‘How the hell did this happen?’ the driver asked. ‘Why is he in fancy dress?’
Good questions. ‘The police will explain,’ Lytten said curtly. ‘I’m afraid I cannot. Or rather, will not. Just do your job.’
Then he turned to Rosie. ‘We have a lot to discuss, but not at the moment. I have something I need to do, and according to Mr Chang it is urgent. You can go home or stay here. Or, if you are up to it, you could accompany Chang and see he is all right. It is entirely your choice.’
Considering that Chang had just tried to stab her, in a manner of speaking, Rosie was understandably reluctant to go anywhere near him. ‘I want to come with you,’ she said in a frightened voice.
‘You can’t. What time is it?’
Lunchtime, she told him. He had been gone for a couple of hours. She’d had a bit of difficulty resetting the machine, and it had taken longer than she thought.
‘Is that all?’
‘How long do you think you were gone?’
‘About six hours. Maybe more.’
‘What are you going to do now?’
‘First of all, I am going to get out of this dressing gown. I look ridiculous. Then I will go to the police station to talk to Detective Sergeant Maltby about Mr Chang. And I need a chat with Angela.’
‘What happened in there? In Anterwold?’
‘Well,’ he said, after a moment to arrange his thoughts into something which passed for coherence, ‘I played the role of a returning deity.’
‘Goodness.’
‘And I had to preside over a trial to decide who killed Thenald.’
‘Who did you decide had done it?’
‘I didn’t. I didn’t have the faintest idea. Henary figured it out. It was Chang. He is some sort of associate of Angela’s. At least, that’s what he says. Oh, and Angela is a time traveller from the future.’
‘I know that,’ she said, as though it were not so very interesting. ‘How am I? The other me, I mean?’
‘Until Chang intervened you were blossoming, my dear. Healthy, self-confident and rather forceful. You seem quite decided to marry Pamarchon, and he seems suitably enamoured of you, so I’m sure you’ll live happily ever after.’
‘Oh. That’s nice.’
‘Pamarchon is the spitting image of an old student of mine. If he has his character, you will get on very well.’
‘So I don’t want to come back?’
‘No. You and I parted on rather bad terms because of it, I’m afraid. That’s what I need to talk to Angela about.’
‘Henary looks like you, you know.’
‘Yes. I feel a little embarrassed about that. Jay looks remarkably like another student of mine. Gontal is clearly based on an unpleasant chemistry teacher who gave my cat his name. Antros was a corporal in the army during the war. In fact, nearly everybody seems to have been dredged up from my memory. It was very peculiar. Just as well I never met Hitler. I really do think you should go home, by the way.’
‘After all this? Not forgetting the spies, the people being arrested, the blood on the cellar floor? You think I can just go home and do my prep?’
She had a point.
‘Very well. You can sit over the road from the police station and wait, if you really want to.’
*
It wasn’t hard for Lytten to see Angela at the police station; after a long conversation with Maltby and a phone call or two to London, all objections were waived. In the end, Lytten promised to write a letter of commendation praising Maltby for his intelligence and diligence, Maltby promised to make sure nobody asked too many questions about Chang, and finally Angela was let out. She looked a little tired.
‘Henry! How lovely,’ she said distractedly when the cell door opened.
‘I’m sure. Can we get straight down to business, please?’
‘The Volkov business?’
‘No. The cellar business.’
‘Ah. That.’
‘I’ve just spent nearly six hours in that invention of yours.’
‘Oh, dear. Rosie should not have done that. That was really rash of her. Where is she, by the way?’
‘One is over the road, the other is still in Anterwold. I did my best to persuade her, and Chang tried to use more forceful methods. But she stayed. I gather that may cause you problems.’
‘Potentially, but it doesn’t surprise me. What about Chang?’
‘In hospital. One of my more dramatic literary creations shot him with an arrow when he attacked Rosie.’
‘That fits as well. He is having a difficult time, poor man. He’s not made for an active life.’
‘Nor am I any more.’
‘He was meant to find out where Anterwold came from. Did he manage that?’
‘He did,’ Henry said. ‘He came to the conclusion that Anterwold is our future, or will be once a nuclear war intervenes. Humanity has to be nearly wiped out to prepare the ground for this paradise of mine. A dark age, lasting centuries, with only a few survivors holding on in the furthest reaches, preserving what little knowledge they can by weaving it into stories that are transmitted by word of mouth, then written down as the Story.’
‘I see,’ she said. ‘I was afraid of something like that.’ She looked up at him. ‘Is it what you had in mind?’
‘I didn’t have anything in mind. It was just a few jottings in a notebook until you got involved.’ They stared at each other for a few seconds. ‘Well?’ he prompted. ‘What are you going to do now? Are you just going to sit there?’
‘Of course not,’ she said, her face clearing suddenly. ‘I am going to try and save the universe, or rather, see if it can be saved. If that sounds a little ambitious, then I am going to visit your aunt. Oh, by the way, Sam Wind was here. He thinks you are a Soviet agent. I hope that’s all right.’
*
It took some time to persuade Rosie to stay behind; she was very upset and wanted to be around the only people who understood why. But Angela was adamant. There was nothing she could do. If she wanted to be useful, then she should go back to Lytten’s house and stay there. Make sure nobody came in, and allow no one, under any circumstances, to go into the cellar. Shoot them, if necessary. If she wanted to clear up the blood, though, that would be most helpful.
Rosie most certainly did not, but she agreed to the rest and went off, although not very happily. Angela then led Henry to her car and they drove to Tudmore Court, near Devizes, Wiltshire.
‘How did you get me out?’
‘Surprisingly easy. I can be very persuasive when I have the head of MI6 on the phone to back me up.’
‘Isn’t that just grand of you.’
They didn’t talk much; Angela was working and driving at the same time, while Henry was lost in thought. Only after an hour, her calculations finished, did Angela say:
‘What did you think of Anterwold?’
‘Oh, it was … astonishing. It works quite well. But I don’t know how it will behave when its horizons expand. I knew I’d imagined it as a variety of England, but I suppose there are other people scattered over the world. Are they at the same technological level? I didn’t bother with any of that. How does that work?’
‘Those elements will be produced by logical inference from the basic information in your notebooks. For example, I remember you state that no one has troubled the place greatly for a long time and that the occasional coastal raid is easily dealt with by a militia. That supposes low population and a matching technological level elsewhere. It doesn’t sound as though you’re suddenly going to get Panzer tanks landing in the south.’
‘I wish more things survived. Of us.’
‘You’d be surprised what they will find if they look. Think how much survived the dark ages. It’s probably there, if they only search in the right places. Lord only knows what they’d find in that Story of yours if they read it properly. And, of course, a Rosie is there to help them. She’ll be instructing them in Shakespeare and Julius Caesar soon enough.’
&nbs
p; ‘I made Catherine look like you.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. She surprised me. I scarcely sketched her at all, but she took on the appearance of a major figure in my real life.’
‘I’m flattered. How closely does she resemble me?’
‘Not identical; a long way from that, but you can see the relationship. Everything that happened in there was because of her, and I didn’t think of any of it. It was odd.’
Angela took a corner at an alarming speed, then said, ‘Interesting. I don’t think you should go back into Anterwold, you know.’
‘I don’t want to. Besides, I thought you were going to close it down?’
‘I don’t know that I can. All I can hope to do is modify conditions to prevent the original machine being used. If I get that right, then preceding events will change. With luck either I will not create Anterwold or Rosie will not go into it. If that happens we will never know about it, of course, because none of this will have happened. This trip is to find out if that is possible.’
‘How?’
‘I want to see if it is possible to destroy the Devil’s Handwriting. If I can’t, then I’ll have to think again.’
‘Do you know what’s really strange?’ Henry said, once he had decided not to query her on that remark.
‘In comparison to …?’
‘I’ve been reading a manuscript by a colleague of mine, Persimmon. He lays out what he thinks is the perfect technocratic society. Hell on earth.’
‘So?’
‘He is quite stupid, you know, but he has forecast the future remarkably well. The nightmare he conjures up is extraordinarily like the one you and Chang describe.’
Angela fell silent for a long time.
‘Now,’ she said eventually, ‘you’re just trying to give me a headache.’
63
It was the pigeons in the great entrance hall which convinced Angela that Henry was telling the truth when he said that his great-aunt’s house was semi-derelict. The ‘semi’ bit was the only part she disputed. His aunt Gertie matched the place perfectly as well, more a character out of a Gothick novel than somebody real. She was dressed in ragged velvet, carried a huge candelabrum about with her and smelled as though she had not had a bath for months. Her hair was thin and unkempt and her conversation bizarre.
Henry, though, was delighted to see her. He gave her a big hug and she examined Angela closely by thrusting the candlesticks into her face and squinting up at her. ‘A pretty one, eh?’ she cackled. ‘That makes a change. Are you here to fix the plumbing?’
‘No, Auntie. Just to collect a few papers,’ Henry bellowed into her ear.
‘They’ve stopped delivering. Say I don’t pay the bills.’
‘Manuscripts, darling. Not newspapers.’
‘You can read it over breakfast, like your uncle Joseph. Have you seen him?’
‘He died in 1928.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. He drove his car off a cliff, remember?’
She shook her head. ‘Tell him to be more careful when you see him.’
‘I will. Now, you go and sit down and pour yourself a nice gin. I just want to go upstairs and collect this thing I’m after. Then, I’m afraid, we’ll have to run off. Angela and I are in a bit of a hurry.’
‘Angela?’
‘This is Angela.’
She peered again. ‘A pretty one, eh? That makes a change.’
‘Blimey,’ Angela said as she followed Henry to the door.
‘She’s very sweet, and I love her dearly, but my head starts to spin after half an hour with her.’
‘She’s right about Uncle Joseph, you know.’
‘Don’t you start.’
*
Henry left me to deal with his aunt and disappeared up the stairs to go to the family archive. It would, he said, only take a few minutes.
Oddly, I have always found the company of the ancient relaxing. What is condemned in this brutal age as dementia, senility and worse is, in fact, a substantial step forward which aligns the mind rather more accurately with reality than our normal state.
Aunt Gertie could not tell the difference between 1928 and now. Uncle Joseph was dead and alive. In other words, she grasped the essential non-existence of time. Generally speaking, our minds impose an entirely artificial order on the world. It is the only way that such an inadequate instrument as our brain can function. It cannot deal with the complexity of reality, so simplifies everything until it can, putting events into an artificial order so they can be dealt with one at a time, rather than all at once as they should be. Such a way of interpreting existence is learnt, rather in the way that our brain has to turn the images which hit our retinas upside down in order to make sense of them.
Children have little sense of time; nor do the very old. They live in an ever-present now, which stretches into the past and off into the future. Effect triggers cause, and both happen at the same moment, be that yesterday or tomorrow. Aunt Gertie sensed this because all the acquired mental discipline of the years was falling away from her. Once you realised this, her conversation was perfectly comprehensible, even if it did make me a little dizzy.
Alas, I didn’t have long enough for a proper talk; Henry was as good as his word. He returned dusty but triumphant.
‘Got it,’ he said. ‘Just where I thought it would be.’
It was a thin tome, bound in red morocco and calf skin, with no lettering, but I knew the moment I opened it that he had indeed found what I was looking for. Page after page, all in Tsou, meticulously written out by hand. I was astonished at the workmanship. Tsou is a very dense script; the slightest error and it is gibberish. Doing it by hand must have taken years. Despite myself, I felt a little surge of admiration for Lucien Grange, or sympathy for the desperation which pushed him to even contemplate such a task. He must have had a perfect copy in his head even to attempt the job. That answered the question of who had accessed the computer before I left.
I checked through as much as I could to make sure. All was well; it was a fine summary of my work, except for the last symbol, which seemed a little odd. That one I absorbed properly and decoded, and unravelled instructions in plain English. Crop yields and rentals, folios 27–8.
‘Henry?’ I said. ‘What does this mean?’
‘What it says, I imagine. In the archives there are shelves of accounts in chronological order according to the estate’s different sources of income.’
‘Can I look?’
‘I’ll go for you, if you like.’
‘No!’ I said. ‘You have a good chat with your aunt here.’
‘As you please. Second floor, third door on the right. I left it open. If you get to the servants’ staircase you’ve overshot. Do you want me to destroy this, by the way?’
‘Not yet. I’d better find out what this reference means first of all. It can wait for a bit.’
So I went, leaving the Devil’s Handwriting with Henry, who stowed it carefully in his jacket pocket. Another coincidence, you see. I could easily have taken it with me, or had him set light to it in the fireplace.
*
‘To whom it may concern,’ began the piece of paper, which I found after only ten minutes of searching. One thing about these aristocrats, they were always very tidy when it came to money.
‘I very much hope that one day someone capable of understanding this letter finds and reads it. My name is Charles Lytten, although I took his identity many decades ago when I arrived in this place. Before that I was called Lucien Grange, and I was an administrator, first class, in the research institute of Zoffany Oldmanter. Unless this means something to you, you might as well stop reading now.’
On it went in a somewhat self-pitying fashion. Grange had written down the code in the hope that someone might find it and get him back, although quite how he expected this considering that he clearly believed he was in a parallel universe was unclear. I suppose he was desperate, and willing to clutch at straws. As I read I
could understand why. He had made a decent fist of living in the eighteenth century, and had adapted well, but was worried nonetheless.
‘My concern is that the colonisation programme will wipe out the indigenous population with me still in place here. I beg anyone who reads and understands this to ensure I am recovered before any such attempt is made.’
That was the last piece I needed. A programme to clear out a world and make it available for colonists from my time. Of course that would appeal to a megalomaniac like Oldmanter. It was obvious how it would be done, as well. Oldmanter liked money; he would choose the quickest and cheapest option, and the further you went, the more power would be required. How to clear a world of its population quickly and efficiently? The evidence of Anterwold gave the answer.
*
This was where the next significant coincidence came in, the final proof, if you like. As I walked to the door I heard a noise through the window which looked out over the main driveway – once a fine avenue of trees, now more like a weed patch. Still, there were remains of old gravel covering it, and it was the crunching of this which made me look to see what was happening. A black car and a plain van were pulling up outside. From the car, I could see the unmistakeable figure of Sam Wind get out.
That was not good. They would knock, Henry would answer, they would find the Devil’s Handwriting and think it was some code for communicating with the Soviet Union. Sam Wind always had a limited imagination. I would not be able to destroy it. It was required to survive. Or rather, probability dictated it was more likely to than not.
I could hardly hang around to argue about it; I didn’t intend to go back to jail merely for the satisfaction of demonstrating that history cannot be greatly influenced by the actions of a single individual. I still wanted to prove that wrong. There wasn’t much I could do for Henry, but at least I might be able to save myself.
I tiptoed down the servants’ staircase at the far end of the corridor, down into the bowels of the old kitchens, and, when I was satisfied that Henry had unleashed the full conversational power of Aunt Gertie on them, slipped quietly out of the tradesmen’s entrance and across the grass to the nearest trees, then circled round to the road where we had left the car. I drove to Hereford, left it in a side street and took the train back to Oxford.