Ouroboros: 3
This is one chapter of a short story. To start from the beginning of the story head over to Ouroboros: 1.
The light was too bright to see. It slowly dimmed to reveal beautiful, lush, green trees all around him. Ben stopped short as he noticed a gaping hole in front of him. There seemed to be someone in the hole, but his attention was grabbed by a voice heard in the distance.
He looked up to see an armchair in the clearing. The voices lingered closer as he examined the floral pattern on the chair from afar. The voice’s words were unintelligible and he looked down for a moment into the well.
There was a boy looking up at him with no facial features at all, save a mouth. The boy whispered, but the sound echoed through Ben’s mind: “Please…”
Suddenly the voices in the distance were close and clear as day. He heard the words “father” and “accident”. Ben jerked his head up to find his aunt sitting in the chair talking to someone. A shadowy figure sat on a couch next to her. He looked directly at Ben and as he finished “…but we don’t want to rule out any possibilities.”
Ben woke up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. He began flapping the front of his shirt back and forth to dry the sweat pouring from his torso. He heard voices in the other room, slowly got out of bed, and walked to his bedroom door. He stopped for a moment for a creaking board and continued when he was certain he wasn’t noticed. He slipped out his bedroom door and peeked his head out into the living room from the hallway.
Betty was speaking with Detective Marr. Ben hadn’t recognized the man’s name at first, but his face was a sure reminder.
The detective sat on the sofa with a glass of lemonade in clasped hands sitting in his lap. He wore a long, dark brown–almost red–trench coat, black loafers with white socks, and what looked like a fifty dollar suit.
Ben was overwhelmed with confusion over the events of the previous day and burst out into the living room. “What happened to my mother? How could this happen again? Why couldn’t I change it?” It seems Ben was making a habit of releasing a flood of questions at once.
The detective looked in Ben’s direction, but couldn’t bring himself to look into his eyes. He looked back at Betty and announced “Perhaps it’s time that I should go.”
“Wait,” Ben begged. Marr looked him in the eyes now. “What has this got to do with my father?”
“I see that you’ve already overheard some of what I said.” Marr hesitated and looked out into the den. “Son… You’re mother has been killed in a car accident. We believe that someone may have…” He looked down at his glass and set it on the table in front of him. He stood up and gathered his coat in his hands. He looked at Betty and continued as if he were never really speaking to Ben. “We’re still working on the case. I’ve already said too much… I thank you very much for your hospitality.”
Ben stood there with his mouth wide open and watched his aunt escort the detective out through the den.
“May have what?” Ben thought to himself. He wrestled with the idea that someone could have murdered his mother, but he simply couldn’t justify anyone wanting to kill her. She had no enemies. He rolled over all that he knew in his head, but nothing came to him. It was all an overwhelming blur of seemingly unrelated ideas.
Ben stood in the same spot he remembered, staring at the clock. He stood in the train station for almost an hour. Looking around he could see so many different kind of people coming from all different parts of the country, all with different stories to tell. There was one thing that bothered Ben about them; they were moving. They wouldn’t stop. Always moving, and circulating like molecules of oxygen floating on a breeze.
Ben looked up at the clock once more before giving up and walking out the door towards his train.
Aunt Betty had excused him from school today given the circumstances. He decided to try to make sense of things. To find the dark stranger and make him explain why he had to relive such a horrible event in his life. To find answers to why he should be put through this nightmare without the ability to change the outcome of the events. He headed home to lay in his bed and contemplate the strangeness of the universe.
Ben had to wait a while for his train, since he missed one waiting for something to happen in the train station. He had about an hour on the train to think about the events that took place over the past week, but his thoughts were a haze and he just stared blankly out the window, noting the difference in the speed of the ground below and the trees in the distance.
He stood in the middle of the road in front of his house. It was the first time he had really looked over the outside of his childhood home in a very long time. The effect of the image on his emotional state was astounding. He felt as if he had never left.
He walked up to the front door and used his key. He looked around inside for a moment and locked his eyes on the door leading into the garage from the kitchen. He walked slowly over to the door and turned the knob, but put his forehead on the door instead and began to cry. He slumped down with his back against the door and put his head between his knees.
A few minutes later he was startled by a sound in the other room. He got up to see what the noise was as he wiped the tears from his face. He found a stray cat licking himself by the back door. Someone had left the door open.
Ben looked around , but nothing seemed out of place. He shooed the cat out the door and locked it. He looked out the window in the door to see the cat meowing up at him from outside.
For some reason he walked back to the garage again and opened the door. There was a station wagon parked on one side of the garage and an empty space where a sedan was once parked.
“She took dad’s car” Ben spoke aloud to himself.
His brain went into overdrive and pieces began fitting together. “If there was something wrong with dad’s car and she only drove it to come out to Aunt Betty’s then that would explain why having her arrive a week earlier couldn’t save her. Perhaps I could save her… If I had another chance.”
He walked over to the empty space and touched a liquid on the floor of the garage. He smelled it and suddenly he was hit with another revelation. “Why would someone want to kill my dad?”
His mother’s death being called an “accident”, his father mysteriously dying shortly before a plot is discovered to kill him, the way all this seems to have been swept under the rug in his previous life; Perhaps there was more for Ben to do here than just save his mother from a tragic accident.
Ben was certain know that he could make things right given this new information. He was certain he could find out what was going on behind all of this.
He began to feel dizzy and desperately grabbed for the wall in front of him to catch his balance as the color went out of his world. His vision returned immediately as his hand touched the wall, but there was no concrete beneath his fingers.
As his mind cleared he could see that he was holding a bed sheet and that he was already horizontal. New questions rolled around in his head: Had he passed out? Had someone carried him to his room?
Looking closer at his surroundings he noticed some of the items were moved. “Is someone there?” he called out.
His door opened a moment later and a head popped in.
“Hey sport. You wanna go hit some baseballs with your dad this fine Sunday morning?”
Ben began to tear up. “You’re…”
“Are you feeling ok kiddo?” His dad interupted.
“Yeah… Yeah, I think I’m gonna be fine.”
Read the next part of the story, coming soon.
Tags: sci fi, series, short story, time travel
This entry was posted on Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 3:55 pm and is filed under Short Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.