From very early childhood he believed that travelling back in time was possible.
The future, well no, after all it didn’t exist yet, but the past was real enough. Of course everybody had said that it could never happen, as it would go against all known physical laws. The most vehement opposition came from the religious zealot who lived at number ten. She would have to be the most evil old hag he had ever come across. In an angry exchange, she had told him one day that he was a nincompoop and would never amount to anything. Well, that not only upset him a great deal at the time, but gave him an even greater reason for figuring out how to bring about the impossible.
When he finally cracked it, all made possible by building a very special telephone from scratch. It worked simply enough on the basis that he used the front, rotating dial, to select a time period. With great excitement, he used its awesome power to travel back and forth several times, making sure that he wasn’t seen. He wanted no fame or glory for doing the impossible. It was far better that nobody knew what he had accomplished, at least for now.
Thinking back, he knew that this most abhorrent person, the malignant witch, regularly opened the back door of number ten every night to let Puss-Puss in for supper and his comfy cat basket for the night.
His dilemma was that he couldn’t make his mind up. He would either return and give the nasty old biddy the fright of her life together with proving her utterly wrong, then go on to reap the rewards of his amazing invention, or simply bump her off. Either way, he had an appointment at number ten.
He was thinking about all this when the phone rang…
