Vibro repairman
Really Experienced
- Joined
- Jun 22, 2003
- Posts
- 281
OOC: Loosely based around Dr Who (will have a Tardis and a TimeLady at least).
September 4th 1922, London
I knelt down, besides the recently filled grave. My father, at just 48, had passed on just a week past, despite his robust physique. His health had rapidly deteriotated over the last month, what first had appeared to be a bad cough quickly proving to be much more than a throat infection. I brushed away the fallen autumn leaves that had fallen across his resting place and straightened the flowers I had brought in the urn at the base of the simple gravestone where his name was carved. Edgar Johnathan Crawford, 1876-1920.
The plot besides him was empty, for the mother I hardly remembered and who had left us when I was just 6 years old. That was 14 years ago, nearly to the day. I wondered where she was now.
I recalled my father telling me how they had met. It was by the Tower Bridge, not far from our home, when she had stumbled into his arms. She had looked tired, and fearful. Her clothes had smelled of smoke. My father had taken her to a nearby hospital. Although she had no real injuries, she proved to be suffering from amnesia. She bore no documents, no indication to her true identity, although she spoke excellent english, was apparently british, and well schooled.
She also was pregnant. I was her unborn child.
After five months in the hospital, after I had been delivered, there was still no response to the enquiries made with the aim of discovering her identity or where she was from, or any improvement to her amnesiac condition. She named me Johnathan, after my fathers middle name. With no-one forthcoming to take care of her, and not willing to see her taken away, my father pulled some strings with some well-to-do friends in government circles and brought her to his home. He had stayed with her on many a night at the hospital, and they had grown close then. With no place to go, he took her in, and two weeks before my first birthday, with no sign she was married with no rings or ring marks upon either her wedding or engagement finger or jewellry, he proposed, and shortly afterwards they wed. Taking his surname for her own, and keeping the first name the hospital had given her as standard procedure for unknown patients, she became Jane Crawford, and I, Johnathan Crawford.
We had been a close family, my father said, his business, where he worked as a bank manager in a branch of Lloyds, had been good and life likewise. Then, one Wednesday afternoon, she hadn't returned home from a shopping trip. Searches and questions asked by police detectives led nowhere. She had disappeared from my fathers life as mysteriously as she had appeared in it, leaving me behind.
The next few years had been hard on my father, and he began to drink more than his usual evening tipple. We soldiered on though, as he would say, and I was put through a local boarding school, where I hoped I did him proud. He never really said what he thought of my efforts, though I believe I did well. Perhaps it was because I wasn't really his son. Perhaps it wasthat I reminded him to much of the love he had lost. I guess I would never know now.
A movement out of the corner of my left eye brought me out of my reverie, and I looked round to see a woman, dressed somewhat unusually for the weather, in a light coat and long skirt that went down to just above her ankles. The clothing itself looked out of place, not of any current fashion I had seen around on the streets. She moved off, behind one of the many mausoleums and large gravestone statues. Intrigued, as it had appeared she had been watching me, I stood and followed.
I lost sight of her around one of the older mausoleums, the inscription over the door too eroded to make out. The stone door was slightly ajar. Tenatively, I pushed it open, and stepped within.
I found myself in a room, though it certainly was no hallowed resting place of the dead. The walls, floor and ceiling were white. Except for the walls, which had a simple triangular pattern all over them, they were quite smooth. In the centre was a raised dias with a hexagonal table-like top, which sloped up towards the centre where a large glass tube like construct was imbedded. The inside of the tube seemed to contain crystals, and the six sides of the dias about the tube were covered with an array of levers, buttons, and dials, such as I had never seen before in my life.
What was most striking, however, was the room was larger than the mausoleum that contained it. Impossible. I walked back out, walked around the grey stone tomb, as if that would make it fit properly, before walking back in to look about the inside room in a kind of daze. It was impossible. But here it was. I didn't believe I was hallucinating, or dreaming, it seemed real enough. I approached the central dias and looked it over, trying to make some sense of the weird machinery before me.
September 4th 1922, London
I knelt down, besides the recently filled grave. My father, at just 48, had passed on just a week past, despite his robust physique. His health had rapidly deteriotated over the last month, what first had appeared to be a bad cough quickly proving to be much more than a throat infection. I brushed away the fallen autumn leaves that had fallen across his resting place and straightened the flowers I had brought in the urn at the base of the simple gravestone where his name was carved. Edgar Johnathan Crawford, 1876-1920.
The plot besides him was empty, for the mother I hardly remembered and who had left us when I was just 6 years old. That was 14 years ago, nearly to the day. I wondered where she was now.
I recalled my father telling me how they had met. It was by the Tower Bridge, not far from our home, when she had stumbled into his arms. She had looked tired, and fearful. Her clothes had smelled of smoke. My father had taken her to a nearby hospital. Although she had no real injuries, she proved to be suffering from amnesia. She bore no documents, no indication to her true identity, although she spoke excellent english, was apparently british, and well schooled.
She also was pregnant. I was her unborn child.
After five months in the hospital, after I had been delivered, there was still no response to the enquiries made with the aim of discovering her identity or where she was from, or any improvement to her amnesiac condition. She named me Johnathan, after my fathers middle name. With no-one forthcoming to take care of her, and not willing to see her taken away, my father pulled some strings with some well-to-do friends in government circles and brought her to his home. He had stayed with her on many a night at the hospital, and they had grown close then. With no place to go, he took her in, and two weeks before my first birthday, with no sign she was married with no rings or ring marks upon either her wedding or engagement finger or jewellry, he proposed, and shortly afterwards they wed. Taking his surname for her own, and keeping the first name the hospital had given her as standard procedure for unknown patients, she became Jane Crawford, and I, Johnathan Crawford.
We had been a close family, my father said, his business, where he worked as a bank manager in a branch of Lloyds, had been good and life likewise. Then, one Wednesday afternoon, she hadn't returned home from a shopping trip. Searches and questions asked by police detectives led nowhere. She had disappeared from my fathers life as mysteriously as she had appeared in it, leaving me behind.
The next few years had been hard on my father, and he began to drink more than his usual evening tipple. We soldiered on though, as he would say, and I was put through a local boarding school, where I hoped I did him proud. He never really said what he thought of my efforts, though I believe I did well. Perhaps it was because I wasn't really his son. Perhaps it wasthat I reminded him to much of the love he had lost. I guess I would never know now.
A movement out of the corner of my left eye brought me out of my reverie, and I looked round to see a woman, dressed somewhat unusually for the weather, in a light coat and long skirt that went down to just above her ankles. The clothing itself looked out of place, not of any current fashion I had seen around on the streets. She moved off, behind one of the many mausoleums and large gravestone statues. Intrigued, as it had appeared she had been watching me, I stood and followed.
I lost sight of her around one of the older mausoleums, the inscription over the door too eroded to make out. The stone door was slightly ajar. Tenatively, I pushed it open, and stepped within.
I found myself in a room, though it certainly was no hallowed resting place of the dead. The walls, floor and ceiling were white. Except for the walls, which had a simple triangular pattern all over them, they were quite smooth. In the centre was a raised dias with a hexagonal table-like top, which sloped up towards the centre where a large glass tube like construct was imbedded. The inside of the tube seemed to contain crystals, and the six sides of the dias about the tube were covered with an array of levers, buttons, and dials, such as I had never seen before in my life.
What was most striking, however, was the room was larger than the mausoleum that contained it. Impossible. I walked back out, walked around the grey stone tomb, as if that would make it fit properly, before walking back in to look about the inside room in a kind of daze. It was impossible. But here it was. I didn't believe I was hallucinating, or dreaming, it seemed real enough. I approached the central dias and looked it over, trying to make some sense of the weird machinery before me.
