Allergic To Time Read online

  Shit, I thought. They were going to pull out of the car park before I reached them. What the hell were they in such a hurry for, I wondered, but I thought I knew the answer. I flew down the steps as fast as I could considering that I was wearing 4 inch heels and the steps were filling with deep puddles. The steps were both muddy and slippery, making their steepness seem infinitely more so as my ankles struggled to navigate them.

  I finally reached the edge of the car park, drenched and out of breath, as the Rolls Royce swerved violently out of the lot, heading towards Parramatta Rd. I didn’t know what else to do so I threw myself in front on it, running in towards it from the left side, splaying myself across the front bonnet. The breaks jolted violently as I bounced off the front and hit the pavement.

  “Jesus christ!’ The man in black pushed his door open and glared at Martin over the hood of the car, as Martin also evacuated the passenger seat. “Who the hell is this?”

  I had landed on my arm but the fall had not been a particularly violent one: nothing felt broken. I lay there and reached up to feel my head just in case, as Martin rushed over to check if I was okay. At least I had succeeded in stopping them.

  “She’s a student of mine,” Martin explained, kneeling down on the concrete besides my head. “Anna?” he looked in my eyes. “Are you okay?”

  I thought about lying. If I admitted I was fine, then they might just get straight back in the car and keep going. For all I knew they would be just that cold and callous: after all they seemed to be on quite the mission. So I lay my head back down on the concrete and feigned injury for a moment, neglecting to answer Martin’s question.

  “ANNA?” he yelled.

  I sat up and rolled my eyes. “Alright alright, I’m fine.”

  Martin took a sigh of relief. “Are you sure?” After I nodded he looked back at the man in black, who was growing extremely impatient. “Fine, then we’ll get going.”

  I stumbled quickly to my feet. “Hang on! I’m coming with you.”

  Martin paused at the side of the car, looking horrified, the passenger door wide open, as the other man started the engine. I ran around to Martin’s side and opened the back left door and attempted to climb in but Martin wrestled it shut, pushing his way between me and the door. “What are you doing? You cannot possibly come with us. Are you crazy?” I stared back at him, defiant. “Anna, stand back, I mean it.”

  The man in black was revving the engine and starring angrily at Martin and I. “Get in the car!” he bellowed at Martin.

  “Look, I am trying, but she’s refusing to let go of the door.” If Martin wasn’t going to let me in the back door then I wasn’t going to let him in the front. I had positioned my way between him and the door making it impossible for him to get inside the car.

  “I told you,” I said, staring straight at him, our faces barely centimetres apart. “I am coming with you. You can’t stop me. Not this time. Not again.” Martin stared back at me and hesitated. I could see the conflict flash across his eyes as he summed up the his options.

  “Both of you just get in the car!” We both turned and looked inside the vehicle, seeing the man in black about ready to explode.

  I grinned and raced to the back door, opening it quickly and sliding inside. Martin hesitated a second longer and climbed into the front, sighing and looking as though he was having the worst day of his life.

  As we travelled down Parramatta Rd I realised I had no idea where were actually going and whether or not they might be taking me on a one way trip to the Blue Mountains to murder me and dispose of my body. Martin kept glancing nervously at me in the rear side window, but the man in black sped down the road at a speed 20 kilometres faster than the legal limit. I looked out the window as the landscape of the campus flew past us, but the trip ended up being surprisingly brief.

  We pulled up barely two kilometres down the road at RPA hospital. Martin and the man in black dutifully opened their doors and climbed out of the car in silence. I nervously unbuckled my seat belt and followed suit. My hand shook slightly as I opened the door and stepped out of the Royce, setting my heels down on the concrete of the hospital car park.

  I followed alongside Martin. I looked up at his face, questioningly. What the hell are we doing here?

  But in return he simply glanced down at me briefly as he simply said, “You have no idea what you are getting yourself into.”

  Chapter Two.

  I had been inside RPA hospital once before, when I had gotten violently ill one morning in my second year of University and had to be taken to the Emergency room. The Emergency waiting room was the only place I was familiar with, but the man in black swiftly and silently led Martin and I to a ward around the far back of the hospital which was down two flights of stairs from the ground level. The man strode right past the escalator and directed us to follow him down the staircase.

  “Are we going to the basement or something?” I whispered to Martin, but he just ignored me and kept walking. He seemed furious at me. Whatever, I didn’t care what his feelings about the matter were. He had tried for too long to keep me away from whatever it was he got up to whenever this mysterious man appeared. Well, this time it was going to be different. I was with them now, and I wasn’t going anywhere without at least an explanation.

  The floor we were on was dim, barely lit by the fluorescent lights above us. We walked down a long corridor of rooms, each with their door firmly shut. There were no nurses or waiting family members littering the hall: in fact, there were no chairs there at all.

  Martin gravely plunged ahead, his hands in his jacket pockets and his head down. He was keeping a brisker pace than I was so I ran slightly to keep up, cursing my decision to wear heels, having let the vanity of the first day of class get the better of me. A quick glance in one of the tinted room windows confirmed that the rain had, as suspected, completely ruined my hair: it hung in a drab jet-black mop around my face.

  After what seemed like a million years the man in black suddenly stopped in front of a room. Like all the other rooms we had passed on the ward it had a closed door, and it had the same dark-blue tinted windows, so that when you looked through them you had to fight your own reflection to look inside. I stopped alongside the other two and fought to squint through the blue tint in order to see the interior of the room. We must have stopped in front of it for a reason, but I couldn’t make out anything inside.

  Martin was standing beside me, hands still burrowed in his pockets, with his face contorted into an agonised expression. He glanced at me and then at the man in black. “She shouldn’t be here,” he said. “This is an extremely bad idea.”

  I took in a deep breath and got ready to defend myself. “I’m sorry, but I have as much right to be here as you do...”

  Martin’s eyes grew wide. “What?” he spluttered.

  “That’s right,” I said. “I know what you get up to, I know what you’re here for. And I am just as qualified as you are, if not more! I’m the one who actually knows about time travel, after all.”

  Martin rolled his eyes and angrily whispered back at me, trying to control his volume in the hospital ward but unable to contain his annoyance with me. “You’re more qualified than me? Anna you haven’t got a damn clue what this is about. You should not even be here.”

  “Can you two shut the hell up?” The man in black finally spoke up. He looked at me and Martin with a disgusted look, like we were two naughty children, and Martin stopped stalking and stood up straight, clearly embarrassed at the implication. After all, at 39 years of age he was almost 15 years older than me. He might have considered me a child, but I am sure he did not consider himself to be one. He always thought he was so superior to me! Well, I had had enough of his condescending, patronising attitude. Not to mention the hypocrisy.

  The man in black interrupted my train of thought by fetching something out of his pocket and shoving it towards Martin. It was a folded piece of paper, a document of some sort. Martin paused for a moment befo
re committing to taking it. “Is this the file?”

  The other man nodded.

  Martin took a deep sigh, and without looking to see what my reaction was or stopping to explain anything to me he unfolded it and began reading. I stood still and studied his facial expressions. He had a commendable poker face: his features stayed still and emotionless as his eyes ran back and forth over the material.

  The man in black cleared his throat. “So as you can see, it’s pretty comprehensive evidence this time.”

  Martin flung the piece of paper back at him dismissively. “It is anything but.” He folded his arms defiantly. “It’s just another crackpot, that’s all. It’s the same story every other week.”

  The other man folded the paper back up slowly and returned it to his pocket. “This patient is different.”

  “How?”

  My eyes darted back and forth between the two of them, trying to keep up. Martin’s eyes had switched from emotionless to defensive. “Seriously, tell me: how is this any different to any other time?”

  The man in black finally removed his sunglasses. He took a long slow glance from the floor right up to Martin’s face so he could stare him in the eye. “You read the file. He couldn’t breathe when he appeared.”

  Martin rolled his eyes up towards the ceiling. “Appeared?” He shook his head. “He didn’t ‘appear’ anywhere, I can guarantee it.”

  “He appeared out of thin air in Pit St Mall yesterday afternoon at 4pm.”

  Martin didn’t respond. He waited, daring the man in black to continue. I waited at his side, scarcely daring to breathe.

  “There were witnesses. People said he appeared out of nowhere. One second he wasn’t there, the next he was.”

  Martin shrugged. “It’s a hoax, other people get in on this sort of thing all the time.”

  “And he couldn’t breathe. He appeared out of nowhere, and collapsed, unable to breathe.”

  I didn’t know what the significance of all this “not being able to breathe” business was, but it seemed to be the one thing that Martin didn’t have any response to. He finally seemed to remember that I was there and glanced down at me. “Do we have to discuss this with her here?”

  The man in black raised his eyebrows. “She might be the very person we need actually.”

  My stunned silence during the conversation up till that point was now replaced with a huge grin that covered my face and I had to refrain from doing a little clap and jumping up and down. Yes, finally, I was going to be involved in whatever it was they got up to on these secret little missions of theirs. The man looked at me almost bouncing up and down and told me to calm down. “This is a hospital you know. There is a gravely sick man on the other side of that door.”

  I quickly spun back towards the room, again trying to peer through the blue glass. “I can’t see in. Can we go inside?”

  Martin stared at me in disbelief. “Anna, do you even understand what the situation is?”

  I raised my eyes at him. “I know you would love to believe I am stupid, but yes, I do know what is going on here.” I glanced towards the man in black as I continued. “The man in that room is a time traveller. You’ve come here to investigate him.” I paused and turned to look back at Martin, and continued on, pointedly: “Or in your case, cover it up.”

  The man in black gave a brief, wary nod, while Martin simply glared at me. I knew he was annoyed with me but I didn’t care. He was supposed to be a scientist! He was supposed to be my PhD supervisor! And yet he hypocritically taught us in all his classes that time travel was a physical impossibility. While in his private time he was sneaking off to solve these little time travel mysteries on the side. Well, I was finally around to show him who was boss.

  “I guess you think you’ve got it all figured out then.” Martin threw his hands up. “Alright, off you go then, on your way. Go and solve your little time travel mystery, if that’s what you think it is.”

  I paused. I looked at the man in black. “Is the guy in that room a time traveller?” I asked slowly.

  “No!” Martin snapped at me, clearly forgetting we were in a hospital.

  The man in black was not so quick to jump in. “That’s what we’re... investigating.” But his eyes said it all: they said yes. Yes, they said, the man who had appeared in Pitt St Mall at 4pm the day before — out of thin air — was a time traveller.

  “The only thing we’re investigating,” Martin interrupted. “Is another hoax.”

  ***

  I didn’t understand why they were keeping the unnamed patient in such a dark room. As we slowly stepped inside, myself and the man in black walking side-by-side, Martin reluctantly dawdling behind us, my eyes gradually adjusted to the light. I began to think that maybe the blue of the windows wasn’t tinted glass, because the interior of the room also seemed dyed blue.

  As my eyes came to grips with the strange blue glow, I saw him at last: lying in a bed by the window, in the far corner of the room. The time traveller.

  I took a sharp gulp of air and stopped in my tracks. I steadied myself as I looked over the long dark body stretched out in the hospital bed, with an oxygen mask over his face, the machine doing the breathing for him. It wasn’t the physical state of his health that was so shocking to me — the fact that he looked tortured and half dead, hooked up to a dozen machines. No - it was the way he was dressed that caused me to freeze where I was standing.

  He was dressed like a 70s glam rocker.

  I inched forward slightly to get a better look at his clothing. He had on a purple suede leather jumpsuit, which stretched from head to toe. On his feet were a pair of platform shoes, also in purple but with a lightening bolt decal in silver glitter up the sides of each one. Over his jumpsuit he wore a short vest with black and purple sequinned feathers spilling off it. And then there were his eyes: they were caked in panda-style black eyeliner, making him look even more ill than he probably was.

  My eyes grew wider as Martin came to stand beside me. “Oh my god,” I murmured, looking up at Martin. “Would you take a look at this guy...”

  Martin rolled his eyes so hard I was surprised they didn’t fall out onto the cold pale blue floor we were standing on. “For crying out loud Anna…he couldn’t even make an effort to be subtle. He’s gone and dressed himself up in the most ridiculous 70s attire I’ve ever seen in my life.”

  Clearly Martin thought I was just naive. That I was being taken in by what he considered an obvious hoax. I crossed my arms. “Exactly,” I said, making a deduction. “If this were a hoax he wouldn’t have been so obvious about it.”

  Martin shook his head dismissively at me and walked over to join the man in black by the other side of the hospital bed, up close and personal with the patient. There was a chart that he wanted Martin to take a look at. I hurried over to stand next to them. As I got closer to the bed the absurd appearance of the patient lying in it hit me. Starring down at him, I’m not sure how but I knew it for sure. It was just a gut instinct. That man was from another time. I believed it in the very depths of my soul.

  Not that this was the most scientific approach to things: I had to admit that. As a science PhD candidate maybe I should have been ashamed of myself. But science and I had always had a strained love-hate relationship. I may have dedicated my life to the study of it, but that didn’t mean I didn’t question it every day. My belief was that you had no right to call yourself a true scientist if you didn’t. I glanced up over at Martin Anderson and thought about how he would consider just the opposite to be true.

  I swallowed and tried to compose myself as I looked down at the body in the bed. I had truly never seen anyone look or dressed like that outside of a film. There was nothing costume-like or fake about the man’s get up. It was the genuine article, the real deal. I was pretty sure of it.

  Next to me, I could hear Martin fervently disagreeing with my silent assessment, only his opinion was very much being said outlaid. “So what, he goes down to the costume shop, picks up
the most ridiculous outfit he can afford — which just happens to be 70s themed, mind — and then fakes an asthma attack at Pitt St Mall? I cannot — “ he paused to stare defiantly at the man in black “ — seriously believe you are wasting my time with this crap again.”

  I pipped up. “Erm, how exactly does one ‘fake’ not being able to breathe, precisely?” I stood up straight. “That seems like something that the doctors may have picked up on.”

  Martin had no response. The man in black looked over at me and nodded. “He’s not faking being unable to breathe, we can be sure of that.”

  I scratched my head and realised I still didn’t understand the significance of the whole being unable to breathe issue anyway. What did that have to do with him having potentially travelled through time? “And anyway,” I asked, directing my question at either of them but being less optimistic about the chance of Martin answering me. “What does it matter whether he is faking it or not?”

  I was proven correct when Martin responded with only a blank stare. He shifted slightly and looked towards the man in black, who explained it to me. “When a person travels through time,” he paused only briefly to wait for Martin’s impatience with that turn of phrase to pass, “he or she is unable to breath the atmosphere of the different time period.”

  He stopped, first to look at Martin, then at me, then at the patient lying in the bed. “They usually die within the hour. This is the first guy to have survived.”

  Chapter Three.

  Martin, the man in black, and I had been unceremoniously ushered out of the room as a team of actual medical professionals had appeared out of nowhere to attend to the patient.