Liam looked at Maddy for reassurance. She nodded. ‘Separate’s not a bad idea. It is actually a lot safer than the spherical portal we used to share.’
‘All right, then.’ Liam buttoned up his waistcoat. ‘If you say so. Remind me, what year are we going back to exactly?’
‘I decided on 1888. That puts you at several years after the viaduct and its generator were built. Time enough for any gremlins to have worked their way out of the system.’
Liam frowned. For some particular reason the year rang a bell with him. ‘1888? Didn’t something big happen that year?’
‘I’m sure a lot of things happened in that year, Liam.’
‘No … I read something recently. Something pretty big in London.’
Bob scowled as he trawled through the data uploaded into his head. ‘The Whitechapel murders happened in that year,’ he said.
‘Murders!’ Liam snapped his fingers. ‘That was it! Wasn’t it that Jack the Ripper fella? He did those murders.’
‘Affirmative. The murders occurred in Whitechapel, east London. Five female victims over several months. The last victim, Mary Kelly, was murdered on the ninth of November 1888.’
‘Aye! That’s it!’ He turned to Maddy. ‘It was all a big mystery, so it was. No one ever found out who did it.’ Liam had an idea. ‘We could find out who did it! You know, while we’re back there looking around for a new home?’
‘No, Liam. We aren’t the police. We’re not a homicide squad. Just concentrate on the job at hand, OK?’
He huffed. ‘Just an idea.’
‘And that’s all it will remain. We’ve got more important things to worry about.’
Sal finished dressing Bob. She’d visited a men’s clothing store in the retail park. Liam and Rashim were now wearing modern polyester slacks and smart shirts with collars that were clearly not Victorian, but the grey flannel waistcoats helped date them both a little. If no one inspected their clothes too closely, they’d be OK. Once again, though, Sal had struggled to find clothes to fit Bob. She’d had to resort to shopping at a branch of X-tra-MAN, ‘the store for gentle giants’, and the choices were pretty limited. Dungarees again for Bob and a loose striped shirt. With a flat cap perched on his coarse hair, he could just about pass as some lumbering navvy.
‘So, I’ve set up a time-stamp for half a dozen years after the setting up of that Holborn Viaduct generator.’ Maddy stepped towards the row of computer screens, and studied one. There was the image of an old parish map. ‘The location is about a third of a mile south of the viaduct, right next to the River of London.’
‘Ah … I think you’ll find it’s called the Thames, Mads,’ said Liam.
She squinted at the screen. ‘Oh yeah, of course. Yeah … the Thames. We did a bunch of pinhole tests on the arrival location, looks like a small shingle bank, brick wall on one side and what look like some steps leading up the side of it. There’s very little spatial disruption. Small stuff, occasional pigeon or something I’m guessing. So, it looks like a pretty quiet spot.’
‘Grand.’
‘So … remember this is just a quick look, OK? Go check out that viaduct, see if there’s someplace we can make ourselves at home. Then come back to the river.’
‘How long have we got?’
‘As long as you want really. I can set up a scheduled return window if you want, or we can just monitor the location for a regular rhythmic spatial displacement signature. Remember? Like you did back in dinosaur-land? Just wave your arms in a regular rhythmic fashion … we’ll pick it up just fine.’
‘Hmm … I think I’d like the scheduled return window, to be sure.’
‘OK,’ she said, tapping it into a keyboard. ‘Three hours? More?’
‘Aye, three hours sounds like enough.’ Liam looked across at Bob. ‘You ready for another jaunt, big fella?’
He nodded. ‘Of course.’
‘Well, all right, then,’ said Liam, clapping his hands together. ‘Shall we?’
‘Be careful,’ said Sal.
‘That I most certainly will.’
‘Have a nice trip, skippa!’ SpongeBubba called out. ‘Bring me flowers!’
Rashim turned to Liam. ‘I need to change his programming sometime soon. It’s beginning to get annoying.’
‘The order of departure is Bob and Rashim first,’ said Maddy. ‘Then you, Liam, on the left square.’
Bob and Rashim took their places in the two taped-out squares.
‘Uh, guys … one minute countdown. Mark!’
A single LED flickered on one of the circuit boards – clocking the energy being drawn in and stored on the capacitor. A single diode that would wink out when there was enough on-board energy to discharge. Maddy told Rashim it would do for now. When they were properly settled, she’d build something a little more elaborate.
She counted the minute down and, with a hum of discharged energy, they both vanished, along with the scuffed linoleum floor they’d been standing on.
‘You’re next,’ she said, ushering Liam on to his square. He was standing on freshly exposed wooden floor. The displacement volume had dug down two inches into the ground.
‘Thirty seconds. Stand still now!’
Liam put his hands down by his side. It felt a little unsettling, looking down at the tape on the floor surrounding him, and not knowing for sure if the tip of an elbow, the heel of a foot, might be too close, or even overhanging the tape. At least bobbing around in that perspex tube he knew for certain he was wholly ‘in’ the displacement envelope.
The capacitor was beginning to hum.
‘Fifteen seconds!’ called out Maddy. ‘No more fidgeting now, please!’
‘I’m not!’
‘Yes, you are! Hold still!’
Liam sucked in a deep breath, closed his eyes.
Ah dear, here we go again.
So much seemed to have happened since the last time he’d done this. It seemed like a whole lifetime ago. In many ways it was a different life. Someone else’s. The last time he’d volunteered to have his body discharged through chaos space into unknowable danger he’d been certain of who he was and why he was doing what he was doing. This time around … it was so very different.
‘Ten seconds!’
This time he understood why his body could take such punishment. It was engineered specifically to take it. This time around he knew if he took a bullet, or the stab of a sword or a knife, it might well hurt, but he’d live. That meant there was less to be scared of. Right?
‘Five seconds!’
Nope. He was starting to tremble like he always did as Maddy counted down the last few seconds.
Liam, ya big wuss. You’re meant to be some kind of support unit, aren’t you?
He was just about to start wondering whether Bob actually ever experienced fear when he felt the floor beneath his feet suddenly give way like a hangman’s trap, and that awful sensation of falling.
Chapter 44
1 December 1888, London
Liam kept his eyes shut. The white mist of chaos space no longer held him in thrall; it wasn’t a Heaven-like magical white wilderness any more but a place that increasingly unsettled him. He’d seen shapes out there so faintly that he couldn’t begin to determine whether they had a certain form or not. They flitted like wraiths, like sharks circling ever closer. Or perhaps his eyes or his mind were playing tricks with an utterly blank canvas. Perhaps it was his imagination. But then hadn’t Sal said she’d seen them too?
His solitary limbo in chaos space couldn’t end soon enough.
A moment later he felt his feet make a soft landing.
Soft, and sinking.
‘Whuh?’
And sinking.
He tried to pull a foot out of whatever gunk he was gradually sinking into, and lost his balance. His hands reached out in front of him, bracing for a face-first impact with the sludge, but brushed past something firm. He grabbed at it.
It felt like wood. A spar of damp wood, coated in a
slime that he nearly lost his grip on.
‘Liam?’
‘Rashim?’
It was dark and foggy and cold. But he could make out Rashim’s faint outline. ‘I think there’s been a mis-transmission. We’re out on some sort of mudbank.’
‘No … I think it’s low tide.’ There could have been some small offset miscalculation that had dropped them several yards to one side. In this case further into the river. It could have been worse. High tide for instance.
‘Bob, you there?’
‘Affirmative,’ his deep voice rumbled out of the fog.
Liam held tightly on to the wooden spar. He wasn’t sinking any more. He pulled one foot out of the glutinous mud with a sucking sound coming from the silt. ‘There’s a wooden post here, hold on to it. You can use it to pull yourself out of the mud.’
‘That is not necessary,’ Bob replied.
‘We’re not actually in the mud,’ said Rashim. ‘We’re standing on what appears to be a wooden-slat walkway.’
The fog thinned and he saw them both several yards away, standing on a creaking, rickety wooden jetty. Quite dry.
Liam realized there must have been a small error in Rashim’s calculation of his mass. Then again, not necessarily Rashim’s fault. He’d eaten a small bag of pecan doughnuts just half an hour ago. That might possibly have altered his mass enough to cause a deviation from where he was supposed to be.
Rashim had actually cautioned them all not to eat just before a jump. Liam cursed his carelessness.
Only got yourself to blame, greedy guts.
He muttered as he took several sinking, teetering, laboured steps towards them through the silt and pulled himself up on to the jetty to join them. His legs dangled over the side and he attempted to kick the largest clumps of foul-smelling gunk off his boots.
‘Information: the translation was offset by fourteen feet and three inches,’ said Bob.
Rashim nodded. ‘We should let Maddy know when we get back. She’ll need to recalibrate the spatial attributor.’
‘Don’t bother,’ said Liam. ‘It was three doughnuts that are to blame.’
‘Ahh … now, yes, I did warn you, Liam,’ said Rashim.
Liam got up off the damp wood, most of the cloying mud shaken off. He grinned in the dark at him. ‘Lesson learned.’ He took in the freezing mist all around them. ‘So this is Victorian London, is it?’
‘Affirmative, Liam.’
‘Yes … Liam. Say yes, not affirmative.’ He picked out the dark mountain of Bob’s back and slapped it gently. ‘You’re never going to get your head around that, are you?’
‘That particular speech file appears to be resistant to replacement.’
‘Should we not proceed?’ Rashim interrupted.
‘Hmmm, you’re right,’ said Liam. ‘Let’s find some solid ground.’
They followed the jetty until it widened and finally terminated on firm shingle at the base of a slime-encrusted stone wall. A high-tide line marked the top of the slime halfway up, and it was mist-damp stonework the rest of the way. The pinhole image they’d gathered earlier had shown this jetty wall. The mist hadn’t been here then. And there were the steps they’d spotted in the image. A dozen slippery, narrow stone steps up the side of the jetty wall.
At the top Liam looked around. A carpet of mist covered the river below like a wispy layer of virgin snow, dusted silvery blue by a quarter-moon. He saw the humps of river barges emerge from the mist, topped with pilots’ cabins like isolated stubby lighthouses rising from a milky sea. The milky sea itself seemed to stir with life; he watched enormous dark phantoms loom through the river mist, like those ever-circling wraiths in chaos space – shadows cast by fleeting clouds chasing each other across the moonlit sky.
The other two joined him.
‘It’s so dark,’ said Rashim.
Liam nodded. Compared to New York, compared to whatever future cities Rashim must be used to, it must seem like some medieval netherworld.
Dark, yes, but punctuated by a thousand pinpricks of faint amber light: gas lamps behind dirty windows, candles behind tattered net curtains. They were standing in a cobblestone square. On one side there appeared to be a brick warehouse or small factory.
They heard something heavy rumbling, rattling across the river, and turned round to look across the carpet of mist. It was then Liam noticed the arches and support stanchions of a broad, low bridge.
‘According to my data that is Blackfriars Bridge,’ said Bob.
Not so far beyond it another bridge … and the toot of a steam whistle confirmed what Liam suspected. It was a train crossing the river to their side. He could just about make out the faintest row of amber lights on the move – lamps in each carriage.
‘My God!’ whispered Rashim. ‘Is that a … a steam train?’
‘Aye.’
‘We should proceed towards our target destination,’ said Bob.
He was right. Liam would rather be back here for Maddy’s scheduled window than have to flap his hands around like an idiot hoping for one. There was no knowing how good their temporary set-up back in 2001 was at picking up hand signals.
‘We must head north,’ said Bob, pointing towards a narrow street.
They made their way up the street, dark and quiet. It curved to the left and a hundred yards up at the end it joined a much broader street. They could hear it was busy even before they stepped out of their dark side street. The distinctive clop-clop-clop of shoed horses, the warning honk of a bulb horn, the rattle of iron-rimmed coach wheels. They emerged on to a broad street lit on either side with stout wrought-iron lamps, twelve feet tall, that spilled broad pools of amber illumination across a wide thoroughfare busy with horse-drawn carriages and carts.
‘My God!’ whispered Rashim. ‘I never imagined it would be quite so busy!’
‘It’s only ten,’ said Liam, pointing to a clock on a nearby building. ‘People stay up even later in my hometown, Cork.’
He stopped himself from correcting that. Not his hometown … of course. But it was a constant, unsettling inconvenience for him and the girls, continually self-correcting statements like that, that he’d finally stopped giving a damn about it. As Maddy had told him, It doesn’t matter if they’re second-hand memories, Liam – we ARE the sum of what we remember. And that’s how I’m dealing with this.
Denial. It was as good a way as any of dealing with the knowledge that your whole life was a lie.
‘This is really quite fantastic,’ Rashim uttered.
‘Glad you like it. Which way now, Bob?’
‘This is Farringdon Street.’ He pointed up the busy thoroughfare. At the far end a low bridge arched over the wide street. Along the top of it were glowing orbs of light of a different colour, more of a pale amber, almost a vanilla colour. And a steadier, more resilient glow than the occasionally flickering, shifting illumination coming from the gas lamps.
‘And that is the Holborn Viaduct.’
‘Those lights …?’ Liam nodded at them.
‘Affirmative,’ replied Bob. ‘They are electric lights.’
The three of them picked their way up the broad pavement on the left-hand side of Farringdon Street. It was busy with pedestrians, a mixture of smartly dressed gentlemen and ladies taking the air after a show, and costermongers and hucksters of various goods packing up and making their way home for the night.
‘Come on! Make way there, lads!’ barked a thick-shouldered man with a handcart laden with pigs’ heads and trotters as he pushed his way past them.
An elegantly dressed woman walking with a whippet-thin man in a top hat curled her lips in disapproval as the cart wheeled past her. ‘Oh really!’ she muttered.
Liam and Rashim shared a grin. The noises, the smells – the acrid smell of burning coke, horse manure, the sight of such churning, shoulder-to-shoulder life – seemed reassuring, life-affirming. After all that time alone in the abandoned school it felt good to be back among so many people.
Liam caught the faintest whiff of it first: the smell of coffee beans roasting in a skillet. Parked up in the dirt at the side of the road was a large four-wheeled cart. Wooden steps unfolded down on to the pavement invited them up to a wooden deck where several tables and stools were occupied by gentlemen and ladies taking coffee and a slice of cake. At one end of the cart a woman and a man in aprons were serving cups of freshly roasted coffee from large tin urns that steamed over small skillets. Candles lit the small tables. Mini oil lamps were strung across the top, like Christmas lights.
‘Just wait till Maddy sees that,’ Liam laughed. ‘A horse-drawn Starbucks!’
A few minutes later they were standing beneath the viaduct, looking up at the thick ribs of glossy green-painted iron arching across the broad street. Overhead, alongside the road that crossed over the viaduct, the orbs of electric light at the top of tall iron lampstands bloomed proudly.
‘London’s first public, electric-powered street lights.’ Liam nodded approvingly. ‘Not bad.’
‘We have used half an hour of our allotted time,’ said Bob.
Liam stopped gawking at the lights and turned his attention to life beneath the viaduct. The underbelly was a row of hexagonal stone columns on either side of the street from which the arches of iron branched out to meet each other. On both sides of Farringdon Street there were pedestrian walkways lit by yet more electric globes. The walkways were flanked by stone columns on one side and rows of brickwork archways on the other, each archway seemingly occupied by one sort of business or other.
As they watched, on the far side of the busy street the thick oak doors of one of the archways swung open and several men worked together, rolling casks of beer out, across the pavement and on to a flat-backed cart.