Talisman, A Time Travel Mystery

 Tom Catalano has provided us with another novel, Talisman, a Time Travel Mystery. I’ve been a fan of time travel stories since the age of nine when I discovered a series of time travel short stories in Boys’ Life, the magazine of Boy Scouts. I remember getting each monthly publication and loving those stories. I was always disappointed when it did not contain another time travel adventure. I rated the time travel story entitled The Little Book by Selden Edwards as being the best book I read in 2012. Catalano has a different take on time travel in his novel Talisman, and it was delightful, but you’ll have to read it to see how it’s different. I will give a way one unique feature to the story, and that was that time travel could only be backward, never forward. One definition of talisman is that it’s a good luck charm that magically wards off evil spirits, but sometimes, it seems to draw evil spirits to the owner.

Professor Henri Rutherford was an esteemed archeology professor at the University of Chicago, and he took a group of his students to the island of Antigua in the Caribbean for a summer field work experience. He was renowned for making discoveries on such excursions, so his students (John, Taylor, Harrison, Louis, and Hannah) were all thrilled to be with him for a couple of months of field research. John Shaw was the professor’s first year research assistants and a 4.0 student, Hannah Miller was a good student and a beautiful woman who happened to be the daughter of the university president, and Taylor was the book’s antagonist, especially to John. Unlike prior excursions, the group had failed to come up with a significant archeological discovery until the very last day, and then they did not have time to fully investigate it due to the need to get back to school for the fall term.

Away from the other student's digs, it was John and Professor Rutherford who found a skeleton buried at the bottom of a small cavern, and while they told the others about this discovery, Rutherford demanded that he keep secret what the skeleton had been holding in its hand, a heavy gold hockey puck-shaped item. It had undecipherable bumps and other markings. Rather than announce the discovery as was proper for any such archeological findings, Rutherford demanded that John keep this a secret. John knew that was improper, but he chose to honor his esteemed professor’s wish. Rutherford rationalized that he needed time to study and contemplate the device. Really, his initial plan was to sell the device on the black market for great profit, but then he simply could never part from the object. The first night that the golden puck was in his possession, he discovered that the puck caused him to experience what he called “time shifting.” He knew that John would not be able to keep the secret for long, so he chose to murder him on the island. However, Rutherford was befuddled when John did not stay murdered. It turned out to be an event that he kept reliving. It was recurring time shifting that was the essence of this novel.

The professor kept the talisman secret until he could no longer bear the burden of having it, and after insisting that John take it from him with a warning never to use it for time travel, Rutherford committed suicide. Because time travel was always backward, Rutherford and John found that time stood still, for them as they relived various events over and over. Life became entirely predictable, and there was no unknown future to be experienced. This was a good mystery and satisfied my appetite for a new time travel story. I think you’ll enjoy this unique take on time travel.