Steam
Jean Johnson
“So this house has just been sitting there, waiting for you to come along and inherit it?”
David refrained from nodding, since that would have caused his cell phone to slip from between his shoulder and ear.
His hands were busy carefully pulling dust covers from strange pieces of archaic electrical equipment.
“Yeah, that’s right. I never even met this guy, but Mom and Dad, and even Grandma and Grandpa always swore he was like the family’s Secret Santa, for decades.
And ‘Uncle’ David left it to me in his will.
Said his ‘namesake’ should be his inheritor.
A pity he and his wife ended up disappearing during that hurricane . . .”
“Actually, I’m more Edwardian than Victorian in my chosen era,” David countered. He pulled yet another dusty sheet off a chunk of furniture and found a beautiful, wonderfully preserved oak roll-top desk. “Ooh, baby . . .”
“What, a sexy picture of a dame?” his best friend joked.
“Almost that good, bro. A late-nineteenth/early twentieth-century roll-top desk.”
“You’re sick, man.” The tone of his friend’s voice was more dismissive than disgusted, so David ignored the insult. “Listen, after you’re done drooling over your Edwardian love desk, you wanna hit the pub for a darts game?”
“That’s rather tempting,” David admitted, gently rifl ing through the papers pigeon-holed in the desk, some of which were quite old and yellow, while others were a lot newer.
A stack of old photographs, sepia with age, drew his attention.
He pulled the pictures out, blinking in shock.
They were of a beautiful young woman, her curls piled on her head in a Gibson hairstyle and her dress equally turn of the previous century.
But her pose was anything but the staid, starchy, glassy-eyed stare of someone forced to sit still for several seconds while the photographic plates were exposed.
Instead, she had coyly unbuttoned her waistcoat and blouse and had lifted her breasts out of her corset, displaying them with a small but clearly lecherous smile.
He dropped the phone. Scrambling to catch it even as it fell from his shoulder, David almost crumpled the pictures as well.
For a moment, he was all thumbs, juggling cardstock and plastic, until the pictures fluttered on to the desk surface.
The disarray displayed more lascivious images, some half-hidden by the photos that had fallen face down.
Gaping, David swallowed and lifted his cellphone back to his ear.
“Uh, listen,” he stated, interrupting his friend’s rambling comments about doing something or other at the proposed bar, “I just found some very important, uh . . . paperwork . . . that I have to . . . examine much more closely. I think it’ll take me all night.”
“Paperwork?” Kevin asked, his tone dubious.
“Yeah. Paperwork. Very . . . important . . . paper. Work. I’ll chat with you later, OK?
Bye.” Thumbing the red button, he pressed and held it a second time as soon as the phone blipped, letting him know the call was ended.
It blipped and buzzed a second time, letting him know it was now turned off.
That left him in the privacy of a gadget-crammed attic with a roll-top desk that would have made an antiques collector weep, and some rather outstanding examples of turn-of-the-century pornography.
Writing on the back of some of the “paperwork” caught his eye. In lovely, large loops, a woman – presumably the one in the photograph– had carefully written, “To my B-beloved David, may this image I-inspire you to look deeper into the mysteries of love and life. Yours F-Forever, Elaine.’
Turning it over, he found his breath escaping him.
David fumbled the chair out from the desk, shoved aside the dust cloth which had partially snagged on the oak-rail chair and sat down before the last dregs of blood vanished from his head.
He arranged each photograph lovingly. She’s probably quite dead by now.
These photos are from a hundred years ago. No one lives that long . . .
He had always been fascinated with the turn of the previous century.
When other kids were grumbling about having to take a newspaper route to pay for Walkmans and CDs, he had been dreaming he was a street urchin hawking papers on a city corner in the days of horses and carriages.
When they chatted about the latest action movie, he had wanted to talk about the old silent films. And now, here in this house he had inherited, he had found a treasure trove of antique delights.
David had seen turn of the century erotica before, and had found the profusion of ruffles, the crispness of the muslin and the contrast between demure layers and exposed skin incredibly sensual.
But those pictures usually had been taken rather impersonally, either for commercial sale – however discreetly underground– or for someone he didn’t know.
These pictures had been taken for someone he knew.
Sort of. And the subject of all these photographs was beautiful.
Long, dark hair, gleaming eyes, mischievous smile, little round spectacles perched on her nose in some of the pictures, and every last one of them was provocatively posed.
Those intimate bits of feminine flesh below her slender neck kept drawing his attention.
He could easily imagine kissing her lips, her breasts, even the secrets exposed between her thighs.
Knowing he had to move on, David reluctantly returned the erotic images to their pigeonhole in the desk.
Studying them in depth could wait until after he had fi nished exploring the rest of the attic.
His fingers brushed against a book. He pulled it out and opened the plain, dark green leather cover to a random page, finding more of the same looping, feminine handwriting inside as on the back of the photos.
It seemed to be a personal journal of scientific experiments of some kind.
Sorting through to the front page, David found a piece of paper, much whiter and newer than the rest, tucked into the front.
The moment he opened it, he felt the blood rushing out of his face a second time – but not, now, from lust. It was written in his handwriting, and was signed with his signature, in the spiky loops that weren’t quite copperplate.
Dear Me,
I realize you’re not going to believe this at first, but it’s absolutely true.
Follow all of her instructions, get this machine of hers going again .
. . and she’ll be yours. Eventually. (Certain courtship rules still apply, of course; take a couple weeks first.) “Compromise” is the key and “equality” the grease for this maiden’s lock.
Not to mention “S-steam”. Don’t worry; you’ll understand in due time.
Um, you might want to burn this note as soon as you know everything is true. Just in case.
David Maddock.
The real David – the one living in the twenty-first century – stared at the note for several long seconds.
The chill in the attic penetrated his dazed thoughts.
He adjusted the straps of his suspenders for comfort and cracked open the book once more.
It wasn’t an easy read, either, despite the lyrical quality of the writer’s penmanship and her engaging, slightly rambling, almost conversational style; he was a computer programmer by trade, not an electrician, and never mind a physicist.
But the gist of the technical diary was how this woman, Elaine Cuttleridge, had managed to tap into what he guessed were nineteenth-century terminology equivalents of quantum wormhole physics, and powered it all by means of the several lightning rods he had noticed sticking up over the roof earlier; lightning rods which normally channelled all that energy safely down into the ground, but which, when switched over, could power the machinery cluttering up his newly inherited attic, causing its whirling cube of rings to link to itself four-dimensionally.
In other words, she had somehow managed to create a time machine. In his attic. Which he had deeded to himself in his own will . . . under the pseudonym of “Uncle” David Cuttleridge.
Twisting in the chair, David looked around the attic at the half-uncovered equipment. Well, a corner of his mind thought idly, that explains the archaic, accordion-style camera over in the corner. I must have taken these pictures of my . . . wife . . . myself . . .
His wife. For a moment, David felt dizzy with the contradiction between his bodily lusts and his mental quandaries.
Shaking it off, he forced himself to concentrate.
If this is all true – if it is – then somehow I have to figure out how to get all of this stuff working again.
Because . . . dayamn . . . that is one hot woman.
Brilliant body and a brilliant mind, and somehow she ends up all mine?
Predestination paradox, here I come! And – wow – how liberal she must have been, to be so willing to pose so naughtily . . .
Another thought had him flushing hot and cold with the possibilities.
If she can create a time machine, then I can go back in time.
I can live in the era I’ve always wanted to visit!
Of course, the medicine and the transportation technology levels would suck, he acknowledged, but just think of the possibilities.
I could see Caruso perform in person, not just on some rusty, static-filled cylinder recording.
I could invest in companies I could look up in the stock market’s history books!
And best of all, predestination paradox would work in my favour, because I know I’ll have succeeded in going back in time . . .
. . . No, no, don’t rush, he reminded himself, looking at the note he had penned to himself at some point in time. Romance is the key . . . well, along with compromise and equality. And “S-steam”. Or did I mean “esteem”? Well, probably straightforward steam, given those photographs . . .