By Dan in Posts

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Mobius Manor is getting crowded, but I have to admit, it’s a fun crowd. Rich got here yesterday. It was one of the most shocking, yet wonderful things I’ve ever experienced. It was about 8 in the morning, and I walked out onto the large front porch with a cup of coffee, knowing that according to the information that came to me through the buried ammo box time capsule, Rich would appear any minute. I have to admit though, that despite the fact that I had built this house in about a third of the time that was really needed, all on the prediction that my friend Rich Girrard would suddenly appear here from 1936, I’m not sure that I truly believed it would happen.

I had just taken a sip of coffee, and as I pulled the cup from my mouth, I saw him walking toward the house.

“Dan?” Rich asked, surprised to see me. Of course he would be surprised to see me, I thought. The Rich who told me he’d be here was much older, and this meeting was part of his past. The Rich in front of me didn’t know I’d be here. This Rich smiled and came trotting up to the porch, his hand extended. He was a little thinner. A little more fit than the last time I’d seen him. Significantly more in shape than the Rich who left here 8 months ago. 3 years in the past had been good for him. I was a little startled too, when I noticed that he seemed to have more hair. How’s that work? I asked myself, making a mental note to ask Rich that same question later.

We shook hands briefly, then he hugged me, slapping me on the back.

“What’s the date?” He asked.

“August 14th,” I replied. “Two thousand nine.”

He nodded, and considered the answer. “Just about what I was shooting for!” He said, excitedly.

Seeing my puzzled look, he explained. “I’ve been away for 3 years my time, and I’m starting to learn to control where I end up. I’ve even been able to hold off traveling twice!” He said, a proud look in his eye.

Then, Rich looked around, seeming to see the house for the first time. “What is this place? Where are we?”

“Well, I call it ‘Mobius Manor,’” I answered, “it’s your design.” I smiled, for once knowing something my friend didn’t.

“I designed it? What are you talking about?” He said. “Wait a minute,” he said, almost interupting himself, and turning around to look out from the house. “Where are we?”

“A couple miles outside of Belton.” I answered.

Rich frowned, sighed subtly and suddenly seemed distracted, looking off to the side as he seemed to be calculating something in his head.

“Why would I come here?” He said quietly to himself. Then, seeming to remember I was standing with him, to me, “I found that I’ve been able to direct my traveling to both places and to people.” He shook his head. “I was trying to travel to Molly. Shit.”

“Looks like you made it,” said a voice behind us, from inside the house. Rich and I both spun around. It was Molly.

Rich’s face lit up like it had done every time they were together when they first met. In the space of two heartbeats, Rich crossed the porch and took Molly into his arms, hugging her tightly. I could hear her softly crying as she held him.

I decided to go check on a couple jobs I was working on in the detached garage/workshop.

I have to admit, as I worked on sanding one of the legs of a chair I’d bought along with 3 matching pieces at an estate auction, the feeling I got from being an important player in the reunion I just witnessed choked me up a little. My two best friends were together again, and of all the things I’ve done in my life, the money I’ve made, the businesses I’ve built, the degrees I completed, this one project, that was just paid off with Molly and Rich embracing was the most satisfying I’ve ever been a part of.

I got to the workshop, a smile still on my face, and heard the chirp of my Blackberry, telling me an email had just arrived from one of my important contacts. I pulled the phone out of my pocket, and read the message.

For some reason, my Mother is coming to Mobius Manor. She didn’t say why, just that she’ll be here on the 18th.

What’s this all about?

By Dan in Posts

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Dan here. Molly and Samantha got here a couple days ago. I picked them up at the airport in Indianapolis, and brought them to the house. I was happy at how much Molly liked it, but Samatha? Not sure she was all that crazy about being here. Sure, she’s happy about seeing Rich, but as for the house? I think she’s a little uneasy about it.

Molly and I have agreed to update the blog without reading the blog, if that makes sense. We had a long talk the night she and Samantha got here, and decided together that we wanted to play this out on the website as it happens, from our own perspectives. I didn’t want to read what she’d written, and she wanted to stay insulated from my thoughts. There will be plenty of time to read the whole story later.

I hope.

As I said before, I believe Rich knows things about the coming years, and wants Molly and Samantha (and hopefully him) to have a safe place to live. I think the answers are all here, in this “storage device” that was in the ammo can/time capsule, and though I’ve got the cube that it fits into, I have no idea how to access the information on it. There’s no cable, power cord or anything. I put the cylinder in the cube the only way it seems to fit, but nothing happens. I’m guessing that Rich knows how it works.

And speaking of Rich, he’s due to return in a week, on August 19th.  I understand his visit will last two weeks. I’m very much looking forward to it. He’s coming from a time some 3 years after he left. We here at “Mobius Manor” have traveled forward in time about 8 months, while Rich has traveled over four times as far.

I also wanted to tell everyone who has written that we appreciate your emails very much. I wish we had time to reply to all of them, but as you can image, we’ve been very, very busy, and I have to say it…Time is short.

By Molly in Posts

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Samantha and I got here yesterday, Dan meeting us at the airport in Indianapolis, and we drove to Belton, following the same route Rich did when he made the drive that started this whole thing. Much like Rich described the weather during his trip, yesterday was beautiful. Sunny, in the 70s and only a few innocuous clouds. Samantha hadn’t been in Indiana since she was a baby, and so she had no memory of it. So different from California, though she usually laughed about the “hicks” and “hoosiers” who live in Indiana, she was clearly impressed by the fields, the beautiful green and yellow corn fields we passed as we sped along Highway 36. It was an adventure for her, made even more exciting by the thought that she’d get to see her Daddy, and not 70 years old this time, but probably looking the same as when he vanished in December.

I was excited too, if a little uneasy about what Rich was going to try and convince me to do. I hadn’t a clue what it was, but was somewhat comforted in that he was emphatic about what he wanted us to do, but not desperate. Desperation I would have interpreted to be his trying to undo something that had happened. I’m not sure it makes any sense to someone who hasn’t been through this before, but his confidence implied to me that what he wanted to happen, had happened in his timeline. And speaking of timelines, I’ve been reading a lot about time travel in the past few months, working hard to grasp the physics of the phenomenon, and fit the whole thing into what’s happening to us. I’m not at all sure that what Rich knows to have happened will happen in this timeline, but it’s possible.

We’re clear than  Rich has traveled in time via two different methods, both in body and in, what I would suppose you would call consciousness or even spirit. He lived almost 15 years in his past when his consciousness traveled to 1976 immediately after the accident. Then, in December of last year, he disappeared from San Diego and, as he expected, traveled to 1933. If all goes as we think it will, Rich will travel from 1936 to now, here in Belton.

Dan was very excited to show us the house. It’s beautiful, from the rustic-looking sign at the gravel driveway gate that says “Mobius Manor,” to the elegantly simple,  finished interior. Samantha and I got the grand tour, with Dan pointing out all the subtle, fine points of the house’s construction. He did a wonderful job.

Samantha though, was a little reserved, and I can tell that her intuition is saying the same thing as mine, that Rich is going to insist that we move here. Clearly, Dan built this house for us. If it’s for Rich’s return, that’s one thing, but if he’s going to ask us to live here without him because of something he has learned, found or figured out in his three years in the 1930s, that’s going to be difficult.

As he says in this post, Dan believes Rich has learned something in the future that has convinced him to shelter us all here, and that he’ll be able to control his time traveling and stay with us. Maybe.

Whatever the case, we’ll all have an answer to those questions in a couple days.

By Dan in Posts

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What a journey this has been. Oh sure, not as dramatic a journey as my friend, Rich’s, but still.

In the matter of a 4 months, I’ve built a house, and it’s a really, really good house.  Small, but then in my opinion, that’s the best kind. Houses are meant to be shelter and home. The bigger they get, the more  they  own you, rather than the other way around. This one’s nice, log construction, a solid foundation, good basement for storage and best yet, completely liveable “off the grid.” That was very important for Rich, a point he made very clear in his instructions to me. There’s a generator, underground tanks for diesel, and above tanks for heating oil and LP gas. A big septic tank that’ll last 30 years, and a deep well, even though the water table’s pretty easily accessable here.

It’s a good house. The least I could do for my friend Rich.

I think he knows something’s coming. I haven’t written anything about it, mainly because I needed to think about what he’d written some more, but also because I wanted to talk with Molly about it before I put anything on the blog.

Rich is coming here in a few days from 1936. When he gets here, he will have been in the past for about 3 years, and the journals I have from him, that he left me in the ammo box, say that once he’d met his grandfather in 1933, he left Belton and traveled, both geographically and temporally. In other words, he time traveled. A lot.

Some of his trips were to the past, close to the period he was living in. But some extended to the future, even beyond now. Rich has written that when he traveled to the future before going back to 1933, being in the future was uncomfortable. The discomfort was greater the further into the future he traveled. I think he wrote that it was like a shreaking in his head that he couldn’t quite hear, but was very unsettling. Apparently, the discomfort wasn’t just internal, because in his journals he describes a near future that’s very, very difficult, and I think that’s  what  this house  is for. I believe that Rich has found a way to stay put in time, and wants to have a safe place for his family to live in this difficult time. That he needed me to build this house now, suggests that the troubling times are coming up pretty soon, and that worries me.

I think the Rich that traveled to San Diego a couple weeks ago didn’t come from 1952 at all. I think he came from the future, to make sure his past happens as he needs it to. I believe that after he left two weeks ago, he traveled to 1952 to bury the ammo box and outline the preparations I’ve made on his behalf.  I am confident that he’ll share the whole story, and what  he’s been working toward when we see him in a couple weeks.

It’s going to be a great story!

By Molly in Posts

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I’m not going to lie to you. At first, it was a shock. My husband, who I last saw just over six months ago, suddenly standing in our kitchen.

And he was old.

70 years old.

If you had never met Rich, you would have probably thought hey, there’s a guy,  about 60, who takes pretty good care of himself.

But to me, and even more dramatically, to our daughter Samantha, he was old. It was, to say the least, shocking. But at the same time, to see my husband, my partner, my love, the father of my beautiful daughter, here and safe, was a joy. I  knew the exact time he’d be appearing in the kitchen, but  I don’t think that was why I felt him here a couple seconds before I heard his voice.

“Hi sweetheart.”

I didn’t know where in the kitchen he would appear, so naturally, I wasn’t facing the right direction. I saw a little disturbance in the air to my right and then heard his voice. I spun around, startled, and saw him first check the clock. Rich reached into his pocket, pulled out a small notebook and a pencil and wrote something down. Then, before anything else, asked “what’s the date, honey?”

I told him, and he wrote that down too. Putting the notebook and pencil back in his pocket, he held out his arms and walked toward me. I met him halfway and almost knocked him down with a hug. We stayed that way in silence for a few seconds before we heard “DADDY!”

Samantha rushed in the kitchen and collided with us,  still embracing. She was starting to cry, but I could tell there was relief in her emotion, not grief. As our daughter pulled back after a few seconds, though, and she really looked at her father’s face, concern came rolling over her. “Daddy, you’re old. What…?”

“I’m 70, munchkin. I’m here from 1952.” He smiled, and I have to admit that it caused a little flash of anger in me, that he would be so at ease and calm at seeing his family for the first time in over 20 of his years. I know how it felt for us, and it had only been 6 months since we’ve seen him. It made me a little mad. What kind of life had he been living in the past, I wondered. Obviously a comfortable one, I realized. Then, to me, Rich said “were you expecting me?”

I nodded. At this response,  he closed his eyes, exhaled and smiled. “Dan found the box, then?”

I nodded again, a little confused at the priorities my husband was exhibiting here, and Samantha jumped in. “Uncle Dan’s almost finished the house you wanted him to build in Indiana,” she said.

Rich smiled a curious smile and said “excellent, honey. That’s great,” with a little chuckle. The strangest thought hit me at that moment that either there was a joke neither Samantha nor I was in on, or in some weird way (as if standing in your kitchen with your time traveling husband wasn’t weird enough), this wasn’t really my husband.

I looked back at him. “What?” I asked, shaking my head.

“Nothing.” Another smile as he replied. “Everything. Look, my dears, I don’t think I’m going to be here very long. Did Dan say just how long?”

“About two hours,” I replied.

“Okay. Let’s go sit down and talk,” Rich said, heading toward the family room. As he walked from the kitchen into the bigger, more comfortable room where we spent most of  our time together, I caught him looking around as if he hadn’t seen the place in 20 years. Which, of course, he hadn’t.

Samantha got us lemonade from the fridge, and as she handed the glass to Rich, he looked at with a little smile on his face. It took me a couple seconds to again realize that he hasn’t seen this place in a long time, and the nostalgia had to be a little disorienting. But, he seemed to put it aside, took a drink from the glass and smiled at me.

“How have you been?”

How have I BEEN? I shook my head slightly and the ridiculousness of the question and replied “I haven’t seen my husband in almost 8 months! THAT’S how I’ve been!” I wasn’t exactly angry, but I have to admit, I was a little put off by his off-handedness.

Rich put his glass down on the coffee table in front of us, leaned in to me and putting his hand on my knee said “sweetheart, I know this is very strange. I know my behavior seems odd to you, but please trust me. This will all work out. I promise.”

I shook my head, sighing a little and looking over at Samantha, still standing in the middle of the room, hugging herself, clearly not sure what to make of all this. It was Sam who spoke next, after a few seconds. “You’re only staying for a couple hours, Daddy?” she asked, trying not to cry.

“Just a couple hours, I guess,” Rich answered, “But, I’ll be back next month. Not here, but I’ll be back.”

“What do you mean not here?” I asked.

“I’ll be at the house in Belton on August 17th. About 10am. I’ll be there for just over two weeks,” he replied.

“How do you know that?” Samantha asked.

“Because for me, that was 17 years ago,” he said. “I came here now from 1952. I’ll be going to Belton in August from 1935. I won’t know about this trip, because for me, it won’t have happened yet, but I need you to be there, at the house in Belton. The one I’m going to have Dan build.”

Then, he paused, shook his head and corrected himself. “The one he’s building now, I mean.”

“Okay,” I answered, “we’ll be there. Of course, we’ll be there.”

“And this is very important,” Rich said, his voice lowering. I looked in his eyes, still bright, but older. This was my husband, but a man who has been through some very different experiences than the one I saw last some 8 months ago.

I nodded.

“I’m going to ask you both to do something you’re not going to want to do, but it’s vitally important that you do it. It may be a little scary, but I promise you, it will all work out fine, and you will see that it’s the right thing to do. I’ve seen that, I assure you.”

I had no idea what he was talking about, but this didn’t sound good. I looked up at Samantha, and she looked as concerned as me. I could tell that this was almost too much for her.

Rich continued. “I’m going to sound a little crazy when I suggest it to you, but believe me, the years I’ve spent since then have done nothing but confirm that what I believed was true. Please do what I try and convince you to do, okay?”

I nodded, since arguing about it here would just waste the short time we had for this “visit,” and the mood lightened after that. We’d have time to talk about this next month in Belton, apparently. My Rich, one much closer to the Rich who left here a few months ago would be there with us, and that would have to be easier.

We talked a lot about what we had gone through here. The phone calls, what I had been telling people regarding his sudden absence. I began to notice that anytime the conversation turned toward what he has been doing in the 19 years he’s lived since disappearing on that December morning, he would direct the conversation back to us. We were talking about what Samantha was doing this summer, and mid-sentence, Rich stopped, reached into his pocket and pulled out a small clear cube, about three inches square, made out of some acrylic-looking material. It had a small opening in the top. Rich handed it to me, saying “I don’t want to leave this in the ground. It’s durable, but I don’t want to take any chances. Dan will know how to use it. It’s to read a stick I’ll bury for him to find. Don’t mail this to him, take it with you when you go to Belton.”

I took the cube and nodded, turning it over in my hand. When I looked back up to Rich to ask him what it’s for, it was just me sitting on the sofa. I glanced at the clock on the mantle. Just over two hours. I quickly looked over at Samantha, and she was sitting on the carpet in the middle of the floor, her mouth open, eyes wide.

“He was there and then…He was…Just…Gone.” And she started to cry.