Somewhere in Time by Richard Matheson

electricity but the gas is not used.
    They're installing, on this very day, a steam heating system which is scheduled for completion by next year. At the moment, every room is heated by a fireplace. This room, 527, is being heated by a fireplace. At this very moment, in the darkness of this Thursday, November 19,1896, a fire is burning in the hearth across from you; crackling softly, sending waves of heat into the room, illuminating it with firelight.
    In their rooms, other guests are dressing, now, for dinner in the Crown Room. Elise McKenna is in the hotel at this very moment; perhaps in the theater checking some detail of her production of The Little Minister, which is scheduled for tomorrow night, perhaps changing clothes in her room. Her mother is in the hotel. So, too, is her manager, William Fawcett Robinson. So, too, is her acting company. All their rooms are being heated by fireplaces; as is this room, Room 527, on this late afternoon of Thursday, November 19, 1896. There is a wall safe in the room as well.
    You're lying quietly, at peace, your eyes closed, in this room in 1896, November 19, 1896; Thursday afternoon, November 19, 1896. Soon you will get up and leave the room and find Elise McKenna. Soon you will open your eyes on this now dark afternoon in November 1896 and walk into the corridor and go downstairs and find Elise McKenna. She is in the hotel now. At this very moment. Because it is November 19,1896. November 19,1896. November 19, 1896.
    (And so on, for another twenty pages.)
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    Six forty-seven p.m. Had a meal brought to my room. Some soup, a sandwich. A mistake. I was so imbued with 1896 conviction-despite the 1971 appearance of the room- that the entry of the waiter was a jarring intrusion.
    No more of that. A backslide but not beyond remedy. I'll buy some crackers, cheese, et cetera, in the Smoke Shop, eat in the room from now on. Just enough to keep me going while I continue with my project.
    Still another problem. Well, actually, the same one.
    The sound of my voice.
    It's becoming increasingly distracting. No matter how far I drift mentally, I know inside of me, in some deep core of realization that will not be deceived, that it's my voice talking to me. I can't imagine what else to do, but it is unsettling.
    Well, I'll deal with that problem if it gets out of hand. Maybe it never will.
    I'm thinking more and more of the fact that, in going back, I am to be the cause of the tragedy which fills this face; I have her photograph in front of me on the writing table.
    Have I the right to do this to her?
    I know I've already done it. Yet, there again, increasingly, I sense a variable factor in the past as well as in the future. I don't know why I feel it but I do. A feeling that I have the choice of not going back if I wish. I feel this intensely.
    But why would I not go back now? Even if I knew (and I don't), that I would have no more than moments with her. After all this, to not go back? It's unthinkable.
    Beyond that, I have other thoughts. Thoughts about choice which can make the situation far more complicated than it already is.
    What did Priestley say? Let me check it out again.
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    Here is what he says, in the final chapter, entitled "One Man and Time."
    He speaks of a woman's dream in Russia; Countess Toutschkoff in 1812. She dreamed, three times in one night, that her husband, a general in the army, was going to die in a battle at a place called Borodino. When she woke up and mentioned it to her husband, they couldn't even find the name on a map.
    Three months later, her husband died in the Battle of Borodino.
    Priestley then mentions another dream; by an American woman in the twentieth century. This woman dreamed that her baby drowned in a stream. Months later, she found herself in the identical place she'd dreamed of, her baby dressed the same as in the dream and about to be involved in the identical predicament which resulted in its drowning in the dream.
    The woman,