Free Somewhere in Time by Richard Matheson

"My Dear Miss McKenna." Drops of perspiration ran into my eyes, stinging them. I rubbed at them hastily, fingered drops of sweat from my eyebrows and flicked them away. "I take great pleasure in answering your note of September 30. We are looking forward with anticipation to your arrival and the performance of The Little Minister at the hotel."
    The letter went on to say that he (the manager) was sorry they could not have presented the play during the summer season when there were more guests at the hotel; but "beyond question we would rather have it now than not at all."
    I shook my head abruptly. I was getting faint. I wiped at my face and neck again. My handkerchief was getting soggy. Sweat was trickling down the small of my back and across my stomach. I had to step into the next room for a few moments. As warm as it was in there, it felt, in contrast, as though I were moving into cool air. I leaned against the concrete wall, gasping for breath. If it isn't in there-It was all I could think. If it isn't in there-
    I went back into the storage room and started rubbing my palms quickly and impatiently across book spines. Come on, I mumbled. I kept saying it again and again like some desperately stubborn child who will not allow himself to see that what he wants is unavailable. "Come on, come on." Thank God, Marcie Buckley didn't come back then. If she had, she'd have felt compelled to get a doctor, I'm sure. I was no longer, as they charitably put it, "in control of my faculties." Only one thread kept me from unraveling entirely: the thing I sought.
    I had to concentrate on that because, by then, I was enraged at the hotel, enraged at all its past authorities for permitting these records to come to such a state. If they'd only seen to it that the records had been stored the way they should have been, I would have had my answer in seconds. Instead, the minutes dragged by maddeningly as I searched in vain for the one scrap of evidence I needed to survive. I felt like Jack Lemmon in that scene in Days of Wine and Roses where he runs amuck in the greenhouse, looking for a bottle of whiskey. What kept me from running amuck I'll never know; my quest, I can only assume. Otherwise, I would have howled and ranted and flung books and papers in all directions and wept and cursed and become demented.
    I didn't even bother wiping off the sweat now. What point was there in that? My handkerchief was soaking wet; my underclothes clung to me as though I'd gone swimming in them. My face was probably beet red. I'd lost all sense of time and place. Like a somnambulist, I searched and searched, knowing that my search was futile but so caught up in the stricken madness of it that I couldn't stop.
    I almost missed it. By then my eyes were barely focusing. I kept discarding books, putting them aside. I put aside the right one too. Then something-God knows what- pierced the murk of my brain and, with a shocked gasp, I twisted back to the book and picked it up. I flung it open and turned the pages with a shaking hand until I'd reached the one on which it read, in giant letters, Thursday, November 19, 1896 / HOTEL DEL CORONADO / E. S. BABCOCK, MANAGER / CORONADO, CALIFORNIA.
    I was so dehydrated, I suppose, so dazed I couldn't manage, for what seemed like endless moments, to realize that dates fall on different days each year, only coinciding periodically. I stared at the page in baffled disbelief, then, abruptly, shook myself in anger as it came to me.
    My gaze leaped to the columns headed Names, Residence, Rooms, and Time; ran down the list. The writing blurred in front of me. I rubbed a shaking hand across my eyes. E. C. Penn. Conrad Scherer and wife (odd way to write it, I remember thinking). K. B.Alexander. C.T. Laminy. I looked in dull confusion at the word do written many places in the columns. Only now do I realize that what it meant was ditto and that it was used instead of the ditto marks we use today.
    I looked to the very bottom of the page