The Temporal Anomaly: Part I
What begins as eerie handwritten notes leads to encounters with shadows and recurring dreams of a known hallway. At the center of events, Jolene deals with destiny, choice, and weight of the future.
Jolene lived a quiet life, safely tucked away in an apartment above the old bookstore in the city that smelled of paper and dust. She had only recently started working there, and for the first time in a long time, her life felt like it was settling into something steady. A simple daily routine of cataloging books, reading whenever she found time, watching the rain from the windows in the late afternoons.
Then, the messages began.
It started on an ordinary morning. Jolene was dusting the shelves when she found her favorite childhood book in the pile. It shouldn't have been there; this was an old, rare edition she hadn't seen in years. She picked it up, warmly. Flipping through its familiar pages, she skimmed it. She wondered how many times she had read it. She almost knew the book by heart, and as a child she could recite entire passages from memory. But when she reached the last page, her breath stopped.
There was a sentence that hadn't been there before. In neat, looping handwriting, a new line was written at the bottom of the last page.
"Why did you do what you had to do? Do you remember?"
She ran her finger over the ink. It wasn't printed; someone had written it there. A prank? An accident?
She shook it off, but in the days that followed, more messages appeared.
A passage underlined in red ink in a book that hadn't been touched in years. Slips of paper tucked between pages, words written in the same elegant handwriting she didn't recognize.
At first, she thought it was someone playing a joke. But then she found a book, the one that wasn't supposed to exist. It had no record of purchase. The bookstore's inventory was very precise; she made sure of that. And yet, there it was, sitting on the shelf as if it had always been there. A thin, leather-bound volume with no title, no author.
Inside, on the first page, there was just a single line written in that same elegant handwriting.
"If you can read this, you are not asleep."
She flipped through the pages of the book. They were blank, every single one. But when she touched the paper, something strange happened. She saw movement. Fleeting images at the edge of her vision, like shadows just outside the bookstore.
She snapped the book shut, her heart pounding in her chest.
Maybe she was imagining things. Maybe she was just tired.
But the pattern continued.
Strangers came into the bookstore, pausing just long enough to make eye contact before disappearing into the city streets. There were shadows always moving in her peripheral vision where no one should be. And the messages. Always the messages, hidden in books, appearing in places she hadn't touched.
Then, the dreams began.
Jolene rarely dreamed, or if she had, she never remembered them. But now, every night, she found herself in the same place, a long endless hallway in the dark. It looked like the hallway in her childhood home. She heard whispers, soft whispers. And at the end of the hallway stood a figure.
A woman.
Never moving. Never approaching. Never speaking. Just watching.
Days passed, and the dreams started to become her reality.
One evening, Jolene stepped out of the shower and froze. The bathroom mirror was fogged up from the steam, but there, on the mirror by an unseen hand, were words written.
"Jolene, you are the only one who sees."
She couldn't believe what her eyes were seeing. She lived alone. She wasn't imagining things anymore. The books, the dreams, the messages; someone or something was reaching out to her.
But who? And why? Who was this woman? More importantly, how did she know about her?
Jolene didn't believe in the supernatural. She didn't believe in fate or ghosts. But she did believe in patterns. And something or someone, was creating one.
She wasn't sure when the realization hit her, but one day, she stopped thinking of them as warnings. They were instructions. And she was meant to follow them.
She spent nights gathering them, writing them down, tracing the handwriting, noting dates and times they appeared, analyzing the phrasing. It all seemed scattered, but there was a pattern. And when she put them all together, a map began to form.
A map leading to something she had never known. Whoever or whatever was sending these messages wanted her to find it.
The map didn't lead to a place. It led to a time.
October 13, 2032.
Seven years from the present. A future date. She thought she would be 30 years old on that date.
That night she barely slept. She dreamed of the hallway again, but this time, the figure was closer. She could almost see her face. She seemed like she was in her mid-fifties. And for the first time ever, the woman spoke softly.
"Jolene, find me."
She woke up startled. The apartment was silent; it was almost sunrise. But she knew this wasn't over. She had to go back. Or she had to go forward in time. She needed answers.
That very morning, she made a decision. She left the bookstore and took the train to the only place where she could find the truth: her childhood home, to the hallway in her dreams.
The house was old and familiar, smaller than she remembered. When she knocked, an older woman answered.
"I'm Jolene, I used to live here," she said, her voice feeble as if strange in her own mouth. "I think I've forgotten something very personal here. Would it be alright if I looked around?"
The woman hesitated, but then, seeing something in Jolene's face, maybe the resemblance to the old owners; she paused. The woman remembered they had a little girl who could have looked similar to the young woman standing in front of her. She stepped aside, nodding her head.
The house smelled the same, like old dust and wood. Her childhood memories flashed in her mind, distant, blurred in time, but something about the house felt... off. She wandered through the halls, her fingers brushing the walls as if they might tell her what she had to remember.
But how could she remember something which hadn't yet happened? What happens on October 13, 2032, she would never know. How could she?
Then, she saw it.
A door at the end of the hallway. A door she hadn't remembered.
It wasn't there before. But she knew, somehow, that it always had been.
She reached for the handle. The door was old and it creaked open.
Inside was a small room, its walls lined with shelves of books. And in the center, a single chair, facing toward a mirror.
Jolene took a step further toward the mirror. And then, she saw her.
The woman from the dreams. The one who had been watching.
But this time, the figure wasn't a shadow. She was real. And she was staring back at Jolene with familiar eyes.
It was her.
Not as she was now, but as an older woman. Her skin aged, her hair slightly turning grey everywhere.
The woman in the mirror blinked, looked at her, her lips parting as if to speak. But she couldn’t.
The woman in the mirror raised a hand, pressing it to the glass. Jolene did the same.
The moment their fingers touched, the memories came pouring in.
For the briefest moment, she saw everything. Everything that had happened. Everything that would happen. Who she would be. What she would do. The terrible, horrible things she would do. The choices she would make.
And then, silence.
Then everything was a blur. She could only see fractured light as if she was in a dream. Then she opened her eyes.
Jolene stood in the bookstore, a book in her hands. The leather-bound volume with no title. She opened it. The pages were no longer blank.
In the same elegant handwriting was a single sentence:
"You are awake now. You now know. You remember now."
Jolene shut the book, tried looking at the shadows which had always been watching her from the edge.
But there were none.
Jolene exhaled. A shivering breath.
She finally remembered. She finally knew.
P.S. Story to be continued...
Jolene discovers she is at the center of events that will unfold in 2032. But what terrible choices await her? What makes her future self reach across time to send these warnings? The destiny, the choices, and the weight of future knowledge. Her journey through time has only just begun.
