Time and Time Again

14

THE DARKNESS WAS absolute.

Except for the lingering images of party lighting that still floated on his dazzled retinas.

The silence was oppressive.

Except for the echo of the trance music that was still ringing and thudding in his ears.

It occurred to Stanton that if he truly had departed the time in which he had been standing, then that fading echo and the floating blobs of lights before his eyes were the last remaining sights and sounds of a world and a century that had disappeared from history. All the voices of those hundred years, all the howls of pain and heartache. The babble and the roar. The whispers and the song. Gone. All gone.

And yet still an Ibiza-inspired club mix and light show remained from that universe. Captured briefly by his senses. Fading fast but still there for a second or two more at least. The sole sensual echoes of an entire century of restless human endeavour.

And the taste of spearmint lip gloss. That too remained. And with it the memory of a girl’s lips on his.

Was he in another world?

Or perhaps simply in another part of space? Suspended somewhere and nowhere in some strange limbo, lost in a Newtonian loop.

But that was just stupid. He hadn’t gone anywhere. He’d just blacked out. Or else the cops had raided the joint and unplugged the generator. That was why there was no sound. No light.

Except, then, where was everybody?

Stanton felt his fists clenched so tightly that the nails were in danger of puncturing his palms. That had never happened to him before. It seemed to help him focus.

He risked his voice.

‘Hello? Professor?’ he said. ‘Professor McCluskey?’

No reply. The silence just got deeper as his ears grew accustomed to it.

He slowly unclenched his fists and found that his hands were trembling. With a conscious effort, he steadied them. He reached into the pocket of his jacket and took out his torch.

The moment of truth had arrived.

Turning it on and shining it in front of him, Stanton saw that one thing remained the same. The arch in the cellar wall that had been in the background of his vision as the girl’s face had appeared behind McCluskey’s falling body was still there. A shadowy brick alcove.

He was still in the same cellar he had been in a moment before.

But he was alone and, except for the torchlight, in absolute darkness.

His stomach tightened. He gulped, swallowing hard. He felt for a moment that he might almost be sick.

He shone the light about himself. The dust was thick everywhere, centuries thick. The alcove that he’d last seen crowded with kissing, groping people was filled now with ancient-looking bottles.

On the floor nearby was a small wooden chair and table. Cobwebbed and somewhat rat-gnawed. That chair, no longer broken, was the same one he’d attempted to use as a marker earlier in the evening.

Earlier in the evening? Had it been earlier in the evening or had it been a hundred and eleven years in the future? Except if that was the case, then there was no future any more. He had come to make it.

Stanton was a brave man. He was the Guts and there was none steadier in a crisis, but he felt almost overwhelmed. He swayed a little on his feet, the darkness disorienting him.

‘McCluskey!’ he called out, although he knew already there would be no answer.

And there wasn’t.

Then he did something he had never imagined would be his first action on the other side of whatever it was he had crossed. He reached into his pocket and pulled out his iPhone. Turning it on he wondered whether it would even work, and of course it did, as had his torch. They would both continue to work as long as their batteries, charged in another universe, held out, and after that he had equipment in his kit with which to recharge them. Thumbing the screen with shaking hand he went straight to photos and clicked on ‘Family album’.

And there she was. There they were. Cassie and the children. Smiling in the blackness, casting their glow upwards, illuminating his face. Just as once they’d illuminated his life.

He felt a little stronger. If he had indeed arrived where he was beginning to think he must have arrived, then it wasn’t the light and sound of some random rave party that was the last echo of the vanished century. It was the precious, priceless images of his loves that had survived. He carried them with him still. In his heart, of course, but also in what was the last iPhone left on earth. And the first.

He turned off the phone and put it back in his pocket.

It was time to begin whatever it was his destiny to begin. His mission. The work of Chronos.

Putting the torch between his teeth he bent forward, leaning down in order to pick up his two bags.

The torch beam arched downwards and he saw her. McCluskey. Unconscious at his feet.

Such had been her burning desire to accompany him into the past that even as the concussion had consumed her she’d somehow managed to contract her body around his bags, thereby sneaking into Newton’s sentry box.

Stanton stared down at her. Her chest was moving. She was alive.

He played the light across the length of her body, an alarming thought striking him that perhaps a limb or a hand or foot might have been left outside the area of the box, in which case he might be dealing with some kind of time-mutilated amputee.

To his relief she appeared to be all present and correct, her swollen, wool-clad calves bulging out of her brown brogue shoes, the fat blotchy hands each with all their stubby yellow fingers intact. She’d made it across space and time in one piece. That same ruthless instinct to win that had made her such a terror of the ladies’ fours and eights on the Cam and which had enabled her to become the first female Master at Trinity had served her well. She’d squeezed herself into the sentry box and he was stuck with her.

Kneeling down he tried to assess the extent of her injuries. The wound on the back of her head wasn’t bleeding much but he knew with concussions that that didn’t necessarily mean anything. It was perfectly possible that the brain itself was bruised, in which case there’d be pressure building on the inside of her skull. Champagne bottles were made of very thick glass and serious damage might have been done. At any rate he needed to ice it as soon as possible to reduce the risk of the brain swelling.

Incredible.

He had stepped back in time in an effort to save tens of millions, yet now he was stuck with looking after one selfish old woman.

It occurred to him that he really ought to just finish her off. Suffocate the outrageous old harridan and stash her tweed-clad corpse deep in the shadows of the catacombs. Why not? She had absolutely no right to be there, she had compromised the very mission she’d claimed to care so much about. She was a liability, a dangerous liability.

She grunted a bit and some dribble slid out of the corner of her mouth.

He knew he couldn’t kill her. He wasn’t a murderer.

Besides, he liked the old girl and, deep down, despite himself, he was half glad of the company.

A thought occurred to him. That big handbag she was carrying. Big even by her standards … more like a small holdall.

He opened it and shone his torch inside. The first thing he saw was an envelope marked with the seal of the Foreign Office and stamped ‘GR’, just like the one Chronos had supplied to him that contained his 1914 identification. This had been no spontaneous act. The outrageous old woman had been planning it all along.

Of course she hadn’t planned to arrive in 1914 knocked out cold. She hadn’t planned on a topless Turkish party girl smashing her over the head with a champagne bottle. Another victory for the Romantics. History just doesn’t have a plan.

And now it was time to get her out of that cellar.

Then what? Who knew what lay beyond it? Could it really be Istanbul in 1914? Constantinople? He still couldn’t bring himself to believe that. It was just as likely that they’d find they were spinning through space inside a small, cellar-shaped asteroid.

He opened the smaller of his two bags and brought out his medical kit. He knew it contained some ammonium carbonate to use as smelling salts. It wasn’t an ideal thing to do, to jerk a concussed person back to consciousness, but there didn’t seem to be any other way of getting McCluskey on to her feet. He certainly couldn’t carry her and the bags unnoticed through an occupied house.

The salts brought her round a little. Her eyes opened, her jaw dropped. He clamped his hand over her mouth.

‘Do exactly as I say, professor,’ he whispered sharply. ‘Don’t speak. Do not speak. Just act.’

She was very woozy and certainly not entirely in the moment but she seemed to understand the instructions, or at least she followed them.

Still with the torch between his teeth he hauled her to her feet, then, clasping the handles of all three bags in one hand, he put his free arm around McCluskey’s waist and half dragged her towards the door. Once there, he leant her against the wall and felt in his pocket for the skeleton keys Chronos had supplied him with. They’d promised that these keys could open any lock on earth in 1914. Of course, as far as Stanton knew, this particular lock had last been turned in the early eighteenth century. The quartermaster of the Companions of Chronos had considered this possibility and supplied Stanton with a tiny aerosol can of silicone lubricant, which he now applied.

The key turned and the door opened inwards: fortunately, since a cupboard had been placed against it on the other side that Stanton was forced to move out of the way.

At once he was hit by the smell of disinfectant. And vanilla … which Stanton guessed indicated morphine. He was in a hospital.

McCluskey sensed it too.

‘That’s morphine,’ she mumbled. ‘We’re in Newton’s fucking hospital!’

‘I said don’t speak, OK!’ Stanton hissed. ‘If we are banged up in Istanbul as housebreakers we’ll miss Sarajevo, you stupid woman.’

McCluskey’s head lolled forward and she put a finger to her lip. It seemed she understood him but she was so shaky and distracted Stanton could not be sure how long that understanding would last.

For a moment he thought again about leaving her. It was just so ridiculous. He should be calmly taking stock, pausing for a moment to assimilate the mind-boggling conclusion that Newton had been right, that every single thing he had ever known was gone. Time had rebooted itself and the last one hundred and eleven years were once more in the future.

But he didn’t leave her behind. He couldn’t bring himself to do that, any more than he could bring himself to kill her. Instead he got her and the bags out through the door, closed and locked it behind him, then leant her against a wall while he repositioned the cupboard and ascended the steps.

They were the same steps. There could be no doubt about that, although in much better condition than they’d been forty-five minutes before. Perhaps it was a blessing that he had McCluskey to struggle with, stinking of cigarettes and wine and dinner. It was a pretty effective distraction from the millennial-scale strangeness of his situation.

At the top of the steps there was another door, also locked, but which sprang easily open on application of the skeleton keys. Moments later the two of them were on the ground floor of the building. Once more Stanton pressed his finger gently to McCluskey’s lips.

‘Shhh,’ he breathed gently.

He heard music. Opera of some sort, scratchy and poorly amplified. Somebody was listening to a gramophone.

He shone his torch along the passageway.

There were nurses’ capes on hooks on the walls. A wheelchair and also a bed trolley. Rooms led off the corridor on either side, from one of which a shaded light shone through a half-open door.

Stanton crept slowly past, one careful step at a time, supporting McCluskey and trying not to bang his bags. Glancing in, he saw a young nurse working at her desk. It was fortunate for him she was an opera fan.

It occurred to Stanton that he was looking at a living, breathing soul who had died many decades before he was born. Truly no human being in all time had experienced such a thing.

The young woman shifted in her seat. For some reason Stanton felt that he would have liked to get a proper look at her face, the first face from a new world. An old world. But the girl did not oblige him by turning round; her cheek remained firmly in her hand as she concentrated on her work. Stanton and McCluskey crept on.

The geography of the old mansion was, of course, completely different to that of the derelict tenement the two of them had barged through an hour before, but the orientation of the building was the same and Stanton knew the direction in which the street lay.

All was quiet as they made their way through the house. As the gramophone music faded behind them Stanton was aware of some moaning and the occasional restless cry from elsewhere in the building. But the ground floor seemed to be deserted apart from the nurse at her desk.

Moving as quickly as he dared, he found the front door.

He was in the process of laying his hand on the handle when it opened in front of him. Suddenly and shockingly he found himself face to face with a neatly bearded man in top hat and tails, who was clearly even more surprised than Stanton was.

The cold night air focused Stanton’s thoughts.

‘My mother seems much better,’ he said in English. ‘I think perhaps an overnight stay isn’t required after all.’

Then he bundled McCluskey past the startled man, down the front steps and hurried off up the street.

He was a soldier in open country supporting a wounded comrade and with three bags to carry.

He needed to find a cab.