Free Twisted Tale of Stormy Gale by Christine Bell

abandoned he was. A bolt of fury toward his parents shot through me. Parents who don’t stand by their children are lower than slugs in my book.
    Tears still flowing, I turned the page and found a whole section of drawings of me, of Gilly, of Bacon, of the TTM and goggles. They were all painstakingly detailed and fairly accurate, with the exception of Gilly. His eyes looked somehow cruel, indicating that Devlin had a skewed view of him based on his interpretation of the events of that day.
    At least an hour passed as I continued leafing through the rest of the journal. There were no more entries from Bethlehem Hospital. The next written entry was dated February 1824, and it was apparent that Devlin had just been released, writing from home. He seemed relieved to some degree, but still very troubled by our disappearance.
    Entries were sporadic from then on, sometimes with several months between them. Many of them chronicled his interviews of the other street children regarding our possible whereabouts and the strange man who had taken us, and his theories over what had happened. One entry mentioned his nickname (although at that time it was “the Loony Lord of Leister”), which bothered him more out of guilt for the burden on his family than anything.
    Things took a turn when he entered university and started taking a serious interest in science and engineering, even dabbling in alchemy. He began to put it all together then, and through his studies, realized that it was no magic or devilry, but science that he had witnessed. This gave him some relief because it allowed him to hold out hope that we were alive and well.
    By his early twenties, Devlin was numb to any judgments of him and had lost patience with his parents’ preoccupation with society and their reputations. By the time they were both killed in a carriage accident when he was twenty-five, their relationship had been strained to say the least. He dutifully mourned their passing, but if their relationship had been one of affection, by the time of their passing it had dulled to one of obligatory respect. He moved on with his life quickly.
    After their deaths, he traveled, studying science wherever he went, still on a quest to unlock the mystery of our disappearance. It was around 1832 that he’d become convinced that what he had witnessed was time travel, and all his efforts and entries surrounded that topic. I was glad to see that they indicated his determination to solve the mystery as well as passion and interest in time travel rather than just guilt and despair over Bacon and me.
    The very last entry was the day after his card game with Bacon. Apparently, Devlin had no clue that this was the boy he’d been looking for all those years. Bacon had only been six at the time we disappeared. As a man, he looked nothing like the dirty little ragamuffin of Devlin’s memories, aside from maybe the hair, but even that had mellowed to a strawberry blond over the years. All Devlin was hip to at that point was that the TTM looked exactly like the device he had seen in his dreams for the past thirteen years, and that he needed to possess it. Once he had won it, he did try to get some information on the devices’ origins, but Bacon, in a rare display of common sense, told him that he had won it himself only a few nights before.
    I closed the book after reading the final page and stood for a moment, still reeling. In all real terms, nothing had changed. I’d promised Gilly that I would never divulge our secret. This was the one thing, the only thing, he had ever asked of me, and I wouldn’t let him down. Telling anyone, even someone as worthy as Devlin, was out of the question.
    So now what? Suck it up and keep it moving, Stormy, that’s what. I tried not to think about Dev at all as I did a thorough check of the room, making sure I didn’t leave anything important behind. I checked my bag one more time to make sure I had everything and left the workspace.
    As I