The Time Traveler

The Prodigal Sister

A voice said, "Hello?"

I had fallen asleep on the cot and sat up fearing that I had missed the opening of the tomb. I blinked at it a moment and saw that it was still closed.

"Hello? Damian? Is that you?"

I turned and saw Connie standing in the doorway. She was still darkly beautiful. Her hair was long and black along her shoulders without a streak of gray. She had remained thin and supple.

"Connie?"

I pushed myself off the cot and went to her. We embraced and I held her for a time. At long last, my sister had come home.

Why she had abandoned us years ago had never been made clear to me. I remember mother telling me in tears after I came home from school one afternoon, only a few weeks after Connie and I had snuck down into the basement chamber containing the tomb, that she'd run away. She had not even left a note. I suspected even then that the stone tomb had something to do with her disappearance.

"What are you doing down here?" she asked, finally stepping away from me.

I nodded to the tomb and said, "Waiting for it to open."

With a nod of her own, she said, "It's not time yet. Tomorrow."

We went upstairs and I brewed a pot of coffee. With steam rising up from the cups before us on the kitchen table, I asked Connie why she'd so suddenly left home all those years ago only to come home now.

After a sip of coffee, she explained, "After our little adventure that Saturday afternoon, I snuck down to the room every chance I got. That tomb, and the living creature I knew lay within it, kept drawing me down there. I became obsessed with it."

After a sigh, she continued, "I told you that day we went down there that I'd felt something when I touched it. A living presence within it. A soul. The soul of a man, a profoundly lonely man. By some magic I do not understand, the man living in the tomb had somehow reached out and communicated with me. And so I kept going down there again and again and again over the next weeks to renew that fusion of mind to mind and soul to soul.

"And then, one afternoon, Dad caught me. At first, he flew into a rage and demanded to know what I was doing down there. He seemed as possessive about that ugly tomb as I had become. But soon, he settled down and accepted that I had discovered the secret of the tomb, and there was no use denying what it was any longer.

"So, he told me everything. About the time traveler and his long journey through time. He also told me that I would have to wait another twenty-three years to meet him. Twenty-three years! That was too much for me. I couldn't wait that long. I suddenly realized I couldn't go on living in this house with that tomb in the cellar and the being within it calling out to me. I would go stark, raving mad!

"So I decided that it would be best for me to leave. Go someplace and forget the tomb and start a new life." She sighed and said, "Of course, I wasn't able to forget, though God knows, I tried. In the years after I ran away, I married two decent men, but in the end, I was always distracted by the mystery of the tomb and the being sleeping within it. And so, both marriages were doomed." She fell silent and stared into her lap. Finally, she looked up at me and said, "I always knew, no matter what, that I would be drawn back to meet him on the day he awakens."

"It's supposed to open day after tomorrow," I said.

"Yes, I know," she said. "That's why I've come back."

I told her about my own failed life, my divorce, my unremarkable career. I shrugged and said, "Perhaps, I sensed it would always come to this. Waiting for the tomb to open. My life's true purpose, inherited from father and our ancestors before him."

Connie laughed and said, "Yes, our family curse."

There was nothing left to say. I helped carry her lone suitcase upstairs to one of the guest bedrooms. As she sat on the edge of the bed looking thin and worn, I asked if she truly believed that there was a man inside the tomb. A time traveler.

"Why, of course," she said with a wan smile. "I am in love with him."