Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

This is the Doctrine’s contribution to the Unicorn Challenge.

Hosted by jenne and ceayr, each week bloggers, writers, dreamers and those cast on the shore of the Land of Fiction are invited to look-upon an image provided by the hosts. Whether tea leaves not once-vital entrails borne, our stories are welcomed. There is a limit, not on topic or fictional-tropisms, but on wordcount. Two Hundred Fifty words.

This week’s un-punched ticket:

Granite and brick and mansard tower guarding God’s locker;
Beneath the squared vault, service stairs to Belle Époque

Leaning against my rental car, I tilted my head just enough for the casual passerby, or constantly-panning cctv to assume I was reading the letter in my left hand. Anachronism 101, the most req-of-prerequisites at the Academy, echoed as I took out my cell phone and held it at the same level, relative to my target’s probable location.

The memory of something Professor Abbott said on the first day of class tripped a pluperfect humor-circuit, “Your grade will have had been calculated only in the course of your first assignment.” I laughed aloud, here and now, standing in the streets of Arras in the rain.

The letter was more than a surveillance prop, it was the second step in my assignment. The first, of course, was writing it and leaving it in a safe deposit box for 139 years. Being here, in front of the Hotel Moderne, was actually the third step. Now, looking both ways, I crossed the Boulevard Faidherbe and started the process of closing the temporal loop.

I couldn’t help but smile at the photo in my phone of the hotel registry: D. Oppelgänger Rm 23.

Standing at the door, the thought came to me, ‘Suppose I don’t actually knock?”

Of course, I did. The traditional sound of knuckles-on-wood filled my hotel room, signaling my graduation from the Academy of Temporal Investigative Agents.