She Arrived Without A Song: A Jukebox Story Read online

  She Arrived Without A Song

  A Jukebox Story

  Dean Wesley Smith

  She Arrived Without A Song

  Copyright © 2013 Dean Wesley Smith

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Cover design copyright © 2013 WMG Publishing

  Cover Illustration by Selestron76/Dreamstime.com

  Smashwords Edition

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

  One

  “Stout!”

  The shout wasn’t really something I paid much attention to. I was standing with my back to the bar working on my bar order that needed to be done by three in the afternoon or the four regulars behind me weren’t going to be drinking this weekend.

  “Stout! You have better turn around real quick!”

  That was Big Carl’s voice and in all the years he had been coming into the Garden Lounge, I had never heard him raise his voice until now.

  I spun around to find all four regulars turned and staring to my left. And they all looked shocked.

  Big Carl, the farthest down the bar to the right looked almost panicked.

  Fred and Billy, both retired older men in for an afternoon “bracer” as Fred liked to call his drink, looked like they had seen a ghost.

  Richard, my friend who sometimes helped me out behind the bar when I needed a break was on the right and leaning back as if he was trying to move away from something that might bite him.

  It took me a moment to see what they were staring at. Then it hit me like a hammer and I had to catch myself against the back bar.

  The jukebox was on!

  That jukebox was never to be plugged in or turned on unless I did it. And everyone knew that. At least everyone sitting at the bar at the moment and there was no one else in the bar on this sunny July afternoon. Even in the faint light of some of the booths, I knew no one else was in here. In the summer, when someone came in or left, the bright sunshine from outside lit up the normally fairly dark Garden Lounge like the insides of spotlight.

  And every time a person came in they had to stop, let the door close, and then let their eyes adjust before moving.

  The jukebox was on.

  Not possible.

  For a second I thought it was one of my regulars playing a joke on me, but they all looked as shocked as I felt and they knew I wouldn’t consider anyone messing with the jukebox any kind of joke at all.

  So I clicked off the stereo behind the bar and eased toward where the old Wurlitzer jukebox sat tucked behind a planter off of the open end of the bar.

  It was out of sight from most of the tables in the bar and on busy nights I just covered it with an old gray cloth to keep anyone from deciding to plug it in and play a song when I wasn’t looking.

  That old jukebox was very special. It could take a person back to the actual memory of the song being played. And the person, while there, while the song was playing, could change the memory, their own history if they wanted.

  And that made the jukebox frighteningly dangerous. It only got turned on for the seven friends that knew about it on Christmas Eve every year, friends who understood the danger of tinkering with their own past in the slightest.

  But there the jukebox sat on this hot July afternoon, lights bright, the hum of whatever secret time travel device was inside it filling the now deadly-silent bar.

  I eased around and looked behind the jukebox.

  “It’s not plugged in,” I said out loud, more to myself than the other four in the bar as I backed away.

  “Not possible,” Richard said softly. “That power is coming from somewhere.”

  At that moment the motor started to whir that brought up a record.

  I wanted to just run for the street and the heat outside, but instead stumbled back behind the bar, too shocked to even think.

  Somehow that jukebox, without power, was about to play a song. Not possible. It could take all of us out and back in time to memories we didn’t want to go to.

  Suddenly, I realized what I had to do and my mind broke free of the shock for the moment. In two steps I reached the drawer under the cash register and yanked it open. In the back was the box of high-grade earplugs clipped together in pairs. I yanked out a handful and scattered them in front of everyone along the bar, then grabbed two for myself.

  “Quickly, get these in and think about a pleasant memory.”

  All of them moved as one, grabbing earplugs and stuffing them into place.

  I did the same, moving back around the end of the bar to the jukebox to see which record the thing was going to play.

  It picked the slot A-1, where I used to have the record that took me back to Jenny. I hadn’t had that record in the jukebox for years, so the pick-up arm of the jukebox picked up nothing and moved toward the platter as I watched.

  “It doesn’t have a record!” I shouted so everyone could hear me over the earplugs.

  But the machine kept pretending it did have a record, dropping the imaginary record on the turntable. A moment later it spun up and the playing arm moved into place, resting over the empty, spinning turntable like a record was actually there.

  I had to be dreaming.

  That was the answer. This had to be an ugly nightmare. I had come to respect the jukebox and whoever had built it. Time travel in any fashion was dangerous and I had had many nightmares about that machine as well.

  But never one where the jukebox played without being plugged in.

  That was always the control I had over the thing. No power, it didn’t work.

  Up until now.

  Two

  Then, as some imaginary song on an imaginary record started to play, there was a shimmering in front of the jukebox, or actually more accurately right over the jukebox, and the image of flowers and colors and bubbles appeared surrounding a beautiful woman.

  She looked almost see-through and she was wearing what looked like sound-dampening headphones.

  She smiled and started to speak, but I couldn’t hear her because of the earplugs. She indicated I should take them out.

  Trying to think of the best memory I could, I eased the plug out of my right ear.

  There was no song. No music at all, just this image of a woman shimmering over the jukebox, sort of fading in and out.

  “It’s clear!” I shouted to the others and everyone pulled out their earplugs. They were all looking as stunned as I was feeling.

  All of us had seen people disappear and then reappear as the jukebox took them back to a memory and then brought them back when the song ended. But only once before had a song brought a person to us.

  And never had someone come to the jukebox without it being plugged in and with no actual song playing.

  The woman floating over the jukebox smiled and the area around her sort of radiated the joy of her smile, the colors becoming brighter and the swirling lines moving faster.

  She did not take off her headphones.

  “Hi, Stout,” she said, nodding to me.

  I had never met her before that I could remember, and she was attractive enough I’m sure I would have remembered.

  Then she turned to Richard and the look in her eyes changed slightly in a way I couldn’t tell. “Thank you for giving me this chance. It looks like it worked, at least the first part of this.”

  I glanced around at my friend.

  Ric
hard just sat there, looking shocked, his mouth slightly open as he stared at the beautiful woman floating above the jukebox.

  I finally managed to swallow, then through a very dry mouth asked the obvious first questions.

  “Who are you and where are you coming from?”

  I wanted to ask how, but figured I needed the first two questions answered first.

  “My name is Donna Neff. I’m thirty-seven and you don’t know me yet. I am coming back from a future I hope to change.”

  I nodded, tried to swallow again without much success. She was a young-looking thirty-seven.

  She smiled and answered my next question. “I don’t know how this is being done either. In the future Richard figures some of this sort of stuff out about this fantastic jukebox.”

  Again I glanced at my friend, but he wasn’t moving. His gaze was just locked on the woman.

  “The song is half over,” she said, glancing down at the jukebox and where the arm was in its position on the imaginary record.

  “What can we do to help you?” I asked. “And why should we?”

  “The why is the easy part, sort of,” she said. “To save the world, to put it bluntly.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that, but I just let her go on. I didn’t much like any of this at this point.

  “Please don’t ask me how I know, I just do, just as I know about this wonderful jukebox. Time travel is very possible, as you all know. My son Danny will invent a device when he is in college that will eventually solve a lot of the energy problems of the world. That’s all I can say because it’s pretty much all I know.”

  I nodded and glanced at the jukebox. Whatever song that had sent her was getting close to being over.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “I am told that in about ten minutes a girlfriend and I will come through the front door of the Garden looking for a cool drink and you all will treat us wonderfully, since you are all great people. And we will become regulars, using the Garden as a sanctuary away from our children and divorces and crummy ex-husbands.”

  “And you changed your past, right?” I asked. I knew the answer because she said that she had been told. She had gone through the jukebox at some point in the future and changed her past.

  She nodded. “One Christmas, because I was slightly drunk and not really thinking, I went back through the jukebox and said something to my future and ex-husband on our first date.”

  “And you never got married and Danny was never born to save the world.”

  She nods. “That’s what I am told by others from yet another future.”

  “You and Richard found me again, because I had never come into the Garden in my new life, and invited me back to the Garden and I met my old friend and she told me everything, since she was touching the Jukebox when I left.”

  I still didn’t understand the part about her son inventing something in a future that no longer existed. How could anyone come back from that future, that timeline to tell her anything?

  She smiled at Richard. “A while after you found me again, Richard, you got a visit from a son you had in my first world, our son, actually, a son that somehow crossed over time lines to warn us.”

  She smiled. “In the timeline I changed, you and I were talking about getting married and we had had a child. But you didn’t remember it either because you hadn’t been touching the jukebox when I screwed up.”

  As she started to fade, she glanced at me and then looked directly at Richard. “Please don’t let that happen to my first son, and to our son. Don’t ever let me go through the jukebox. Ever.”

  And then she was gone.

  Three

  A moment later the jukebox ran through the return routine, put the invisible record back in the A-1 slot and then went dark.

  The quiet in the bar was so intense, it felt like my ears were ringing.

  I forced myself to take a deep breath and move back behind the bar, staying a good distance away from the now clearly unplugged and powerless jukebox.

  I was almost afraid to even look at Richard, but I did.

  He sat there, mouth open, staring at the now dead jukebox.

  “I’ve got to admit,” Fred said as I clicked on the stereo to break the silence. “You sure know how to put on an afternoon’s entertainment.”

  Everyone but Richard drank to that.

  I stared at my old friend. He was in his early forties, had never been married, and didn’t drink, although he used to. He was a plant manager by day and spent his evenings here in the Garden with friends sipping on orange juice and grenadine and helping me when I needed help. Sometimes, on long lunch breaks, like today, he came in to cool down. In the Garden we didn’t call his drink a Shirley Temple, as they did in every other bar. We called them “A Richard,” and Richard was proud of that fact.

  I took my glass of fresh-brewed ice tea and leaned against the back bar, trying to put aside the shock and deal with what had just happened.

  I was used to thinking about time travel over the last years of owning the Garden and that jukebox. And if we didn’t welcome the women who were about to come in the door, we would feel a faint shimmering and we would never remember she had come to visit us.

  I knew that for a fact. If we chased the two women away, we would have changed the future, the future where she and Richard meet and have a child. She would save her first son, but not Richard’s son. If we chased the two women away we would kill the child who would grow up to understood time travel well enough to cross timelines.

  Somehow we had to save both sons.

  And I knew exactly what I had to do. What we all had to do. We had no choice.

  And we had to do it quickly, before that door opened and let in the outside sun and heat and two women looking for a cool drink.

  “Listen up!” I said, not shouting, but getting everyone to look up at me instantly, including Richard.

  “That never happened,” I said, pointing at the jukebox. “We never saw her, never heard what she had to say.”

  “But Stout,” Fred said, “that would mean she would lose her son.”

  “No, it won’t,” I said. Then I turned to Richard. “You and I will never, ever allow her to go back through that jukebox. Ever. Once she learns about what the jukebox can do, we will just never let her travel in time.”

  Richard nodded. “At some point we’ll have to tell her why.”

  “I’ll leave that up to you,” I said, smiling. “When the time is right.”

  He just shook his head, staring down at his drink.

  I grabbed a pair of earplugs from the bar in front of Richard, quickly hooked them back together, then took a bar napkin and wrote in large black ink, “Donna.”

  Then with a tack I put the earplugs up on a post above and to the right of the cash register. “For the future,” I said.

  I turned back around to my four friends. “We can’t tell a word of this to anyone. Not even the other regulars. This is a very, very important secret. Lives are at risk, maybe in the future of our world. Are we in agreement?”

  All four of the regulars facing me across the Garden Lounge bar nodded, their expressions very serious and intent.

  “Then pick up your glasses for a toast,” I said as I grabbed my iced tea.

  All four regulars did and I raised my glass upward. “To the different possible futures.”

  “To the futures,” they all said and we all drank.

  A moment later the front door opened, flooding into the Garden Lounge bright sunlight and warmth. And through the door walked two attractive women. One was a slightly-younger Donna Neff.

  Again, my stomach sort of flipped over.

  It hadn’t been a dream and the secret we had all just agreed to keep really did have lives and worlds at stake.

  “Not a word,” I whispered just loud enough for the four at the bar to hear me.

  They all nodded as they all turned toward the front door, clearly staring at the two women.

  Both w
omen stopped just inside the door as it closed, trying to look around as their eyes adjusted to the dim light.

  “Put on your most charming smiles, gentlemen,” I whispered again.

  Then I motioned for Richard to scoot down two stools closer to the jukebox to allow room at the bar for the two women to sit.

  Then I went around the bar with a wide smile to greet a woman I had just met a few minutes before.

  “Welcome to the Garden Lounge. Your eyes will adjust in a moment.”

  Somehow I kept myself from saying, “Welcome back to the Garden Lounge.”

  But I did.

  And that boded well for the future. Maybe a number of futures.

  About the Author

  Bestselling author Dean Wesley Smith has written more than one hundred popular novels and hundreds of published short stories. His novels include the science fiction novel Laying the Music to Rest and the thriller The Hunted as D.W. Smith. With Kristine Kathryn Rusch, he is the coauthor of The Tenth Planet trilogy and The 10th Kingdom.

  He writes under many pen names and has also ghosted for a number of top bestselling writers.

  Dean has also written books and comics for all three major comic book companies, Marvel, DC, and Dark Horse, and has done scripts for Hollywood. One movie was actually made.

  Over his career he has also been an editor and publisher, first at Pulphouse Publishing, then for VB Tech Journal, then for Pocket Books. He is now an executive editor for Fiction River.

  Currently, he is writing thrillers and mystery novels under another name.

 

 

  Smith, Dean Wesley, She Arrived Without A Song: A Jukebox Story

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