September 8, 1898
The girl’s screams finally stopped at nine o’clock in the morning.
“Why is the last one always the most difficult?” Doyle Grady asked the ceiling as he lay awake
in bed. A thick ray of sunlight seeped through the gap between the two drapes that had remained
closed ever since he arrived in 1898.
Only 40,000 people lived in Dallas before the turn of the century, the city still a decade away
from its first population boom. Upon his arrival, Doyle immediately bought the bi-level
Victorian house a quarter mile east of the Lone Star Saloon. The home stood slightly elevated
above the town square, overlooking the dozens of businesses on Main Street.
He could keep his eye on the town, and technically, they could keep their eye on him. That’s
why the drapes remained closed. No one down there needed to know what happened in this
house of horrors.
Doyle yawned, stretching his tired limbs. Carrying the dead weight of the young woman a
quarter mile through an underground tunnel had proven as physically demanding as the first two
times he had done it.
But she wasn’t dead, only heavily sedated. Five milligrams of midazolam slipped into her drink
had done the trick. And when you operated the only speakeasy in town—a concept still unknown
to the world in 1898—it was rather simple to drug the women he wanted to bring back to his
house.
“Did you drink the water?” Doyle shouted, finally sitting up in his bed.
No response was the correct response.
The girl had been screaming and shouting since she woke up sometime around three o’clock.
The prior two had only lasted an hour before drinking the glass of water he left for them. This
one, however, lasted three hours. Good thing his house was at the top of a hill with no neighbors
within a half mile.
“Did you drink the water?!” he shouted once more.
Silence.
A grin touched his lips as he swung his legs over the bed’s edge, his feet hitting the wooden floor
with renewed enthusiasm. His heart raced. The moment they drank the water was when it all felt
real, making him feel alive.
He slipped on a pair of fresh socks, hurried out of his bedroom, and headed down the stairs,
where he had left the girl handcuffed to the immovable brick stove in the kitchen.
Within arm’s reach, the girl could have enjoyed her choice of apples or bananas, along with the
glass of water that had been spiked with just enough pancuronium bromide for the paralysis to
start within minutes of ingestion.
Doyle ran into the kitchen and found the girl lying motionless on the floor. The glass of water
stood empty on the edge of the counter. He shuffled over to stand above her, arms crossed. “You
poor, beautiful soul,” he said, shaking his head. “Wrong place at the wrong time. Shit happens,
right? I know that all too well.”
Tears welled in Doyle’s eyes. He turned sappy before he killed his victims. It always brought
back memories of his wife. Oh, how he missed her. He had quickly learned nothing numbed the
pain. Nothing filled the void. He might as well walk around with a hole in his chest, because
that’s exactly how he felt every miserable day since the love of his life had succumbed to her
battle with ovarian cancer.
“Fuck cancer,” he muttered as a tear fell to the floor.
A booming knock came from the front door, followed by a familiar squeaky voice.
“Mr. Grady, are you home?” the voice called.
“God dammit,” Doyle spat, jerked out of his trip down memory lane. The front door was around
the corner from the kitchen, so he didn’t need to worry about hiding the girl’s body.
Doyle hurried to the door, wiping his eyes free of tears, and pulled it open just enough to stick
his head through the crack.
A short man in a stiff three-piece suit stood on the front step, a top hat perfectly straight on his
head.
Warren Dinsmore, the biggest prick in Dallas, Doyle thought. He knew Warren wore the top hat
to make him appear taller. But Warren wasn’t fooling anyone. Even with the hat, the little weasel
barely touched five-nine.
“Mr. Dinsmore,” Doyle said with plenty of sarcasm.
“Ah, a most pleasant morning, Mr. Grady,” Warren replied as he clutched the lapels of his suit
jacket with both hands. “I never collected from you last night. It seemed like a busy night for
you, from what I could tell.”
“Yes, it was. Sorry about that, Mr. Dinsmore. It got late, and I was tied up with some things. I
have your money here.” Doyle reached into his pocket and pulled out a one-dollar coin, planting
it into Warren’s open, pudgy hand.
“Really? You’re telling me you sold one hundred drinks last night?” Warren’s eyes widened.
“On a Wednesday?”
Doyle shrugged. “I tried a new promotion. Called it Ladies’ Night. Let all the women drink for
free until nine o’clock.”
“Free?!” Warren gasped, taking a step back. “That’s preposterous.”
“Maybe, but it worked. It got all the women in town inside the building, which meant the men
followed. And guess who got charged double for their drinks?”
Warren chuckled and shook his head. “Oh, Mr. Grady, sometimes I think you’re from the future
with these wild ideas. I’ll see you tonight.”
I’ll be gone from this place forever long before tonight, Doyle thought, watching Warren turn
around and stroll away, still giggling and saying “Ladies’ Night” like it was the most absurd
thing he had ever heard.
Warren owned and operated the Lone Star Saloon. Upon Doyle’s first visit to the saloon, he
noticed only half of the building in use and questioned the vacant space in the back. Warren had
used the space as a makeshift office and storage. Doyle, who was from the future, proposed a
concept called a “speakeasy” to Warren. Women and minorities weren’t allowed in the regular
saloons, and Doyle framed this as a business opportunity to tap into an entirely new segment of
customers.
Warren wasn’t caught up in the drama of racism and sexism like most of the other men who
patronized his saloon. The man only cared about money and wanted to make as much as he could
every damned day of the week. He agreed to Doyle’s absurd idea and only asked for one cent
from each drink sold, so long as Doyle operated the secret bar entirely on his own.
But Doyle didn’t care about any of that right now. He returned to the kitchen and rolled the girl
onto her back, her wavy brown hair splayed out in a tangled mess. A guttural noise came from
her throat, but her body remained motionless. The spiked water caused complete paralysis of all
muscles, including the lungs. He could leave her to suffer for the next eight hours until her lungs
eventually ceased to function.
But Doyle wasn’t a monster. He never had a desire to put his victims through physical torture.
He didn’t use them as sex objects. Mental suffering was the only thing he wanted them to go
through. The same suffering he and his wife had to endure as they counted down the final year of
her life.
Watching the cancer progress over twelve months was no different from being handcuffed to a
stove. Seeing the world keep spinning outside while his wife vomited blood inside their once
happy home was a trap of its own. Having to go to work as a surgeon every day and perform
what the patients described as “miracles” as he saved others’ lives had only given him hope for
so long. He couldn’t give his own wife that same miracle, so why did anyone else deserve it?
He had lost much more than his wife when she passed, a moment that seemed like another
lifetime. The months that followed that dreadful day were filled with desires to end his own life.
As a surgeon in 2021, he had easy access to the drugs he now used on his victims. He could have
just as easily administered the proper dosages to himself and drifted off into the void.
But then he had an opportunity, which momentarily gave him hope. A purpose. Just as his wife
had once been his hope and purpose. But, once again, he lost all that, too.
People didn’t appreciate the joy in their lives. How could they, if they never had to suffer to earn
it? His only hope for his victims was for them to experience that genuine appreciation in their
last moments. The mental strangulation he put them through probably made that difficult, but
was that not the point?
“What are you thinking about right now?” he asked the girl on the floor, lowering himself to
whisper mere inches from her face. “At this exact moment, your brain and heart are the only two
things working in your body. I know you can hear me. Are you thinking about the life you had?
All the memories from your childhood? Or are you thinking about everything you’re going to
miss in the future? A future husband? Kids? You probably would have made a wonderful
housewife, as much as I hate to say it. But that’s the circumstance of your times. My wife was a
pediatric surgeon. Can you even grasp the idea of a woman getting to do such a job? Wherever
you go, I hope the world gives you more opportunities than this one did.”
He paused and stood on his knees to reach into his pocket for the syringe loaded with potassium
chloride, pulling off the cap.
“It’s time, you beautiful angel,” he said, sticking the syringe into the girl’s arm. “This is only
going to slow your heart down until it stops beating. It will feel no different from falling asleep.”
He pressed down the syringe’s plunger until the clear liquid vanished into the girl’s body, then
replaced the cap over the needle. Without a word, he jumped to his feet and rummaged through
the nearby cupboards, where he had stashed a can of red spray paint he had brought from the
future.
Across the cabinets, Doyle sprayed two vertical lines six inches apart, then a U-shape beneath
them to form a smiley face. “Always keep a smile on your face. It’s the only way to get through
this life.”
He stuffed the can into his pocket along with the syringe and scanned the kitchen. There
shouldn’t have been anything to leave behind as evidence. He kept a simple life so he could
vanish at will.
Doyle hustled back up the stairs to his bedroom and slipped into his shoes, making one last check
of the room he had spent most of his six months in 1898. Only clothes and a stack of books
looked back at him.
“It’s been real, Dallas,” he said before exiting the room and descending the stairs. The house was
perfectly still and silent, a definite perk of living in this era before automobiles.
Doyle crossed through the kitchen and swung open the back door, where a curvy trail cut across
the lawn to a tool shed. The shed had existed as long as the house had, but he built a second wall
inside of it to conceal the powerful secret it contained.
A table stood against the back wall, and he crouched down to crawl beneath it, where he had
built a swinging door with a latch too small to be seen by a casual observer. Earlier that morning,
he had moved aside the piles of junk used to block the door from wandering eyes.
He unhooked the latch and let the door creak open. Heat radiated from the space as he crawled
through, sure to replace the boxes and bins of clutter before closing the door behind him. The
portal stood beneath a six-foot-tall brick archway, its force longing to pull him through. With his
back against the wall, it was only two steps forward before his body would pass through into the
next dimension.
Doyle drew a deep breath, heart racing. “On to the next one,” he said, taking two steps toward
the heat. ...
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