Once upon a time machine…
The platform at St Pancras existed on no map, nor did it quite exist in the present. It smelled faintly of roasted chicory and forgotten anniversaries. The engine idling beside the invisible edge was no gleaming brass contraption with ticking gears, but a damp Victorian train named The Enduring Omnibus. Violet steam rolled from its iron flanks like whispers in a forgotten language. Inside, the carriages were carpeted in damp velvet that grew small, luminescent mushrooms whenever a passenger thought too loudly about their childhood.
A conductor, with three fountain pens stuck through the brim of his cap like black feathers, adjusted his pocket watch, which had no hands, only a small goldfish swimming in a circle.
‘Single tickets only, ladies and gentlemen,’ he announced, his voice sounding like dry leaves blowing across cobblestones. ‘The return leg is currently stuck in a bureaucratic dispute between the Renaissance and the Late Cretaceous. We are confident our engineers will iron out the fabric of space-time shortly. In the meantime, enjoy the descent.’
Salvador adjusted his tweed cap and boarded. He had left his flat exactly as he’d found it that morning: washing-up in the sink, unread emails multiplying by the hour, and a diary already filling with obligations he couldn’t remember agreeing to. If anyone noticed he was gone before Monday, he suspected it would be an automated reminder. He was thirty-four, exhausted by modern noise, and unconcerned with the lack of a return ticket. His phone had spent the last six months reminding him of birthdays he’d forgotten, meetings he’d dreaded and memories that appeared each year with algorithmic precision. None of them felt like his anymore. The company, Temporal Transit Ltd, had advertised for beta travel testers in the back pages of an obscure gardening magazine. Salvador had applied before he’d even finished reading the advertisement.
The train slipped out of the station without a sound.
Through the window, the landscape did not blur; it unspooled. Yesterday bled into last month. Skyscrapers dissolved into Victorian chimneys, which melted into fields of wild mustard, which crumbled into vast, prehistoric swamps where clouds resembled geometric shapes. Time was not a line, Salvador realised, but a carpet being shaken until every year fell loose.
In the dining car, the waiter served tea brewed from dried memories and crumpets still warm from rainy afternoons. Salvador sat across from a woman wearing a dress constructed entirely from torn love letters.
‘Where are you disembarking?’ she asked, her voice crackling like an old gramophone record.
‘1888,’ Salvador replied, buttering a slice of nostalgia. ‘I want to see the colour of the fog before they invented electricity. You?’
‘Ancient Babylon,’ she sighed, sipping her Earl Grey. ‘I left my umbrella there in a previous dream. I intend to retrieve it.’
‘And if we never get back?’
She smiled, revealing teeth made of polished mother-of-pearl. ‘My dear young man, back is merely a habit we formed because forward was too terrifying. Why return to a world that has already happened to you?’
The train lurched. Outside, the sky turned the colour of a bruised plum. A flock of clockwork birds flew backwards, un-singing a melody that made Salvador feel briefly both young and ancient. The carpet mushrooms pulsed bright blue.
A loudspeaker chimed overhead. ‘We are now arriving at Whitechapel Station. Passengers for the foggy alleyways of 1888, please mind the gap between the train and the century.’
Salvador stood up, buttoned his coat and walked towards the brass door. As he stepped down onto the cobblestones of a damp London night, the air smelled of coal smoke, river mud and fresh possibilities. For the first time in years, there was nowhere else he needed to be.
Behind him, The Enduring Omnibus gave one long, melancholic whistle before dissolving into lavender steam and vanishing into a dark tomorrow. He had no way back, but as he watched a horse-drawn hansom cab clatter through the mist, Salvador decided that staying behind was the most forward-thinking thing he had ever done.
