the room for another timepiece. His eyes cruelly led him to a wrist that had escaped its cloth house, still ticking as if unaware of the departure of its master. Hector felt his neck stiffen and muscles contort. He knew the face well, the same that now leered back at him, clapping its hands aggressively to the seconds. He felt earth’s wavering support beneath his feet as he stumbled forward with stilted, jerky movements and lifted the tag that dangled from the toe with twisted innocence.
Milton Lopez. Deceased. 10th July 1932
Hector forced himself to lift the sheet, and as he peeled back the shroud, he sensed a greater horror beside him. When he turned, his mind having already processed the tragedy of the sight, he saw the delicate arch of her feet. As he was sucked backwards, his legs crumpling beneath him, his eyes fixed on the bump that told of a life that would not be lived. The lights flickered and he disappeared into himself, hearing his screams in the distance as they merged with the voices in his head until there was just a static that clawed at his heart. His mind travelled through time, to past memories and future ones that he had created out of the things that could have been, all of which were now relegated to live on in his memories alone. He could feel each moment of the present falling onto him, crashing through him and into the past, regressing steadily away from the future, from their lives ahead, until time left him with no reality, just illusions, disjointed images that he doubted even came from his own memories.
Flitting through a patchwork of heartache, he rode the carousel - Maria’s hands cold against his; poppies growing tall and dancing for them as he sunk to one knee; the beacon of the lighthouse competing with the moon to illuminate the water as oars plunged into the dark; sliding the plaster across her belly to cast the progress of their unborn child; the times he had stared down the end of a bottle when he should have been with her; pillows wet with tears; sun grazing her hair as she first appeared to him; her voice calling to him as he disappeared into times long gone; all the spectres of the past dancing to the music of the lost; and he saw their faces before him as they turned to stone, their names and dates written across their cheeks, and he reached out but they crumbled to ash in his embrace.
Hector gasped for air as he surfaced from the tide of delirium. Anger and disbelief momentarily suspended his grief and he was consumed with vengeance that barricaded the tears and forced him to his feet. He had allowed time to take him and in losing a day had lost what was his life, for without them he was nothing and it was his nothingness - his absence - that had sacrificed them. He wandered through the fog of his mind, arms outstretched as he staggered blindly forward clutching at splinters of memory, searching for the past, for an explanation. He drifted through the corridors of the hospital, passing ghosts of the recently departed as they left on their journeys, souls travelling through a timeless universe. He saw their reflections in each of them, and began to wind back the hands of his watch, in search of the truth.
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‘Hector?’
‘Maria?’
‘That’s all in the past now Hector. You’re here with us, in the present.’
Hector retreated into his thoughts, willing himself back, cursing the odourless air that told him he had slipped into the future again. Fear swam inside him and as the distorted curtains of his mind drew back, he knew that he had fallen into the hands of the Watch.
‘Hector?’
The voice was cold and mechanical.
‘Are you with me?’
He opened his eyes to a large white room, windowless and empty except for a bare bulb that hung from the ceiling and the bed that he lay in. He asked his body to move but it was unresponsive. A man dressed in white overalls stood over him and bent his head to face Hector, his eyes dark and indifferent.
He began to answer but his voice croaked, his throat dry and calling for whisky.
‘We’ve had your watch engraved for you,’ the man continued.
Hector saw that he was dangling the wristwatch that Maria had given him for their last anniversary, gold-rimmed with a black leather strap, and the memory pierced his heart and forced the air from his lungs.
HECTOR ARCO
1135706163
He had been tagged by the Watch and the only chance of survival was to escape or he would be forever at their service.
‘It’s just so we can keep an eye on you, in case you disappear so someone will be able to bring you back home.’
‘This is not home,’ Hector growled as he struggled to lift himself up and felt a firm hand pushing him back onto the pillows, his aged body unable to fight. He thought it wise not to mention his time travelling or anything that might incriminate him, there was a chance at least that they did not yet know that he was a portal himself.
‘No need to get yourself worked up,’ he said in a patronising tone. ‘They’ll be coming to get you soon, just rest for now.’
Hector listened to the soles of the man’s shoes as they smacked against the floor and the door closed, the key grating against the lock as it turned. Knowing there would not be much time before they came again, he took the watch in his hands and wound it back.
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Hector spat out dirt from his mouth and expelled the dust from his lungs, relieved to smell the salt in the air. As he walked towards the lights of the town he spoke to his heavy heart and asked it to stave its grief a while so that he could place one foot in front of the other. He asked his legs, riddled with the ache of loss, to carry him just a little further, so that he could be with them again. Dust swirled in his tracks and the wind tugged at his shirt as night’s blindness set in.
With each step he thought of her, with each breath of their unborn child and of his betrayal in not guarding them against the unknown evil that had taken them. Milton, his only friend, faithful and constant, a man banished from a life that he deserved to live. Hector prayed that they might be together, and that one day, soon, he would find them on the other side. He drifted into his mind and the hands of their memories led him away to the desert moonscape of the south, with its ancient turrets and fish bones, to wander the crypts and labyrinths that they once were guests in. They swam through the island’s rivers, his fingertips brushing the reeds beneath as they tangled with his toes, entwining theirs with his and he felt their icy bloodlessness and he gave his warmth to them but they grew colder still, until the cracks appeared and they shattered in his hands, melting into the muddy water. Hector watched as they struggled onto the shore, dragging themselves up on their bellies, crawling on their knees, running on the stumps of their legs and he burned with shame and prayed to the gods that they would cut off his own feet so that he might run alongside them and share in their pain, but when he opened his eyes, they were already lost to the horizon. Instead he saw himself, a young boy, staring back at him, before he too turned and disappeared.
He surfaced from his delirium, face stained with tears, the lights of the town loud and blinding. Time was running away, but with a regretful heart he knew where he would find himself. Through the windowpane of the inn he saw a man, cowered in a corner, head bowed and hands clasped tightly to a glass; eyes vacant and hollow. It was the same position he had occupied for many years. He, the ghost of the man inside, watched the man who was himself also a ghost, a half-man with half-thoughts. Immersed in the alcoholic abyss that had poisoned him all his life, he drained glass after glass with a thirst sustained only by those that have fallen prey to the unforgiving and unfaithful elixir. He had only ever drunk rum, he could never stand anything else, but Hector saw that the man inside was drinking from a bottle of whisky, and he felt an uneasy distance. Images flitted through him of broken glass, leaves falling, the faces of strangers, eyes red and swollen, and he felt that he would be here again one day, that in witnessing the man before him he had been shown his future, and the darkness within it. The man slipped through time and life, allowing its sands to trickle through his fingers while the woman who had his heart had her ear pressed to the door, eyes fixed on the window, willing him to return. He was not a husband deserving of a wife, nor a father of a child or worthy of a partner so devoted. A man of these things would have been with them now, guarding their safety. The marked rim of the glass, the sticky stains across the wooden table, cramp in his hands and the hiss of a cigarette as it raced to its end, these all seemed to belong to another past, to a distant, buried age that he could no longer connect with himself.
Hector watched as the man checked the time and reluctantly set aside his glass. When he emerged through the door, Hector hurled himself at him, punching his fist into his chest, desperate for him to wake up to his wrongs, but he slipped through him. As if a ghost, a voyeur, his body had no weight and his voice no sound. Perhaps it was too recent a past, that he could not enter into it completely, or perhaps they were unable to share the same physical space, for they were made of the same parts. The night was crisp, but the inebriated Hector stripped off his jacket and flung it across his shoulder, removing the hipflask from its pocket in the process and bringing it to his lips. Hector walked noiselessly behind himself, quietly preparing his heart for what would come next, though what, he did not yet know. They turned a corner, and, at the sight of his car and himself scrambling for the keys in the dust, Hector knew the truth. What followed was not as before, he was no longer there with himself but in some timeless, unknown place within, where only he existed and the images before him. He watched as a series of slides were projected onto his mind. The round silhouette of his wife, hand cupped under her bump, black hair merging with the night; Milton tall and willowy easing into the passenger seat; himself puffing on a cigarette, the amber ash separating in the wind. Husky voices and frenzied drumming yelling from the radio, a burst of light ahead, wheels skidding then a pause, silence, before screams as metal scratches rock, rubber tearing, glass shattering and footsteps running against gravel.
The driver’s seat was empty. Just like his eight-year-old self, the velocity and drop had caused him to time slip before impact, unjustly saving the culprit. Only the gentle hiss of the steam from the engine and the drip, drip, of blood and oil could be heard. Milton’s body was crumpled across the bonnet, shards of glass sticking up from his skin like stalagmites glinting in the moonlight, his scalp torn from the crown to the neck, revealing not the mind of a friend but the brain of a mortal - a being of flesh and blood that bore no resemblance to the soul that had inhabited the man. Hector caught an arm in the reflection of the glass but dared not look back. It was enough to see the strands of hair that dangled from the window, tangled together with a crimson sheen, wrapping themselves around his heart and squeezing the life from inside. He wanted to take his mind to another place but it forced him to bear witness to his crimes and as if to offer up his punishment, the door to the glove compartment was expelled by the heat to reveal his revolver. His cowardly instinct was to hold it to his head but it would not save them, only serve his selfish desire. Instead, he placed it in his pocket, for now he understood what he had to do.
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Hector slipped back and forth in time, tracing the guilt of the past, now foreign and tainted. He searched for himself and for them, but the hands of the time ghosts dragged him down, and he felt the eyes of the Watch upon him, calling him into the future as he drowned in the vortex of memories, shards of the past raining down on his flesh with daggers that pierced his skin. Each time he surfaced for air he found himself at the accident, stiff limbs, flesh crumbling and disappearing with the wind; Milton’s eyes open as he spoke with silent words. A confused pastiche of images fought against one another and Hector ran towards these false memories, as they lay in bed with the truth, abstract and distorted until he could not tell them apart and could not know what was real, each time reaching out for the past and returning to the cliff. He saw himself as a boy, darting across his thoughts and he ran after him, calling after the innocence of his youth that crushed Hector’s heart against his chest, but he did not answer. He wound his watch round and round until the hands turned on their own, ever faster, against him. He held it in his fist, its face grimacing as its lashes batted against the seconds, winking at the minutes and he brought it down onto the rock, for he had no need for time anymore.
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Hector inhaled the odourless future and felt the damp sea air cling to his skin. He pulled his coat around him and eased himself upright on the bench, his muscles resistant and bones grating at the joints, once again imprisoned in the body of an old man. The derelict pier creaked as its splintered wood fought to hold its weight, weak and rotten after years of exploitation, candyfloss summers and star-struck lovers, only to be rewarded with neglect and abandonment. Across the water, his comrade coughed weak strobes of light at the ships as the waves crashed against his stone legs. The loyal pier had supported the traffic of its passengers and the rides in which they escaped from their lives for a fleeting moment, witnessed kisses that would mark a lifetime and squared its shoulders firm against the waves to protect their ungrateful souls. With quiet patience and unwavering determination, it had held strong and watched the landscape around him grow and warp, in a constant state of flux, while he, forgotten in the middle of it all, remained himself, alone and battered by the tides of time.
Holding his wrist to the light, Hector saw that the hands were dead again, leaving him neglected by time and abandoned by the past. As the boats meandered through the delta, navigating the misty waters that were as grey as the sky, he could not guess at which point the day was at, for even the natural light of time was gone. After struggling to remove the strap, he held the watch up and tapped the glass with his finger. Turning it over, he saw his name engraved in bold and a number beneath, which he did not recognise nor understand its relevance.
‘What are you doing?’
Hector turned to see a young boy carrying a milk crate filled with empty bottles he had gathered from the beach.
‘Do you know what this number is for?’ he asked, holding up the watch.
The boy inspected it as the rain began to fall.
‘It’s a phone number,’ he replied, pointing to the telephone box. ‘Local.’
Hector thanked the boy and pivoted himself off the bench and to his feet. He was grateful for the shelter of the box and took out his handkerchief, curiously with him again, to wipe the rain from the back to reveal the number. Carefully, with his numb and cramped fingers, he began to dial.
‘You need coins,’ the boy said, standing next to him.
‘Oh.’ Hector replied, fumbling his pockets and finding them empty.
The boy extended his hand to Hector, a silver coin resting on his open palm.
Hector held up the coin and inspected it, the face was familiar but its weight and size were strange. Smiling gratefully at the boy, he handed him the watch.
‘Does it work?’
‘Not so well, but you just need to wind it up at the side.’
‘That’s for changing the time,’ the boy said as he set off down the beach. ‘It needs batteries.’
Hector did not hear the boy, only a muffled ringtone.
‘Hello?’ a voice answered.
The line was distorted, Hector turned against the wind and cupped his hand over the receiver to make his voice clearer.
‘Whom may I ask is speaking?’ he said.
‘Hector, where are you?’ replied the voice on the other end.
Suspicious that a stranger should recognise his voice, Hector remained silent.
‘What can you see?’ the voice barked. ‘Stay where you are, we’ll come and find you. Do you understand?’
The Watch. They were coming to get him, to force him to live in their future. He would not allow them to capture him, to abuse his powers and destroy his memories.
‘Hector?’
He left the phone dangling, the voice on the end still calling after him as he walked away. The black clouds of the storm were rushing in from the horizon, the rain coming in sheets that cut horizontally across the pier and he began to walk towards the shore, stumbling across the sand as he hurried away from his pursuers, the wind carrying to him the sound of the phone ringing again, calling him to a future that he had no place in.
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The waves crashed against his mind, drowning everything to silence as he walked along the shore, the colour of the clouds and sea as one, rain blurring the landscape with oily strokes, grey ghosts dancing in the wind. The house, towering above the water on its stilt legs, appeared fragile and brittle, its green paint peeling back to reveal the bare wood beneath. Standing at its feet, Hector could make out the silhouette of his pregnant wife at the window, her head resting against the curtains and her belly round and full. As his younger self, just days before the accident, came running from the porch towards him, he knew what he had to do to save them and give them back their lives. He raised the revolver and gripped his hands around the trigger. Aiming at himself, he waited until the figure was within range, arms outstretched in protest, unaware of his sacrifice and ignorant of the future that he deserved no mercy from. The shot fired, muffled by the rain, and he watched himself buckle and fall to the sand. Then he waited to disappear.
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NEWSPAPER ARTICLE
**** Thursday, July 12, 1962
Pioneering psychiatrist and local resident Dr Hector Milton Arco was yesterday shot dead by his father, Hector Arco, while celebrating his birthday at the family home in Playa de Lágrimas. Police investigating the incident have ruled out a murder inquiry on mental health grounds. Archaeologist Hector Arco, 60, famed in the area for his discovery of ancient remains buried in Isla Pajarito, has battled with acute Alzheimer’s for a number of years and is believed to have been suffering from hallucinations at the time.
Dr Arco, 30, dedicated his life to working with dementia patients such as his father and was known for his groundbreaking research into cognitive therapy. He leaves behind an expectant wife and the legacy of a family wrought with tragedy. Three decades earlier to the day, Arco and his father were the only survivors of a motoring accident that killed his then pregnant mother and his father’s colleague, Milton Lopez. The driver of the car, Hector Arco senior, fled the scene of the crime and served a six-year sentence for driving under the influence and manslaughter.
Jemma Foster is a writer and artist, founder of Wild Alchemy Lab, Mama Xanadu and Semantica Productions.
The Watch is one of a series of twelve short stories published in 2010 as The Cardboard Book Project.