The Time Travelers, Volume 1 Read online

  Praise for Both Sides of Time

  “With memorable characters and a fast-paced plot … it’s fun to read.”

  —School Library Journal, Starred

  Praise for Out of Time

  “A suspenseful, focused melodrama along the lines of Philip Pullman’s The Ruby in the Smoke but fastermoving and more romantic.”

  —The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books

  The Time Travelers

  Volume One

  Novels by Caroline B. Cooney

  The Lost Songs

  Three Black Swans

  They Never Came Back

  If the Witness Lied

  Diamonds in the Shadow

  A Friend at Midnight

  Hit the Road

  Code Orange

  The Girl Who Invented Romance

  Family Reunion

  Goddess of Yesterday

  The Ransom of Mercy Carter

  Tune In Anytime

  Burning Up

  What Child Is This?

  Driver’s Ed

  Twenty Pageants Later

  Among Friends

  The Time Travelers, Volumes I and II

  The Janie Books

  The Face on the Milk Carton

  Whatever Happened to Janie?

  The Voice on the Radio

  What Janie Found

  What Janie Saw (an ebook original short story)

  Janie Face to Face

  The Time Travel Quartet

  Both Sides of Time

  Out of Time

  Prisoner of Time

  For All Time

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2006 by Caroline B. Cooney

  Cover art copyright © by Steve McAfee

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. This edition contains the complete and unabridged texts of the original editions. This omnibus was originally published in separate volumes under the titles: Both Sides of Time, copyright © 1995 by Caroline B. Cooney, and Out of Time, copyright © 1996 by Caroline B. Cooney.

  Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Visit us on the Web! randomhouse.com/teens

  Educators and librarians, for a variety of teaching tools, visit us at RHTeachersLibrarians.com

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82283-3

  First Delacorte Ebook Edition 2012

  Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Both Sides of Time

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Out of Time

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  About the Author

  BOTH

  SIDES

  OF

  TIME

  CHAPTER 1

  It was Annie’s agenda that summer to convert her boyfriend, Sean, into a romantic man. It would not be easy, everyone agreed on that. Sean was far more likely to be holding metric wrenches than a bouquet of roses for Annie.

  Annie did not know why she went out with Sean. (Not that you could call it “going out.” It was “going to.”)

  Sean’s spare time involved the repair of mechanical objects, or preventive maintenance on mechanical objects. There was always a lawn mower whose engine must be rebuilt, or an ’83 pickup truck acquired in a trade whose every part must be replaced.

  Annie would arrive at the spot where Sean was currently restoring a vehicle. She would watch. She would buy Cokes. Eventually Sean would say he had to do something else now, so good-bye.

  Nevertheless, on this, the last half day of school, Annie had planned to hold hands for cameras, immortalized as boyfriend and girlfriend. But Sean—the least-romantic handsome boy in America—had skipped.

  The girls met in front of the mirrors, of course, to compare white dresses and fix each other’s hair. Usually everybody dressed sloppily. It was almost embarrassing to look good for a change. Annie Lockwood had gotten her white dress when she was bridesmaid in a garden wedding last year. Embroidered with a thousand starry white flowers, the skirt had a great deal of cloth in it, swirling when she walked. At least the dress was perfect for romance.

  Everybody was exuberant and giddy. The moment school was exchanged for summer, they’d converge on the beach for a party that would last all afternoon and evening.

  Annie brushed her thick dark hair into a ponytail and spread a white lace scrunchy in her right hand to hold it.

  “So where is the Romance Champion?” asked her best friend, Heather.

  “He’s at the Mansion,” Annie explained, “getting his cars ready to drive away.”

  Sean would be at the old Stratton Mansion, getting his stuff off the grounds before demolition.

  Sean loved destruction. Even though it was his own home being torn down, Sean didn’t care. He couldn’t wait to see the wrecking balls in action. It was Annie who wept for the Mansion.

  The town had decided to rip it down. They were right, of course. Nobody had maintained the Mansion. Kids had been rollerskating in the ballroom for decades. Roof leaks from the soaring towers had traveled down three floors and ruined every inch of plaster. To the town, it was just a looming, dangerous hulk.

  But oh, Annie Lockwood loved the Mansion.

  The girls hurried out of the bathroom at the same second, not fitting, so they had to gather their skirts and giggle and launch themselves through the door again. The whole half day was silly and frivolous. Annie decided she was good at silly and frivolous, and it was a shame they didn’t get to behave that way more often. School ended with hugs, and seniors got weepy and the freshmen vanished, which was the only decent thing for ninth graders to do, and everybody shouted back and forth about the afternoon plans.

  “See you at the beach,” called Heather.

  Annie nodded. “First I have to collect Sean.”

  “Good luck.”

  That Sean would agree to play beach volleyball when he had a car repair deadline was highly unlikely. But Annie would certainly try.

  When the school bus dropped her off, she didn’t even go into the house to change her clothes, but retrieved her bike from the garage and started pedaling. The frothy white dress billowed out behind her in fat white balloons. It was a ridiculous thing to bicycle in. She pulled off the scrunchy and let her hair fly too. Her hair was dark and romantic against the white of her dress.

  I’m going to ruin the dress, she thought. I should have changed into jeans, especially when I know perfectly well Sean is just changing the oil on some car and he’ll want me to help.

  I’ll help you, she promised the absent Sean. I will repair your entire person
ality, you lucky guy. By the end of summer, you will have worth.

  Lately, Annie had been reading every advice column in existence: Ann Landers, Dear Abby, Miss Manners. She’d become unusually hooked on radio and television talk shows. She knew two things now:

  A. You weren’t supposed to try to change other people. It didn’t work and afterward they hated you.

  B. Mind Your Own Business.

  Of course nobody ever obeyed those two rules; it would take all the fun out of life. Annie had no intention whatsoever of following either A or B.

  She pedaled through the village toward Stratton Point. The land was solid with houses. Hardly a village now that eighty thousand people lived here, but the residents, most of whom had moved from New York City, liked to pretend they were rural.

  It was very warm, but the breeze was not friendly. The sky darkened. They were in for a good storm. (Her father always called a storm “good.”) Annie thought about the impending thunderstorm at home, and then decided not to think about it.

  Passing the last house, she crossed the narrow spit of land, two cars wide, that led to Stratton Point. Sometime in the 1880s, a railroad baron had built his summer “cottage” on an island a few hundred yards from shore. He created a yacht basin, so he could commute to New York City, and then built a causeway, so his family could ride in their splendid monogrammed carriage to the village ice cream parlor. He added a magnificent turreted bathhouse down by a stretch of soft white sand, and a carriage house, stables, an echo house, and even a decorative lighthouse with a bell tower instead of warnings.

  Decades after the parties ceased and nobody was there to have afternoon tea or play croquet, the Mansion was divided into nine apartments and the six hundred acres of Stratton Point became a town park. The bathhouse was used by the public now. The Garden Club reclaimed the walled gardens, and where Mr. Stratton’s single yacht had once been docked, hundreds of tiny boats cluttered the placid water. Day campers detoured by the echo house to scream forbidden words and listen to them come back. I didn’t say it, they would protest happily.

  The nine apartments were occupied by town crew, including Sean’s father, whose job it was to keep up roads and parks and storm drains. Nobody kept the Mansion up.

  Annie pedaled past parking lots, picnic areas and tennis courts, past Sunfishes and Bluejays waiting to be popped into the water, past the beach where the graduating class was gathering in spite of the look of the sky. She passed the holly gardens and the nature paths, more parking lots, woods, sand, meadow, and finally, the bottom of the Great Hill. The huge brown-shingled mansion cast its three-towered shadow over the Hill.

  Pity the horses that had had to drag heavy carriages up this steep curve. Biking up was very difficult. There were days when Annie could do it, and days she couldn’t.

  This was a day she could.

  Stretching up into the hot angry clouds, the Mansion’s copper trimmed towers glimmered angrily, as if they knew they were shortly to die. Annie shivered in the heat, vaguely afraid of the shadows, steering around them to stay in the sun.

  Sean would be parked on the turnaround, getting his nonworking vehicles working enough to be driven away before the demolition crew blocked access to the Mansion.

  At the crest of the Great Hill, the old drive circled a vast garden occupied by nonworking fountains and still valiant peonies and roses. There was Sean, flawless in white T-shirt and indigo jeans, unaware that his girlfriend had arrived. Derelict vehicles were so much more interesting than girls.

  It won’t work, she thought dismally. I can’t change Sean. Either I take him the way he is, or I don’t take him.

  Annie wanted the kind of romance that must have happened in the Mansion back when Hiram Stratton made millions in railroads, and fought unions, and married four times, and gave parties so grand even the newspapers in London, England, wrote about them.

  She imagined Sean in starched white collar, gold cuff links and black tails, dancing in a glittering ballroom, gallant to every beautiful woman over whose hand he bowed.

  No.

  Never happen.

  I am a romantic in the wrong century, she thought. I live in the 1990s. I should be in the 1890s. I bet I could have found true love a hundred years ago. Look at Sean. All I’m going to find around here is true grease.

  Annie stood straddling the bike, and leaned against a stone pillar to catch her breath.

  The first falling happened.

  It was a terrible black sensation: that hideous feeling she had when she was almost asleep but her body snapped away from sleep, as if falling asleep really did involve a fall, and some nights her body didn’t want to go. It was always scary to fall when you were flat on the mattress. It was far, far scarier to fall here on the grass, staring at Sean.

  Her fingertips scraped the harsh stones of the wall. She couldn’t grab hold of them—they raced by her, going up as she went down. She fell so hard, so deeply, she expected to find herself at the bottom of some cliff, dashed upon the rocks. She arched her body, trying to protect herself, trying to tuck in, trying to cry out—

  —and it stopped.

  Stopped completely.

  Nothing had fallen. Not Annie, not her bike, not the sky.

  She was fine.

  Sean was still kneeling beside his engine block, having heard no cry and worried no worries.

  Did my heart work too hard coming up the drive? thought Annie. Did I half faint? I didn’t even skip breakfast.

  The hot wind picked up Annie’s hair in its sweaty fingers. Yanking her hair, the wind circled to get a tighter grip. She grabbed her hair back, making a ponytail in her fist and holding it.

  Just a breeze, she said to herself. Her heart was racing.

  There was something wrong with the day, or something wrong with her.

  “Hey, ASL!” yelled Sean, spotting her at last. Sean referred to everything by letter. He drove an MG, listened to CDs, watched MTV, did his A-II homework.

  Annie’s real name, depressingly, was Anna Sophia. Every September, she asked herself if this school year she wanted to be called Anna Sophia, and every September it seemed more appealing to go to court and get a legal name change to Annie.

  Sean had adopted her initials and called her ASL. Everybody thought it was romantic. Only Annie knew that Sean’s romance was with the alphabet.

  When she let go of her hair, the wind recaptured it.

  The leaves on the old oak trees did not move, but her hair swirled horizontally as if she were still biking.

  For a strange sliding moment, she saw no decrepit old cars under the porte cochere, but matched chestnut horses with black manes and tails. They were alive, those horses, flicking their tails and stamping heavily. She could smell the distinctive stable perfume of sweating animals.

  What is going on here? she thought.

  “They’ve sold the marble floors, the fireplace mantels and the carvings on the staircase, ASL,” said Sean happily. “Antique lovers love this place. Town’s probably going to get enough money from the fixtures to pay for demolishing it.”

  It was so like Sean not to notice her dress, not to comment on the last day of school, and not to care that good things were ending forever.

  She climbed the high steps onto the covered porch. The immense double oak doors were so heavy she always felt there should be a manservant to hold them for her. Of course, the doors were padlocked now, the windows boarded up, and—

  The doors were not padlocked. The handles turned. What a gift! Annie slid inside.

  The front hall still had its marble floors, giant black and white squares like a huge cruel chess game. Antique dealers had taken the gryphons from the staircase—little walnut madmen foaming at the mouth—but nobody had yet touched the mirrors. The house was heavily mirrored, each mirror a jagged collection of triangles, like the facets of diamonds. Fragments of mirror dismembered Annie. Her hands, her face, her dress were reflected a thousand times a thousand.

  It was not as dar
k inside as she’d expected it to be. Light from stairwells and light wells filled the house.

  This is the last time I’ll ever be inside, she thought, going overboard emotionally, as if this were also her Last Visit to the Lockwood Family As It Ought to Be.

  Don’t think about home, she ordered herself. Don’t dwell on it, because what can you do? Mind Your Own Business. That’s the rule, everybody agrees.

  Outdoors the rain arrived, huge and heavy. Not water falling from the sky, but thrown from the sky, angry gods taking aim. She expected Sean to come inside with her, but of course he didn’t. He angled his body beneath the porte cochere and went on doing whatever mechanical thing he was doing.

  Annie resolved to find a boyfriend with interests other than cars and sound systems. He’d be incredibly gorgeous and romantic, plus entranced by Annie.

  The stairs loomed darkly.

  These were stairs for trailing ballgowns and elbow length white gloves, the sweet scent of lilac perfume wafting as you rested your fragile hand on the arm of your betrothed.

  It was difficult to think of Sean ever becoming a girl’s betrothed. Sean had a hard time taking Annie to the movies, never mind getting engaged. He was the sort who would stay in love with cars and trucks, and end up married quite accidentally, without noticing.

  Annie walked into the ballroom. Circular, with wooden floors, it had been destroyed by decades of tenants’ children’s birthday parties. The upholstery on its many window seats was long gone. Only the tack holes remained.

  I wish I could see the Mansion the way it was. I wish I could be here a hundred years ago and have what they had, dress as they dressed, live as they lived.

  Oh, she knew what they had had: smallpox and tuberculosis and no anesthesia for childbirth. No contact lenses, no movies, no shopping malls, no hamburgers. Still, how nice to have both centuries … the way her father was having both women.

  I try not to hate him, or Miss Bartten either, she thought, but how do I do that? My mother is this wonderful woman, who loves her family, loves her job, loves her house—and Daddy forgets her? Falls in love with the new gym teacher at the high school where he teaches music?