A Dread Hour of the Past

by Bertil Falk

Part 1 appears
in this issue.

conclusion

Through the door stepped a strange shape dressed in a funny cornet-shaped headgear hanging down on his back. Julia thought of the discovery of the very well preserved body of a 14th-century man from Bocksten, who had been dressed in a similar way and now was on display in a museum. The same tight-fitting trousers and a similar kind of muddy boots. But what made her start when the handsome young man entered, was that he seemed to have stepped through the door — without opening it.

Julia was alarmed. She stared at the strange man. “Where did you come from?” she exclaimed.

He stared back at her without answering,

“Are you a ghost?” she continued and tried a smile, but felt somewhat frightened.

“Who art thou, fair maiden?” asked the stranger.

“You speak as funny as you look,” Julia replied. She crossed her arms and regarded him.

She had at this moment realized that this ghost was as astonished as she was and that he most probably was not at all dangerous. If a ghost he was, he seemed to be a rather nice and pleasant ghost.

He stepped backwards.

“I think you're afraid of me,” Julia exclaimed. “It's I who should be afraid of you.”

“Thou art fair, but art thou a troll?”

At that she burst out laughing. “Me — a troll! No, certainly not! What about yourself, handsome hunk?” she continued. “Heading for a fancy-dress ball? Come here. Sit down.”

It turned out that it was easier for her to understand him than for him to understand her. She realized that it probably was because she used a vocabulary that was modern, while he stuck to a vocabulary that, however old-fashioned, at least still could be understood.

As it was, Arvid Persson von Klots introduced himself and Julia Karlsson von Klots realized that her ghost was a very, very, very, very, very distant relative of hers. Anyhow, they spent forty-five minutes together and Julia found him most agreeable, as did he her. And when she touched his hand to find out whether he was for real or a transparent ghost, she felt a warm and sudden thrill of pleasure.

When he left, she saw how he went straight through the door. To begin with, Julia thought that she had dreamed, until her eyes fell on the cornet-shaped headgear her relative from the very, very, very, very, very far away past had left on the table.

Two days later, when going to a disco, Julia Karlsson von Klots told her best friend about her strange experience, but she did not to tell anyone else.

At the same time, or rather a little bit later, in the 138th century, to be precise in A.D. 13,795, the blind Lady in Black, or the Queen of Spades as some people called her, used her dead eyes asking: “What's wrong now?”

Greta Imelda Gandhi replied: “They've caused some problem with the time coordinates.”

“How come? And which ‘they’?”

“It affects us all in a very bad way. There are waves of time convulsions, almost like earthquakes.”

“Time quakes!” those dead eyes repeated. “Who's responsible?”

“The people of the Warp Syndicate. They've been experimenting a lot.”

“What did they do?” the Lady in Black glanced, combing her hair with a flea comb.

“They brought together a piece of space from A.D. 1353 with its equivalence in A.D. 2009 with the effect that two beings met and formed a serious acquaintance. That, in turn, caused this upheaval in time that now threatens the cosmos. It has just begun in a slow way and it may well take an enormous time until the whole universe is turned upside down. But if we are to stop it, it has to be done now.”

“Most disturbing,” the Lady saw with her stillborn ones. “What can be done?”

“Had they just talked to each other, everything would have been okay. Now it seems that one of them touched the other one.”

“Oh damn oh damn!”

”Thus creating this unstable situation,” Greta Imelda Gandhi said and scratched her head.

“And?”

Using her lifeless sight, Lady Black directed her question at Greta Imelda Gandhi.

“If we are able to collect the two specimens inside that room, seal them inside a SpaceTime bubble and transport them here, that might prevent the catastrophe.”

“And the warp people can do that?”

“No!”

“No?”

“Yes!”

“Who can?”

“Torbjörn Ramrod.”

“He, who made us catch that compulsive thief Evita Drugstore, who drained museums of their treasures. Yes, I remember him.”

You should, Greta Imelda Gandhi thought inwardly. He used to be your lover.

But she wisely kept her tongue.

“Okay, set him on the task. But something must be done to get rid of this annoying flea problem,” the Lady in Black blindly looked, still combing her hair with a flea comb.

“We're working on it,” Greta Imelda Gandhi replied and the Lady in Black waved her aside.

The audience was over.

That was how it came about that Torbjörn Ramrod was sort of drafted in order to straighten out the problem the warp people had created. He found pretty soon that he was not able to perform more than a few of the artifices needed.

“I thought that you were good at time killers?” Greta Imelda Gandhi scolded him.

“This is not about killing time. It's about transplanting a mistake performed in TimeSpace.”

“You mean SpaceTime?”

“No, I mean it the opposite way around: TimeSpace. But together with another specialist, we would most probably complement each other.”

“Who do you mean?” Greta Imelda Gandhi said, and at the same time a horrible suspicion hit her. “You can't mean Evita Drugstore,” she screamed. “She's right now sewing Long Space Johns by hand at the house of correction in Williamstown on Pluto. Remember?”

“That's fine. It means that we don't have to issue a description of her. We just extract a permission to get her.”

Greta Imelda Gandhi thought that the Lady in Black would get a fit of rage, but the proud Dame calmly said that she had thought of the same thing, so the old musical-star cum thief was released after negotiations that took the better part of A.D. 13,796.

Result: if Evita Drugstore succeeded in solving the problem together with Torbjörn Ramrod, she would definitely be indefinitely free on bail as long as she could keep her light-fingered activities in check.

With a broad smile on her pale face, Evita Drugstore basked in the suns. She was dressed in chequered (actually her own pattern) Long Johns, bare-breasted and with her nipples replaced by sparkling diamonds.

“We should be in the laboratory and not here,” Torbjörn Ramrod protested.

He was irritated, well knowing that co-operation with this shrewd thief not would be like a honeymoon, but rather like a spatial roller coaster ride.

“It's your own fault,” Evita Drugstore explained in a droning way. “Had you not arranged the trap that caught me when I was on my stealing spree in time and space, then I would not have been as pale as I am, forced to be inside a jail sewing Long Space Johns. My punishment is turned into your punishment. I want to be tanned.”

“This is not my punishment. It's just that we've a job to do.”

“Then let's do it now and here.”

She gave him a thundering smile. “What we have to do,” she roared, “is once more bring those two specimens together inside that same room consisting of its shape combined as it was in the 13th and the 21st centuries. Right?”

“Right!”

“Then we must tie off that piece of space and transport it to our own 138th century.”

“That's right.”

“And then they'll pose no threat any more and we may release them.”

“That's possible.”

“And they'll never be able to go back to their respective times!”

“No, and the reason for that is of course that it would upset our solution and cause a new wave of time quakes.”

“Do we have the coordinates?”

“Yes.”

All of a sudden, way back in 1354, Arvid Karlsson von Klots found himself once more together with his future relative Julia Karlsson von Klots. In 2009, at the moment he appeared in Julia's room, everything went black before his eyes and the same happened to Julia.

When Arvid Karlsson von Klots opened his eyes, he was lying in a coffin-like bed. He had a horrible headache. Fair Julia Karlsson von Klots sat by his side.

“How are you?” she said.

“I feel bad!” he replied and felt a fit of shivering. “It's chilly here.”

“So he's awake now,” a voice thundered.

Another voice: “He is.”

Evita Drugstore smiled in her booming way. Torbjörn Ramrod nodded in a friendly way.

Julia Karlsson von Klots had pulled through the time travel without any problem, but Arvid Karlsson von Klots was in a bad state. And he did not seem to be better. Medicos took care of him, while Evita Drugstore and Torbjörn Ramrod entertained Julia Karlsson von Klots to dinner. They told her that she never could return to her own century, but that everything would be done in order to make her and Arvid Karlsson von Klots' stay in this future of theirs as pleasant as possible.

Instead of recovering, Arvid Karlsson von Klots got more and more sick. He vomited, had back pain and could not stand the sun. Swellings appeared; lumps under his arms. They turned black, burst oozing blood and pus.

“This is bad,” one of the doctors said. “He's dying. The symptoms are similar to, yes, but it can't be possible, unless...”

“Unless what?” Torbjörn Ramrod asked.

“Well, what I thought of is definitely impossible.”

“What did you think of?”

At that moment, a quite breathless Evita Drugstore came running.

“Julia has also been hit. Time travel obviously has a very bad effect on them.”

“You mean that time travel can cause the same symptoms as a disease that existed in the past?” the doctor said.

“What are you talking about?”

“The Black Death. Killed just about one-third of Europe's population in the 14th century. It was spread through fleas.”

They just stared at him.

“Gracious Jove!” Torbjörn Ramrod exclaimed. “Arvid is from that century and now Julia has been hit as well. We must do something.”

But it was too late. Of the sixty trillion inhabitants of the known cosmos, at least twenty-one trillion fell prey to the plague.

That is what happens...