I’ve just finished the beta draft of “The Doorway to Extra Time,” my own contribution to my own anthology DOORWAYS TO EXTRA TIME (see what I did there?) forthcoming from Spencer Hill Press. It ran a bit long, but that’s why I have a co-editor. (Or maybe I should stick to my plan of letting the stories in the anthology be the length they should be). Regardless, here’s an excerpt:
“I know what you’re going to do,” the old woman said, “because I’ve done it.”
Jackson flinched from the sparkling deranger that threatened her. It was as yellowed with time as the crone who held it: twin chambers of glass cracked like the woman’s bared teeth, gas capsule as battered as her top hat, glass sights as dented as her spectracles.
“I—I have no idea what you mean,” Jackson said, voice quavering less from fear the gun would addle her tubes than from the fact her statement was ridiculous: the old woman had barred Jackson’s path just as she was about to step one hour into the past through the Riemann Gate.
The Gate was a thing of beauty, a four meter brass ring as fresh as the century, its Art Nouveau outer hull intricately filligreed, its elaborate Tiffany-style service windows hinting at the movement of the original escapement, eternally spinning within a ring of Tesla magnets.
The shimmering plane of its opening swam with possibilities, tiny fluctuations in the shape of space itself. When it was dark, the doorway sparkled like a sky of twinkling stars—but even though it was night, the view through the Riemann Gate was not dark.
Fading sunlight flickered through the Gate, filtering down through the glass roof of the Curie Center’s containment dome from the surface of Fresh Lake above—because, on the other side of the Gate, almost a full hour in the past, the sun had not yet set.
“The Doorway to Extra Time” is set in the universe of THE CLOCKWORK TIME MACHINE, forthcoming from Bell Bridge Books, and while The Machine doesn’t make an appearance, it does star Doctor Jackson Truthsayer, one of the characters of the related short story “Steampunk Fairy Chick” published earlier in the year in the UNCONVENTIONAL anthology also by Spencer Hill Press.
This was a fun story, though the stack of books you see in the picture is only the thinnest slice of the immense number of time travel, gravitation and wormhole books I read while doing it. Most of that reading ended up on the cutting room floor, or, sometimes, an immense amount of reading changed only one word of my writing. But it’s as accurate as I could make it.
Perhaps I’ll do The Science of the Doorway to Extra Time someday…
Anyway, it’s off to my loyal betas now … may they be insightful!
-the Centaur
