THE HOUSE ON SPACE TIME LANE

Chapter Two
THE LAUNDRY ROOM TO FOREVER
by Galen Hardesty

~*~

Daria knocked at the door of her parents' bedroom, then, at her mother's invitation, opened the door and entered. Helen, having changed out of her work clothes, was slipping into loafers to go with her casual attire.

"Mom, could you to tell me about this house and its previous owners, and why you and Dad got such a good deal on it? Tell me all you know," Daria requested.

'Well, Daria, the real estate agent said the woman who lived in your room, the crazy one, was the original owner, she and her husband. He and their youngest daughter vanished without a trace, and she went mad. Kept searching the house for them. Her son and his wife moved in and took care of her for a few years, and then she disappeared too. The son wanted out of the house so badly that he took our first offer. So it wasn't just the bars and padding in your room that led to us getting a good deal."

"Did the parents and the girl ever turn up? Do you know anything else about them?"

"I never heard of any of them being found, but I can ask the real estate agent next time I see her." Helen pulled an accordion file out of the closet. She extracted an important-looking document from it, examined it for a minute, and handed it to Daria. "There was an 'as-is' clause in the deed, which is a little unusual. And their name was unusual too, even more so than Morgendorffer."

Daria flipped through the document to the last page. 'Ruykelderfer'?"

"I'd never heard it before. And they pronounced it, 'Rykledyfer'."

Daria looked through the deed for a few more seconds, long enough to speedread it. There was nothing revelatory there. "I've never heard it before either. She folded the deed back up and handed it back to her mother. "Thanks, Mom," she said as she walked out, deep in thought.

~*~

"Daria, could you, uh, help me for a minute?" Quinn was standing at the door to the laundry room, arms full of laundry.

Daria rose from the table, came over and opened the door. "Hey, you don't have that much stuff. You could've opened that yourself."

"I know. Could you just come in the laundry room, please? I, um..." Quinn looked down at the floor, embarrassed. "I don't want to be in there by myself, okay? That 'wrong' feeling is strong in there." Daria started to say something, but the look in Quinn's eyes stopped her. She sighed and followed Quinn inside.

"So, other than being crowded, do you feel better?" Daria closed the door to make more space inside the laundry room.

Quinn was sorting her clothes on the counter. She looked around uneasily. "Well, actually, I feel... more anxious... like something bad is about to happen, and I need to do something."

"Yeah, I feel it too. But I don't see anything, other than that poor dust bunny drowning in that wet spot. Where is the bad thing happening?"

Quinn's head snapped around, and she stared intently at the other door, the one that led to the dining room. Or, sometimes, the basement stairs. "Did you hear that?"

Daria was about to reply in the negative when she heard something too, something that sounded like a faint, faraway scream. It would have seemed to be coming from the dining room, if the dining room had been two blocks long. The scream came again, and Daria snatched the door open.

Intense tropical sunlight streamed through. Daria and Quinn gaped, slack-jawed, at the lush green meadow where the dining room should have been. In the distance, a tropical forest and a brilliant blue sky contrasted starkly with the rest of the scene. Three people, a middle-aged man, an older woman, and a girl about Quinn's age, were running directly toward them.

Then Daria saw what they were running from, and her eyes widened in horror. Behind the people and the meadow and the forest loomed a volcano, and it was erupting. A wall of churning, roiling ash was blasting down the slope of the volcano at hundreds of miles per hour. It reached the forest, and the forest vanished. The wall of ash rolled on, unstoppable. The terrible words formed unbidden in Daria's mind: Pyroclastic flow.

"Over here! Run! Run faster!" Quinn screamed at the fleeing people. Taking a step out the door, she jumped up and down, waving her arms. The girl saw her and seemed to increase her speed a bit, but then she looked back over her shoulder and screamed again. The man, in the ragged remains of what must once have been a pair of shorts or slacks, and the woman, in pink pajamas, waved at her to keep going. The girl turned back and ran on, her face a mask of despair. The towering wall of ash bore down on them at a hideous velocity. Daria wanted to shout some encouragement, to urge them to greater speed as Quinn was doing, but her vocal cords would not. She could see they weren't going to make it.

The woman stumbled and fell, and vanished under the ash cloud. The man disappeared a split second later. Daria reached out, dragged Quinn back through the door and slammed it, but not before they heard the girl scream one last time as the ash cloud swallowed her up, less than fifty yards away. Daria shoved Quinn out of the laundry room into the kitchen and slammed that door too, and mindlessly followed her sister as she ran out of the kitchen and dove over the back of the sofa. Seizing each other in a terrified embrace, they huddled there, shivering and sobbing, for what seemed a very long time.

~*~

Daria timidly raised her head and looked around. All was as it had been. The Morgendorffer family room looked reassuringly normal. Untangling herself from Quinn, she half rose and picked up the box of tissues from the coffee table. After blowing her nose as daintily as possible, she used a second tissue to wipe her face. Replacing her glasses, she saw that Quinn was beginning to do the same.

Quinn looked up at her sister with big frightened eyes. In a small, shaky voice, she asked, "Daria, was that... real?"

Daria returned Quinn's look with the ghost of a smile. "That question just begs for a philosophical discussion, but for your purposes, I think... yes."

"Then those people actually got buried under all that dust? Do you think they could've gotten out? Where was that? Who were they?"

Daria dabbed at her eyes and wiped her nose, and spoke softly to the floor. "That was a pyroclastic flow. That ash was red hot. They died almost instantly. Where? An island, probably in the south Pacific. It kind of looked like a picture of Tahiti I saw once. As for who they were, there's really no way to know, but I think it was the people who used to live here and vanished mysteriously. The madwoman, her husband, and their youngest daughter."

Quinn gasped. "You don't really think..."

"Granted, none of this makes any sense, and granted, it could be anybody, but yeah, that's what I think."

Quinn pondered this for a moment. "Ohh, that's so sad... lost for all these years, and then we find them, and they almost make it back, but, but... ohhh, gyaaa-a-a-ha-ha-hahhh..."

Quinn broke down again, and Daria, much to her chagrin, found herself doing the same. Rather than huddle on the sofa and trade facial fluids with Quinn again, she managed to make her way to the kitchen and come back with two glasses of water.

Several minutes later, after more leakage and more cleanup, Quinn looked up once more at her big sister. "Daria, what just happened? How did it happen? What caused it?"

Daria shrugged. "The distortion, I guess."

"That, that... distortion in the time-space continuation? How does it work?"

"Quinn, if I could tell you that, I'd be the smartest human being who ever lived. And, while I do aspire to that high estate... hmm. Hey, I just thought of something. Your eyes are better than mine. How long would you say it would take that man's clothes to get into that condition?"

"Jeez, Daria, I don't hang onto clothes when they start to show wear! But, basing a guess on Dad's favorite work pants, and assuming he wore that one pair all the time, I'd say... two or three years?"

"And what was the girl wearing? Did you notice?"

"Well, of course I noticed. Some sort of fur lion cloth."

"You mean loincloth?"

"Whatever. It was practically nothing. If those were her parents, I'd have to say there were definitely no other men on the island, and no other clothes, either."

"Hmm. Interesting deduction. I was thinking that whatever she was wearing when she arrived had likely worn out completely. But the woman was wearing pajamas. Aside from the grass stains, I didn't see any signs of wear on them, and I wouldn't expect pajamas to hold up all that well in the jungle. How long would you say she'd been there?"

"Hey, you're right! She couldn't have been there much more than a week, maybe just a day or two!"

"But she vanished shortly before we moved here, almost two years ago. Assuming she's the madwoman, that would mean that, when we looked through that door, we were looking two years back in time! And that means..." Daria rose and strode purposefully toward the laundry room door.

Quinn rose and followed. "Not to mention half a world away. And I stepped through!"

"Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." Daria was cautiously sniffing at the crack of the door and feeling for heat with one hand. She opened the door a crack, peeked in, and instantly slammed it shut again.

"What is it?" squeaked Quinn, alarmed.

"The laundry room. It looks okay." She cautiously opened the door again and peered inside, then stepped through.

"DARia! If you make me wet my pants, you're washing them!"

"I'm worrying about my ass, not your pants." Daria approached the other door, palm extended toward it. Feeling no excess heat, she ran a finger across the floor at its base, checking for ash. Not finding any, she cautiously placed an ear against the door, then relaxed a bit. "Well, the house seems to be back to normal, whatever 'normal' means for this house." She turned and looked at her younger sibling. "How do you feel?"

"Frazzled. I think I survived." That reminded Quinn of the three who hadn't survived. She started to tear up again.

"No, I mean, do you still have that feeling that something bad is about to happen, and you should do something?"

"DARia, something bad like, already happened!"

Daria looked around, irritated. "Well, I still have that same feeling."

"Well, maybe I do, too, but those poor people are dead now! If only we'd opened the door a little sooner, or been a little closer, they might have made it, but now it's too late!"

Daria turned her head sharply at that and stared at Quinn, and her green eyes lit up with a mad inspiration. "Think, Quinn. We just went at least two years back in time, maybe a whole lot more. When you can travel back in time, there's no such thing as too late. 'A little sooner and a little closer', you said. Okay, let's go for it!"

Belatedly, Quinn's 'crazy sister' alarm went off. "Daria! What the hell are you thinking?!"

Daria's answering smile made Quinn's blood run cold. In a voice more vibrant than Quinn had ever heard it she said, "I'm thinking, "Let's do the time warp again!" Before Quinn could say "eep!" she had spun around and yanked open the dining room door.

Intense tropical sunlight streamed through. Before them stretched the lush green meadow. In the distance, a tropical forest and a brilliant blue sky contrasted starkly with the erupting volcano. A middle-aged man, an older woman, and a girl about Quinn's age were running directly toward them, less than fifty yards away.

Daria was through the door at a run before she could form a thought, heading straight for the woman in the pink pajamas, the one who had stumbled last time. The woman who had lived in her room longer than she had. The author of the poetry on her closet walls. Glancing up at the volcano, she saw the pyroclastic flow barreling down its slope. Her boots cut through the tall grass like scythes. The wind whistled past her ears and pulled her hair out behind her. She felt her lips pull back from her teeth as she realized she'd gone into overdrive. She dashed past the girl and the man and skidded to a halt beside the woman just as she stumbled.

A glance at the mountain showed her that the wall of ash had almost reached the high edge of the forest. Daria lifted the woman up, turned and ran for the door, pulling and partly supporting her. The man had turned and was heading back. Daria yelled, "GO! GO!" He ignored her and took the woman's other arm as they pounded past him. Steadied and pushed forward on both sides, she was able to keep up a creditable pace. Daria realized she wasn't as old as she looked at first glance. Perhaps she'd gone prematurely gray after her husband and daughter had disappeared.

Quinn was holding the door, beckoning and yelling encouragement. The girl was almost there, running strongly. Daria couldn't help noticing the rippling muscles beneath her deeply tanned skin. She was in excellent physical shape. Daria wished, a bit enviously, that she could spend a year or two on some tropical isle, buffing up and working on her tan in a fur bikini. Or part of one. Just not this isle, not this year.

Daria glanced over her shoulder just as the last of the forest vanished beneath the pyroclastic flow. "FASTER!" She yelled, and urged the woman forward as fast as her husband on her other side could keep up. The girl vanished into the laundry room and Quinn wisely followed her. They were almost there. "Home", she thought. Giving the woman a final push, Daria grabbed the doorknob and pulled it shut behind her. Then she was through the kitchen door and leaning on a counter, gasping and wheezing like the others, feeling the hot pounding rush of blood through her arteries and the fierce joy of having robbed Death of his prey.

The girl looked around. "Hey, we're home! How did you know where we lived? And how did you find us and take us back?"

Daria suddenly realized that these people had traded one set of problems for a completely different set. "Well, actually, we live here now. After your mother disappeared, your brother sold the house. And I suppose we found you the same way your mother found you."

The implications of their situation seemed to be occurring to the man, as well. He visibly sagged under the weight of returning responsibilities and new problems. "Oh, gosh. We don't have a house. I probably don't have a job. And if we've been declared dead, we won't have anything. I've got to find out what our legal status is, and what to do about it."

Suddenly Daria really felt sorry for this man. "Well, my Mom is a lawyer. She can at least tell you how to get started. Oh, she and Dad will be getting home soon. Why don't we find you guys some clothes?"

~*~

Helen Morgendorffer shut off her engine, got out, and stretched a little. It felt good to get home a little early for a change. Helen thought longingly of stretching out in a recliner with a wine cooler, but then came the guilty thought that she should use this time to get caught up with her family's lives. And there wasn't a recliner in the house, anyway.

She hadn't even made it halfway to the front door when it opened and Daria came out. "Hi, Mom, how was work?" she asked.

Her maternal instincts tingling, Helen answered, "Not too bad. It was kind of a slow day."

"That's good," Daria replied. "Oh, you know the people who used to live here and disappeared?"

"I haven't had time to talk to the real estate lady yet, Daria."

"That's okay. We found them."

Helen stopped in her tracks. She couldn't quite get a handle on that seemingly simple statement. "You… found them? How? Where?"

"They were…" Daria paused, looked down at the ground, and scratched her head. "…in the dining room," she finished, checking Helen's expression. "I lent Mrs. Ruykelderfer some of your clothes, and Mr. Ruykelderfer some of Dad's. I hope that's all right."

Helen stood there, staring at Daria, who wasn't showing even the faintest trace of a smirk. After a couple of seconds, she closed her mouth. After a few more, she said, "You found them. In the dining room. In our dining room? Naked?"

"Oh, no, not naked," Daria replied, although it seemed to Helen that she hesitated a bit. "They just needed a change of clothes."

Helen seemed to be having trouble deciding what her next question should be, so Daria said, "Where they've been, there weren't any clothes except what they were wearing when they got there." She hesitated, then added, "They were on an uninhabited island."

This clarification raised more questions for Helen than it answered. She asked one. "And how did they get from this uninhabited island to my dining room?"

Daria looked down at her feet and scratched her head again. "I don't quite understand that part. Uh, look, I'll tell you all I know, and I'm sure they will too, but it's going to take a long time. We should probably wait till Dad gets home, so we only have to do it once. Do you want to go in now? Mr. Ruykelderfer thinks they might've been declared dead, and doesn't know what to do about it."

"They're still here, then," Helen asked. Daria nodded.

"Yes, I'm coming in. Why did you meet me outside?"

"I didn't think you'd want to walk in on this cold."

Helen smiled a small, crooked smile. "Good thinking."