The Time Traveler

A Deathbed Revelation

I was on a business trip out of town when my father's doctor reached my cell with the grim news that he'd suffered another stroke and was near death. I booked the next available flight and arrived at the hospital around midnight.

"How's he doing?" I asked the plump RN at the nurse's station.

She gave a sad smile and said, "Not so good. He's been asking for you. Room 602."

She pointed down a hall to my right and I hurried to his room. At his bedside, I was surprised to find him awake, his eyes wide open. Seeing me, he smiled and whispered, "Damie."

"Hi, Dad." I kissed his forehead. He was cold and pale as the sheet covering him.

"I must tell you something before I die, Damie," he whispered. "Something I should have told you long ago." After a swallow, he continued, "The stone tomb in the cellar - what it is, Damie, is a time machine."

"Dad, what? You should rest."

"No, listen to me, Damie," he went on. "What I tell you is true. The time machine – it's not like the kind in science fiction. It is a vessel for transporting a person through time. And in the tomb sleeps a time traveler."

"Dad, please rest."

But he kept talking. "You see, Damie, inside the tomb is a gel, a magical gel that prevents aging. How - I don't understand. And it knows to awaken the time traveler every seventy-three years. Every seventy-three years, the length of a generation. The tomb, Damie, it was invented ten thousand years ago by a people more advanced than us. That civilization was called, Atlantis."

I gazed down at him, not knowing what to say. Surely, this bizarre claim must be a symptom of the stroke.

"There is more, Damie," he went on. "We are descended from those people. And like so many others in our family tree the past ten thousand years, I inherited the duty of becoming caretaker for the tomb and the time traveler once he awakens from his long sleep. That is to occur, Damie, next year. May the First. Six months from now." My father's eyes filled with tears. "For seventy-three years I have waited to perform that duty. But the Almighty has not granted me enough time."

He suddenly reached out, grasped my wrist and said, "That duty, Damie, now falls to you."

For ninety years, the stone tomb had lain against the far wall of a locked chamber in the dank cellar of our family's sprawling five-bedroom country home. After immigrating to America from Macedonia in 1914, it took my grandfather three years to build the house in a rural hamlet about forty miles southeast of Buffalo.

When the house was completed in 1917, he sent for my grandmother and their four young children, and they took a steamship on a three-week journey across the Atlantic Ocean to join him. Shipped with them was the stone tomb.

My father was born in 1920, after the family had come to America and settled into the country home. He remained there after his older brothers and sisters left home and took care of his parents as they grew old and sick. My grandmother died in 1947, three years after my grandfather had passed, and then, my father inherited the house.

"At least," my father continued, "I met him, Damie, the time traveler. Seventy-two years ago, in 1931. I was eleven. He had just awakened from his sleep. Your grandfather took me downstairs into the vault which only the day before had been a place forbidden to me. But that morning, in the dim light of that secret room, I finally saw it – the tomb. And it was open. The lid was up.

"And then, Damie, I gazed upon the time traveler himself. He was a shadow hunched over on a rocking chair in a dark corner of the room with one of your grandma's knitted shawls draped over him. He looked up at me with kind blue eyes that sparkled even in the dim light of the room. His hair was a thick wave, and his jaw was square and handsome. And his skin, Damie, was bronze. Bronze! Looking at him, I was reminded of a Greek warrior from the old epics, Hector or Achilles. Your grandpa introduced me to him, and in a strange voice, the time traveler told me that his name was Romal.

"He had last awakened in 1858, in Macedonia, and had stayed awake only three days. This time, he stayed a week, and I saw him every day. I still feel sadness in my heart remembering the morning he reentered the tomb and was sucked up into the purplish gel. Then, the stone lid slowly lowered, shutting him off from us for another lifetime.

"Before stepping into the tomb that day," my father continued, "the time traveler patted me on the head and told me that when he next awakened, I'd be an old man. He hoped that I'd tell him that I'd led a good and happy life.

"So you must promise me, Damie," my father whispered with some urgency, "that you will be there when the vessel opens, on the first of May. The time traveler will be weak after his long sleep and will need your help. He will also need you to guide his way in this age."

Deciding to humor a dying man's last wish, I said, "I promise, father. I'll be there."

Having revealed the secret of the stone tomb at long last, my father closed his eyes and fell asleep.