Tales of Twisted Time by Scott William Carter

Author:Scott William Carter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction, time travel, twilight zone
Publisher: Flying Raven Press

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For a few days Martin didn't go out, listening with rapt attention to every sound that came from the baby monitor. He didn't hear the voice imitating his as often as he heard Laura's and Penny's—that was the baby's name, also his mother's name—but he heard it often enough to be convinced that someone had spent a lot of time learning to mimic him. That's what he believed at first, but then there were details that could not be explained, things that were spoken that nobody would know except somebody who lived in the house.

Like how the washing machine would sometimes leak: Dear, are you ever going to get that fixed?

Or how the heating vent in the spare bedroom, the room that would become the nursery, made a ticking noise when the furnace was running: That sound is going to wake the baby, I swear.

And little things like how he had a tendency to leave his bathroom towel on the floor: I can smell that thing in here, Marty. It reeks.

So it was not long before he became convinced that it was not a trick—at least not in the sense he had been thinking. Maybe God was playing a trick on him. There was always that. His relationship with the Almighty—and he had always said the word with a sneer, especially when his mother had gotten after him about how he never attended mass—had been rocky since his father had died of a sudden heart attack when Martin was an undergrad. But if it was a trick, he didn't know what the joke was. Was he hearing another life he might have lived? Or was this a future that was waiting for him somewhere around the corner?

It didn't take long for him to begin hoping it was that last possibility. He wanted that life. He wanted it more than he thought he ever would. It wasn't all laughter and ice scream, either. For three months he listened to the baby monitor, keeping his routes as short as possible, on some days avoiding them altogether, so he could spend the majority of his time listening. He shut the blinds in the spare bedroom, covered them with a heavy blue sheet, and sat in near-total darkness, both day and night, so he could better visualize what was happening. He did hear good times, Laura singing, the baby babbling what sounded like words, but he heard the tension in Laura's voice, too, especially when she was woken in the middle of the night. Sometimes it was him—or the other him, the future him—who came into the room to comfort the baby. Sometimes he sounded happy, and other times he sounded tired, defeated.

There were fights—horrible fights when the two of them screamed at the top of their lungs, shouting every profanity he knew and even some he hadn't yet learned. Sometimes they fought in the baby's room, with the baby screaming through all of it, but mostly he heard the

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