***
The following summer, Graham received an e-mail from one of his students who was now in Paris. Neil Carter had found a collection of interesting past life regression interviews at the French National Archive, where he was working as an intern before heading back to Bristol the following year. The reels of tape had been found in a cabinet in a room that hadn’t been touched for thirty or more years. Neil wrote that notes found with the recordings suggested one of the women, a certain Nadine Vartan, was interviewed in 1966 and claimed to have been alive as Marie Percier in the first half of the eighteenth century.
“I’ve listened to one of the reels, Graham,” Neil wrote. “She mentioned a visit by a travelling menagerie in 1711. She mentioned the Blythe Brothers Show!”
Within twenty minutes, Graham had used his credit card to purchase an air ticket and three nights accommodation in the southern suburbs of Paris. He hugged his wife and told her she had to let her crazy husband do his thing on occasion.
“There’s something about this case, Julie. I have to go to listen to what this French woman said in 1966. It’s stronger than me. You do understand, don’t you?”
She looked up at him and smiled, her hands squeezing his love handles affectionately.
“You’re my very own detective Columbo, aren’t you? Go and get the bad guys, darling.”
Three days later, Graham was entering the French National Archive, armed with his academic pass from Bristol University and accompanied by Yves, his interpreter. He retrieved the two reels of interviews with Nadine Vartan, Fevrier 1966 written in felt-tip pen along the spine of each box. The two entered a cubicle, got out their notebooks and prepared for the day’s work.
Before listening to the first reel, Graham showed a letter to Yves that he’d received from the woman in charge of the past life regression collection at the National Archive. Yves read it out for him.
“Dear Professor Higgins, I’m happy that you have decided to visit the National Archive. Nadine Vartan’s is considered one of the least reliable of the interviews that were carried out in the mid- to late-1960s. Her French regularly and randomly changes from modern day to 19th century. There are many biographical details that have been confirmed, however. Much of her interview dealt with everyday life and contains information that was already in the public domain at the time of the interview and that is where she probably heard it from. Her description of the travelling show borders on the ridiculous and goes a long way to discrediting her testimony. Cordially Yours, Fabienne Leroux.”
“Thanks, Yves. Well, that’s whet my appetite! So basically, they’re saying this Nadine is a bit of a crazy lady, right?”
“Oui,” replied Yves. “It certainly seems that way.”
The first reel had already been heard by Neil, the intern who had written to Graham. Nadine, or Marie as she insisted on being called, made two passing references to the travelling shows that used to visit her town of Arras, some hundred miles north of Paris. It was the second reel that proved more fruitful.
Yves, patiently interpreting for Graham, began to talk about the first time that Marie went to visit the show:
“We went, it was me and all my family except Henri who was sick, he was ill, in bed with, I don’t know that word Graham, I didn’t hear, so they all went out to the fields by the lake, no, a pond and at about three o’clock, the Blythe Brothers Travelling Show arrived.”
Graham sat at the table nodding his head as Yves spoke, occasionally making notes, though he was recording the whole thing anyway.
“I was very sad for the animals because there was, there were, only some goats, an old elephant and some birds, some colourful birds. Now the guy’s asking her if she went there only for the animals. OK, now she said not really, she went because someone in the next village told them about the storyteller.”
Graham looked up like an attentive guard dog who had just heard something.
“They told us that the storyteller from the other side of the ocean was something wonderful to behold.”
Yves leant forward and pressed the pause button.
“That Fabienne lady was right. Her French is all over the place, Graham. She uses some structures I don’t even recognize, stuff from a hundred, a hundred a fifty years ago. Then she throws in some words that, well, it’s just modern slang that our Acadamie Francaise wouldn’t be happy with.”
He pressed Play again.
“He came and told us stories as the sun was setting. There was a man playing a harp to one side. Me and my friends were laughing, sorry, giggling is better, giggling a lot. He was very handsome. He had a sort of painting on the side of his neck, a flower, this is strange word she says and he was very tall with short blond hair, she says modern French word that means like cropped or shaved. He said his name was Antoine Gardner.”
Graham scribbled furiously in his notebook. It was all he could do to stop himself from crying out – he had a name!
“He told us he was from another world, a world where everything was as different as you could imagine. He said his country was the United States of America. He said magical, no fantastical, stories of his country. He told us people in his land had gone to the moon and travelled on trains under the ground in cities. He did not speak our language very well and his voice, no, his words, his accent I think she means, was odd.”
“We listened to him and everyone had their eyes bright and open, it was amazing for us. Someone in the crowd asked this storyteller why he was in our world, why he had come to be in Arras and he replied that he had arrived nine years ago with a friend and they couldn’t go back. They had tried to live in public, in the public world, she says something I didn’t catch, but that it caused them many difficulties. The citizens thought they were wizards and he was frightened of being attacked, even killed, so they decided to join the Blythe Brothers Travelling Show and Antoine become a storyteller. This man, he spoke for about an hour, and then the bear came out again and people were dancing to the music. Many people were drunk. Now she’s talking about her brother again.”
Graham stopped the tape. His brain was crackling with possibilities and he needed to catch his breath. It all seemed so preposterous and Yves said out loud just what he was thinking.
“So this guy is from the United States in, what, 1711? It’s utterly absurd, isn’t it?” he said, smiling broadly.
“I know Yves, it is utterly absurd, but I’ve been on the trail of this guy for six months and I’ve read several accounts of him. There’s something that doesn’t add up.”
Graham really did feel like Columbo saying those words.
“That’s the first I’ve heard about him arriving with a friend,” he added, writing something else on the notepad in front of him.
They listened to the rest of the second reel, but Nadine never mentioned the storyteller or the travelling show again.
For the last two days of his stay in the French capital, Graham hunted down every reference to the Blythe Brothers or Antoine Gardner in the archive, the Bibliotheque National and several museums. He turned up precious little, and certainly nothing that he didn’t already know. He’d exhausted both himself and Paris.
***
For Graham, the trail went cold after his return from Paris. He wrote to several colleagues across Europe and the United States, but all possible leads turned out to be frustrating wild goose chases. He entertained friends with the tale of the mysterious storyteller over wine and dessert at several dinner parties, guilty even himself of the occasional embellishment, but his listeners always shared his disappointment at the lack of closure to the case.
It was two years later that a professor at Boston University wrote to Graham. The e-mail was one line of text followed by a link.
“The fourth name rang a bell – thought of you.”
The link led to an announcement of recent winners of scholarships to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the fourth name stilled Graham’s heart: Anthony Gardener.
A f
ew minutes later, Graham was looking at a short article on the website of the newspaper in Anthony Gardener’s small Ohio town. Anthony Gardner was tall and had blond hair. In the photo, showing Anthony shaking the hand of his high school principal, Graham thought he could see a hint of what was possibly a tattoo on his neck, peeking out from below his shirt collar.
“Holy shit!” cried out Graham.
He looked through the brief article and read the words of Anthony Gardener as he spoke about his dreams for the future.
“At M.I.T., I am going to be focusing on quantum physics and theoretical stuff like wormholes, exerting control over time, slowing it down, even reversing it. It’s going to be pretty cool!”
Graham leaned in and looked into the eyes of Anthony Gardener from a couple of inches away.
“What did you go and do Anthony, goddamit? Where will you end up after M.I.T.? You’re going to get into some serious crap, aren’t you?”
Graham sat back in his chair, certain now that he’d finally traced his mysterious storyteller. The end of the story was, as Yves had so accurately described it, utterly absurd, far more than even he had dared to imagine.
He thought about his own life and how far he’d come since a childhood visit to a mediaeval outdoor show, replete with jousters and knights, had first awakened his fascination with the period. Graham’s eyes snailed slowly across the bookshelves behind him, a wall of academic studies devoted to his true love: history. What would it be like to actually live it, he thought to himself. To actually see and touch those things he’d only glimpsed through the medium of the printed page.
He took down a large red folder, “Paris, 2007” written on the cover, and began to turn the pages of notes he’d made in the bowels of the French National Archive two years before. To an observer, it looked as though Graham was aimlessly leafing through the pages, but he knew what he was looking for and soon found it, written in his neat hand:
He arrived nine years before – with a friend! Which friend?
Graham closed over the folder and pulled his laptop closer to him.
“Dear Anthony, I’d firstly like to congratulate you on your scholarship to M.I.T., one of the finest academic institutions in the world. I’d like to arrange a time and place where we can speak about your studies and future career.”
***
About the author:
Neil Coghlan is currently living in Buenos Aires where he divides his time between writing, web design and walking around the city. He has several stories published in anthologies and magazines. He hopes you enjoyed this story as much as he enjoyed writing it.
Connect:
You can find Neil’s author blog here: https://esllou.blogspot.com
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