The Time Traveller

Once word got around, students started attending Dr Wieland's classes like they were rock concerts. The best seats were tussled over a good hour in advance, and students from such widely varied faculties as Molecular Biology, Studio Art, Macro-Economics and Pre-Med started showing up in clusters and small herds. The classes had to be moved three times to larger and larger lecture halls until even the largest of the lecture halls the university had to offer were packed to the rafters. 

It was standing room only by the time Dr Wieland arrived, took up his place at the front of the teaming eager audience and smiled.

He had no lecture notes. No overhead projector. No charts. No thick dossiers pulled from a beaten-up leather satchel. He carried no satchel. He never picked up a stick of chalk. He never asked questions. He never called on anyone. He simply stood in front of his students, and spoke.

You had to be there. 

No second-hand told tales did Dr Wieland justice. No descriptions of his odd, black cloak that looked like it had been stuffed around the shoulders with a thousand flattened cotton-balls or the bizarre black cap that sat on his head like a sleeping blackbird, or his wiry, grey beard sculpted to a sharp point an inch or two below his chin, or the implacability of his accent, could every really come close to actually witnessing him in action. Perhaps that's why it took his university colleagues so long to notice, so long to become worried about, his ever-increasing popularity.

"An alchemist can you believe it?," snorted Dr Thorpe in the over-heated stuffy history faculty lounge one morning after his first, serendipitous, attendance of a Wieland lecture, "the man honestly gives his lectures got up like a bloody 16th century alchemist. And the worst part – the students don't recognise that's what they're seeing. They think he's just original."

"He's not one of those historical re-enactment people, is he?" asked Dr Colburn, unable to keep the nervousness out of this voice.

"Let's hope not," said Dr Laventon, sucking on his pipe. "Or we'll all be asphyxiated by the fumes from the DIY athanor he'll have built from a kit in his office. You know what such people are like, Colburn."

That was a low jab. Dr Colburn had spent one of the most horrific weekends of his life at an English Civil War re-enactment event and was still plagued by nightmares featuring screeching camp followers, mould-speckled bread, black pudding and drunken (acting?) Cromwellian pikemen. And Laventon knew it.

"He seems normal enough when you talk to him," piped in Dr Keegan, from her place by the hearth where she sat crocheting under a print of the battle of Waterloo, "perhaps he's just attempting to engage the students' imagination and thereby their attention. Laudable, when you think about it." No one answered. Dr Keegan was the only woman in the faculty, and as such could be safely ignored.

"What was Wieland lecturing on exactly?," asked Dr Hemple, not one to give into colleague bashing. That was, unless blood was already flowing and bodies were starting to litter the floor.

"The beginnings of the Thirty Years War. Specifically, the Prague Defenestrations and their impact on Imperial and Bohemian politics," answered Thorpe with a raised eyebrow. "His specialty, as I understand it, Bohemian politics. But I wouldn't call it a lecture as such, it was more a....more a....dramatic monologue."

"A what?" asked Laventon through clenched teeth as he attempted to relight his pipe.

"Dramatic monologue, Douglas. You must have heard the term before, I'm sure."

"You mean he acted it? Gave an eye-witness account, as it were?" offered Hemple, ever the helpful boy scout.

"Exactly, and rather more like he was there at the time. His descriptions of the tumult in the castle, the outbreak of panic in the streets and the general aftermath complete with scenes of corpses in the snow and fleeing, starving nuns was so life-like I'm sure he got it straight out of a Hollywood movie. Not hard, historic fact, of course. More like those wispy, emotional day-dreams one expects from the likes of historic novelists."

"Pure sensationalism, then."

"Peppered now and then with a few researchable facts of dubious interest, yes."

"Such as?"

"Ah, hm, like how much a half-hour in the bathhouses cost and what exactly you got for your money." (Here Thorpe shot a quick glance at Dr Keegan.)

"No wonder they're all flocking to hear him," said Colburn with genuine indignation, "never underestimate humanity's interest in muck and filth."

"What has he published recently, anybody know?" asked Laventon. All eyes turned towards Dr Mitchell, the head of the department, who was sitting in one of the overstuffed brown leather chairs by the window, his feet propped up on a convenient footrest. 

And was obviously, deeply and profoundly, asleep. 

After a slight, embarrassed pause, Dr Hemple cleared his throat and said, "If that's the case, then it's worse than we thought, gentlemen, he's..."

"And lady."

". . .then it's worse than we thought. He's not a re-enactment nutter; he's an actor."

The collective members of the history faculty looked helplessly at each other as a collective shiver ran down their spines.

"We'll be the laughing stock of the university," said Hemple.

"God help us," said Colburn.

"That's the end of the department, then," said Thorpe.

"I think we should withhold judgement for now," said Keegan.

"Anybody for a drink?" asked Laventon.