Lost In Time

"Another one? Sure you don't just want to call it a day?"

"But this one could be it. There's still plenty of time."

A quiet house stood at the end of a dangling rocky path. Below them was an ebbing hush of formless clouds and faraway lights, each one flickering in and out. The lights in the house were on -- and moving.

"We've spent hours already. There's no guarantee we'll find her here."

"There's never a guarantee. She might not even exist. Isn't that the point?"

He shook his head, pulling a stopwatch from his suit pocket. "You have an hour, Julia. And the window..."

"A few minutes, like usual?"

"Just a few."

Julia took a few steps up the sidewalk. She was in the same kind of suit, sewn with fibers from another world. Her shoe chuffed the walk as she turned, looking back with a smile. "Thanks, Harold."

Harold said nothing and held up his watch. A light shone out, and he vanished. The clouds, the stars, the swaying -- it all vanished. Julia felt herself manifest in the chilly winter air. Harold's voice rang out from somewhere far away, but quietly, as he whispered. "Hundreds of years ago. Probably 19th century like the others."

"I could have told you that."

"You never know with him; you should see him now."

The walk was coated in snow, save a single track of footprints lining up to the front door of the home. It was warmer now, with a steady orange glow pouring past the curtains and falling on the dead hedges. Smoke billowed from a chimney and unkempt wild grasses poked through the snow. This house was lived in now, Julia could see that much. And a little man reached up to knock at the door.

"Pardon!" he whined. "Pardon! Inquiry!" and went on like that for a while, until the curtains shifted and the children got their peeks. He didn't notice them or pretended not to. His hair was white and his skin tight over frail bones. The same bones Julia knew quite well.

A woman answered the door with a baby in her arms. The other children collected at her knees to see the man. He lowered his hat, murmured some words and held out his hand as the woman's eyes grew hard and tight.

"She's skeptical," Julia said.

"And well she should be, remember." Harold said. "He brings nothing but a curse. Trust a mother to see true intention."

"Yet she ends up taking it."

"Trust a man to deceive."

A clockwork ticking rattled in Julia's head as Harold spun her forward a few minutes. The lights flickered violently as the passing of time rushed along. When she arrived, the frail man had begun to walk down the street away from them. The children were playing in the yard. Their mother was cooking dinner, too busy for baubles and curiosities. So it was their toy now.

"They're throwing it?" Julia asked.

"It is something like a ball," Harold spoke from somewhere near.

"It could have slaughtered them. In moments."

"Thankfully it didn't. The home still being mirrored in his cognitive plane proves it. Besides, the activation method is complex. Unlikely they'd do it by accident."

"But still... the... the idea of it. He's a monster."

Harold sighed. "Follow protocol. This pocket may still have answers."

"He's looking back at them," Julia said "but smiling. He doesn't always smile."

"True. He usually shows no emotion. Why smile now?"

"He usually doesn't see children?" Julia said, not really asking.

"We've seen the limits of his austerity. But nothing of his past."

"Ugh," Julia said "if only we could see his home. A diary, letters, something. But it's all gone."

"Focus. Does he have any different clothing? Scars?"

She did as asked. "No new scars, just the same one above his left brow. Same old tattered coat. Same brown boots... but..."

"But?"

"They're new."

"Is that important?" Harold asked.

"They've always been worn down flat," Julia said "and never ever shined or crisped or cobbled. Ever."

"So it is important?"

"It could be," she said.

The air was still cold, even if the sensation wasn't real. Julia wanted to call off the dive, but Harold would expect her to find more answers. To find out why a frail old man hundreds of years ago, over the course of twenty years, would give out dozens of... those. Of her. To paupers.

"Is this the first time he did it?" she asked.

"It's possible," Harold said.

"And he's smiling because... because he expected something. But he never got it. So he kept trying. And he grew bolder... dumping them in rivers, dropping them in mailboxes. All of her bits and pieces, perverted and scattered along the winds."

"We only get one chance to figure out why. Don't forget that."

"OK. But there's not much else here, so... give me a minute to grab her splinter."

"We aren't supposed to keep mirrored constructs, you know. They're unstable."

She plucked it from the outstretched throwing arm of a frozen little boy. "If it were your splinter, I don't think you'd be complaining. Now pull me out."

Julia came back to herself standing at the door of a quiet house. The lights in the house had gone out. The clouds had closed in a little tighter. Between her hands, the soul splinter hummed a little. It was warm to the touch.

"Don't get attached. It will collapse with the rest of all this when his remains are disposed of."

Thoughts and dreams of a woman she never knew -- of standing on a beach, of running through the trees, and of nights and nights of fevers coursing through life like a fall that never broke. Of a woman that found herself lost in time, split into pieces and made into the world's greatest puzzle. An answer to more than misery; a key to heaven.

"No," she said. "I think I will. She deserves that much."

Harold sighed, but left it be. "So she does. Another one?"

"I thought you'd never ask."