In similar fashion to last blogpost, I just uncovered this really wonderful excerpt for an as-of-yet unwritten sequel to In Due Time. (… which I only just realized was called that and not Time After Time– I just really underestimated my titling abilities. You’ll see the edits about this all over my posts, because I apparently talk about this janitorial time-travel tale a lot. [Come to think of it, I kind of feel like what I AM is a time-travelling janitor, especially when I’m writing.]) I have to say, this feels like a precursor to the nightmare that would lead me to come up with one of my newest ideas, Semi-Conscious. Perhaps both of those stories will grow up together and see to inspire each other, in turn.
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It was too much. Just too much. I sucked away my tears. It raised in me a familiar rage that I had had for years—that though I’d killed him, I’d not snuffed him out, completely. Time has a way of retaining lives within its twisted catacombs, and as one of its many enigmatic means to an end, it had preserved his being in some infinite loop of chaos. And to think of all the sorts of horrible, yet marvelously poetic things one person can do to himself. I’d blame it on Shakespeare laying it down that anyone leading a movement is destined to bring to pass his own end. But then that’d be like cursing the heavens, and that’d also be exactly what such a clever dead snob like him would want me to do. So I just wring out a mop again, sloshes and squelches erupting from its compacted hair, and think. I brought him into being, and I pulled him out. And he brought me up, and he brought me back down.
Oh, when first I’d met him, he’d presented a perfectly reasonable alibi for his memory loss. His wild-eyed anxiety made me compassionate. He was alone, and if there’s anything in this world a human can commiserate with, it’s isolation. He was a castaway, stranded on the Earth. The whole world was a ghost town for him, and he was, for all he knew, not really human but a ghost himself. And then something lit in up in him when he saw the machine. His already lidless eyes raised and raised, and his gaunt features had a sudden rush of unbelievable vibrancy. It re-coloured both our hopes in that spectrum just beyond the visible. He told me what he’d known before he’d forgotten, and it brought us back.
We stood, side by side, on the other side of the tunnel of time before too long. He and I were responsible for a whole world of good, literally. And yet, that electric energy radiating off him– that thing that seemed to raise his hairs towards a polar gravity– whatever drives any of us towards the inevitable inhumanity of human consequence– it turned a wicked twist of hue… and he realized why he knew what he’d known…
Yes, ThatAweSomeBlog 