I found that letter with the others, behind the loose brick beside the fireplace in the living room at Longhaven. They prompted this book. I’ve spent years researching my son’s life, finding out what happened to him after we transited. I used a robotic excavator and was able to tunnel through the boulder and discovered the cave and the computer that stored his video files. I saw the same footage Harri and Elliot did; concealed motion-activated cameras captured the day they came to the cave. I was able to access Harri’s email journal, and the court and police records to provide me with enough information to try to do my son’s life justice. I’ve shifted through time as I’ve told this story, moving from past to future, through perspectives, to try to give some impression of what it must have been like to be my son, living and thinking in four dimensions with nothing in his life where it should have been.
Beth and I were marooned two hundred years in the future. Temporal refugees without a thing to our name. Or so I thought. Elliot left some money and the cottage in trust to an Elizabeth and David Asha, but we could never bring ourselves to live in it. So I maintain it as a museum of our lives and visit once a year to be reminded of his sacrifice. Beth comes with me to the Peak District, but she has never once accompanied me to Longhaven.
Too painful, I suppose.
When Harri didn’t come back, her colleagues thought she and Elliot had been murdered by Ben Elmys, a man recently released from prison and set on revenge. The police searched for him, but of course he was never found. None of them were, and rumours swirled about their disappearances, but everyone assumed Elliot and Harri were dead. Case closed. No loose ends for anyone to pull on. The secret safe. The secret of time.
I often think about the implications of what Elliot did, and have spent many years researching time. Is he a paradox? Some might say so, but they’d be wrong. We perceive time as a continuum, but block theory dictates it must be extant. All moments must exist and always have existed for other physical properties such as gravity or atomic bonds to be true. The block theory of time, that all moments exist at once, changes how we consider paradox. If moments are as real as rooms in a house, we can move between them, be active in them and affect physical reality without what we would typically consider to be causation. Cause and effect cease to matter if all we’re doing is travelling between spaces.
Our minds are bound by their limitations. Elliot’s wasn’t. He saw the universe differently. We imagine ourselves travelling from one moment to the next, but are we? Where is the past? Point to it. Where does it exist other than in our minds or the collective memory or some artificial record of history? And where is the future, other than in our anticipation? And the now? The now we experience is the new past, and as it drifts away, it becomes the distant past.
Time is an illusion our minds create to give us a sense of direction. Elliot knew that and invented a way to break free of our bonds. I’ve tried to tell this story before, to close friends. Given my profession, it’s dismissed as fiction, but even those who give it a degree of credence struggle to conceptualize time in this way, and when they find it difficult, I talk about stories and storytelling. A tale can be told from beginning to end, going neatly through the middle, or the author can chop and change, taking the reader through time as best suits the purpose of the story. In the real world most of us are like characters, destined to play out our lives in the chronology we’re given, but Elliot found a way to become something akin to an author, to rearrange events to suit him. I’m not sure my explanation helps, but it gives people a new way to think about time and ultimately it doesn’t matter what others think. What’s important is that Beth and I know the truth about our son.
And now you do too.
Beth and I had three more children. We named them Ellie, Ben, and Harri, after the people who made their lives possible. We have never told them about their older brother and all he did for us. They don’t know about the sacrifice that made their lives possible. I suppose they will learn the truth when they read this book.
Honour your brother in your acts and deeds, children. Hold him dear in your memories. Think of him when you look at your own children. What he did echoes through the ages in the good that you do, and all the good that is done by those who come from you.
His legacy is boundless.
I don’t like to think of my boy alone, for even though it seemed he had company for a while, he raised himself. He shaped his destiny. He made choices as an adult that forced a life upon him as a child. I don’t like to dwell on my boy alone, lost, afraid, hurting. Seeing the universe so differently must have been nothing but a source of torment.
I don’t like to linger on that. I like to picture him as a brave spirit. I prefer to think of the years he spent with Harri, living in the Elsewhere House, happily growing old together.
He died shortly after meeting Harri in the bookshop, at the age of eighty-four, in a bed and breakfast not many miles from Longhaven. As far as I can tell, it was two weeks after he wrote me the letter that contained his last poem. There was no notice of his death, just a note in the church record that an Elliot Asha had passed away at the Three Horseshoes Guest House. He was buried in the churchyard at St Leonard in Ipstones, next to the grave of Anna Cecilia, mentioned by Harri in her journal.
I’m proud he chose to be buried using his real name and when Beth and I visit his grave each year, we can just about make out the faint outline of the letters in the weathered stone. Anna Cecilia’s inscription is almost gone.
I haven’t much more to say. Beth is calling me. We came here as refugees, and what career options are available to a person with no assets and little talent beyond the ability to spin a yarn? Our skills as physicists were useless in our new time. We were like Victorian railway engineers dropped in the world of silicon chips. So she retrained as a historian and I became a writer. There is a steady demand for historical fiction and as a refugee of the time of war, espionage, sickness, and poverty, I can draw on a lot of personal experience that is alien to my contemporaries.
So I’ve written my stories, and Beth has taught, and together we have built a life here. It is a world of wonder and possibilities compared to the time we came from, and not a day passes we’re not grateful for the sacrifice our son made.
It took a long time for us to get over the loss of Elliot and to understand and accept what he’d done, but eventually we realized that if we didn’t learn to move on, we would have been torn apart by grief, and all his suffering would have been for nothing. So, to honour him, we have lived a good life together and raised a family. We have a house by the sea. It’s not an elsewhere house, but it’s our home, the place where we raised Elliot’s brother and sisters, and where they now visit with our grandchildren. Each time we see them, every photograph we look at, we cannot help but think of Elliot and the sacrifice he made. None of them, none of the blessings we have in our lives, would have been possible without him. We’re supposed to suffer for our children, but he took such pain for us and he bore it alone. It troubled me for a long time, and I know Beth struggled too. When we’d had three more children and the pain still hadn’t stopped, we realized we needed help to get through it. So we went to a therapist, telling him we’d lost our first son. One of the exercises he had us do was to write a short story about what we’d do if we could have had one more conversation with him.
Beth has kindly allowed me to share hers with you.