Traveling Town Mysteries

Since she couldn’t recall having passed any cabins within the last several miles, she decided to plunge ahead into the strange, foreign landscape glittering in the cold. Because, when in doubt, go towards the creepy Twilight Zone landscape.

They would be playing God, and not only that but what if their tampering resulted in making the future worse? Their altering of history could set off a chain reaction, events woven together in an unforeseen way, that resulted in World War III or the zombie apocalypse for all she knew.

Soon after her arrival, light flashed like a dome over the town. When it had dissipated, they were in a new location—and a new time. Now, just like the other citizens, she was a woman out of place and out of time.

Flo’s tower of hair bobbled as she moved to a different cabinet. After not-so-gracefully shoving folders aside, she came out with a medium-sized binder with the year 1961 printed on the front. It threw Ella for a moment before she realized 1961 was the year she currently resided in, although Keystone had been cut off from the outside world for ten years, thereby making it a time capsule of the early 1950s.

She shook away the impending headache that hit anytime she tried to keep straight the time travel aspect of the town.

“I only intended to make a small inter-dimensional field, so to speak,” the professor continued. “Just large enough to encompass my house. At first, it worked. The field or bubble drew the enormous energy required to create the bridge from the fifth dimension itself and folded space-time.

“But then something went wrong. Horribly, horribly wrong. The bubble expanded. It kept growing, drawing more and more power from the fifth dimension. I shut off the machine, but it was of no use. The field had become independent of the device.

“Eventually, the bubble stabilized. From what I can tell, we’re stuck in an inter-dimensional, space-time feedback loop.”

How many people could say they slept through a herd of dinosaurs?

[. . .] the bubble could transfer to a flux capacitor in a DeLorean, and we could use the car to travel back to the future.

“Because we don’t know how returning to our own timelines will affect things.”

She let out an exasperated noise. “For God’s sake, Will, that’s why you go back to a few seconds before you enter Keystone for the first time. It’s Time Travel 101.”

“Do you know, most nights when I’m trying to fall asleep, I can still see the faces of my friends who died in the war?”

“What? I had no idea . . . do you mean WWI?”

He nodded. “I enlisted as soon as I turned eighteen. Served from 1917 to 1918.”

Ella had seen the doctor’s exercise outfit on a previous occasion, but it still made her choke with stifled laughter. With the blinding neon leotard, tights, belt, and headband, she could have stepped straight out of an Olivia Newton-John music video.

Pauline caught Ella staring and sighed. “I told you, I was driving home from my Jazzercise class when I passed through Keystone just before it jumped.”