My life flashes before my eyes. Pain, joy, regret, achievement. She is there too, I am her chosen one. She is an angel of death, a Reaper, my - our doom. I remember how she found me in my youth. I remember her words and hate her for speaking them to me and for saving me all those years ago. Those words she spoke started it all in motion. As I die I recall that day.
I wasn't yet the great Dr. Peter Morgan. I was but a boy on our family ranch on the southern fringes of Gettysburg. That storied battlefield that rebirthed a nation, who could have seen what would be? My parents left me alone to attend a weekend church retreat. I took my favorite horse Yohan out for a ride. A surprise summer storm came up with little warning. I turned back home but Yohan was spooked fording Plum Creek. Yohan fell atop me, breaking my legs and several other bones.
I lost my voice calling for help over the next two days. I lay there gazing at the sky, half-drowned in the rain-swollen creek. Agony and terror were my only companions as I drifted in and out of consciousness. That's when she came to me. She was wrapped in a red dress, carried the customary scythe and wore a mocking grin. She examined me for a moment then spoke these fateful words.
"Peter, it's not your time."
"What do you mean?"
"Time lives in your blood. You have much more."
She dragged me out of the creek. I may have been delirious there on death's door but I think she rescued me. It wasn’t long before my parents found me in the mud where she had left me. They took me to the emergency room where I won a fight for my life, I was her chosen one. She came to me often as I languished in the hospital recovering, learning to walk again. In fevered dreams, her words echo her cryptic riddle. "Time lives in your blood." What could it mean?
I asked for books about time. I read everything available about the science of time. I read when resting from therapy, while I ate and when I should have been sleeping. My first outing after returning home was to the library. There was little but more than disappointment to be found there. When I was able to return to school, I found their collection only slightly more helpful. Soon it became apparent that what we know of the substance of time is only abstract theory. Obscure math and concepts born of an incomplete understanding of the universe. Time fast became an all-consuming obsession. Blood was a part of that riddle too, but the thought of studying blood was macabre and revolting to the boy I was then.
Recovery from the accident was never complete. I was beset with physical disorders. I would never ride again. I needed a cane to walk and could move but slowly. I studied obsessively, slept little and was always reading. I dressed up my obsession as 'academic endeavors'. Neglecting my rehabilitation to pursue my studies broke my mother’s heart. Nonetheless, my parents supported my efforts.
After exhausting every resource available to a high school student, I began corresponding with professors from around the globe. I knew them only as names found in the back of the books I devoured. Many were unreachable, retired or dead. I annoyed most, if not all of the living ones. By chance or by fate, one did befriend me. That professor was Dr. Anne Li-Wong of our very own Gettysburg College. Though I was only a humble cripple haunted by death, Anne paid attention to me.
Anne sent me books from her collection, various articles and select journals. She gave me access to an entire academic world previously unavailable to me. With Anne’s help, I began forming several nascent theorems of my own. Anne and I became friends. She honored and surprised me once with a letter from a student congratulating her for the 'Morgan-Li-Wong Principle'. She had used our work in her class, I was only a bumpkin in a backwoods high school, but I was making a contribution to the adult world of high science.
When I was ready Anne helped me enroll in Gettysburg College, one of only a handful of non-legacy enrollees that year. I didn't have the credentials to get into a science program. I had to enroll as a literature major with a disability waiver. Though it meant an extra year of schooling, I was able to switch to my desired science program and work directly with Anne.
That time in a literature program wasn't wasted. Even in high school, I sensed I had learned most of what science had to offer me. That motivated me to dive into literature with the same fervor I had consumed scientific knowledge. I explored poetry, art and anything that might only be tangentially tied to time by theme or metaphor. I even contemplated studying blood on the days I awoke from nightmares of the red draped skeleton taunting me onward.
Despite a terrible academic showing, I managed to graduate. By some miracle, Anne got me into graduate studies where I was able to flourish. Graduate school was a breeze. I was able to do real work and teach to defray the cost of attendance. When it was time to pursue my doctorate, I had exhausted my meager savings. No matter, the school arranged a loan and teaching first years provided funds for my basic needs.
That was a small matter, I needed little. I didn't date or travel beyond school funded trips as an assistant to Anne. I slept on a cot in the labs, scrounged meals at the cub or at the pizza house like a freshman. Before anyone could have expected it, I was a tenure track professor and the college put me to work full-time. As much as my duties allowed, I continued my research. I came to believe that I was on the verge of a breakthrough, I was about to discover what all the scholarly giants had missed.
It seemed to me everyone else was looking in the wrong direction, or merely failing to see what was before us. The classic training of a scientist directed inquiry towards subatomic particles where the laws of physics seem foreign. They looked for 'god-particles' and dark matter. They tried to read meaning into the X-rays and static of the cosmos. They hypothesized about the environment of the event horizon. What was before them was impossible for them to see. I was on the cusp but something was happening to me.
My health, stolen by the accident of my youth, was in steep decline. I was getting older and the trappings of success were a constant distraction. Wife, home and wealth meant children of my own. Divergent careers meant illicit affairs. My disabilities meant painkillers and debilitating bouts of illness requiring bed rest. It seemed time was slipping away from me. It always seemed I had less time to devote to my work. Sometimes I made excuses to ignore my work, I entertained a nagging doubt. Though I believed I was on the threshold of an imminent breakthrough, I suspected I was at a dead-end.
The years dragged on. I lamented the sense that I had less time than in the past. I ricocheted between anniversaries, holidays and birthdays. Deadlines rolled by and events overcame me. One night things came to a head, sparking a terrible fight with my wife. I slept on the guest suite couch that night. There I dreamt of her, my red garbed angel of death. Her words again echoed through my fitful sleep. I rose before the sun and watched it rise through the window of my lab office, reflecting blood-red warnings of doom.
There at my desk, I threw my research away. I found the courage, or desperation, to search where I dared not before. Blood, the grinning nightmare destroying my sleep had pointed me there in the beginning. How much time had I wasted? Was there enough left for me? I drew my blood, probably too much. I searched the atoms, tested every reactive agent and combination looking for something. I separated the components and recombined them. I delved deeper into the substances and things living there, nothing looked like time.
I wasn't sure what I had expected to find but, came away with frustration and disappointment to spare. Days turned into weeks, weeks into months and months into years. In desperation, I decided that what I was seeking must be invisible to the mechanical eyes of science; gas spectrometers and electron microscopes. There was only one thing left to me, a leap of faith. Forced to guess what was hidden in the blood, I designed new tools around the holes in the math. It must be there, time ‘lived’ in those holes in the math.
Anne was skeptical when I brought her my hunch and designs for the new tools. I called the first one the ‘blood engine’. It would power the other device that would measure time with unknown accuracy. It was based on the original Morgan-Li-Wong principle posited while I was still a sophomore in Gettysburg high school. I explained to my understandably reticent mentor that no one else thought to look in the blood. Why would they? No one else would risk resources or reputation on a blind hunch.
Admitting that perfect understanding was yet beyond me, I pleaded that I knew with certainty that living blood was the key to the puzzle. Anne listened as I explained that none of our colleagues had suffered all their lives visits from my mocking muse, that grinning nightmare we all must face one day. To my surprise, she didn’t scoff at or recoil from me.
Anne confided that she had begun her university career as an occult arts major at Bryn Wyrd University and switched to please her parents. She believed there was much more to the universe than what science had to offer as well. Though she had no near-death experience of her own, she had seen the research. Despite some misgivings, Anne agreed to help me build the machines. She cautioned that the use of human blood in our experiments might bring consequences and so should be a closely guarded secret.
Anne and I experimented and observed. I built the blood engine at home to avoid implicating her. I used my blood to power it. I activated the ‘time measuring device’ and watched. It measured time with perfect accuracy, far beyond the atomic clocks the government was using. I had found something, a breakthrough of sorts. I found that time was accelerating. Indeed, each of us had less of it every day. I was not mad. That grinning mocking angel was no hallucination!
After that experiment, I rushed to see Anne. She agreed to assemble a team of students who could be discreet. Anne soon confirmed my findings, replicating them successfully and further discovered something new. The acceleration was found to have a slight increase in its rate. The implications were too frightening to be believed. One of the student aides confirmed with help from NASA that our planet's orbit was decaying. He reported that we were moving further from the sun and suggested it was due to this anomaly in time. The result would be oblivion. So you can see all my exertions were meant to save us all!
Anne was too frightened to take our findings to the college to ask for help seeking a solution. A student beat us to the punch. Our friend who spoke to NASA had disclosed that our power source was human blood. I was released for violating the rules regarding human experimentation. Rumor and innuendo raced around the world. It destroyed my reputation. I became a laughingstock and the warnings about the fate of our world fell on deaf ears. I heard the red angel laughing in my dreams.
My career in tatters, unable to get work in another institution, I lost my family and home. Alone with nowhere to go, no one else to turn to, I returned to my ancestral home, the long abandoned ranch on Taneytown road. It was now an excellent sanctuary for me. Free from mocking rivals, the media or any distractions whatsoever. It was the perfect place to resume my work, to save humanity. That now was the ego-inflating proposition, my obsession and all-consuming quest.
Determined to settle in for a long haul, I stocked up on supplies of food and potable water. I stockpiled supplies of cable, sheet metal, chemicals and circuitry. I drew and stored my own blood, not yet aware of the requirement for freshness. Farm equipment was put into perfect working order. The windmill-powered well pump, a generator set, lighting and everything necessary was restored to perfect working order so nothing would distract me. Satisfied everything was ready I began my work in earnest.
The first task was to make a new measuring device to replace the one the university confiscated. I still had the original blood engine from my home lab for use. I began the construction of a new device. This one is designed to slow time to its normal rhythm. Inspired by years of visiting the coast, by the memory of weekends sailing with friends, I imagined it as a sea-anchor of sorts. Designed to slow and steady the ship against the cosmic currents pushing us towards destruction on a rocky shoal.
The first anchor was small and underpowered. During its initial test, it hummed to life and vanished. It had fallen back into the past and disappeared from our time continuum. When its battery was exhausted it returned undamaged but coated in odd organic substances. I cleaned it up and celebrated the successful test of my anchor. Now I needed a way of tethering it to our ‘ship’. A flurry of calculations revealed that I needed a bigger blood engine as well as a new tethering device. More blood.
Filling batteries from my veins had taken a toll. There was nothing more I could do alone. Too sickly and desiccated to keep up with the requirements of my experiments, I sought a new source. I began with blood banks and experimental lab-produced blood substitutes. These failed. My old stocks of blood kept in refrigeration also proved useless. Freshness seemed to be required. The reaper in my dreams nodded confirmation and encouragement. The blood had to be fresh, warm and real.
I tried animal substitutes before the unthinkable. A hog didn't provide adequate quantities. It took several pigs, so I replenished my pork supplies. I found it was easier to manage with a cow. A single cow held enough blood, so I feasted on steak to regain my strength. I had enough blood but the experiments still failed. There was something else missing. The red-clad nightmare nodded, always grinning. In addition to real, fresh and warm, the blood also had to be human.
Fresh human blood was not easy to obtain. I would need at least a dozen donors. I gathered them from the underpasses and dark alleys of York and Harrisburg, Baltimore and Westminster. They were nameless drug addicts and mentally deficient types that should have been safely institutionalized. I housed them, fed them and took what I needed when they were sedated. I put them to sleep using drugs clandestinely mixed into their food. Success!
A few donors died, unimportant and unfortunate accidents but, their contributions meant I could postpone the next terrible step. Abducting and murdering my donors. Years of frustration melted away. I felt trapped under ice for decades, unable to break through. Now the mystery was unraveling itself, of its own volition. More donors came and went.
Struck by a bout of illness I was forced to my bed to rest. I used this time to copy my notes and send them to Anne. She replied on occasion, mostly with trivial banalities, a birthday card or a missive about her cats. Then she began to send me her own ideas. I had rekindled her interest in our work. Soon she was sending me notes and articles from former colleagues and students.
Though it was corporate research, safe and orthodox it did lie at the fringes of our prior joint endeavors. They were of particular value in the area of materials research. I learned to substitute aluminum or glass where I thought iron or steel was required. New plastics, circuitry and insights into their manufacture and employment were invaluable.
With the blood of the forgotten people and improved material science, the construction of a new battery, anchor and tether field generator was a trifle. Calculations suggested that the tethering field generator and anchor combination would only correct a small area surrounding the combined machinery. Growing impatient under the menacing eyes of my angel, I tested the equipment without further preparation. This was a mistake.
I learned the limits of the tethering field. It did not encompass my control console only three meters away. As expected, the equipment vanished as it had before, falling back into the normal flow of time. I stepped into the field and found it there. I turned to look behind me and watched myself leave the storm cellar in elation. I returned to the control console, noting that the field had somehow grown to encompass it. I deactivated the field and experienced a terrible jarring. It was brief and survivable but disconcerting.
I went outside in the same way I had observed myself from within the field. The barn was decrepit, damaged by a decade of neglect and storms. The century-old family house was leveled. My doppelganger was nowhere to be seen. Knee-high grass grew where our proud home once stood. A sign indicated that the lot was to be developed into a subdivision for retirees complete with a golf course. A second sign on the barn declared it condemned. The sign carried the date 7/12/2000. I fell to the ground.
In what seemed like a few moments I was catapulted years into the future. I entered the tethering field from 1986 and emerged into the 2000s. I walked to the highway and marveled at a world I didn't recognize. I worried about how much time I had lost and what might be left to me and my quest. I imagined hearing her laughing at me, though I knew I was awake. I walked to the familiar Lincoln Diner and learned the money in my wallet was just enough for a cup of coffee.
A quick jaunt to the bank after my luxurious repast at the diner led to another terrifying discovery. I was declared dead in 1994. My assets were divided between my children. Only one, Avery, still lived nearby. My desperate pleading and careworn appearance convinced the teller to give me his address. Fortune smiled on me. His address was within walking distance. As a cripple, it took the better part of the day to reach the trailer park where Avery resided on Old Harrisburg Road.
Avery was living in a single-wide trailer with some 'friends'. He had apparently squandered his share of the inheritance on drugs and rented companionship. He wasn't surprised to see me. He seemed confused about what or who I was. When I convinced him I was not a dream or a ghost, he wasn't happy to see me. Heartbreak. He confessed to wasting years in prison, ranted about a divorce and the loss of his child. A granddaughter 'Petra' I would never meet. Poor Avery looked older than I was or felt and he didn't seem interested in going on living.
With the promise of a hot meal and a warm dry place to sleep I enticed him to the barn and storm cellar. “Thank god,” he had a car. He settled into the only dry, clean stall left in the barn and I tried to explain what happened to me. He didn't seem to grasp what I had been doing or care.
Avery had many questions I couldn't answer. What is the meaning of life, why his mother and I had separated and why had I returned at all. He wasn't only distraught, he was intoxicated and incoherent. I watched him argue with the toaster in my lab for the better part of an hour. After a meal, I left him sleeping on a cot in that last serviceable horse stall. I took his car and went to find Anne.
Anne would have the resources to help me complete the work. If she still lived, she was middle-aged when I was a kid. I had been gone 15 years, what might have become of her? I stopped at a gas station where I found a rare payphone.I put in a call to the college offices. They told me Anne had taken ill and was in the hospital for treatment. I found her in an oncology ward. Anne had once been a two-pack a day smoker. That habit riddled her with cancer. She had for years suffered a host of maladies I was utterly unaware of. Now congestive heart failure was likely to be her end.
Though she lay dying, a ghastly remnant of her once ageless radiance, she looked upon me with pity. She begged for news of where I had been. We talked for hours despite the nurses' demands that I leave after visiting hours. Anne told them I was her stepson, so I was permitted to linger overnight. I explained everything to her and she discovered a new life in every word. She seemed invigorated even as I was exhausting myself in the recounting of my tale.
Anne asked if I had received her notes. I thanked her for them and shared how helpful they were. She told me she continued working from what I sent her and sent me a design for a device to expand the tethering field. I never received it. We determined that the post office probably kept my mail in a dead letter bin. I made a mental note to check there. We reconstructed her designs from memory. It all seemed simple enough. I would need some esoteric materials but her influence could provide them. She called her department and arranged the transfer of everything needed to me. Then she warned me.
The new device, the ‘Li-Wong Field Amplifier’ she called it, required a living battery. Someone would be trapped in suspended animation at the core, in the enormous battery required. A living soul was required. I invited her to join me when she felt up to it, to consider perhaps being the one to power it. Her reply was honest and brave.
"I'm suffering Peter. The pain meds don't work well on my stubborn nerves. I'm ready for the end. I can't go on living inside a machine, frozen in agony. I've had a great life, Peter. You've been one of my favorite parts of that life. But I'm ready for the end now."
"I have to build this thing, Anne."
"I know. I hope you succeed for all our sakes. Be sure you build in a safety in case something goes wrong, we can't afford to lose you. No one else would know where to start before it was too late."
I promised I would, but I didn't plan to put myself into the blood engine battery. I was too important. A hapless drifter would suffice. What was one life to save all humanity? The moral implications were laughable. I was beginning to understand the Reaper's grin.
Satisfied that the recollected design and procedures were adequate I returned home. As soon as the post office was open I inquired inside about my dead letters. Though my ID had long ago expired, the world-weary clerk didn't care about that any more than about his own hygiene. I returned home to find joyful students unloading a rented box truck.
The students were delighted for the news of the ever-popular professor Li-Wong. They lingered and shared pizza, beers and stories. They helped set up the equipment and stow items in neatly organized groupings for ease of access later. They were amazing. I told myself it was for them I would finish this work. I was sad to see them go. They gave me phone numbers so I could reach them if I needed an assistant.
I found my son Avery reading in his stall. He asked for some food and went back to sleep. I inventoried his drugs and took some to sedate him later. My son would be the hapless one to fill my machine and fulfill my promise to save the world. What a gift I was giving him. He would live on eternal, happy in a drug-induced haze, oblivious to his immortal fame as the savior of all humanity. The government would make a holiday for him, build a great memorial about this site and always remember Avery Morgan.
Without reservation, I poured my last full measure into the work. Working like a madman I built the amplifier, the new battery, sized to accommodate my son and prepared recording devices to document the fateful moment.
I took my last meal with my son and he succumbed to chemistry. Avery’s slight build made loading him into the battery manageable. I pulled the comically large activation lever, designed in homage to the Frankenstein movies as my single expression of mirth I would ever indulge in. The device awoke, freezing my son in place and jarring me violently at the control console. Everything was going as planned. The measuring device indicated time was normalized and the field was expanding. I didn’t realize in time that the blood-soaked soil of Gettysburg, that legendary hallowed ground was also somehow feeding the machine! Poisoning it...
In elation, I picked up the phone at the console and called Anne. She was gone. She would never know of our success. She would be spared our fate. Then a thought hit me. I can bring her back. I can slow time; it follows then that I can reverse it. It was only a matter of a slight alteration in the field dynamics. I shuffled to the chalkboard. I scribbled out my calculations and that is where she found me.
That menacing angel appeared for the final time. Panic gripped me. I was neither asleep nor dying. Why was she here? My trembling hand dropped the chalk. It shattered on the stone floor just as my mind splintered. Fear knocked the wind from me, bringing me to my knees.
"Why?"
She grinned hissing her response. "I came to thank you, Doctor Morgan."
I tried to speak, "I don't understand..."
"I came for you, but I wanted to thank you first. Today my work is complete." She grinned still wider.
"No, please, I can reverse time," I pointed frantically at the chalkboard "you see, I can do this, I can fix it."
"No Peter, it cannot be done. Your time is up. Everyone's time is up. Did you never stop to wonder why time was accelerating?"
"No."
She led me up out of the cellar and pointed to the sky. They darkened the heavens with a thick blanket of gnawing, gnashing teeth and claws. They plummeted towards us, hordes of demonic nightmares from across the cosmos. She laughed then told me that these things have been racing to catch us since our creation. I realized God, whatever universal intelligence there was controlling it all, had kept us safe. He alone kept us ahead of the eldritch appetites lusting for our blood. In my arrogance, I ignored the possibility of God. I made myself a god, the savior of humanity.
Maybe it wasn't too late. I hobbled, then tumbled down the cellar stair into the lab to deactivate the machine. They were coming through the amplifier now, surrounded it to protect it. I dove for the control console, but they dragged me into the darkness to feast on my flesh. I begged for help to no avail. The Reaper's hideous peals of laughter were the only thing I could hear over my own screams.
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