See if the matron is all right

Joe walks up to her confidently, as though he’s been told to go and see her by some other fictitious matron or member of staff. He’ll blag it somehow or other.

She doesn’t turn or even seem to notice him as he approaches. He finds that she is sitting there sewing a tapestry. Only she is absolutely still. Her eyes are open, her tongue slightly protruding through her lips – a sign of concentration on her part as she does the tapestry – but she seems completely frozen.

Joe says: “Uh… miss…”

But there is nothing. Not even a movement. The woman is frozen. Joe checks her pulse – nothing. Her skin is still warm, but there’s no beating heart there. She must have had a coronary – and it can’t have been long ago, or she’d be cold. Doesn’t rigor mortis freeze you in place sometimes when you die?

Joe isn’t frightened or horrified - perhaps if he was a real teenager discovering this, he might be -but he has a more experienced mind, he can deal with it, shock as it is. He does feel the urgency, though, and realises he has to do something.

There is a telephone on the desk. He picks it up and dials for an ambulance. Nothing. There isn’t even a dial tone. Damn it.

Quickly, he runs back, out of the girls’ end and downstairs to look for another phone or a member of staff to help. He remembers that the headmaster’s office is nearby, and runs to it. The excitement of exploration has gone now, there is just the urgency of his situation. He doesn’t even notice the cold as he runs about in just his pyjama bottoms.

A knock on the headmaster’s door is not answered. Tentatively, he pokes his head around the door. The lights in the study are on. In the room, which is surrounded by bookshelves, the headmaster sits at his desk, writing something. The old man is peering through half-moon spectacles, just the way Joe remembers him. But now is not the time for reminiscing.

“Sir?” he says.

The headmaster still does not move. He’s frozen – just like the matron. Joe walks up to him. Eyes open, frozen in motion – just like the matron. What is going on? Joe picks up the telephone, but there is no dial tone there either.

And then he notices the fireplace. The fire is burning nicely – or at least, it should be. The flames, like the matron and the headmaster, appear to be frozen in place.

Time is frozen.

“Oh my God,” Joe says, running his hand through his clean, untangled, silky hair.

The clock on the mantelpiece above the fire is also still, the hands frozen – even the second hand. It’s good to be young again, but the reality now appears to be that Joe is trapped in this precise moment in time. The experiment must have really screwed things up. If not for the rest of the universe, then at least for him it has.

If time doesn’t roll onwards, there’s no way he could get a message to Bennett and the others. But then what would his message be anyhow? The experiment hasn’t been a success. Admittedly, it has produced interesting results, but that is not good enough for a project like this.

Somehow, he’s got to find a way to get time moving again. He has to do something that will somehow push himself back into the real world. If he doesn’t, perhaps he’ll go crazy – with loneliness if nothing else.