The Librarian and The Time Machine: A Supernatural Suspense Horror Comedy by Brian Yansky

Author:Brian Yansky [Yansky, Brian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Keeping It Weird Press
Published: 2023-10-26T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

I opened the library to the public exactly at nine. No one was waiting to get in, not even the government man, which was kind of disappointing since I was on time. I yawned as I walked to my desk. Time travel could be exhausting. After grabbing some old texts on temporal anomalies, I collapsed onto the leather sofa in the reading nook, determined to learn more about the mysterious cat.

The first book, ‘Curiosities of the Chronosphere,’ claimed the cat had been spotted at the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. There was a grainy photograph with a cat sitting impassively on a tree branch, watching the sky as fire rained down. The first question that popped into my mind was who took the picture? My guess was another time-traveler. Who else?

A second book detailed the cat’s presence during the 1908 Tunguska event in Siberia, when a meteoroid exploded above the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. This picture was a fuzzy black and white; the cat was observing calmly from a safe distance. This time on a brick wall of a Gulag prison camp. Why these two events?

In “The Time Traveler’s Almanac,” I found accounts of the cat at the 1883 Krakatoa volcanic eruption and near a battle during the Mongol’s conquest of Asia. The cat was always a little apart from the historic event, from everything.

In another painting, the cat sat primly in a rowboat, its yellow eyes fixed intently on the towering figure of George Washington who stood heroically at the bow, one foot raised up on the rowboat’s gunwale, hand on hip, chin jutting out bravely. The dark Potomac churned around them, flecks of ice dotting its surface.

I went to the sofa in the living room (still no visitors to the library today) and lay on the sofa and read a little more.

Another image captured the cat perched on the Roman Senate chamber steps, gazing down with an inscrutable expression as the notorious assassination of Julius Caesar unfolded. Crimson blood poured from Caesar’s wounds as he collapsed, surrounded by his frenzied killers, his fellow senators, his friends, one of them, maybe even his son. The cat seemed unaffected, but watchful, ever watchful.

It didn’t escape me that all of these events were important historic ones. How was my trip with Lord Blackstone in this company of historic events?

My eyelids grew heavy as I searched for more clues. The words on the page blurred...

In my dream, I lay on the sofa in the library reading nook again, but now a sleek Siamese cat with piercing blue eyes sat grooming itself on the sofa across from me. Somehow, I knew this was the same cat, even though it didn’t look the same. Those somehows were pretty common in dreams where the conscious and unconscious mind often blended together.

“You have questions,” the cat said. Well, said wasn’t quite right. It spoke telepathically in a deep, velvety voice.

I nodded mutely, unsure if I was awake or asleep. It was one of those strange dreams that seemed too real to be a dream.

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