“Where am I?" Roan gasped, squinting against bright sunlight.

  "A possible past," the bird head proclaimed. "I, though, am of a future. Not of course, the ‘actual’ future, but I use the expression to get the point across, to those who wouldn't quite grasp the full concept, you understand.” Signor Rimgumbaldy used the comment not as a question but as a statement; to him it was all very obvious.

  Roan did not, and to him none of this was! He really wanted to express his confusion, and address obvious issues, but a compelling mental lure emanating from this odd old man sent him down a peripheral trail of inquiry: it was what the bizarre elder had said about ‘the future’ that he found himself questioning: “Possible?”

  Signor Rimgumbaldy seemed to anticipate the line of enquiry without a hint of doubt or confusion and he replied smoothly: “Of course, young man!” The tone in his voice was laden with the ludicrous, and ornamented with a little chuckle. “Due to Time being unidirectional, you understand!” Again, a demand rather than any desire to check if his audience was keeping up. “And that is essential to remember.”

  Signor Rimgumbaldy, who wore a large wooden box on his back, dangling with various accoutrements, evidently was one of those ancient, unstable types that existed in life by walking the fine line between unbounded genius and unrivalled lunatic. However, Signor Rimgumbaldy not so much walked the line but ran up and down it waving and shouting wildly while performing somersaults and cartwheels! He certainly had a knack for reading looks. Seeing Roan’s expression, he delivered an explanation to a question Roan was still struggling to formulate into thought, let alone coherent vocalisation: “Not as restrictive as you would imagine, however, no! Not at all! Otherwise you would not be here, would you, Master Roan?”

  The fact that this aged sage obviously knew who he was further alarmed him. Casting his eyes about the dusty street, overhung with woven awnings to ward off the blazing sun, Roan knew he had to try and get some control of this situation: he settled on an attempt to, at least, level the score over this seasoned veteran of the surreal’s familiarity advantage. “Who did you say you were, again?”

  “Signor Rimgumbaldy.” And as expected, he flourished the introduction with a little bow, setting his box and equipment jangling.

  “Really?" Roan tried to stare through the old lunatic's brass-rimmed lenses, as his confusion subsided gradually into suspicion.

  “Are you... Spanish?” It was a desperately hopeful guess: an anxious effort to normalise the bizarre situation he found himself in. Roan cast a series of imploring looks around him in an attempt to translate the environment into something familiar. “Is this Spain?”

  “Actually, no!” confessed Rimgumbaldy, “That is just what I am called here. My real name is Rimicus Gumotheus Baldercon, this is not Spain, and this object that you seem to be hovering over rather protectively, Master Roan, is my invention!”

  Abandoning the geographical enquiry, his attention was once more distracted by the savant’s suggestions: “Your invention?” - and despite the intention to keep structured, rational control over the things he needed answers for, his mouth, once opened, had other ideas and decided to take advantage of the air time. “How do you know my name? How did I get here? Where is here?”

  Roan stood, face to mask with the old man, his mind racing; not an egg-and-spoon-like race, on a warm sunny day at a summer fair in a pleasant country village; this was a muscle-burning, sinew-aching, lung-busting excursion of an Olympic fifteen-hundred metres, under the beating sun of a punishing equatorial dust bowl. Every synapse in his mind was afire in effort to keep up with its own inquisition. His head hurt with the pursuit of questions and ached from its demands for answers. He had to force himself to discipline his mind; chasing maddening thoughts as they scampered like a flock of rabid sheep across the fecund fields of his imagination, to corral them all into the desperately inadequate pen of his logic.

  “… and what exactly is this invention of yours?” Roan snatched up and cradled the device to his chest as he backed up a step. “Is it precious?”

  Rimgumbaldy’s demeanour, as he leaned lazily on his gnarled wooden staff, suggested that he fully expected the outburst, and he showed a remarkably stoic calm throughout the whole eruption. He waited for it to run out of steam, eyeing Roan through the brass-rimmed lenses of his elongated leather mask, before returning the conversation to the course of his choosing, which evidently, took a very different direction from that which Roan had intended.

  “This, Master R, is the most dangerous contraption of the entire multiverse.”

  “Er…? Did you say multiverse?” Roan physically felt his brain jolt; but a few seconds ago it was strapped to the front seat of the high-powered sports-car of demand, purposefully belting down the fast lane of emotional-insistence towards Revelationsville. Now, it had nosedived into the concrete bollard of the crank’s response. The abrupt delivery of the comment gave his rationale severe whiplash.

  “Indeed!” Rimgumbaldy said, setting his box creaking and jangling as he walked off, “And this ‘device’ is the gateway to all of them.”

  “Dangerous?” Roan asked, following up the dusty, stepped alley, overhung at intervals with intricately-carved wooden balconies. The wreckage of his mind-crash left him feeling capable only of releasing each thought one word at a time. He really needed to get a grip; but he knew that if he tried to string a sentence together, his confusion would hurl out another long, rampant flash-flood of inquisition.

  “Oh yes! Indeed! If this were to fall into the hands of the Z-liners again, even I could not imagine the catastrophic devastation that would inevitably unfurl across the Parallels. I sometimes wish that I had never created it…” His voice trailed off in wistful regret.

  “Z-liners?” Roan disciplined himself to concentrate on whichever expression might offer the most mileage of explanation from each statement that the kook made. It seemed to do the job, Rimgumbaldy stopped between the shadows of the awnings.

  “Yes! They had it once: so much damage done... So much pain… I cannot let it happen again! I mustn’t let them find it again!

  “Again?”

  “Yes… Keep it secret; keep it safe.” Rimgumbaldy held Roan in a trance-like gaze, beak nodding gently; it was obvious he had more to say about this. “There was a great and terrible war, Master Roan. Z-liners nearly destroyed our world. Their demands for time were insatiable; they craved it like a drug; they pursued it without thought or care for anything but their own perverted needs.”

  Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  “War?”

  “Oh, yes! A great and terrible war: the first ‘Time War’! They stole so much time that we nearly ran out of time altogether! It was horrific. Can you comprehend how hideous sentient beings become when they have no more time?”

  “The Y-liners won though, eventually, pyrrhically. And we shut them down!”

  Roan felt unexpected surges of adrenaline flood through his body, as the seeds of these revelations sunk into the soil of his consciousness, unravelling roots of comprehension; he wasn’t far now from feeling completely overwhelmed: “First war?”

  Rimgumbaldy nodded; slowly, sadly, painfully: “Indeed! Do we ever learn from our mistakes? You can steal time; manipulate time; you can even divert or crash time, but you can’t stop time! What’s happened’s happened, even if it’s happened in the future. They soon found the time they were looking for to continue their diabolical pursuits. And that is where my role in this whole shebang becomes relevant. You see, I discovered the existence of the parallel worlds; revealed the multiverse. It was the creation of the device that allowed me to cross those parallels. In a nutshell, Master Roan, the Z-liners stole it: used it: opened their own breach, and they crossed. We got it back! Eventually, but not before they managed to master it: copy it: and learned how to jump worlds at their whim. We are on the verge of another war Master R, and this time it will go parallel.”

  “Parallel?”

  “Enough of all of this; where are my manners?” His chuckle made a welcome return, breaking the spell of conspiracy and solemnity.

  “You must be hungry, thirsty, tired! You certainly are smelly. Take a bath. I will prepare some food, and we will talk more later.”

  Ignoring the offers, Roan had one more question before anything was eaten or drunk or washed: “Why me?”

  “Because, Master Roan, you are here. Something is wrong. You were all supposed to be here. But you’re not. Gum still has work to do.”

  “Gum?” With the mention of his friend’s name, the resemblance between him and the old man once more began to cause concern. “Gum? Then what am I doing here?”

  “Ah, you just might be the glue to all of this Master R. Without you Master R, what would we do?”

  Roan was slower to respond this time, but once more, Rimgumbaldy managed to read him and anticipate his next comment: “Let me use language you may understand better: I am the CPU; the brains; the thinking machine. Gum is the, well let’s just say, he is the printer; the one who will actually do all the work once the message has been transferred. But you Master R, you are the driver.”

  Roan realised that he was, now, totally exhausted; mentally, physically, emotionally. He had no idea what to say next. It was crazy! The ridiculous ramblings of some ragged rumplestiltskin: time-manipulating devices, parallel multiverses, Time wars, Y and Z Liners: he finally felt that now was the time to ask about the one thing that actually mattered: “Do you know what has happened to Mist?”

  “All in good time Master Roan, all in good time! All in good time. For indeed, Time is good! For now, we need to send a message and Gamaliel Oliver Jonas will print it. ” The venerable nutter was imperious now. He moved to the all-important device that Roan still was holding and gently pulled it from Roan’s tightened grip.

  “Keep it secret; keep it safe," he soothed. "Bathe, eat.”

  **********

  Hev of timeline one didn't need anyone to tell her that she was Hev of timeline one. She knew that she was original, that her universe was right now, right here. However, she was beginning to have doubts as to her being all there was of total potential Hevness. Of late, she was inclined to ‘sense’ or to ‘see’ strange things with confusing certainty.

  There was that green dress, for example: she had known it was the right one. Gum hadn’t known. If he had, he would have understood, would have said that it looked just right or would have known to remain silent. But no, he hated it, said he hated it, and so had interfered with the natural flow of things in ways that only Hev could fully appreciate.

  She had tried to bend to the situation like household cutlery in the grip of a master spoon-bender. She had explored other outfits, stood frowning before the bedroom mirror, pretty much emptied her whole wardrobe, but to no avail. Time rolled inexorably onward, the green dress it was. It had always been the green dress. She had ‘seen’ that somehow from the start. This one event alone might easily have been dismissed as an inconsequential blip, as a minor difference of opinion, but it was not alone.

  She was beginning to harbour portentous misgivings regarding Gum too, and not just the usual stuff, like 'no good will come of you watching American football in that foetid attic and nurturing a pasty-encrusted beard all winter'. Something big was approaching. She had tried to apply the motto that got her through many of life's challenges: 'if you love something, let it go', but this time she just couldn't. During one of his marathon NFL sessions, she'd pinned notes to his attic door like Martin Luther at the church, hoping he'd take a break and read them. She'd texted him repeated messages that something big was coming. She'd even tried standing in the doorway and explaining it to him, but he wouldn't look up from his precious NFL game. So she'd gone to the fuse box and flicked the breaker switch to the circuit for the attic, knowing that the dog would be lying at the top of the stairs.

  A distant, agonised scream revealed that she had his attention, and the series of bone-crunching thuds and crashes that followed - along with surprised barking and cries of, "Argh! My new bannister," - ensured that repercussions wouldn't be immediate. As she stood over his broken form at the bottom of the stairs, he moaned wistfully up at her, "I was recording that! It was Miami! Miami! Now I'll never know… "

  "They lost," she scolded, eliciting a groan of abject misery. "I don't know why you have to watch and record them all. Besides, your archive is going the same way as everything else. What was I to do? The world could be about to end and you’d ignore your Bluetooth earpiece. Your Post-it tasks have gone unheeded, I've had to rub them all out and write new ones. What with your games and your work! I said you'd bring that thing back didn't I? You'll get such a smouting if you're not careful!"

  It was true, he’d pushed his luck that year, working on the new health and safety training module at home, neglecting his grooming and archiving his matches at weekends. Gum had suspected that his dogged, hirsute pursuit would lead to eventual disaster, but he’d been most proud of the American-football-shaped CPU he’d designed for the virtual training programme and he hadn’t expected Hev to react quite this strongly. It wasn't the end of the world. He scowled at the dog as it joined them to see what all the fuss was about.

  “You touch my dog and you’re going down, you crow-bait,” she threatened. “Let it go. If you love something, let it go.”

  That was a few days ago now and Hev was less and less like her usual self; she dreamed at night of plagues of rats and troupes of monkeys, shape-shifting sand timers where the sand flowed upward in strange tides and odd currents contrary to expectation. She dreamed of Gum and his Chicken Scratching game, running with a big egg under his arm and then flinging it right out of her dream onto her sleeping face. She dreamed of a great crash approaching, a disaster far greater than the time that Gum had dared to claim her upturned posterior was sticking out of the car window and drawing the attention of a policeman in the car behind whilst she was, of necessity, adjusting something in the back seat from the front seat. No, the certain wrath of that event paled into insignificance by comparison. This was to be a mind-straining impact where great forces of entropy surged onto the simple orderliness that she so valued; where everyday family pleasantry was unfeelingly steamrollered into harsh oblivion like a delicate clutch of blue eggs under a wayward rugby scrum.

  She had tried to bury her fears, distracting herself by indulging an irrational urge to bake cookies. She knew the crash was coming, wrote down on scraps of paper the hazy forebodings that filled her. She expected it when her world stopped, ran backward like the tide readying itself for a tsunami. Gum hadn’t been there, he had been dropping Roan off all the way across London. The darkness that overwhelmed her came exactly at the point the calendar had predicted.