The door was like any other. Rectangular. It had a knob. There was something on the other side. Still it wasn't just another door to Harry. He was a man of God and it wasn't God's work being done there, it was devil's labor. Backroom voodoo. Witchcraft. He'd heard about it, read about it, feared it, even preached against it like everything else he knew little about, yet he was there. Rain splattered his brow making rivers to the ground down his neck. Drip. He was limp as a gutter rag doll and the cuffs of his trousers dragged a puddle. When she was alive, Mary would've hemmed them. His clothes never fit since she left. Nothing fit anymore. Not since the war. That's what all his buddies called it and the older vets too who had fought their own battles. THE war. As if slavery had never happened. As is there would never be another. As if theirs was the war that would end all wars. But Harry never thought about it like that. He just wanted to go back. Things fit then. Kill the enemy. Survive.

A Mustang rolled by, tendrils of water snaking across its tinted windows, bass music thumping in time with the thunder. Hoodlums, he thought. Thugs. The world didn't make sense. It had come up at Harry's support group, this disconnected feeling he'd suffered since leaving the jungle. The others had seen terrible things, developing phobias and stress disorders, never ceasing about their nightmares and families that couldn't understand. To Harry, that was all in the abstract. The fight had offered him purpose. He wasn't alone in this. There were others, they just didn't attend support groups. But now it seemed there might be an outlet for them too, or so Harry had heard. That's why he was there. To find out if it was true.

He'd learned about the man they called 'the mapmaker'� through word of mouth, but there was no phone number to call and no hours posted outside. Just a door. Harry rapped his knuckles on the corroded metal. If there was anyone stirring inside, he couldn't hear them. Even the storm was silent. The temperature had plunged in the last hour and the cold was amplified a hundred times by the drizzle and damp fog. The inner city was more foreign to him than fields of fire halfway around the world. It stung his center.

A pair of locks clicked open and the door swung in. Through a high window, the light from a streetlamp shone in making a frail, bent figure burn white in silhouette and hiding the face in shadow. Harry hesitantly stepped inside, removed his hat and smeared raindrops across his forehead as the man he'd come to see closed the door behind them.

Bondi regarded his visitor with a rousing blend of disgust and pity. Word was getting around and they were showing up at a brisk pace. Harry looked much like the rest: sullen, old, with a certain nameless gaze like a junkie that hadn't dosed for years but finally decided after years of searching there was nothing else to live for. Everyone wanted to get high. The only thing that separated them was the drug of choice.

Harry extended his hand, but Bondi refrained from any formal introduction. He could smell the death on them and never got too close for fear of transmission of the death virus. He did however say, 'Hello.'�

Harry retracted his moist palm and gripped his hat. 'I've come-'�

'I know why you're here.'�

'How much do you charge?'�

'Depends on how far back you want to go.'�

World War 1. World War 2. The bigots preferred the Civil War while the so-called patriots among them paid top dollar for the Revolution. Bondi extracted the extra cash by insisting the further back they went, the more effort was required on his part. Technically this wasn't true, he was just being a shrewd entrepreneur. Personally he had no use for the hierarchies of men. They called themselves privates and colonels and generals and clung to titles like flotsam on a sea of vanity and nothingness. He didn't consider them heroes'no man that placed his destiny in another man's hands could be considered a hero; brave perhaps, or just blind, but not a hero. Still his contempt didn't stop him from profiting from their obsessions.

Harry took a deep breath and puffed up his chest. 'The second World War, the beach at Normandy-?'�

'Five hundred.'�

Harry followed Bondi to the corner of the wide industrial space he occupied. They passed a long wall with a shelf filled from floor to ceiling with books, mostly history and philosophy as far as Harry could tell. On the opposite wall was a large crucifix lit from all sides. It wasn't one of the wooden ones Harry was used to seeing, but made from steel and found objects welded together in a collision of man and machine. Christ's eyes looked forlorn towards the heavens, head encased in an old television with the screen caved in and shards of broken glass forming a crown of thorns. Red candle wax dripped from his forehead and wrists. Harry felt uncomfortable. He didn't trust the mapmaker.

Bondi went to a corner and lit a series of candles on pedestals, illuminating a couch and low table. He observed Harry's fearful reaction to his cyber Christ. Reinterpret their precious symbols and their worlds skidded into oblivion and came apart. They were so easily manipulated with symbols and ideology. They fought for it. Killed for it. Such narrow minds will never see God, he thought.

Harry set his hat on the table and took a seat on the edge of the couch for a closer look at the mapmaker. His left hand was a gnarled claw. A bone white shock of hair with streaks of gray that might have been dirt or grease fell to his shoulders. 'I was hoping, before I commit, that you could tell me about the process,'� Harry said.

Bondi laughed when he thought of books and films, science fiction and its tales of high-tech time machines sending heroes and heroines whirling through space to the Stone Ages. For one, that was not how it was done. There was no machines or gadgetry. Beyond that, no one cared to visit with dinosaurs. They wanted a second chance at the life of men, not beasts. 'Hypnotism,'� he replied.
'Completely painless.'� He always challenged that objection first. Amazing how often his customers shared concerns over pain yet were prepared to take a bullet. Did they think they couldn't be harmed?

'So I never leave the couch-?'�

'That's not exactly how it works. After receiving the hypnotic suggestion, you're free to leave and go about your business. Your subconscious must seek out one moment in time from an infinite number, so it can take several hours or as long as a day for the suggestion to manifest.'�

'I'm not a man of science but it seems incredible.'�

'There's very little science involved. My father was a cartographer-'�

'A mapmaker.'�

'Yes. I've carried on his work to some degree, but the Earth was illustrated centuries ago and I find history and the workings of the human mind far more interesting.'� He opened an ornate wooden box and took out a silver medallion with his good hand.

Harry couldn't believe it was so simple. Was it too simple to be true? He feared the loss of control. What would stop the man from hurting him? Robbing him?? Though he grew more nervous by the minute, he recalled his friend Marty praising the experience of returning to the battlefield '�to new enemies and challenging missions. Imagining the weight of an automatic weapon in his hands, he felt calmer.

Bondi lit sweet-smelling incense in a burner engraved with a Celtic Cross. 'My studies led me to mapping the subconscious mind which I found contains the whole of history. Time travel simply involves journeying to those parts of the mind. It has more in common with past life regression and the work of psychics than scientists.'�

'I see.'�

'Do you have more questions-?'�

Harry shook his head.

'The fee is payable before we begin.'�

'Of course.'� Harry reached into his coat pocket, took out five hundred dollar bills from his wallet and slid them across the table. They were ready to begin.

Bondi swung the medallion back and forth. Though his visitor had never been hypnotized before, he met no resistance. Harry's attention first focused on the pendulum motion of the medallion then drifted to Bondi's voice counting backwards '�10'�9'�8 '�communing with the world beyond the senses '�7'�6'�5 '�shadowboxing with nature'�.

Harry couldn't recall anything after the countdown. When his awareness returned he was outside on a broken sidewalk, light-headed with a sharp electrical sensation in his neck, but otherwise unharmed. His wallet remained in his coat pocket. A strange experience that would surely only get stranger, he mused.

The streets were deserted. He felt urgently that he ought to get home as soon as possible. He'd taken a cab to get there but doubted there would be one by to pick him up. Cabbies didn't do drive-bys in neighborhoods like this, he thought. So he walked. Like burning zeppelins, storm clouds split with lightning rallied on all sides. He turned a corner and headed east to a more familiar part of town. As it began to rain again, he picked up his pace, but the night insisted on drenching him. Gutters overflowed with urban sewage: paper cups, cigarette butts, hands and feet. He froze, staring in horror at the body parts in the run-off. A leg. An arm. The water was moving faster, spilling onto the sidewalk and over his shoes. Then he was knee-deep, knocked to the ground and gasping for air '�underwater, frigid cold '�drowning. He kicked his legs and paddled, rising, lungs nearly bursting as he broke the surface on a turbulent sea with the foul mist of ocean spray on his face. The wake of an amphibious landing ship rocked him from side to side. Loud voices howled into the fog. A mortar exploded and dark red blood struck the water; arms, legs, a head.

Treading gasoline in the abyss with the fire starters.

June 6, 1944. D-Day.

A young soldier grabbed Harry's shirt and dragged him to solid ground. He stood and shrugged off his waterlogged coat, sloshing to the edge of the tide as a cacophony of gunfire rang out. He spotted an M16 on the ground nearby and snatched it up to return fire. The weapon bucked to the rhythm of chaos. The beach was a red, brown and gray slaughterhouse, nothing like Henry's memories of Nam where his company would go days without seeing combat before taking small arms fire in the jungle. That's exactly why he'd chosen this day, for the variety of spectacular death.

More ships were arriving. More comrades. Harry had no idea he'd be forced to fight in his civilian clothes and felt silly slapping an artillery belt over his slacks, but he also felt alive for the first time in twenty years. Not alive like someone waiting to die, but truly alive. He trudged up the beach, spraying the cliffs with bullets as a biting wind snapped at his face. Bodies lie all around, dismembered or disemboweled. Several enemies charging over a dune fell to Harry's fire. It felt good to kill again, he thought.

'Harry? Fucking Harry Allen??'� Harry spun to the sound of his name, instinctively leveling his weapon. A familiar face stared back, one he hadn't seen in decades'Tom Crowley, his battalion commander from Nam. In the midst of the hell all around, he greeted Harry with the stoned revelry of an old friend at a cocktail party. 'How the hell are ya?'� He slapped Harry on the shoulder. 'Jesus, I'm not that old Harry, dontcha recognize me.'�

Harry recognized him all right. He'd always hated his superior for ridiculing him in front of his men for taking a hit in a fire fight. Others in the company had died, but no one ever got wounded except Harry and he never heard the end of it; as if he was somehow less courageous, less of a man for living. 'What are you doing here?'� he asked.

'Same thing you are I would guess. Hell Harry, we're all over the place!'�

Harry looked around the beach. Another man in civilian clothes dove to the ground and fired his weapon'�and there were more, soldiers older than the rest, out of shape with ecstatic grins on their hardened faces. Tom held his rifle in the air and pointed, 'All the real action's down the shore.'�

Payback, Harry thought '�I can do anything want here. Fuck him. Fuck Tom.

'You hear me, Harry? There's a bunker-'�

Harry fired a short burst into Tom's face and the tide thoughtfully washed his brain out to sea. Harry figured the war was already won. They didn't need another vet hogging all the good kills, especially a prick like Tom.
Harry fell in step with a group of infantrymen. The battle had only just begun! He wanted to do it all, experience the whole campaign and charge inland to Germany, killing and liberating along the way. Up ahead, a pair of bodies dropped and he recognized another face, a comrade from Nam. Suddenly it struck him, Harry had neglected to ask the mapmaker an important question'did his actions carry real consequences here? A shock wave of fear penetrated his stomach. Was his life on the line? Certainly he would've been informed him if there were risks.

The older soldiers were out of practice, slow to react and fell quicker than their younger counterparts. Harry dodged a round of fire from the cliffs high above. Mortar shook the earth beneath his feet. There was no organization, and no one calling the shots apart from occasional calls of 'Go, go, go!'� Just a suicidal charge up the beach that was fast becoming a cemetery'move, move, move, don't trip, fire, move'

Exhausted and out of breath, Harry took cover behind a sand dune as the battle raged fiercely all around. Gunfire pelted his position which was pinned down from all sides by invisible foes sunken into the rock. Lifting himself up and crouching at the knees, he stuck his head out, reading the high positions. A bullet sunk into his head. Blood fled down his face as he fell over. He was alive. Bleeding badly, but alive. Dying, but alive. A medic rushed to his side. 'You'll be all right, pops-'�

The medic's face crumbled, coming apart pore by pore but there was no blood or torn flesh. The rest of his body fell away, arms, legs, torso and head, all disappearing. Harry blinked his eyes, trying to clear of his mind of the death trip. He was seeing things. Hallucinating. The heavy fire tapered off'he couldn't hear, must've taken a hit on the ear. Everything faded. He was fading out. Rolling over on his side, he looked around. The beach was empty. He was alone. There were no bodies, no debris, and no ships. It couldn't be real, just a peaceful interlude to death. He fretted about the lights. Everyone saw lights. Where were the lights? It was dark. Harry lost consciousness.
#
Bondi had never planned for it to work out this way. In the beginning, he was just trying to make a buck. But it was too perfect once it started happening. And so very ironic like few things are. He'd dabbled in witchcraft all his life and at first he thought the spirits he'd courted were being playful; his book on the wars of Ancient Greece had vanished from his bookshelf and he saw this as some sort of message that history was useless and he ought to seek value in other things. Then he read in the paper that one of his clients had gone missing. It seemed odd '�it couldn't be coincidence, he thought. Soon more would be reported missing, all war veterans, vanished without a trace from jobs and homes. His books began to rot on the shelf. What was the significance? he thought. What was going on? It became clear they were being massacred on the battlefield and would not be coming back.

It was no moral dilemma for Bondi. On the contrary, it became a crusade. Let the fighters fight and the meek endure. Those who sympathized would live and those who perpetuated the darkness of war, would die. One by one, battle by battle, Bondi was helping them rewrite history, and on his days off ...enjoying the new world peace.

Want to comment on this Short Stories? Sign up to Edit Red and you will be able to comment on Short Stories and get access to: Upload your own stories and poems, get readers and their feedback, promote your work...