Checkmate (ePub)

Dr. Hawthorne is a clinical hypnotist residing in early-nineteenth-century England. The daughter of his neighbors, Patricia Finney, has been singled out for elimination by a sinister organization from the future known as Apex. When they send timenauts into the past to carry out this directive, he gets added to their hit list. Instead, the two of them manage to evade their intended deaths and end up acquiring capabilities that can potentially cancel out the future of the entire program of time manipulation. Once they discover that the Doctor by himself has the capacity to cut them off from their own past, Apex has to figure out a way to get rid of him without killing him outright. While they are in the process of formulating their plans to do this, a strategically concealed plot emerges from an unexpected source with the intention of getting rid of Apex itself.

The foundation upon which this story is based is the alleged normality of everyday English life. It serves as the reference point against which all the numerous venue changes that follow are contrasted. Included in these changes are dreams, forays into the future, alternate realities, extraterrestrial contacts, flashbacks, and journeys through the astral plane. The major trust behind this adventure, however, are the continual psychological adjustments necessary to navigate among all these mutable states of conscious awareness. And to top it off, the entire adventure is contained within a single event whose nature will not be revealed until the very end.