John Wise

Leaving from the front door of the house, walking up the street around the corner and around a house at the next corner, coming back again to walk through the front door of the other house, walking clockwise around the interior perimeter, exiting again through the door you entered jumps you forward in time. Or so found out a girl from an old Indian witch/shaman who told her a story of people moving into the future near where she lived. In her time she had many a person trying to follow her to catch her secret, with a few people coming close to discovering where she was disappearing to.

One crotchety old man even thought he might have figured it out that all he had to do was walk to the other house and around the outside with four coins in his pocket where he would learn what the magic was, but the girl didn’t let him know nor does he figure out that passing through the first house is of importance to passing through time. Fast forward to the present, and the house is being renovated when the new owner finds a hidden drawing showing a figure eight and a half with a poem going something like, “in today and down the hall out the door into tomorrow, I skip the path into the future to follow the path back to today.”

After figuring out that the other building is the necessary point to complete the loop he stumbles into the secret that has for two centuries been well guarded. The owner determines there are magnetic field anomalies in which vortexes are leaving the earth, similar to the phenomenon in Sedona and Machu Pichu, and that crossing these in the right pattern will jump you back and forth between two time periods. Initially, his timing is off, and he misses days, but on further contemplation of the poem, he recognizes the girl said skip, which shows that she was maintaining an even speed between rotations around the block. This then has him trying experiments where he speeds up or slows down his looping, which allows him to adjust the years between jumps.

Cut to the future, and someone is notified by software that notices an anomaly on a satellite image that a door to a historical house, which is cared for into perpetuity by various grants and hidden ownership, has had its front door opened during a satellite sweep. The software recognized that this door hadn’t been opened in 37 years, which presented an anomaly that required someone to look into the situation, so the house was targeted for automated surveillance. After some time, the images show someone leaving the house, walking around the block, and back into the house; the person then never emerges. One thing leads to another, and soon, someone in the government puts the puzzle together and figures out that the speed at which you move between the two vortex fields will determine how far in time you jump.

The home, now controlled by a secret government agency, is used in an experiment that successively ups the speed until the jumper moves in such a way between times that the house is destroyed during the final jump while the mysterious owner and the government time jumper are both in transit thus trapping them both without a method to return nor the resources to effectively live rich lives but as the government jumper was the original girl from the beginning of the story who had become a woman waiting for the opportunity to reenter the house which the government had sequestered years before her leap into the time where she had been trapped, the man had already been trapped in a past where he could no longer find the home and the two meet as they both walk towards where the door would have been, but finding an empty lot are forced to live together due to the secrets they share and how they use the information about the future to make a better life during the time they lived in the future. The home was destroyed by a freak storm in the 1850s. The magic was thus broken, but the girl from 19th century New Bedford and the contemporary man from the 21st century find each other.