The Chronicles of Louis Brandon, Time Traveler – Chapter 8, Part 2

Louis and Stella meet the Deadheads and are pleasantly surprised!

© 2022, Michael William Clark. All rights reserved.

Did you miss part of the story? Find it here!

Things, indeed, were almost rotten to the core in both centuries. There was little difference between the old plunder by the blade and post-20th century corruption.

Louis recalled the 16th century Florentine, Niccolo Machiavelli who said the art of ruling depended upon one’s ability to lie and deceive better than anyone else.

Niccolo would be well at home in the 21st century, he thought.

Not quite the image in my mind’s eye but you get the drift…

A healthily rounded, attractive woman with wavy orange hair interrupted Louis’s reflection. She had spied the two strangers approaching and emerged from the camp to greet them.

“Welcome to the edge of night—or the break of dawn,” she said amidst the soft guitar music and floating background laughter. “I’m Sondra.”

“That’s a very eloquent greeting,” Louis replied with a smile after introducing himself.

“Where ya headed?” She asked.

“We’ve got no cutter,” Louis said anachronistically, “and need a place to hang.”

“Hmm. You come from a faraway place, eh man?” Sondra asked.

“Sort of like Captain Picard,” Stella interjected lightly.

“Okay…” Sondra smiled. She respected their desire for privacy.

Contrary to Louis’ expectation, their initial contact with the Deadheads wasn’t unpleasant at all. Quite the contrary. Sondra didn’t judge them by their unusual garb or by Louis’ advanced years.

“We walked out here from Piazza di Spagna,” Louis began, feeling more at ease. “We’re really tired. No money, no place to stay. A guy we met said you might be able to help us..”

”

No problem.” Sondra said.

The unofficial leader of the group, her hair moved freely in the breeze as she spoke through the last rays of sunset.

“We’ve got room. We’ve got food. Happy to help, man!”

Stella sighed in relief.

“She did the whole thing on heels,” Louis said.

Stella’s feet were bleeding around the toenails.

“Why didn’t you take them off?” Sondra asked, gazing at her shoes.

Stella still imagined that Italian roads were like Indian roads, and she had heard that the 21st century was disease-ridden and mired in primitive, ineffective medicines. But she didn’t say that.

“Oh, I don’t know.” She replied weakly.

She hated to lie, but was tired and in pain.

They walked over by the fire and sat down. The others gathered ’round hardly took notice. It was as if Louis and Stella had always been with them and were just returning from a walk in the nearby woods. After a spell of casual conversation, Louis concluded that their hosts were a truly amiable bunch.

A young man, Jem, offered Louis a “toke” from his hand-rolled cigarette. Louis had never tried the drug but knew what it was. A moment’s hesitation and then he inhaled it. These people intrigued him. He wanted to fit in. He might learn something.

“Stella, I’m going to do what social scientists call a ‘participant observational’ experiment,” he said. “I hope you won’t think any less of me.”

“Go right ahead,” she said. “But I’ll pass on your little experiment.”

“At this point… what have we got to lose?” Louis said as Jem passed him the joint with a grin.

“Social scientist! That’s a good one,” Stella muttered under her breath.

“Got some java juice too,” Jem added with a Turkish accent, offering Louis some homemade booze.

“Oh no, thank you,” Louis said. “This will be quite enough.”

But Louis’s curiosity got the better of him, so he tried a bit of both.

“Actually,” he drawled, after having imbibed a fair amount of Jem’s java juice, “We’re not uh, here. I mean, we’re not from here at all!” The drugs combined with the alcohol had considerably lowered his usual, gentlemanly inhibitions.

“LOUIS!” Stella gave him with a furtive glance, trying to tell him in not so many words to shut up.

Having politely declined the intoxicants, she conducted her own observational experiment, but at the safe, drug-free distance which Louis had lost.

“That’s right,” Louis continued. “We is time travelers,” he slurred with improper grammar.

“Say what?” Sondra’s girlfriend, seated beside her, asked.

Stella realized the futility of trying to keep him quiet

“Have you read The Time Machine by H. G. Wells?” she said.

Just then a willowy young woman with sandy blond hair recited in a singsong voice:

“We travel through time, where the mu mu mate, and the children still sing, mine’s a 99…”

It was a late-twentieth-century jingle by the KLF, although neither Louis nor Stella knew that.

© 2022, Michael William Clark. All rights reserved.

Did you miss part of the story? Find it here!