The Despairing Posture of His Fall - Part IV

Part I here.
Part II here.
Part III here.

The Despairing Posture of his Fall
by
driftglass

Part IV

...
But I had to, don’t you see?

I had to catch a glimpse of him, as he was then; young and innocent and full of promise. It seems that he has been a part of me for as long as I can remember, and I felt sharply that this was something I simply had to do. This was, at least, my intent. What I may have actually done instead haunts me terribly.

I expected to step out onto the far edge of a field in the heart of a beautiful summer day. The sky was blue and limitless and the boy was alone. All according to plan, except that I stepped out to a blast of lightening and was engulfed in tiny swirl of furious black clouds. More alarming still were the long, blue, electrical tendrils that appeared from nowhere and now seemed to dance all over my body and set my hair on end.

I now believe the effect to have something to do with the discharge of excess energies and the differences in the atmospheres between the two times and places. I stepped clear of the tiny maelstrom -- the whole of my body still alive with a coruscating display of crackling energies -- to see the boy, much closer than I had expected, looking directly at me with an expression of pure horror. But rather than fleeing –- which one might expect -- he was approaching me, hand outstretched, pointing, mouth agape but silent.

I stood utterly still in a daze until he had nearly crossed the field to reach me. It was then I seemed to awaken from a brief dream, pushed the button on the aluminum rod marked Emergency Return, and I leaped back through the hole in time, back to the safety of the lab. Behind me the rift resealed itself, and the same gaudy display of light and sound attended my return.

After my shock over the events had subsided I checked myself and discovered that the great volleys of electricity had, in fact, done me no harm whatsoever. I further noted that no time at all had passed on the clock, confirming one theory about such travel that most of the scientists seemed to agree upon: you may age on your journey, but upon your return, no time will have passed at your point of departure.

Still more proof that I was in God’s hands! The Divine and the Scientific, both in partnership to see that His will be done.

I began to shout in celebration of this further revelation when a terrible thought formed in my mind. I was suddenly remembering lines from a poem of his called "Alone".

It is about an incident from his childhood that affected him all his life. He wrote of it as “the mystery which binds me still.”

The last of the poem reads –

“From the lightning in the sky
As it pass'd me flying by —
From the thunder and the storm —
And the cloud that took the form
When the rest of Heaven was blue
Of a demon in my view.”

Unbidden, that scrap of verse came to me and I had to ask, “Was it me?”

Oh God, could your plan be so malign as to shape me towards an end this perverse? Was it I who sent him down another road? Had my apparition at that moment pushed him, somehow, to become the man I hated?
...