The trouble started when he went for a walk. Or perhaps it had started earlier with the cup of coffee he drank just before going out. It wasn’t so much the coffee as the milk, but that had not seemed important at the time.
 
It was cold outside. The residue of a snowstorm lingered along the sides of the road. The potholes were filled with icy water. There was no one about. Even the birds had gone.
 
As he turned up Whitehead Road he thought that were it not for the occasional low rumble of distant traffic he could be walking in any era. This was the potentiality of time travel—that sense of otherness in a familiar place. The desire to build a machine to do the job was just a vestige of industrial capitalism. There was no need for strange alloys and glowing control panels. The answer would lie somewhere else. It most likely involved individual perception, which implied time travel could only be conducted alone. He was alone now.
 
He was coming to his favourite stretch of the road where it bent like an S, past the decayed tennis court. There was a gentle upward slope that curved slightly to the right and blocked his vision—just long enough to delay the onset of pleasure for half a second. This part of the road had a pungent lack of time. It was appealing all year long—from the blossoms of the mountain laurel to the dead tannic smelling leaves and finally the ice. The seasonal metamorphosis reminded him how different the same things could be. The obvious had as much mystery as its counterpart.
 
There was an old culvert that he liked to stop and look at whenever he walked that way. It was a rectangular trough encased in bluestone that vanished beneath a driveway, but as he approached it he saw that he was not alone. Someone else was already there. A man stood looking at the stones. He was striking on account of his eccentric clothing—jodhpurs disappearing into knee-high boots and a military style coat of green tweed, open despite the cold— a hipster Cossack, recently up from the city no doubt. He passed him by.
 
Timelessness contracted into the present with a jolt. His mood was tarnished. This trespasser had denied him the mystery of his surroundings. It wasn’t so much the people who had been moving up from the city in droves that annoyed him, but their attitudes of entitlement. They had the arrogance of immortals.
 
He tried to brush these angry inner conversations aside. He was a hypocrite, because he too had once been a young hipster from the city. It was better to acknowledge your prejudice than to pretend you had none. 
 
He regained his composure as he continued around the S-bend, alone again. The wizened tangle of wild vines made scribbles against the cold sky. This section was short—too short. It was always a disappointment. He would have liked to walk on it for at least half an hour but it only took several minutes. He was soon in the woods, heading towards White Pines, the house that Ralph Whitehead had built for himself in 1902.
 
Then he saw the Cossack again, leaning on a boulder, smoking a cigarette. It came as a shock and his heart rate quickened.
 
Either the laws of physics had fluctuated, or there was something wrong with him. How could this man be ahead of him when he had just left him behind? He thought about the milk. Something so seemingly inconsequential might actually have signified this cognitive degeneration, or was perhaps even a symptom of it.
 
He had looked in the fridge and it wasn’t there. Then he saw it on the counter. He must have forgotten to put it away. He turned to fill his coffee cup but when he reached for the milk it was gone. He found it again, back in the fridge.
 
He could see the man’s face but not his eyes. They were covered by a pair of blue mirrored sunglasses. In each lense was a distorted, minuscule version of himself. The Cossack leant back, nonchalantly smoking his cigarette. It was impossible to know what those eyes were looking at, hidden behind the lenses, so he kept on going.
 
He was suddenly overcome with a most profound doubt. The things he had taken for granted, like air and solid ground no longer seemed so certain. There was a clear demarcation between the way he had seen his life before and the way it appeared to him now. Everything was different—the light, the trees, the rocks. He knew this difference must lie in his own perception but it seemed to be expressed by the things he was looking at. Object and subject were intertwined. He had become a self-conscious part of the landscape, or merely a figment of it.
 
When he emerged from the trees at the Whitehead house, the man from the city was already there, peering into a window. It was strangely unsurprising now to see him again. 
 
Three times was all it had taken for him to accept the impossible.
 
“Excuse me. Can you tell me how you’ve managed to stay ahead of me, when I’ve passed you twice?”
 
“If I could tell you that, I wouldn’t be here.”
 
“Where would you be then?”
 
“Somewhere else.” He had a faint Irish accent. His face had a weather-beaten quality that suggested a tough life, even though he barely looked forty. Thick black hair brushed his shoulders. His eyes were still obscured.
 
“So It’s not just me. You’ve noticed it too?”
 
“I have. But the way I see it is that you’re always behind me, no matter how many times you pass me by.”
 
“Well, we’re in the same place now.”
 
They were standing at the front door of White Pines. It seemed a little too narrow for a building that size. It reminded him of an entrance to a tomb. There was a heaviness to this place, with its thick beams and dark siding. There was also the weight of history that had run its course—the effect of entropy on human endeavor—the aroma of absence. Once, this house had been the center of a utopian community, humming with artists, potters and craftsmen. Ralph Whitehead had owned most of the mountain. Paid for with the profits from his father’s mills in England. 
 
It was money filtered down from the industrial Revolution, with a catalytic spark of inspiration from William Morris that had created this utopia. There had been parties and wealthy visitors. Furniture was built. Domestic servants were an acceptable necessity. 
 
He tried the door. It was locked. It always was.
 
“What do you think is going on?”
 
“I don’t think there’s anything going on, Mister, that hasn’t been going on a long time already.”
 
“I’ve never experienced anything like this. I think there’s something unusual happening.”
 
“That’s because you’re one of three.”
 
One of three. The way he said ‘three’ made it sound like ‘tree’, which was faintly amusing. He felt a hint of pleasure at being singled out this way but it was ridiculous to be swayed by flattery. Why would he assume that a perfect stranger had any more wisdom than he did? 
 
“Who are the other two, then?”
 
“Well one of them would be me. And the turd would be the both of us together.”
 
 

© Tom Newton 2021