Armageddon

Epilogue 2

It had taken some time to debark at the port of Ostend, as it was quite busy that morning. Sir Roger had his footman Thomas retrieve their luggage while he thanked the Captain of the Anne roundly for taking his small party on a minute’s notice The Captain was all to gracious and willing to do more. The glitter of the diamond the Duke had left in his palm was more than ample inducement.

“May I look for your ship in these waters again, sir?” Ames had inquired as he made ready to leave the ship.

“Most certainly, Mister Ames. I make this run from Edinburgh to Ostend once every fortnight, and then sail on to London before returning north again.”

“That will work out well, Captain, as I shall have business in London soon,” said Ames.

“Excellent. Well I do hope the French don’t complicate matters for you. I would advise you to stay well away from the border.”

“I take that as good advice, Captain Cameron. Very good, sir. Farewell.”

The Duke quickly found a pawn shop and brokerage near the wharf that agreed to buy a few of his diamonds for a considerable sum in coinage, which he thought would make for much easier commerce in the days ahead. He soon had a nice leather pouch full of pounds, shillings, and pence, though the old 240 pence pound was still being used, with a pound equal to twenty shillings, and a shilling equal to twelve pence at the time.

The first order of business was then to secure a good coach for the journey to Brussels, some 80 miles inland which was accomplished in an hour’s time. Thomas and the coachman loaded the luggage on a sturdy post-chaise, a common four wheeled carriage of the day, and the two men climbed aboard. Sir Roger leaned out to speak with the coachman, intent on giving him firm direction.

“Now then,” he said. “We will not be going to the principle residence of the Duke of Richmond on the Rue des Cendres. There is a coach house back of the property with an address on Rue de la Blanchisserie. Make for that location, my good man, and an extra shilling if you get us there before sunset.” The exact location of the ball being given by the Duchess of Richmond was in some doubt for many years, but the Duke had discovered it was held in that very coach house, and not the main residence. He recalled attending mock events of the famous ball, the last given on the 200th anniversary of the battle in 2015. Yet none will be so grand as the original, he thought with some satisfaction.

He eased back in his seat now, exhaling and pleased that they were finally on their way, though the Duke’s companion and would be footman sat in sullen silence. Ames regarded him sympathetically, knowing the shock of his present circumstances must be very hard to take, even in the comfort of the plush riding coach. He reached up, sliding the window shut to make certain the driver would hear nothing, then regarded his hired hand Thomas with a steady gaze as he fished in his pocket for a pipe.

“I managed to get my hands on a bit of Bull Durham tobacco while we were at the wharf. I don’t suppose you’d care for a smoke?”

Thomas shook his head, saying nothing.

“Well,” said the Duke, “I don’t partake often, but I rather feel like getting into the swing of things here. You know the saying…When in Rome, do as the Romans do. My meerschaum pipe is an old favorite.” He held up an ornately carved pipe in a pale cream meerschaum, a Black Sea mineral that was perfect for the application and used for pipemaking since the early 1700s. “Much better than a clay pipe,” said Ames. “The stone is soft and porous, and it cools the smoke wonderfully. I’d favor a pipe like this over briar wood any day. Manzanita is another fine wood for a pipe, but meerschaum stone is top drawer.”

He could see that his attempt at simple civil conversation was having little effect on Thomas, so he inclined his head and got round to the trouble at the bottom of his footman’s depressed mood. “Well, Mister Thomas. I suppose you think you have been hoodwinked here, eh?”

“Sir?”

“Come now, I can read that glum expression. Yes, I know this has all been quite a shock, and perhaps more than you bargained for when I first proposed this journey.”

“It’s just too much to believe, sir. I can’t imagine how any of this could be happening!”

“Of course not. You have taken it all bravely, my man. I suppose you thought it was all sport and theater to tickle my fancy at first, though I tried to put you off that mindset several times.”

“Well who could believe it, sir? Who could believe this without seeing it all first hand?” He gestured to the world outside, passing the windows of the coach as it started off down a narrow road.

“Indeed. Seeing is believing, however, and we have only just begun. You will see a good deal more before we’re through here.”

“How, Sir Roger? How did we get here?”

I’m afraid that is a very long tale, my man. But I do suppose I owe you a bit more of an explanation. That business at Lindisfarne was no mere sightseeing tour. The place has a long history, and hides more secrets that many know. You have just seen one of them-that passage at the back of the closet on the upper bedroom. It was that stairway, and the tunnel after it, that led us here. We walked only that very short distance, but traversed long years with every step we took.”

“What…through time, sir? How is that possible?”

The Duke regarded him with narrowed eyes, considering. “I suppose you have both feet in it now, Thomas, and you did not know the full measure of what I was asking of you when you signed on to this little adventure. I tried to convey the indefinite duration of the assignment, and its potential hazards. Yet I apologize for not revealing everything. If I had told you this beforehand you would simply not believe it. There was no other way. Sometimes you cannot go by rope or ladder when you come to a precipice in life, my man. You must simply throw yourself over. Very well then, in all fairness I will be candid with you now. Few men or women will know what I will now tell you. To put it simply, the world we have just come from is in real jeopardy, not just with that war brewing up like a storm on our near horizon, but because it seems time itself has simply run itself down there. Things are starting to come apart and it’s about to get very strange, which is why it was necessary that we go somewhere else.”

“I don’t understand, sir. How could we move in time?”

“Of course you don’t. Let me see if I can explain it. You are given to thinking of time as something you always have, and always spend, like these shillings in my leather pouch here.” He cupped the pouch under his waistcoat and went on. “You think of your life as beginning at birth, when you are handed a nice big bag of coinage in time and you spend two pence a day until you run out. You move through time every day. Yes? But you always move in the same direction, forward. The thought that you might ever take a step back, to unsay an ill made remark, or correct some other misjudgment often crosses every man’s mind, but it’s not something he can ever do-or so he believes. You’ve heard the poetry by Omar Khayyam: The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all thy tears wash out a word of it. So it has seemed to be true for most of our lives. Yet I have found it to be in error, Mister Thomas. Other men have too-though they are very few in number.”

“Others have done this-they have traveled back here?”

“Not here. This is my keyhold, and I paid handsomely for it, believe me. But there are other places like Lindisfarne in the world, and they open hidden doors like the one you and I just went through. I only know of a very few, but they are there.”

“You’re telling me these doorways and passages exist elsewhere?”

“They do. There’s one in the Great Pyramid, and others in Greece and China. There may be more that I do not know of, and each one leads to a different place-or rather I should say, a different time. This one led us here to the eve of a great moment in history, and it was much coveted. I had to pay a great deal for the key, and there it is.” He touched the chain that held the key where it hung about his neck.

“But… how? Who built these passages?”

“The short answer is that we do not really know. There is no doubt that the portals exist, though they are really more like fissures in time. The one we traversed was discovered in the early 19th century when the restoration of the castle was underway. How they managed to determine its unique nature remains a mystery. There were signs that they tried to open the doors, without success. Those works were beyond the means of anyone in the 19th century. They could not be breached by force. The doorways were six inches of tungsten-carbide steel and titanium alloy! That is technology we may master in 2021, but not in the 1900s.”

“Then they were built in our day?”

“I could find no evidence of that, which means that they were built in the past.”

“But how could they achieve that? You just said the technology was beyond them.”

“So one would think. Well, we don’t know who built them, do we? They may have been built in the past, but that does not mean they were built by anyone native to the time of their construction. I could undertake a project here, for example, using knowledge and methods known only in our time.”

“You are suggesting they were built by…by someone from a future time?”

“Very good, Mister Thomas. I knew you would come round to it one way or another. It’s really just a process of elimination, isn’t it? If past generations could not master the technology required to build those doors, and they were definitely not built in any of the modern history we know, then they had to be built by men who could complete the project, and also built before they were discovered by architect Sir Edwin Lutyens in 1902. In fact. He may have been privy to their existence.”

“How would that be possible?”

“Easy enough, Thomas. He may have been from the future! I’ve given all this a good deal of thought, you see. Suppose Lutyens deliberately engineered his restoration to deftly conceal those doors, stairs and passages? He would have to have rather specific knowledge of the subterranean layout and all.”

“Did he have that key, sir? The one you used to open those doors?”

“Perhaps he did. Perhaps he was a warden of sorts-a gatekeeper. In any case, those who did know of the passage kept it under their hats and quite secret.”

“Then how did you come by the key, sir?”

The Duke folded his arms, considering. “I’m afraid that would be a very long story, Mister Thomas. Let me put it to you this way. Men of privilege, wealth, and power have a handle on things that go on in this world that few would realize or ever know about. This is a perfect example. Suffice it to say that I had the means and the will to find out about this passage, and to obtain the key.”

“Amazing, sir. Though I still can’t get my mind around this. How does it work?”

“It’s not a machine, Thomas. It’s a physical rift in time. Think of it this way. You may now believe time is fluid, that it flows or moves like water in a river, and you are on a raft simply being carried along. Well these little passages are like whirlpools in the stream. Happen across one and your little raft might be swept under and pop up somewhere else entirely. That’s one way of grasping it.”

“I think I follow you, sir.”

“If you want to know the truth, however, time is more like a solid thing, but it has cracks, fissures, little tears that can take a man from one moment to another. You live your life in one, day by day, like the grooves scratched into an old vinyl record. The music as you go along is your life, and you never think the song can be stopped in mid stream, reversed, or ever played again, just like Omar Khayyam’s poem, even if you do know it will come to an end one day. But it can be played again. Scratch that record and the needle skips! Sometimes it may get stuck and simply repeat a segment over and over, like a time loop. You’ve had brief skips like that in your own life, coming upon a person or place and knowing you have been there before.”

“You mean like deja vu, sir?”

“Yes, exactly. Now, we believe we are stuck here in our song-track number five on the album if you will, and it never occurs to us that we might skip back to track number three. But that needle can run across a scratch in the record and skip a whole segment of the tune, or even skip backwards again to play a part over, or go to an entirely different song! That’s what these passages are like. They are physical scratches in time. They were discovered by chance, I suppose. Someone stumbled through one and then found a way to stumble back. When one is found, it is well hidden, and well secured, as you have seen. And it is my belief that men from a future time are behind all this. Only a very few are known to exist. Scratches, tears, grooves, fissures, whirlpools. I mix all these metaphors to make it understandable, but the simple fact of the matter is that if you find one, you can move the needle of your life somewhere else-and that can be quite thrilling.”

“And quite daunting, sir. Yes, I did think this was all theater, until we finally made port and the sheer magnitude of it all finally struck me.”

“I thought it might work better that way,” said Sir Roger. “Wade in gently before you take the plunge, eh? Well, now here we are, on the eve of great events. We’ll have a long carriage ride to Brussels today, and then rest up at a hotel near the ball room at that address I gave the driver. A room may be difficult to come by, with the British army garrisoning the town, but I’ve enough coin to loosen things, and more diamonds if coinage fails. Then we get down to business. I will explain it all to you in good time. Lord knows we have enough of that now that we’re here.”

“That passage we took,” said Thomas, his mind still wrapped about the mystery the Duke had related. “We can go back?”

Ames raised his eyebrows. “I suppose we could try, though I have no intention of doing so any time soon. This is a very exciting world here, Mister Thomas. Men were real men in this day and age. They fought with swords, pistols, and rifled muskets with a good bayonet, and not missiles and machine guns. They still rode horses into battle, and this one here is going to be rather grand.”

“Waterloo?”

“What else?”

“And this…business. This business you speak of, Sir Roger. You said we were going to kill-”

Ames held up a hand, stilling him. “No need to discuss that here,” the Duke said quickly. “But yes, we have some urgent tasks at hand, and then I’ve a mind to get back to England after the battle.”

“To Lindisfarne, sir?”

“To London-Piccadilly in fact. I need to see the 7th Earl of Elgin there.”

“The 7th Earl?”

“It’s a special matter. We’ll discuss it all later. For now, my man, get your mind and thoughts around the business at hand! We’re here, just a few days before the battle, and we get to see sights and breath air that no man of our day could ever imagine. Smell that air, Thomas. Not a hint of pollution on the breeze. There’s nothing in the sky but the clouds and wind by day, and the stars by night. This is a world still unspoiled by modernity-no radio waves, cell phone traffic, or microwaves flitting about carrying a blather of nonsense and text messages, eh? I think we’ll have the time of our lives here, and then, after we’ve done what I came here to do, we’ll see about a matter that I have recently stumbled across myself-a very interesting matter indeed.”

“Yet you do plan to return when this is concluded?”

The Duke sighed heavily. “Well I suppose I should be forthright about this as well, Mister Thomas. We could reverse our footsteps, even rejoin Captain Cameron again on his ship if we choose. He would be more than happy to deposit us on Lindisfarne Island again. And we could make our way back through that passage, though I shudder to think of what we might find if we do so.”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“What I mean is that the world we have come from is going to hell, my man, and it’s not going to be a place where you and I might wish to be at all. We were warned of this some time ago, and those in the know have made arrangements, if they could. There are some that will simply try to go underground-you’ve heard all the stories and rumors about the deep underground shelters and bases… the Denver Airport and such. In fact, they even modeled some of it by way of disinformation in those Hollywood movies about the end of the world. Well it was all true. Anyone in their right mind back home is going underground by now, but only the key holders have any real chance for a life in another time.”

“The key holders?”

Sir Roger held up the odd key he had used to open the hidden passageways at Lindisfarne, smiling. “Yes, the key holders. This little adventure is the arrangement I have made. It is my chance, and by extension your chance at life as well. I have no intention of returning to discover what might be left of the world in 2021. I mean to stay here, Mister Thomas. There’s real adventure here, and that passageway at Lindisfarne is not the only fissure in time I am privy to. There are others, and we can do a good deal of exploring if you have the stomach for it. For us, tomorrow is yesterday. The only way to traverse the years between this date and the world we came from will be the old fashioned way now-one day at a time-but we will make a grand adventure of that.”

He looked at Thomas now, a smile on his lips and a challenge in his eye. “Come along with me, Mister Thomas, and I’ll show you worlds you could only dream of. Are you with me?”