Number 19 had previously been occupied for ten years by Hector MacLeod, an eccentric Scottish polymath with a fondness for invention and an optimism that peaked around three in the morning, usually after a particularly mature camembert cheese toastie. Most of Hector’s ideas were, at the time and usually only to him, very good ideas indeed. Unfortunately, most of them never progressed beyond notebooks, breadboards, or cardboard boxes marked WIP.
Hector remained in happy penury until one day in 2018 when he simply disappeared.
After that, Number 19 passed quietly through a succession of owners, mostly companies, rented, repainted, and lightly ignored. No one stayed long. Nothing dramatic happened. Which, in retrospect, may have been a warning.
In early 2026 it was bought by Sidney Fitzwilliam.
Sidney had recently completed a PhD in Physics and had been hired by the Finality Corporation as a Quark Specialist on their Mesons Project. His life, for the first time, felt stable. His job was fascinating, his salary respectable, and his new house, modest but solid, gave him the peculiar thrill of having arrived somewhere.
He had lived in Number 19 for three months before finally tackling the garage.
It was there, in a box tied with string and labelled in fading beige card WIP, that he found the remote control.
A handwritten tag dangled from it:
Needs 4 AAA batteries. Note to self need to buy some
The remote itself was heavy, grey, and stubbornly analogue. The buttons bore Dymo labels including the enigmatic
FLUSH
SCENT
RUN!
Sidney slipped it into his pocket, finished clearing the garage, and congratulated himself on finally fitting the car inside.
That evening, the remote fell out of his pocket onto the kitchen floor.
“What the hell,” Sidney said to nobody.
Mildly interested, he opened the hatch on the back, inserted four AAA batteries, and was rewarded with a small red light beside the power button. He pressed it. The light turned green.
He pressed FLUSH.
From the toilet in the hall came a decisive SWOOOOOSH.
Sidney froze. Then laughed.
“Ahh it is a Smart house,” he said, relieved.
He went to the downstairs toilet and pressed SCENT. There was a quiet whirr, a brief hiss, and the room filled with the scent of sandalwood and jasmine. Sidney thought a little unkindly that the person that installed it may have suffered from excessive flatulence requiring remote disgusing.
He pressed FLUSH again. The toilet flushed.
“Very clever,” Sidney murmured.
Back in the hallway, he examined the final button.
RUN!
He pressed it.
Nothing happened.
He shook the remote gently, as if that might help. Pressed again. Still nothing.
Sidney sat down on the toilet and looked around. The cistern appeared entirely normal. Pipes behaved themselves, whatever and wherever the machinery that was attached to the remote was hidden.
He turned the remote over in his hands.
Then, as he leaned forward slightly, there was a distinct CLICK, as though a hidden switch had engaged beneath the porcelain.
“Oh,” Sidney said.
He pressed RUN! again.
The universe wobbled.
Not dramatically at first, just a subtle hesitation, like a buffering video. Then it lurched, folded, spun, went briefly inside out, and performed several manoeuvres that would have caused the Special Effects Department of Doctor Who to weep openly after a very good Christmas party.
Then it stopped.
Sidney sat very still.
After a minute, he opened the door to the hall.
The house was still there. Ordinary. Polite. The hallway carpet needed vacuuming.
But through the living room window, the world had been replaced.
Sidney opened his front door the road was gone. The lampposts were gone. In their place stretched a vast, fern-filled plain beneath a heavy, unfamiliar sky.
A diplodocus wandered past.
It paused. Chewed something ancient. Then continued its way.
Sidney closed the door carefully.
He looked at the remote.
On the back, beneath the battery hatch, something Hector MacLeod had scratched very small indeed finally made sense.
“Temporal Plumbing Interface – Do NOT press RUN unless seated.”
Sidney swallowed.
“Well,” he said, “that explains the label.”
Sidney did not panic he went straight into what he called “Figure-it-out” scientist mode.
He fetched his coat, his phone (no signal, naturally), and the remote control. He stood in the living room for a long moment, looking from the remote to the window, then back again, as if the two might contradict each other if stared at long enough.
They did not.
He stepped outside.
The air was warm and damp, heavy with unfamiliar plant life. The ground was soft underfoot, springy with ferns and mosses that had not yet learned the virtue of restraint. Somewhere in the distance something large moved with the slow confidence of a creature that had never once been late for anything.
Sidney walked.
He did not know why he expected the Close to still be arranged in neat crescents, but after half an hour it became clear that Nether Oak Close was no longer a close so much as a philosophical suggestion.
That was when he saw the hut.
It was small, round, and improbably domestic. Smoke curled from a stone-lined chimney. Outside, a line made of a vine hung a pair of excessively tatty socks and a pair of blue 1970’s Y-Fronts
Sidney approached cautiously, his mind pulled the stories of the mysterious disappearance of the previous owner.
“Hector MacLeod?” he called, feeling faintly ridiculous.
The door opened.
Hector looked old, not dramatically so, but in the way of a man who has learned to make do the hard way. His hair was wild, his beard untamed, and his clothes were stitched from hides with the careful precision of someone who had once owned a sewing machine and missed it terribly.
He stared at Sidney for a long moment.
“Oh, thank God,” Hector said. “You’re wearing shoes.”
They sat on logs.
Hector had tea. Real tea. Sidney did not ask where the kettle came from.
“I tested it,” Hector said eventually, gesturing vaguely back towards the house that was not there. “Everything worked beautifully. Temporal displacement, spatial anchoring, the whole lot. Absolute triumph.”
“Except,” Sidney said gently.
Hector sighed.
“Except during transit, I dropped the remote. Slippery hands. Butter. Long story. When I landed, the house was gone, the remote was gone, and I was exactly where Number 19 would be… just somewhat earlier than expected.”
“How much earlier?”
Hector considered.
“About one hundred and fifty million years before the arrival of high-speed internet to the town so slightly before fibre.”
Sidney nodded. This felt like the correct response.
“So, you’ve been here since 2018?”
“More or less. Time’s funny here. Days stretch. Years compress. I learned which berries won’t kill you. That took a while.”
“And the dinosaurs?”
“Mostly very polite,” Hector said. “Terrible table manners.”
Sidney looked back towards the invisible Close.
“So,” he said, “the remote works both ways?”
Hector’s eyes brightened.
“In theory.”
“In theory,” Sidney repeated.
They both looked at the horizon as something vast moved slowly through the trees.
“Only problem,” Hector added, “is that the coordinates are fixed. Nether Oak Close is the anchor. If we misjudge the timing ”
“We arrive halfway through the Cretaceous?”
“Or the housing development phase,” Hector said grimly. “Both dangerous.”
Sidney turned the remote over in his hands.
“Why the toilet?” he asked.
Hector smiled, just a little.
“Best grounding point in any house. Ceramic. Water. Privac and the place everyone visits every day, so it acts as a excretory temporal anchor. Also I was very tired.”
They sat in companionable silence.
At last, Sidney pressed the FLUSH button.
Far away, impossibly, there was a familiar SWOOOOOSH.
Hector laughed.
A deep, relieved sound.
“Well then,” he said, standing. “Shall we go home… or see what happens if we press SCENT first?”
The mistake, Sidney would later reflect, was leaving the front door open.
They returned to the house in the same careful way they had left it, stepping from deep time into the reassuring geometry of Number 19’s hallway. Walls reasserted themselves. Carpet behaved. Gravity resumed its usual contractual obligations.
There was, however, a small sauropod in the dining room.
It stood on the rug, neck craned toward the window, gently investigating the flowers printed on Sidney’s curtains. It seemed particularly taken with the yellow ones. Its tail swayed with the unhurried curiosity of something that had never encountered net curtains before.
Sidney opened his mouth.
Hector raised a hand.
“Don’t startle it,” he whispered. “They imprint.”
The creature snorted softly and knocked over a chair.
“Right,” Hector said. “Toilet. Now.”
They retreated down the hall with the exaggerated care of men backing away from a mildly radioactive situation. Hector grabbed a pad and pen from the telephone table in the hall and then the pair entered the downstairs toilet, Hector closed the door firmly.
He began to calculate on the pad.
Numbers appeared quickly, confidently, he paused, sucked thoughtfully on the pen, frowned, crossed something out, then nodded to himself.
“Thirty-two digits,” he said, tapping them into the keypad on the remote. “Any fewer and you get… drift.”
“Drift,” Sidney repeated faintly.
Hector looked up.
“Sit.”
Sidney hesitated.
“Sit exactly as you would if suffering from particularly stubborn constipation,” Hector added. “It helps align the quantum fields.”
Sidney sat.
He leaned forward slightly.
There was the familiar, deeply reassuring CLICK.
“Perfect,” Hector said. He stepped back and said “Don’t move.”
Hector pressed RUN!
The universe did the time machine thing.
Reality folded, spun, lurched, and briefly forgot which way round it preferred to be. Sidney found, to his surprise, that he could both smell and taste his mother’s lasagne, layers of meat, tomato, and slightly overdone pasta, despite the fact that she was neither present nor alive in any useful temporal sense.
Then everything stopped.
There was silence.
Sidney opened the door a fraction.
In the hallway stood the stegosaurus pup.
It regarded them quizzically, head tilted, as though mildly disappointed they had not emerged bearing snacks.
Through the living room window, Sidney could see Nether Oak Close.
It was there.
Intact.
But newer.
The cars were wrong. The paintwork fresher. A “For Sale” sign stood at Number 14, optimistic and uncreased.
Sidney checked his phone signal had returned but only 2 bars and just about 3G.. the header read 2018.
Perfect,” Hector said quietly. “I am home.”
The stegosaurus pup snorted again and nudged the coat stand, which wobbled but did not fall.
“Well,” Hector added after a moment, “on the bright side it is not raining”
Sidney looked at the dinosaur. Then at the remote.
“Hector,” he said, “it’s 2018. Eight years before my time. I’m a spotty teenager.”
Hector smiled.
“We’ll sort that,” he said. “And the rogue dinosaur. Now.”
Hector sat at the kitchen table and made more calculations.
“2026, you say…” he murmured. “Hmm.”
He scribbled furiously for a moment, then froze.
“Oh.”
He stood abruptly and hurried to the toilet, remote in hand.
This time, he tapped in a long stream of numbers with practised confidence and then, without ceremony, sat down.
“I need to do this one,” he said, seeing Sidney’s expression. “Because of… reasons. Too complicated to go into just now.”
Sidney nodded to be fair it was the only thing he could think to do other than scream.
Hector pressed RUN!
The world burped, farted, and sneezed simultaneously, like reality attempting to take a screenshot of itself and getting the timing wrong.
Then it stopped.
They opened the toilet door.
As far as either of them could tell, the world was back to 2026.
The stegosaurus pup, however, had reacted exactly as all frightened animals do.
There was a large, unmistakable pile of dinosaur droppings on the hall carpet.
Hector sighed.
“Right,” he said. “You need to go for a walk.”
“A walk?”
“I have to return the dinosaur to its own time,” Hector said. “There may be… overlap. You might meet yourself in the garage. Best to leave the Close. Nip to the shops. Get some milk or something.”
They looked at each other.
“Well,” Sidney said finally, “that was… interesting.”
“It was,” Hector agreed, smiling. “Now time waits for no man or stegosaurus. Scoot.”
As Sidney left the house, he heard Hector shout, “—and thank you!” just before the toilet door closed firmly.
Sidney slipped down the side of the house, avoiding the garage. Through the open door he could see himself moving boxes, busy and unaware.
He went to the shop.
He bought two litres of milk and a Mint Aero.
On the way back down, the Close he chatted briefly with Michael, who was worried about the bins being overfilled again and thought they should have a residents meeting.
By the time Sidney returned home, everything appeared normal.
Except for the dinosaur droppings.
Hector was gone.
The dinosaur was gone.
The other Sidney was gone.
Sidney stood in the hallway, staring at the carpet.
“So,” he said aloud, “I am currently both one hundred and fifty million years ago and here now in 2026.”
He fetched a pan from the kitchen and began scooping.
Bent over, mid-scoop, he heard a nervous cough behind him.
“Mr Fitzwilliam?” a voice asked.
“Yes,” Sidney replied, without turning.
The man standing in the doorway was wearing full hazmat gear.
“I’m from Finality Corporation,” the man said. “We’ve detected a temporal anomaly. We need you to come with us.”
Later, sitting in the back of a black Transit van, Sidney watched Nether Oak Close slide past the window.
He wondered, not for the first time that day, when he would be back and what time it would be.