I have written several stories about a timestopper -- someone with the unnatural ability to stop time. This is the story of how this man came to be a timestopper, how he learnt about his power and what he did with it. It is a bit rude in parts - actually quite rude (well chapters 3-26 anyway).
Chapter 1 - Starting time
Prosaic: it was not a radioactive spider - at least I never saw it; my parents were not brutally gunned down leaving me scarred and determined - they are both still living a quiet life in a retirement home in Beaconsfield; I did not fall from the sky, the child of a planet with a red sun -- 'greetings Earthmen I come from Croydon'; I did not even find an old knarled stick or old bone and tap or twist it - I do not think I have found so much as a sixpence that was not mine; I am not some great inventor with a heart problem - be fair, I did not even get Physics GCSE.
How then did I come to be a super hero?
Super, yes: hero, well perhaps not so much the hero - though I did try. I did, I really did.
Accidental: it was certainly not of my own making. I did not set out to learn how to start time. Ha! That had you. You were thinking what fun it would be to stop time but let me assure you the greater pleasure is being able to start time... when it has stopped. And stopped it had for me.
Dramatic: I give it that. There was thunder and lightning, blackness and light, howling wind and driving rain. Great dark clouds swirling high above the darkened lonely heath as I trudged solitary, a mere speck in the immensity of that lonely place to my appointment with time.
Of course I should not have gone but you know what young love is; I would not have walked had I possessed a car then; could have avoided the anguish of the solitary walk and what came after. She was not at home when I got there; had gone out with someone who did have a car; did I wish to leave a message? No.
It was a lonely walk back to town and the railway, not that I wanted anyone with me just then, not when I was feeling so utterly miserable. She was out with him! Him, yes him! The idea of them together, laughing, holding hands, even... no, it was all too awful. And as I walked the sky darkened, yes, growing as black as my mood if you like, and the wind began to rise. Was that a portent? Was it a sign of great things? No, I think it was the weather.
Now when I say a darkened lonely heath you are, most likely, thinking of Macbeth and the Three Witches: 'How far is't call'd to Forres? What are these so wither'd and so wild in their attire.'
Probably, though, the aged hags would not have recognised the neatly mown grass, the little flags and oddly shaped patches of sand as a heath but that was what it had once been and a heath it still nominally remained, crossed by a lonely road albeit now metalled by the district council. Deserted certainly - there were no golfers there that evening: not with a sky like that. They were not stupid. A warm Nineteenth and the important knowledge that the last place you want to be in a thunderstorm is on a golf course (OK, fair enough, or on a mountain top, or on the roof of a very tall building or... but you know what I mean).
I should have taken more notice of the gathering storm, should not have been caught like that, should have accepted the kindly offered lift from a stranger in a car, but caught I was. Caught by the rain, caught by the wind and, coming to my senses, caught by the lightning as, rather too late, I realised for a split second that a very strange pressure was building and knew with a surprising clarity of thought that static electricity, truly millions of volts, was building to use me as a conduit from the sky to Earth and that the Earth was reaching through me to the sky. You can imagine the thought which went through my head - 'oh, that's really such a deuced shame' or, at least, sort of words to that effect...
It was, suddenly, very, very quiet; there was no great thunderclap, no fizz of sparking electricity like Franklin and his kite borne key, no explosion of me changing from man to over-cooked kebab, no nothing - just a remarkable and immediate lack of sound. There was not even the sound of rain falling - yet rain was falling because as I moved it felt wet on my face.
Perhaps, I reasoned, I had been deafened by the lightning strike even if, or so it appeared, it had singularly failed to hurt me in any other way. I could not feel anything wrong with me as my hands roamed over my apparently uncrispy body. It was just at about that moment I noticed something particularly curious - the rain was not actually falling. It was in the air: it just was not moving. Nothing was moving. The wind, which seconds before had been blowing the branches of the trees this way and that, was not even moving so much as a leaf. A car's headlights in the distance were not getting any closer. Nothing but me was moving.
