Chapter 1

Two weeks and I'm bored out of my head, it is only two weeks since I returned to my own time with Carol and young Charlie to Marjorie's home, well my home now. Marjorie has picked up since we returned and doesn't look the sick woman we saw when we came through that front door two weeks ago. Now she is back to her organizing old self and during the day I hardly ever see her.

Marjorie's friends call but I try to avoid them as much as possible, as I have said in the past their pebble in the mouth way of talking grates on my nerves. To prevent any embarrassment I keep away from them.

As usual I spend the best part of each morning after I do my five mile run is to read the local and national papers. This morning an article caught my attention, a young woman on her usual morning run disappeared, nothing unusual in that there is always young women disappearing, usually running away from home and the many other reasons. This time there was a witness, who states he saw the woman run under a rail bridge and just vanish. According to the reporter this is the second person to disappear from this area in two years.

I wondered to myself, could this be another shimmering as we called it, a gateway into another time?

Out of curiosity I rang the newspaper and enquired of the date when the other person disappeared from the same area. I was given the date and I also was told the date of the disappearance of the young woman was wrong it had happened three days ago and not two as the newspaper reported.

Getting pencil and paper I worked out the days between the two disappearances and found they were 644 days apart now divide that by 92 which was the cycle of the shimmering we passed through and it fitted. It may be coincidental the two disappearances occurred exactly at the same time frame, but this now gave me something to get my teeth into.

Fortunately Marjorie was at home this morning so I went up to her home office. I burst in all excited.

"Marjorie, I think I have found another time warp. Look at this article first." I said handing her the newspaper.

Without saying a word she took the newspaper from me and read the article.

"It could be co-incidental, there is no date given."

"I know, so I rang the newspaper and got the date of the first person disappearing and I worked out the days between." I showed her my calculations. "It is the same period between."

"So you think there is other time warps, we saw no sign when we were there or any strange appearances reported from the villagers."

"Marg what if it's to another time period altogether, for something to do I'm going to hunt out missing people and any funny disappearances. Have you a spare computer I can use to create a database?"

"I think you will find these disappearances are not what you think, but you can have my laptop I'm not using it now."

I gave her a kiss and returned to the lounge, now I have something to get my teeth into, and break this boredom.

The first thing I did was log on to the missing persons web page on the internet and picking the area of central England checked the people who have disappeared. I was surprised at the number which came up, but I sorted through them and was left with about ten where people just vanished leaving all their possessions untouched over the past twenty years.

The next trip was to the local newspaper archives in the library. I spent three full days going over all the details of vanishing people. Starting with the ten I had from the internet, but this time I found six more that fitted in to the pattern. But I dropped five from the list of ten. I now had eleven people who mysteriously vanished. Four men, five women and two young male children, the only thing was they were from three different localities. Within these localities they fitted into my 92-day period of cycle.

There was a difference of ten days between each area including the gateway we had passed through. This pattern was too much of a coincidence for me and I was going to visit each of the areas and I knew what to look for, I just had to have the exact location. The site of the latest was given, as under the rail bridge, all I had to do was get the details for the other two. No witnesses were reported for the vanishings at the other sites, but the locations where they were last seen and the activities they were performing was all in the records.

Two other people had just vanished in the area where the young woman had vanished. Five years previous a married black man called Ralph Busing, with three young children, a good job. He had been advised by his doctor to exercise more so on one of his walks, which went through the bridge he never returned home that day and hasn't been seen or heard from since.