Smoke, Chapter 5
After Penelope had taken a nap, she sat down with Georgie and the other woman, Hayden, in a cozy living room to be told "everything."
"Now," Georgie began, settling on a sofa that faced Penelope and Hayden in their respective armchairs. "Have you read Beowulf?" Penelope shook her head. "Do you know the story of the Odyssey?"
"No."
Hayden broke in, "Harry Potter."
Penelope smiled. "Yeah."
Georgie nodded at Hayden and continued. "Think about the creatures in stories like Harry Potter. Basilisks, dragons, hippogriffs. Where do you think those ideas came from?"
"Just people's imaginations I guess." But then Penelope thought of the monster that had dragged her underwater. "Or..." But she didn't know what else to say. "But if those kinda things were real, they'd be on Animal Planet and YouTube. They'd be in books -- nonfiction books with photos."
"They exist, but they've changed and grown fewer. Long ago, they were common enough that people wrote chronicles of them. Everyone used to know about them and do battle with them. But they didn't know where they came from or why. They were different everywhere, depending on the people they were near, and the time there."
"The time?"
"Yes. 6:00 PM, for example, isn't the same here as it is on the other side of the world. You know that time isn't the same time right now, even in every part of the United States?"
Penelope nodded.
"But how can that be? If time is set in stone, why does it change just by driving across a state line?"
"Well...because the sunlight's different. Because the earth moves." Penelope paused. "Rotates," she corrected, remembering the proper term from school.
"Is the sun a giant clock for the universe, then? Is time just something that the sun coats Earth in? Does the sun contain time in its very light?"
Penelope felt incredibly confused. "That can't be right. But the Earth rotates. How fast the Earth moves..." She fell silent, more confused by her own thoughts.
"Right. The sun is only a star, and the Earth is only a planet, and the passage of time in our clocks is only the numbers we set according to what was the most useful way for us to track time: the light of day. 'Time' itself is just a way of saying that things change. That they grow old, like me." She smiled gently, tucking a stray bit of grey hair behind her ear.
Penelope looked at her wrinkled face and the thought came to her mind, She's not afraid to die. She tried to imagine what that would be like, and realized that she had experienced a feeling like it when she put her feet back in the water. But this was different: it wasn't a despairing kind of defiance of life. No, this woman was at contented peace with her own inevitable death. Nothing like mom. Always wanting to avoid being like her mother, Penelope subconsciously felt drawn to Georgie as a maternal figure.
"Here, watch my hand," Georgie continued. She moved her hand in a line across the coffee table in front of them. "That's time. Advancement. My hand was there; now it's here. It was 6:00; now it's 6:03."
"Feel confused?" Hayden leaned in from her armchair. "You should. That's what makes time so powerful. It affects almost every move humans make. 'Am I late? Am I early? When is this due? When is dinnertime? When should we attack? When should we launch the missile? How many years of life do I have left?' We almost never stop thinking about it. But nobody understands it. It makes our heads spin. Philosophers and physicists are always arguing about it. Something that controls people, but that they don't understand -- if you were evil, and found a way to sink your fangs into that, wouldn't you?"
"Evil?" Penelope's reeling mind latched onto the key concept in the seas of words the way that it had latched onto the old woman Charlie's ring.
"Yes. There's a dark force all over the world -- we don't understand it any better than scientists understand dark matter -- that feeds on time. It scrapes off seconds or minutes and uses that stolen energy to manifest monsters."
"What?" This seemed to contradict something else that had been said, but Penelope couldn't place it.
Georgie looked carefully at Penelope's wide-eyed, bewildered face. "Let's summarize and take a break." She sounded like a schoolteacher now. "Time, in the sense of numbers that change with sunlight and the rotation of Earth, is a human invention that dictates almost every aspect of our lives. A dark force feeds on that time. It steals minutes from us and turns them into monsters who want to control or consume us. And you, Penelope, were captured by a 12:01 AM."
"So...so 12:01 that night..."
"Actually, it was 12:01 of the previous night. The night you met Charlie. She should have tried to destroy it, but she tried to restore that minute instead." Georgie sighed. "Charlie takes too many risks. In any case, she failed, and it returned to wait for you."
"But," Penelope persisted, "12:01 the previous night...what happened to it?"
"Poof!" Hayden said, throwing her hands apart to mime a magical disappearance.
"And nobody noticed?"
"Nobody ever notices. Except Asima. She noticed, nearly a thousand years ago." A glow of excitement came onto Hayden's face.
"Who?!"
"Sh, sh!" Georgie stood suddenly, batting her hands at Hayden. "It's time for a break. Do you want some tea?"
"Yes," Penelope said gratefully. "I like the fruit kinds best."
"I have some nice cherry tea, actually. And cookies?"
"Yes, please!"
"You just relax, Penelope. You've been through a great ordeal, but I'm afraid we don't have much time to explain before we'll need to return you to your mother. Take this moment, in any case." Georgie's warm smile and the promise of hot tea and cookies made Penelope feel better.
But when they left, her eyes slowly strayed to a grandfather clock in the corner the way someone might turn at the suspicion of a ghost. 6:12 PM. "This moment..." Though it was a common phrase, she shuddered.
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