One touch of it, one gentle brush against it and he was dead.
‘Oh, bugger this,’ he whispered.
He turned round and leaped for the portal.
1899, LONDON
Liam landed heavily on the brick floor of the dungeon, a drop of several feet that knocked the air flat out of his lungs.
Maddy and Rashim were anxiously waiting for him right beside the portal. ‘Oh, thank God!’ cried Maddy. She swiped at her cheeks with the heel of her hand as she dropped down to her knees and reached out towards Liam, to get a hold of him. To be sure he was the real thing and not some apparition.
‘God! I thought I’d lost you as well –’
Liam managed to get some air in his lungs. ‘CLOSE THE PORTAL!’ he screamed. ‘CLOSE IT NOW!’
All eyes in the dungeon rose to look at the liquid image of the sphere hovering above Liam. The orb revealed the pleasant crimson tint of sunrise warming ridges of weather-worn rust-coloured sandstone. The dark outline of a distant jungle horizon; pools of mist coloured candyfloss pink by the rays of sunlight; creamy combed-out clouds in the sky above, lit from beneath.
Amid this swirling scene of beautiful serenity, something suddenly moved into view. A dark and indefinable form: like a murder of crows fluttering far too closely together and merging into one; like a school of fish constantly changing form as they evade the jaws of a circling predator.
The dark shape quickly filled the spherical image and for a moment it seemed like it might emerge from the orb and step out into the dungeon among them, but then the portal suddenly collapsed down to a pinprick of light and vanished.
In the dim electric-blue glow of the array of computer screens across the room, and the unblinking glare of the solitary bulb in its wire cage dangling from the low ceiling, they silently stared at each other. Ragged breathing filling the space between them; no words were necessary, and anyway, right then, none would have sufficed in helping them make any sense of what they’d just been through and all that they’d witnessed.
All the same, the silence was eventually broken.
‘I think I might just go now,’ said Bertie. He nodded politely at the others as if he was excusing himself from a rather uneventful game of cribbage. He turned and walked across the room, ducking as he stepped through the low archway. He looked back at them and offered another polite nod, before walking out of the dungeon and gently pulling the oak door shut behind him.
Chapter 70
1937, 13 Hanover Terrace, Regent’s Park, London
FROM THE JOURNAL OF H. G. WELLS
I will admit I never cast eyes on those people again. Every night after our return to London – for weeks, perhaps even for months afterwards – I recall I was awoken with the most dreadful night frights.
Awoken by my own screams.
So it was that I avoided them. I admit I even had trouble entering the premises of Delbert Hook’s business for the knowledge that only several brick walls separated me from their device that opened a doorway on to Hell itself. I became haunted by imagined visions of that demon stalking the dark corridors and archways of the viaduct.
I recall that I managed to last but a few days before I finally left a note for Delbert informing him that I would be seeking employment elsewhere, with immediate effect. I do believe now that that was the only course of action I could take.
Over the intervening years I have often wondered if those young ladies and gentlemen ever truly existed, and what became of them. Whether they remained as subtenants of Mr Hook and his so-called import/export business. Or whether they eventually found other premises more suitable to their goals and plans.
I moved from Holborn to Kilburn in London, where I took up a teaching post at Henley House. Although I think I made the move more to distance myself from those haunting memories, to distance myself from their Hellish device. And I recall for many months after leaving Holborn I hungrily scoured the morning newspapers for fear of reading a ghastly report of giant three-legged monsters emerging from beneath the ground to burn us all to ashes.
With every year that has passed, I have managed to convince myself better that those memories were the product of an excitable young mind, an imagination run wild with no outlet of expression for it. Thus, I do believe my writing of works of fiction in later years has helped me in this respect.
Helped me to accept that in all likelihood those things never in fact happened to me.
That they were perhaps the side effects of a fever, most probably caused by food poisoning. A hallucination that lasted a few days. Or a particularly vivid dream that has stayed with me.
I believe I have finally managed to convince myself that none of those things were real. That they were imagined and that I am safe. That this – fortunately – is a very mundane world. That there are no such things as machines that travel through time or open doorways on to Hell. That there are no demons and monsters waiting patiently for such doors to open. That maybe, after all, mankind’s future will not be as dire and dark and war-torn as the girl (what was her name, now? Maggie?) described it to be.
Such notions now seem to me to be too ridiculous and far-fetched for truth.
They have, however, proven to be particularly profitable to me, treated as ideas I have used for my fiction.
Chapter 71
1889, Brighton
The trip away from the smoke and fog of London down the line to Brighton for a few days turned out to be one of Liam’s better ideas.
Maddy’s mood was lifted by the sight of so many fine dresses and elaborate chapeaux, by the warmth of the unfolding spring bringing summer unseasonably early. Her spirits were raised by the sight of families playing bat-and-ball games together on the wide beach, by the jaunty sound of brass bands competing with each other for applause from the bandstands along the promenade.
Warm evenings filled with tea and cupcakes and the soothing draw and hiss of a gentle sea across sand and shingle. He noticed every now and then that her gaze was off somewhere far away, wistful, seeing other possibilities, other could-have-beens. But when he spoke to her she came back to him with a quick smile accompanied, he now noticed, by the first faint hairlines of crow’s feet beside her green eyes.
We’re both ageing.
The attrition of so much time travelling, of so much exposure to that misty hell, was finally making itself apparent. Even though he knew they’d both been engineered to have a greater resistance to the corrosive effects of stepping through time, it was, inevitably, going to catch up with them. Eventually. And as he studied her now – as she stared at seagulls swooping and bullying a hapless child throwing out breadcrumbs – he also saw the faint lines of silver in her hair and a purse line on her upper lip, subtle indicators of what she might one day look like.
Not old. Not even close just yet … but the signposts were all there.
Rashim too was showing the signs of this attrition. Liam had noticed the heavy folds in his brow, the grey highlights in his beard, a subtly mottled tone to his dark skin. He most certainly looked ten years older now than the man they’d first encountered in a remote field outside Ancient Rome.
And Bob and Becks? Liam smiled as he regarded them. They sat stiffly at the tea table, both slurping a lamb broth from soup spoons. They of course never seemed to change. At some point tachyon damage would surely reach too high a level for their cells to repair. At some point they too would start to age. However, he suspected that he, Maddy and Rashim would be long gone before either support unit began to grumble about aching hips or creaking knees.
He knew Maddy was still quietly grieving for Adam. He hadn’t realized until now how strongly she’d felt for him. That it was, quite possibly … love. Or maybe he’d just been some kind of a lifeline: a last chance for her to feel like a normal girl. She’d told him the other day how Adam had pulled her away from the seeker and offered himself up as bait at the last moment. And how she’d only just now figured out what he’d meant with his last words to her
. She said Adam must have worked out that he was going to die in 2001. He was going to die anyway, whatever happened. Either now or be one of the victims who died in the World Trade Center – he wasn’t going to be in the world for much longer.
She’d told him she reckoned Adam had decided he might as well die for something. To save her.
‘I’m not done with this,’ said Maddy presently. Her eyes returned from the child, now backing nervously away from the gulls massing at her feet. ‘I’ve been thinking about things.’
‘About what?’ asked Rashim.
‘That column field.’
She was quiet for a while. Thoughtful. Fiddling with a coil of her hair, wrapped round a finger. ‘What if, as you suggested back at that city, Rashim, the column was some sort of a marker? An end date for mankind?’
‘A marker?’
‘Like one of your tachyon beacons. But, you know, on a much, much grander scale.’
‘Indeed.’ He stroked his beard thoughtfully. ‘It is highly conceivable that it had that function.’
‘And you suggested that perhaps … this is all, like, some big experiment?’
‘Experiment?’ Liam finished his tea and set the cup back down on its saucer. ‘You’re actually taking his idea seriously?’
She nodded.
‘You are in a strange mood this afternoon, Maddy.’
‘No, listen to me … what if he’s right? What if that’s all we’ve ever been. Us humans? An experiment? A grand experiment? And experiments have a cut-off point. Right? When you’ve gathered enough data, you close the whole thing down.’
Rashim shifted in his seat. ‘It was just an idle theory, Maddy. Just a –’
‘What if you’re right and all of Earth and the last – I dunno – the last, say, two thousand years of history have been like a giant Petri dish?’ She looked at him. ‘And us humans are like the bacteria sitting in it, being studied?’
Rashim returned her gaze over the rim of his glasses.
Maddy continued. ‘Rashim, didn’t you say that there was something really odd about why we never, ever, intercepted a single radio signal from aliens, even all the way up to 2070? Despite all our powerful radio telescopes and stuff, combing the frequencies, searching the skies for decades. Do you remember saying that?’
‘The Fermi Paradox,’ he uttered. ‘Yes.’
‘And you agree that the math is stacked against us being the only intelligence in the universe? That it’s highly improbable that we are alone here?’
‘Yes, of course, that would be the Drake Equation you are talking about.’
‘You also agree that, in theory, at any given moment in time, given the infinite size of the universe there should be thousands of intelligent –’
‘Tens of thousands.’
She looked at him. ‘And yet in over seventy years of radio astronomy we pick up not even one single, solitary, radio signal?’
‘And therein lies the Fermi Paradox, yes.’
She carefully unwound the coil of hair from her finger and looked at him. ‘So, I know you were only theorizing, but maybe you’ve got it exactly right. We’re in some kind of “quarantine”. Some isolated dimension?’ She glanced at Liam. ‘Maybe his Petri dish theory isn’t so stupid-sounding?’
‘What are you gettin’ at there, Mads? I’m not sure I –’
‘So, my point is this … what if Waldstein knows something more? What if somehow he knows what’s going on? What if he really is trying to do the right thing?’
‘The right thing?’
‘For us. For everyone!’ She shrugged. ‘I dunno … I guess what I’m saying is that maybe if we steer history the way he wants it to go – to the place he wants it to end up, to the day where humans nearly wipe themselves out with that Kosong-ni virus …’ She looked up at her two friends. ‘Maybe that’s the only way we get out of this Petri dish? Maybe it’s the end condition of this “experiment”?’
‘You think it might be just like Adam thought?’ said Liam, instantly regretting his words. He noticed the slightest stiffening of her lips. He knew the mention of his name was a painful jab for her. And it probably would be for a long while yet. He blundered on, keen to quickly move on from the mention of Adam’s name. ‘That those visitors in the jungle, the Archaeologists, came from the far-future? From beyond 2070?’
She nodded. ‘But they’re not observing us discreetly, like anthropologists. No, they’ve taken us and put us into this – this isolated pocket of space, just like we’re all a bunch of lab rats.’
It sounded ridiculous to her and she decided to let it go. ‘It’s the only explanation I can think of.’ She shrugged. ‘Or maybe I’m just losing it.’
‘No,’ Rashim was nodding slowly. ‘Who knows how advanced humans become in the far-future.’
Maddy also nodded thoughtfully. ‘So maybe all of our answers lie in the far-future – lie beyond the year 2070?’
Liam met her eyes; they both shared the slightest smile. ‘Aye. You thinking what I’m thinking, Mads?’
She turned and looked back out over the low promenade wall at the sea gently lapping across the broad beach, at distant scudding clouds in a warm and clement evening sky, at seagulls dipping and swooping, hovering on the breeze like untethered kites.
‘Yeah … maybe …’
Epilogue
1379, the Lost City of the Windtalkers
The holy man dipped the bristles of his brush into the clay pot full of dark brown paint and then daubed some more on to the cave wall. Carefully. He needed to get the symbols exactly right, to faithfully reproduce them.
They of course meant nothing to him. An incomprehensible series of markings, but clearly they meant something. A message from the heavens that perhaps wiser men, more deserving men than he, would be able to fathom out.
Again he picked his way forward through the cave to remind himself of how the markings on the very next symbol went. The light of the day was bright. The midday monsoon had been and gone and cleared the sky, leaving the sun sitting in clear blue, warming up the jungle below.
The old man emerged from the mouth of the cave on to the lip. To his right a merchant was leading a tethered line of heavily laden llamas up the trail, oblivious to, or perhaps used to, the drop to their side. The merchant hesitated, and turned and looked at the same thing as the old man. A spectacular sight. Then he returned to the task of ensuring his animals carried on into the cave and through the access way to the city at the rear of it.
The holy man stepped to one side to let him pass, and the cave behind him soon echoed with the snorting, scraping, clopping of the beasts as the merchant guided inside and towards the rear.
His eyes returned to the jungle before him; below, moisture steamed up from the thick velvet carpet of tree tops, like the ghosts of the forefathers rising from Deep Mother Dirt to gaze curiously at the enormous object in the sky.
It hung there, over the jungle, like a solitary storm-cloud, casting its shadow over much of it. The Visitors came from it and returned to it each night from their labours in the village. They were hard at work on something beneath the ground.
Something godly, something wonderful. Something his people’s ancestors had discovered centuries ago and now protected, kept safe for the Visitors. Its purpose was mysterious and yet the Visitors were not secretive; they were happy for the villagers to watch them as they set about their work.
The holy man once again looked out at the vast structure hanging in the sky. Vast, and circular in shape, topped with ridges and spikes and convolutions that made no sense to him. It glistened in the sunlight, as smooth as a polished riverbed pebble.
Along the surface of this floating heavenly chariot, as large as a mountain top, were giant markings – symbols. The old man studied the next symbol carefully, making sure he had it in his mind correctly before finally turning and heading back into the cave to daub it on the wall beside the last one he’d painted. As he stepped back inside, he reminded himself again that
perhaps, one day, wiser, far more deserving minds would determine their actual meaning.
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