Stout used to own the Garden Lounge where the time-traveling jukebox sat. He sold the Garden to live with his love, Jenny.

Now Jenny’s cancer diagnosis gives her only five months to live.

Bonnie and Duster, the original owners of the jukebox, will not stand for that diagnosis.

A Thunder Mountain story of love and death and living?

 

 

 

THE CAVERN

A Thunder Mountain Story

 

 

ONE

 

 

Richard Cone sat at the kitchen counter in the huge underground cavern below the Historical Research Institute.

Outside, the summer heat had hit close to one hundred, but the cavern was cool and comfortable.

Dawn Edwards had just fixed herself and Bonnie Kendal some soup and a ham sandwich for lunch when Richard had come wandering in. He looked like he had lost something and even though Dawn didn’t know Richard very well, she had always seen him with a smile on his face.

Not today. He looked every bit of seventy years old and he walked like an old man instead of the spry bartender who owned the Garden Lounge, a small local bar on the outskirts of Boise.

She had offered to make him some lunch and he had nodded and thanked her, than sat down at the counter.

Bonnie looked at Dawn with a raised eyebrow. Something was very, very wrong.

Around them the huge cavern was empty except for the three of them at the kitchen area counter.

The cavern was mostly a central location for all alternate time travelers, with living room furniture in various groups in front of a huge fireplace, a long kitchen counter, a giant kitchen large enough for five people to work behind the counter, and large restrooms and showers tucked off to one side.

Travelers using the Institute time travel sort of gathered in this area when not either in their apartments sleeping, doing research or writing in their offices, or back in time for a short trip.

In 2025, since there were so few time travelers, the room got very little traffic and was way overbuilt, but hundreds of years in the future Dawn knew this room had people in it all the time.

Actually, Richard was from a hundred years in the future and would need to return and reset at some point, since he was aging so much. He had been living in this timeline for over forty years now, but in 2120, when he was from, he will have only aged two minutes and fifteen seconds.

That allowed all time travelers to live thousands of years.

Richard had come back to this time period on the request of Bonnie and Duster to help out with an experiment in music penetrating time. They had built a jukebox to test theories on sound cutting through time and Richard had put the jukebox into the Garden Lounge, owned by a wonderful and kind man by the name of Radley Stout.

And Richard had then spent years being a regular customer in the bar, monitoring the use of the jukebox.

Dawn really, really liked Stout and his wife Jenny. Two of the nicest people on the planet.

Richard now owned the Garden Lounge after buying it from Stout and loved it. Every Christmas Eve a bunch of them from the Institute went in to have drinks with the wonderful regulars there who knew about time travel but really didn’t know about the Institute or seem to care.

And every year they toasted the jukebox and all the lives it saved, even though it no longer worked. No one but Stout and Jenny and Richard knew the jukebox that could take people back to their memories had been removed and replaced by a duplicate that was just a regular machine.

But everyone who was a Christmas Eve regular had been affected by the time travel aspects of the original jukebox, so they all toasted it every year in memory.

Stout and Jenny knew about the Institute and Richard. They had traced the jukebox back to here when it stopped working five years earlier. But they were not travelers, even though at one point Bonnie and Duster had offered to have them travel back in time.

They both had said they were very happy right where they were at. They had all their friends at the Garden Lounge here in Boise and her family with her first husband in the Bay Area.

Richard and Stout and Jenny seldom stopped by the Institute or the big cavern. In fact, in the last two years, Dawn couldn’t remember even hearing that they had come to the Institute.

And now Richard showed up, looking very down and sad.

And alone.

Dawn put the chicken soup and ham sandwich in front of him, then took her plate from beside Bonnie and moved it to the back counter so she could see Richard and Bonnie and it would be easier to talk.

“So,” she said, “what’s happened?”

Richard just shook his head. “Jenny’s got cancer.”

“Shit,” Bonnie said. “How bad?”

“Bad,” Richard said. “They just found out yesterday and told me today.”

Dawn felt like she had been punched. Death and dying of those they got to know in the past was a normal course of events. It never made it easier. Never.

Richard just shook his head and stared at his food. Then he said simply, “I’ve lived almost four thousand years in various timelines and I would trade all of that to keep Jenny alive.”

Dawn knew the feeling exactly.