What would you do if you had a way of being able to travel, a kind of conduit, if you will, between the past, present, and future? Imagine how much fun you could have. What would you do, and where would you go? Of course, in your initial excitement, would you consider the consequences of any jaunt that you made? Probably not. Maybe, if you sat and thought about it, perhaps caution would be a good byword. Nothing outlandish to begin with. A day forwards or backwards into one or the other realms?
Remember! Before you get carried away, you have to make sure that you can get back. It's all very well going adventuring, but what if you get stuck, with no way of returning to your present time? What then? And so, you maybe take the chance, one day forward or backwards, what could go wrong? It is only one day. In the grand scheme of things, you have gained an extra day in your life, or you have lost one. No major adjustments need to be made; you would be able to slip back into your present life with ease, or so you would hope.
Where would your first foray be? Into the future, the ability to know what tomorrow would bring and manipulate it to your advantage. Or into the past, reliving those joyous moments, meeting the people you knew you would never see again.
Pause for a moment and take a step back from the excitement and anticipation. The future, in a way, could perhaps be the scariest; the chance of discovering your own mortality, a month, a year, twenty years? Longer, shorter? Is it something you would want to know, something that with the knowledge of its coming, you would try and avoid? And for how long could you delay it, is it already foretold, just a futile exercise, your existence continually taken up with trying to cheat death?
The majority of people would maybe choose to visit the past because that is where our memories spring from. But, without giving it considerable thought, it is also the most dangerous destination to visit. You have to understand that you are an anomaly, an object that shouldn't be there. In both the past, present, and future, your presence sends out minute ripples, tiny waves which affect everything and everyone around you.
The ripples in the past, though, multiply faster, becoming larger; their influence is far-reaching. Every meeting, every interaction, is minutely changing something. The future has a way of absorbing and making right those small ripples you cause, as does the present. But it is those larger ripples in the past, the ones that seemed innocuous; that become the problem. You see, they are the ones that affect the present and the future, not only for you but for everyone with whom you come into contact.
Mark's father was an architect, and their home was a mixture of ancient and modern. Originally, it had been a country hall, but as with any building of that size and age, as times changed, its owners and occupants found the upkeep harder and harder to afford. Over the years it had first fallen into disrepair and then eventually, partial collapse. The new main building, which Mark called the "upside-down house" was modern; the lounge, reception rooms, kitchen, and ablutions were on the first floor; its large plate glass windows giving views across the rolling countryside and distant hills at the front, and across the huge gardens at the rear. His parent's bedroom and the guest rooms were on the ground floor along with another shower room and toilet.
A corridor, which his father called "the long gallery," led to a section of the old house which he had been able to salvage. This was where Mark's bedroom, along with that of his older sister, was located. On the ground floor were a large playroom, his father's study, and a storage room full of unused furniture, clothes, and other items the family didn't have the heart to discard. The first floor contained their two bedrooms plus a spare, as well as another bathroom, and toilet. Along the gallery and into the old section of the house, his father had retained the oak beams and the panelling which clad a lot of the bottom half of the walls.
Mark had no memory of what it looked like on the day they moved here, simply because he had not been born at the time. To help finance the rebuild, the family had sold their home and lived on-site in an old static caravan. All he knew about those times were what his parents told him and the many photographs they had taken. This was where he was born, in this new house, years after they had moved here. As he got older, his father explained that back in the day, well over a hundred years previously, it had probably belonged to a wealthy landowner or perhaps a titled family. But by the time he bought the land and the ruins, very little of the main house remained. The roof had started to collapse and then someone had started a fire in the main section. The hall itself was gutted, and after the fire was extinguished, it was just left to collapse in its own good time.
Slowly, the land and fields had been sold off to developers, new houses springing up all around as the place fell into further disrepair. All that was left was an acre or two of land and a pile of crumbling brickwork when his father had snapped it up; a vision in his head of the home he wanted to build for his still-to-be-born family.
Elizabeth had come along, first, her infant years spent in the caravan on the site until a section of the house was completed and which they could move into; and then as she approached her tenth birthday, he had appeared, a complete surprise to his parents, who had accepted that they may never have another child.
There were always going to be problems when one sibling was so much older than the next. Lizbet was ten when he was born, twenty by the time he reached his tenth birthday. They had nothing in common; she saw him as a nuisance, who took attention away from herself and then as an annoying child who was always making noise, getting into mischief, and was, as she put it when their parents were not around. 'A pain in the arse.'
For a young child growing up, the house and gardens were a magical playground. It was the place he had his adventures. He fought off pirates and Indians, battled enemy troops who tried to invade, and searched for buried treasure, though his dad wasn't impressed with him digging holes. The huge garden was where he and his friends would camp out in the summer; a tent on one of the rear lawns. The trees at the far end of the garden were where he would go as a hunter, foraging for food, and gorging himself on the fallen apples, pears, or blackberries. On the other side of the trees, a gate led down a slight incline to a stream at the bottom, Mark once or twice spotting the odd fish in there as the water meandered its way down towards the town.
Overall, it was the perfect place to grow up, as a toddler, as a child, and then as a teenager. Between the ages of eight and fourteen, the house and grounds were large enough for friends to stay over at weekends, or during summer breaks without disturbing the rest of the family. As he got older and when Lizbet left home, he and his mates could play their music as loud as they wanted and do all the things that teenagers are renowned for. When he eventually got his first girlfriend, they would go to his part of the house, allowing them privacy away from the prying eyes of his parents.
Mark's first discovery about his home came when he was aged eight. The long gallery with its smooth polished wooden floor was the ideal spot to practice on his skateboard because of the inclement weather outdoors. He had been scolded before about using it as such, but with his father at work and his mother doing housework, he took the chance to practice without anyone disturbing him.
Trundling along at speed, he'd tried to flip the board around, ready to go back in the opposite direction. But it had gotten away from him, shooting up and off at an angle before crashing into the dado rail and wooden panelling as he tumbled across the floor and scuffed his knees.
'Damn!' When he looked, it seemed a piece of panelling had come adrift; his father was going to go ape shit unless he could push it back into place and disguise the damage. It was only when he got closer that he realised that the panel was actually a door with a large dark space behind it. He examined the opening and the surrounding area, suddenly noticing that one of the carved flower stamens on the dado rail above seemed to be slightly depressed compared to the others.
