(Part O , XVI , XVIII)
Someone was shaking me, and not at all gently. It was worse than being shot out of the bowels of the Earth via volcano, or at least it was to my battered brain. I dared to open my eyes and saw time running forward and backward depending on where I looked. There seemed to even be a null time event under the desk. Slowly the disparity in time streams began to equalize toward what we thought of as normal. Plainly something bad had happened and passed by. Everyone was here, sprawled around the out of kilter flat. How far out of synch could we all be?
Carter groggily looked at me from where she was lying prone by the doorway. Agnes was still out cold on the floor where she'd been knocked out. Why had Carter knocked out Agnes anyway? Getting back to myself - my favourite person - I was hanging halfway off the bed and being shaken by the shoulders, by person or persons unknown. Dragging my eyes upward it was almost a non-surprise to see myself. And there I was over by the window as well. I could even pretend to be groggy still any more, so I pulled myself out of my own grasp and stood up unsteadily. Somehow I had to fix all this so it would make sense. Stepping on a now-wobbly board I tottered over to one side and that must have been required as the helpful alternative me ambled out the door looking satisfied. That was one time loop that could be closed pretty easily.
I stepped into the only reverse time zone that was still running, around the grandfather clock and jumped out again as quickly as I could. Duly and deliberately I went over to the me half sprawled on the bed and shook him like a string of comedy sausages. He fumbled up to a level of unconsciousness and then looked about blearily. The eyes widened suddenly at the bizarre time zones scattered about the room, and the light diffusions around their edges. He stood up, tottered on a floor board that had never been wobbly before and I set out the door into the hall, and wondered what on Earth to do next. How would I get back to the window?
I kept on walking down the hall, went up the stairs to the roof, and surveyed the city. Nothing was visible beyond the confines of our own abode. Even the roof was clear of disturbances. A dishevelled Carter emerged from the interior and tied back her hair. We looked outwards in opposite directions and waited for the ice to cool. I broke finally, never being one to let a good partnership run to dust. "What's she done, Danielle? Why'd you deck the kid?"
Danielle Eloise Carter coloured slightly in the mid-afternoon sunshine. Her nose wrinkled. "Well, now I think about it, I did it because the super told me she was rotten." Beads of perspiration of began to bead out on her forehead. "I had to go and ask for someone to cover me when you sent your invitation. No overtime left. But something happened..." Carter blinked, frowned, quaked a moment, and then gasped before doubling over. "That skunk hypno-gassed me!" Carter became messy for a while and then wobbled over to a handy bit of wall to have a lean.
Comforting the suddenly shocked Carter successfully took a few minutes but I managed it before bouncing off some kind of paradox temporal horizon and ending up outside the window to my flat an hour earlier. Settling in, I wondered what I had to do to break the loop and restore time. Looking in my pockets I found a piece of paper and bizarrely a green pen and knew at least one thing I'd need to do. Listening at the window, all seemed quiet. I peeked in and there was Carter waiting beside the door, prepared to deck Agnes. With nothing else coming to mind I decided to help out Danielle and wrote a little note explaining everything as I knew it. The door inside my flat opened, Carter swung and Agnes went straight to the ground. Time flaked into a haze of crystals and through the merry diffractions I watched as I ended up unconscious on the bed, Carter slumped onto the floor and normality began to fade back in. Opening the window - it recognised my key card - I slid in and moved around quickly avoiding the worst distortions.
The note was put in Carter's pocket, then a green pen and a sheet of paper moved from a lesser-used desk drawer to unconscious me's pockets, a floor board was summarily ruined and then I slipped back to the window. Waiting seemed to take an eternity, probably due to some pocket of slow time, but finally I appeared in the middle of the room, shook me to consciousness, and then when I was finally spotted by myself I flipped out backwards through the window and walked to the pub to have a drink and think things through.
Every reason for my leaving academia in the first place had just come back to bite me. Even the local pub, where the beer had unaccountably become even worse.
To be continued...
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Merry Haddock Day, everyone!
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