Chapter Seven

Back to the Scene of the Crime

Most of the morning, Elias had simply been lying in bed, buzzing with anxiety and waiting for an acceptable hour to wake his guide to this strange new place. He felt restless, excited…a little scared, yes. But there was so much he wanted to know. To explore.

Finally there was movement. Tyler flipped onto his side and groaned, clearly adjusting for comfort, but Elias decided he would take it as an invitation to start the day. He hopped from the bed and figured the least rude way to rouse his host would be to let in a little light, but when he went to pull the curtains aside, he was baffled by their strange design. Rather than one curtain on the left and another on the right to be parted down the middle, there was one wall of material with horizontal slats running all the way down.

He spotted a thin white cord hanging along the side and gave it a tug. As he’d suspected, the strange curtain rose. What he wasn’t counting on was it falling right back down as soon as he let go. He made another attempt, but with the same results. He tried again, and again, and again, but the damned thing wouldn’t stay put. He stopped trying only when he heard groggy laughter from the other side of the room.

Tyler rose and wordlessly took the cord from him, yanking it at an angle, and just like that, it stuck. The way he made it look so effortless, Elias felt equal parts incompetent and foolish.

“Did you sleep all right?” Tyler asked, reaching for his glasses on the nightstand.

“Mmm.” Elias gave a quick nod. He didn’t say yes, so technically, it was not a lie. Elias moved to reach for his clothes, which lay discarded on Tyler’s floor.

“Ahh—maybe not,” Tyler said, blinking away the sleep from his eyes.

“Pardon?”

“You might want to wear something else, ya know, blend in a little.” Tyler went to his wardrobe, and after riffling around, offered him a handful of garments. “Here.”

Elias looked down at the pieces. Gray trousers, a maroon jacket with a crest featuring a falcon perched on a stone wall covered in ivy and the words Briar Grove Academy emblazoned on the lapel, a white dress shirt, and some long, thin piece of fabric with a similar color scheme of grays, black, white, and maroon.

Elias frowned. “Come now, you must have something a little more exciting for me.” He peered back up into the wardrobe and spotted a garment with red and white stripes then pointed. “What about that?”

Tyler grinned, dimples deepening on either side of his lips. “I said blend in. Ironically enough, you’re not going to be able to do that very well in my famous Where’s Waldo sweater.”

Elias was silent. Tyler was speaking to him in gibberish again.

He sighed. “Sorry. Look, while we’re on campus, it’ll be easier to just make you look like any other student here.” He nodded to the clothes in Elias’s hands. “And that’s the official BGA uniform.”

Elias gave a reluctant nod and began to dress himself. The only thing he grabbed from his own clothing was the pocket watch, which he quickly shoved into the pocket of the blazer Tyler had given to him. As inconspicuous as it was, he decided that an object that could transport one through time and space should not be left in a pile of clothes on the bedroom floor. Luckily for Elias, he and Tyler were about the same size, as the clothing pieces all fit properly, for the most part. He had put on almost all the pieces of the uniform, save for the long bit of fabric. He wasn’t entirely sure what Tyler was expecting him to do with that. After Tyler finished dressing, he must have noted Elias’s confusion, because he held out a hand. Elias gave him the garment.

“You guys were all about cravats and bowties, right? This is sort of similar. It’s just called a tie.”

Tyler moved in close, wrapping the tie around his neck, and Elias felt a rush of blood through his entire body as his heart rate quickened. He did his best to keep his breathing pattern normal as Tyler fiddled with the length of fabric, looping it in and out until a knot had formed. He left it hanging for Elias to adjust on his own, though he would have been more than okay with him being the one to tighten it, closing the distance between them even less.

He stared at Tyler for a second longer than he had meant to and quickly covered it up with a question. “So what are we up to this fine day?”

Tyler led him out the door and said, “I figured we’d head over to the library.”

Elias let out a groan. “But I’ve already been there, seen that. Hell, I wouldn’t have even had to leave my home to see a library.”

“Well, you appeared there. It had to have been for a reason.”

They cut across the courtyard, and already, flocks of students were out and about, chatting and laughing and throwing balls and disks back and forth to one another. Elias yearned to join in their merriment—he wanted to know what they were talking about, he wanted to be in on their jokes and laugh right alongside them. Instead, he begrudgingly trotted along after Tyler, having to jog at times to keep up with Tyler’s determined strides. His curiosity was outweighed by the concern of being separated from one of the few people whose name he actually knew here.

When they arrived at the library, he noticed Tyler avoided eye contact with the pointy-nosed woman at the front desk as he strode through the aisles and toward the spot where they’d first encountered each other. He thought back on the night before, tried to recall the sensations, what it looked like, sounded like, felt like to be transported through time. It was all so hazy. It certainly hadn’t been painful or anything. Come to think of it, he really hadn’t had the wherewithal to know what he was experiencing. It all happened so fast that by the time he’d realized a change had even taken place, he was already plucked from his own world and miraculously in another. Standing, living, breathing, blinking, heart beating, chest rising and falling. Real. It was all real.

“Now what?” Elias said.

It seemed Tyler was wondering the same thing, though. The red-haired boy circled about the space, searching from the floor to the bookshelves, only to turn his gaze back down to the floor. Elias glanced up at the high ceilings with what he hoped appeared to be a thoughtful expression on his face. He knew he wasn’t going to find any clues or signs up there, especially considering the key to what they were looking for was already in Elias’s possession, but he figured he would humor the bloke by at least acting like he was inspecting something.

“Do you remember anything about the moment you showed up?”

Elias reached into the blazer pocket, pressing his fingers around the impossible device that had brought him here. “I had my eyes closed when I disappeared from my grandfather’s room. When I opened them I was here…in this library.”

Tyler pressed his lips together. It made it seem like the answer frustrated him, and Elias got the strong sense that Tyler didn’t quite believe him—as if he knew there was information that Elias was leaving out.

“What do you remember from my grand entrance?” Elias asked, quickly turning the tables.

Tyler took a few moments, rocking back and forth on his heels, but then his eyes widened in some silent epiphany. He rushed over to the table where he’d set down his bag. From it, he pulled out the strange silver device he had been holding the night before. “My camera!”

Elias knew what a camera was. They were fairly new back home and were used to take photographs. But this was unlike anything he knew of what a camera was. Tyler pulled out a compartment on the side and pressed a button on the device. Elias walked over to stand just beside him and looked over his arm. Tyler continued to fiddle with more buttons and when he pulled his hand away, Elias was at a loss for words.

The camera’s side compartment had a window, and on that window was a picture of the room before them—only it was moving! Elias watched the visual story as it unfolded before his eyes and realized the scene was that of his arrival the night before. Breathless, he looked up at Tyler, expecting him to share in his sense of amazement, but he was looking down at the tiny window with an expression of frustration once again, biting at his lip.

“This doesn’t show us anything,” Tyler finally said, pressing another button and freezing the moving picture by doing so.

It took Elias a moment before he felt he could even move his jaw, which had been hanging open, but when he could he cried, “Are you joking?!”

The woman at the front desk shot them a severe look from across the room. Elias continued at a lower volume but with the same amount of wonder and confusion. “Nothing? How can you say that showed us nothing? That was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen. You’ve captured a moment in time. That’s the closest thing to magic I’ve ever witnessed. Well, aside from traveling through space and time, of course.”

Tyler seemed to consider Elias’s words and, after he did, a playful smile wiped away the frustration on his face. “Yeah, I suppose you’re right.” He continued to smile dreamily but then switched back to a more serious tone. “But the camera footage doesn’t actually explain how or why you showed up where you did. There isn’t even a clue; you just…appear. Out of thin air, like some sort of ghost or something.”

Elias laughed. In a morbid sense, it was humorous—by all means he should be a ghost. If he’d passed through time normally rather than miraculously leaping past it, he would be in the ground right then. A corpse somewhere in England, rotting away.

He shook the thought and scanned the room once more. “Why are you so determined to piece this puzzle together? What’s your rush?”

Tyler blinked. “You don’t belong here. We need to find a way to send you back home, to your own time. Your family, your friends, they’re probably worried sick about you.”

Elias could tell that Tyler had not meant to be malicious, but there was a biting quality to the words. You don’t belong here. It was the same old tale that seemed to keep repeating in Elias’s life. He didn’t belong with his parents. He didn’t belong at Cambridge. He didn’t belong here… It seemed no matter where or when he went, the story was always the same. He certainly didn’t have any friends to be concerned over his disappearance. Little Samantha would likely fret over his sudden absence, but he thought on his last interaction with his parents and wondered if they would even care.

“My parents were about to send me away, as it were.” Elias hadn’t planned on being so open about his home life, but once the words started, they wouldn’t stop. “They probably see my disappearance as an unexpected gift. It will save them the trouble and the money of having to physically ship me off.”

He expected protest from Tyler, in an attempt to comfort. Words of assurance that it likely wasn’t the case and that his parents surely loved him and would do everything they could to find him. Even though this boy from the future knew nothing of him or his family, it was what one was expected to say in such circumstances.

Thankfully, Tyler didn’t rush to defend his parents. Instead, there was a look of empathy in his eyes.

“I’m sorry. I get it.”

Elias severely doubted that. “Oh, you do?”

“Well not your specific situation, obviously. I just…I know what it’s like to not be wanted. My dad married my stepmother out of loneliness, and she was with him only for the financial security. When he died a couple years ago, she couldn’t get rid of me fast enough. Sent me to a boarding school in another state. Now I’m not her problem anymore.”

They stood in silent understanding. Elias was from an entirely different world and yet here he was, able to connect with a boy so different from himself over such a similar pain…a similar sense of abandonment.

Anyone could have been there in that library when Elias had been transported. In an overwhelming moment of gratitude, he was glad that it was Tyler who found him.