Living Dreams

Scattered

I stood before the door. My bones were rigid as I forced my arm up to knock on the wood.

“Come in, come in.” The old man’s gravelly voice wafted through the door.

I entered his chamber. It was completely dark except for the streams of light trailing from his work bench. He liked to work in the dark but whether it was because he enjoyed scaring visitors away or if it helped with his ideas, I hadn’t a clue.

He was my tutor, Dr. Kynaston Richards, best in all of Europe. He was mad but made all the sense in the world if you just listened. The basement of the manor house my father had given me was the old man’s underworld, his realm. I drifted down there when I had the chance and had worked up the nerve to disturb his misunderstood brilliance.

He always greeted me with a smile and a lesson. Today proved to be no different. “Would you rather be buried in a coffin that is longer than it is wide or one that is wider than it is long?”

“Longer, I suppose, sir.”

“Then don’t be the arrogant fool who eats more than his fair share.”

“Yes, sir.” I paused and glanced down at his moving hands. He was tinkering while looking at me with narrowed eyes. His hands with those deformed stubby fingers were always moving, fidgeting even if there was nothing with which to play. “What are you making?”

“The future,” he murmured humbly. That was always the answer.

I chuckled. “No, but what does it do?”

He held it up to the gaslight and studied it, his big dark eyes narrowing and widening like a lens of a camera. He did not speak until the image of those flaps of metal screwed together came into focus. “It does nothing. It sits in my hand. It is an inanimate object. Why are you asking stupid questions, Nick? I have yet to breathe any life into it.”

He was stubborn. “Do you know what it’s going to do, sir?”

“Yes.”

I rolled my eyes, though I found him quite humorous. “What? Do you not wish to tell me?”

He placed the little machine onto the table, still staring at it intently. “It does nothing now but break and squeal. It will do something amazing one day . . . just like you.”

I narrowed my eyes on him.

He glanced up at me and his eyes moved to focus. The old man had become a machine himself. “Do you know what you are going to do twenty years from now?” He looked up in thought. “What will the year be? 1887?”

I thought a moment. “I suppose I’ll be married with kids. I’ll inherit some of my father’s land and have a title of some sort.”

He chuckled lightly to himself. “You think Britain will mourn the death of a great man like your father by the time you are thirty-six years old?”

I felt no pain or fear at the thought of such inevitability. “Just a guess. I would not mind being wrong.”

He checked on his little machine then looked back at me. “I think you have a different path.”

“And what might that be?” I got defensive. “Not some crazy inventor like you?”

“Thanks for the compliment!” I couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not. “No, but . . . when you place a curious mind in a new place, as in your manor house, its curious legs tend to take them to places where curious hands search for things.”

I squared up to him. “What did you find, Dr. Richards?”

“Cannabis,” he said dismissively, “and some stories.”