Walter had been watching Anne's eyes since they had returned, and he knew she was hiding something. They sat at the table in the dining room, a small round, two person nook with a ceramic flower pot in the shape of a rooster in the center, and each sipped on a cup of coffee. Walter asked Anne, "Is something bothering you? Are you angry at me?"

She averted eye contact with Walter, "No. I was just wondering."

"What?"

"I was just wondering how we could be missing for a year and everything in this house seems exactly the way we left it."

Walter paused a moment, "I haven't noticed. I guess no one bothered anything because they thought we would be back any time."

"Missing a year would have placed Carol in a panic. She would have gotten all branches of military and government to search us out; you know how she is. That's not the troubling things, though."

"What are the troubling things?"

"You look older, Walter. I look older. The date on the phone says we have been gone a year. But the coffee you are drinking is from the same can I purchased before we left. There wasn't so much as a speck of dust on it. As a matter of fact, there is not dust settled anywhere. Who would have came in here and dusted, and yet moved nothing around? Also, everything, and I do mean everything, in the refrigerator is just like we left it. Your unfinished sandwich is still there, with a bit taken out of it, and the bread is not moldy, and the tomato in it is as red and firm as ever."

Walter scratched his head, "What do you think is happening?"

Anne shrugged, still not making eye contact, "I don't think we are really back yet."

Walter chuckled, "Come on, look around you. You see where we are."

"Oh, I think we are back in the right location, I just don't know if we are back in the right time yet."

"That doesn't make much sense."

At that, she made eye contact with Walter, "Nothing about any of this makes any sense, Walter. I keep waiting to wake up from a dream, like none of these happenings really ever happened. But the dream keeps on going and going. Walter, that fountain, that thing down there, whether it is natural or not, it is doing something, working. Whenever there is work, energy must be used, and that thing has been doing work on time. It has… some sort of way to gather the energy of time and manipulate it. Now, I don't know if it has some sort of unique material or whether it is the result of a thousand blood sacrifices to some god, but someone knew what it could do, and facilitated it to cheat."

"Cheat? Cheat what?"

Anne said coldly, "Cheat time, Walter. Cheat time, and age, and possibly even cheat death. Only I don't think it was very successful. I don't think they got away with it."

"How do you know they didn't get away with it?"

Anne said certainly, "Because you can't cheat time, and you certainly can't cheat death."

Walter said musingly, "You don't know. Maybe they did cheat death. Or at least maybe they found a way to reset life. I mean, did you see what happened to us? We were younger, healthy on the other side. There was enough food and resources there to live another life. I think whoever built it was successful in doing something amazing. If we knew the secrets, if we just knew the secrets, we could prolong the life of anyone…"

"Walter, nothing has been prolonged. We are still aging. And what's worse, we have missed an entire year of our lives. We have missed so much with our loved ones, doesn't that mean anything to you at all?"

Walter slammed his fist on the table, "We are still aging because we came back! If we had stayed, we would be young right now. We would be happy."

There was a silence, not long, but very discerning, and Anne said, "Aren't you happy with your life?"

"I was. I'm not now. I keep loosing things as I get older. My parents, my career, my health. Time has taken all of these things from me, so pardon me if I don't have much moral argument against cheating time, or at least giving one heck of a shot. I would cheat time if I could, it certainly has cheated me."

Anne twiddled the handle of coffee cup and said, "Time also gave me, to you, and a wonderful, beautiful daughter, and a terrific son in law."

"And I would still have you on the other side."

"You have me now. Walter, you have me now."

Walter said softly, "Remember when we got the report, years ago, that you had cancer?"

Anne replied, "Yes."

"It was like… it was as if my entire world had been shut down. Everything stopped. Nothing else mattered except finding a doctor who would make you well. I wanted to cheat death then, at any cost."

Anne gulped a large knot in her throat and reached out to touch Walter's hand, "Walter, I need to tell you something. And I need you to be calm, and I need you to not freak out, and I need you to be strong."

Walter knew what was coming, he could feel the inevitable words that her cancer had returned hollow out his heart with it's dark spade. He began to gnaw on his lower lip, bracing himself on the one hand, and hoping on the other her words would be something else. He knew it would not be, though. He knew it would be those dreadful words.

"My cancer is back, end stage."

Walter would have thought this moment would have sent him to tears, but instead his heart flamed with a rage and his face flashed intensely red. He did not speak for a moment, and then he said, "How long have you known?"

"Since right before we went back through the fountain and gathered the samples."

His voice trembled, "How long do you have?"

"They gave me three months, five if chemo does well."

Walter began to smile, "Five months? Three months? A year has passed and you still alive. A whole year," his voice was now filled with joy. "Anne, we did do it; we did! We cheated it. We prolonged your life. It's a year past, and you aren't deathly sick even. We have to go back, for longer. Possibly even stay, Anne."

Anne had knew this was coming, and she said, "Walter, I won't go back. We don't know how long we have been back. The clocks say a year, but the surroundings say we haven't been gone at all. We don't know that we have prolonged anything."

"I know we have," Walter jumped up from his chair excitedly, "I know it, Anne. I just know it. We have to go back."

Anne said, "No. Walter I will not go back. And I don't want you to go back either. Walter, there is a natural order to the universe, and to us. It can't be cheated, and it can't be undone."

Walter was now angry again, "Oh, you are a stubborn woman. You saw with your own eyes. You saw you were younger. We have a few details to figure out…"

Anne laughed, "A few details? No. There is nothing to figure out which hasn't been figured out all along. We live, and we die. I don't want to leave my home again. When I do go, Walter, I want to be surrounded by all my life has built, and all that has gave meaning to me."

Walter said nothing and stormed from the dining nook. Anne herself was feeling quite tired, and made retreat to her bedroom, and lay down on the bed. The sun was high noon and incredibly warm on the front step where Walter stood. He remembered Anne's question, why had no one touched anything in their home? Why did it seem as if time had stood still, yet the clocks were reporting that a year had moved on?

Walter thought for a moment, and maybe a year had not passed. Maybe it was still the same day. Or maybe it was something in between, something he could not understand. What was important to Walter is that both of them were safe. There seemed to be no ill effect of the jump from the old world, to the young, and back.

Standing on the front step, Walter wiped the sweat from his forehead, "It's warm. Sure could use a breeze."

It was then Walter noticed there was no breeze blowing, absolutely none. Not a leaf on a tree twitched, not a blade of grass. And it was also around this time Walter noticed a speck high in his peripheral vision. At first, he dismissed it as a floater. Something about this speck would not leave him be. He turned his head to it, and a chill ran through his body. The speck was a black bird, still in the sky, not flapping, not breathing, not falling. It was frozen in one position in a single location.

When thinking back to it from a much harsher place, Walter would never be sure if it was his scream at the sight of the still bird which triggered the next events, or if it was time for it to happen and his scream was only a coincidence along with it. He did lean towards the notion it was his scream, that he had let the magic or the phenomenon know he was back around. From this moment forward it all seemed so much more personal.

Walter screamed, and the bird began to move. Slowly at first, very slowly, as if it were trying to flap its wings while in a thick viscous fluid, the bird began to move forward. The wings sped up at a constant rate until the bird was flying at normal rate, and then surpassed that, disappearing in a blink. Across the street, trees were violently thrashing their limbs about. Walter blinked a few times while his heart thumped, and he raced into the house. He called out, "Anne!" There was no answer.

He was making his way through the hallway when he heard a grinding roar, and it was coming from the cellar. He felt a droning vibration in the floor and through the walls. He opened the cellar door and looked down into the sink hole, which now had a railing all around it, and the edges of the pit had been lined with concrete and smoothed. The simple wood steps were now replaced with a flight of stainless steel stairs which made their way down into the pit itself.

Fear had Walter, tightly, in his chest and around his temples. He could not understand what he was seeing. His breath was almost taken from him when he saw his photograph hanging in the doorway of the basement. It was a framed picture of Walter on the cover of 'Time' magazine; the caption read "Walter Springer and His Incredible Find. The Lost Fountain of Youth."

Walter ran his fingers over his lips and muttered, "We were never… gone. It's like we were never gone. Time did not miss us here, and it's like we never left. Now it's catching up. Time didn't miss us, we missed time, and now it is catching up."

The scent of flowers now assaulted his nasal passages, and he turned to see the dining nook where he and Anne had just been sipping coffee was mysteriously full of flowers. Walter slowly approached the flowers, all of which had small cards pinned to them. He picked one of the cards and read it. He released the card to the floor.

It read: "Walter, so sorry for your loss. We all loved Anne."