The Clay Lion Read online

  Amalie Jahn

  THE CLAY LION

  A NOVEL

  Copyright © 2013 by Amalie Jahn

  License Notes

  This e-book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This e-book may not be resold or given away to other people.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any informational storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Kindle Edition

  A BERMLORD E-book

  First Edition

  Typeset in Garamond

  Cover art by Amalie Jahn

  To Molly and Brody-

  A sister and brother whose love for one another was my inspiration.

  May you always remember to cherish your time together.

  PROLOGUE

  I heard it through the wall from the other room. It was faint at first, but then came on a little stronger. There was a moment when I was sure that I was imagining it. Hoping. Praying. But then I heard it again. The low cough that always came. Always.

  I resisted the urge to go to him, but my feet were moving before I could stop myself. I paused at the door to the hallway, waiting. Listening. The world was imploding around me for the third time, and more than ever before, the full ramification of what the cough signified weighed heavily upon me. I knew it was over. It was the end of the dream. For all of us.

  I padded down the hall quietly and stood at his open door. He was there, as he often was, lounging on the bed reading nonfiction. Probably historical in nature. Perhaps for his world history class. He was a voracious reader. That fact had never changed. I studied his face, with his cheeks that were clearly not chiseled, but slim. He was chewing at his bottom lip, not out of nervous habit but out of comfort. He did not know I was watching him, which made the moment all the more special, until the cat meowing at my feet alerted him to my presence.

  “Whatcha’ doin’?” he asked, without looking up from his book.

  “Nothing,” I replied, inching into the room, “What are you reading?

  “About the fall of the Roman Empire.” He looked up and saw me. Really saw me looking at him, and like always, he could see right through to the core of my soul.

  “What?” he admonished. “What is it?”

  Oh Brother! I wanted to scream. I am about to lose you again! Only this time even the hope of you is lost and I can’t begin to explain it to you!

  I averted my eyes quickly and climbed on the bed with him.

  We sat there, side-by-side, heads resting on the headboard, looking ahead, not at each other. He was so close I could feel his warmth. Time passed. Several minutes in fact. He finally accepted that I was not going to willingly share what was bothering me, and so, knowing me as he did, he tried another tactic.

  “Do you remember when we were little? When I would get up early, before Mom and Dad would let us wake them? I would come to your room instead. You would let me climb under the covers with you so I would be warm and you would read your books to me. What were those ones we read over and over a million times? The Adventure of Doodle Bear? Doodle Bunny? Doodle…”

  “Doodle Beetle,” I answered quietly.

  “Yeah! The Adventures of Doodle Beetle! I loved those books! I wonder if we still have them around somewhere?” He looked at me again, gauging whether or not I was ready to talk.

  I smiled at him. Not because of our circumstances, but because of the shared memory. There had been quite a few during the course of my second trip. Not as many as the time before, but enough that I was able to keep my purpose under wraps.

  The first time I had returned to him I had almost given myself away on more than one occasion. I was horrible at remembering that some things would be different. That there was no way that it could all be the same. One small decision could change everything. I knew that all too well. Over the months, I had made the mistake of mentioning shared experiences from our past a number of times. There were several instances when I was forced to act aloof when he no longer shared my memory. I had to pretend that I had dreamt it or that perhaps the event had happened with someone else. But I had gotten better. I rarely talked about the past, unless he brought it up first. For this reason, the moment was sacred.

  He coughed. Once. Twice. Three times.

  “Must be catching a cold!” he said, laughing. “Probably shouldn’t sit too close! And we better not tell Mom… she’ll quarantine us!” He winked at me.

  “Must be,” I replied, scooting over out of pretense, not out of fear of some unknown virus. I knew he had nothing I could catch.

  “You think Mom has any cough drops in her bathroom?” he wondered aloud as he swung his long legs off the bed. He pulled himself up, crossed the room in two strides and was out the door. The moment was gone. Forever.

  I returned to my room and sat at the desk, not knowing what to do. I stared out the window into the forest just beyond the edge of our yard. The trees were beginning to bud. Tiny patterns of pink and gold played in the barren branches. New life.

  Trees are amazing, as is so much of nature. They know when it is time. Time to grow. Time to sprout new buds. Time to lose their leaves and go dormant for the winter. It all has to do with the amount of daylight that the leaves receive on any given day. During the summer, the sun shines on the leaves for 15 hours a day, giving the chlorophyll in the leaves plenty of sunlight to produce the glucose the tree needs to survive. But by autumn, the sunlight the leaves receive is down by several hours a day, causing a chemical reaction which forces each leaf to close the trap door at the base of its stem that connects it to the branch. Once the trap door is shut, glucose cannot exit the leaf and water cannot enter. The green chlorophyll dies off and the true beauty of the leaf is momentarily revealed before the leaf breaks from the branch, falls to the ground, and dies.

  As it was for the leaf, so it would be for my brother. His time was coming yet again. I had been almost positive that whatever needed to change to reset the outcome had surely taken place, but if the cough was any indication, that was not the case. In time, my brother would die. I had failed to stop the inevitable. The only question now was whether I would have the courage to stay and watch it happen again.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The first time Branson died, the “original” time, as I would come to refer to it, I almost died with him. Not literally, but figuratively. My soul broke into a thousand tiny pieces that I did not think I would ever be able to put back together well enough to sustain a normal existence. Months went by. I moved in and out of my foggy reality. One that did not include my beloved brother.

  Slowly, over the course of many months, I pulled myself out of the pit that I was in. I grew obsessed with the idea that I was not living the life that was set for my soul. Clearly, something was wrong with my timeline. I felt that perhaps Branson’s death was caused by something that I could fix. I set about to rectify it.

  After months of gentle persuading and outright begging, I convinced my parents to let me use my trip. They were not easily convinced, knowing that once you used your trip voucher, you could never travel again. Unless of course another voucher was freely given to you, which rarely happened. And so I began the laborious process of petitioning the federal government to use my trip with the hope of saving my brother’s life.

  The paperwork I was forced to fill out seemed endless. And for good reason, I supposed. When the ability to time travel was discovered, it was at first quite expensive and reserved only for scientists and those who could afford its hefty price tag. There were a handful who served as pioneers, courageously sending their consciousness back into their own bodies within their own lives to reco
rd how small changes would affect the outcomes of their personal timelines. Unfortunately, as with all technology, as the science behind the travel became easier to replicate and cheaper to create, more and more people were able to gain access to the equipment that would allow them to travel back into their own lives. But with growing numbers of voyagers came larger and larger problems.

  One of the best-documented problems involved what came to be known as the “snowball effect.” In essence, when early travelers returned to their lives at previous points in history, researchers assumed that since the past had already happened that they would be able to simply relive the same paths step-by-step. They quickly found that it was impossible to do. Initially, timelines seemed unaffected by very small changes in day-to-day activities. However, after travelers began returning to the past repeatedly and for longer and longer periods of time, it appeared that those infinitesimally small changes began to accumulate into what would become more noticeable changes.

  For example, one of the first women to travel, Dr. Ronda Smallson, chose to relive her honeymoon dozens of times. Each time, she tried to replicate the exact same chain of events that was documented via microscopic digital surveillance. Over the course of the first several trips, she made only slight variations of her speech and activities and it appeared that the changes caused no significant shift in her timeline. The trip ended in the same way and researchers agreed that successful time travel looked promising. Dr. Smallson ended up reliving her honeymoon 64 times in all, but by the final trip, so much had inadvertently changed along the way that she and her husband returned home on separate flights, by choice. When she arrived back to present day after the 64th trip, she found that she was without her wedding band and that she had been divorced for twelve years.

  Despite the setbacks, scientists continued traveling back in time and eventually the general population began taking voyages as well, although the scientific community advised against it. It was at that point that the real dangers became apparent. As more and more people were traveling back to relive wonderful moments in their lives, one can imagine that eventually there would come a time when some of those infinitesimally small changes would affect, not only the traveler’s life, but also the lives of innocent bystanders. Inadvertently, travelers were changing the futures of the people around them without even knowing they were doing it. They would return to the present only to find that people who were once a part of their lives were no longer there. Different career paths were chosen. Loves were lost. Children disappeared. It was a dark period in the history of time travel.

  Perhaps the most horrendous of the traveling effects involved retribution. Once there were enough travelers that people were changing timelines outside their own, it was inevitable that those affected would eventually realize that their lives were changed because of another person’s voyage. Some began to go back in time in an attempt to prevent the former traveler from affecting their timeline. Many times these voyages ended in brutality. Sometimes murder.

  The government was eventually forced to step in, as generations of people were in danger of having their lives, and more dangerously, other people’s lives, irreparably destroyed. The problems of time travel were well documented, but there seemed to be a part of human nature that assumed that bad things only happened to other people.

  When the government became involved, politicians fought bitterly about the crisis. Split down party lines, there were those who believed that our ability to time travel was just another evolution of our species that should be allowed to play out accordingly. Others believed that the practice should be obliterated and never attempted by humankind again. An agreement was reached somewhere in the middle.

  Beginning with the third generation after the discovery, new laws were put into effect limiting the number of traveling trips each individual could take in a lifetime. At birth, all citizens, along with their identification tagging, were coded with one trip voucher. The trip could be used at any point during a lifetime after the age of 18, but was good for just one trip. The duration of the trip could not exceed six months. Classes were required with mandatory attendance three times a week for two months before the trip. In addition, the paperwork was extensive. The decision to time travel was taken quite seriously by most people.

  The final hours before the voyage were filled with government propaganda that attempted to convince travelers to change their minds. The last papers to be signed waived your rights to sue the government should something go wrong. They also informed you that there was always the possibility that the past you were hoping to return to would not exist as it did when it was first lived, having been changed by someone else’s voyage since that time. Finally, and most importantly, you were forced to certify that every attempt would be made to ensure nothing was changed in your timeline during the trip.

  I signed the final affidavit with my fingers crossed behind my back.

  CHAPTER TWO

  My brother and I shared a bond that was uniquely ours. I do not know how my parents fostered it or whether anything they did or did not do ever had any effect on our relationship. We led a secluded childhood. We had friends at school outside of one another, but at home, it was just the two of us. Our home was isolated from the neighborhoods and subdivisions where other children would cross invisible property lines into one another’s yards to play hide and seek and football. Branson and I were always just outside of most parents’ acceptable range of travel for a child on a bike, and therefore we spent most of our time playing together, just the two of us.

  My best friend in elementary school had a little brother the same age as Branson whom she never spoke to, much less played with. She could not understand how I could stand to be around an annoying little brother. I could not understand how she could ignore such a fun kid. Eventually our friendship faded away.

  I will never forget the day my mother took Branson to the doctor the first time about the cough. Like all children, we had both dealt with our share of infectious diseases. We had weathered influenza, strep throat, and pink eye… the usual suspects in the list of childhood illnesses. We always hated that our mother would separate us into our respective rooms in an attempt to keep one from infecting the other. It was rarely a successful endeavor. Whoever was quarantined in their room would set up a makeshift bed by the door while the other would make a nest of games and toys in the hallway just outside the infirmary. We would play cards together by calling out the card we were playing, taking the other at their word that the card they were playing in the adjacent room was actually one that was held. We read books. We told stories. We laughed until our mother would arrive in a whirlwind to clear up the hallway nest and insist upon our separation once again.

  It was different with the cough. Not long after it began, Branson started commenting that the physical education class seemed to be getting more difficult. He was getting winded playing basketball and running, activities at which he usually excelled. When after a week, the dry hacking cough was getting worse instead of better, Mother decided, against Branson’s wishes, to take him to our family physician, Dr. White. Having exhausted every diagnostic tool in his arsenal, Dr. White sent him on to the specialists. My brother was tested for pneumonia and whooping cough. There was blood work. There were x-rays. Dozens of doctors convinced themselves that, clearly, the next diagnosis would prove to be the correct one.

  During those months, Branson was brave. He never complained. His faith in the scientific process never wavered. He felt confident that his symptoms would eventually be explained and that when they were, a successful treatment would soon follow. Then life would return to normal.

  He was right on only one of those counts. Eventually, as his quality of life was diminishing rapidly on a daily basis, a final and true diagnosis was identified. After a lung biopsy, which left my once strapping brother a weak and eerie shell of his former self, the lung specialist declared that Branson had pulmonary fibrosis.

  Some diagnoses produce a str
aightforward response. Not that they are necessarily easy to hear, but at least people know how to respond. Cancer for example. No one wants to receive that diagnosis, but at least everyone knows what it is, everyone knows someone who has had it, and everyone is fairly familiar with the course of action to treat it. It is not always a death sentence and most of the time, though it will be a battle, it will be a battle that can be won.

  Branson’s diagnosis left us unable to respond. First, none of us had ever even heard of pulmonary fibrosis, which is the progressive scarring of the lungs due to, in many cases, an unknown environmental factor. After being schooled on its definition, and being already well versed in the disease’s symptoms, it was then time to discuss Branson’s treatment and prognosis.

  In a word, there was none.

  We left the clinic silently, unable to make eye contact with one another. I pushed Branson in his wheelchair to the rented van and waited as my father helped to hoist his weakened body into the bench seat. After securing the chair to the back of the van, I slid in next to him. We were inches apart but worlds away. In the few minutes since the doctor had disclosed his revelation, my brother had quickly retreated into the land of the dead. His prognosis was certain. He would surely die. I let my hand slide toward his and slowly, calmly, let my fingers find their way between his. His hand was warm and his muscles tensed at my touch, but he did not pull away. I slid closer and pulled his head onto my shoulder. And then my brother cried. Big heavy sobs wracked with coughing and the rattling of his chest. My mother and father wept quietly from the front of the van. We sat together, the four of us, in a rented conversion van in the parking lot of the city’s pulmonary clinic, crying for the loss of the life we were about to lose and the lives that would surely never be the same again.