There was a movement a short distance from Lloyd, and he turned. The two freezers who had been following him had been joined by two others, one of whom was the woman he had seen inside the pub. The freezer who seemed to be the youngest had already raised his device, and was pointing it across the river, but the other three were saying something to him. (Lloyd could see their lips moving, and the expressions on their faces, but as always he could not hear them.) The young man shrugged away the restraining hand of one of the others, and walked down the bank to the edge of the water.
One of the Germans came down near the edge of Richmond Park, and was lost to sight as he fell beyond the houses built near the crest of the Hill; the other, buoyed up temporarily by a sudden updraught, drifted out across the river, and was now only some fifty feet in the air. Lloyd could see the German aviator pulling on the cords of his parachute, trying desperately to steer himself towards the bank. As air spilled from the white shroud, he fell more quickly.
The young freezer by the edge of the river was levelling his device, aiming it with the aid of a reflex sight built into the instrument. A moment later, the German’s efforts to save himself from falling into the water were rewarded in a way he could have never anticipated: ten feet above the surface of the river, his knees raised to take the brunt of the impact, one arm clutching the cord above his head, the German was frozen in flight.
The freezer lowered his instrument, and Lloyd stared across the water at the hapless man suspended in the air.
January, 1935.
The transformation of a summer’s day into a winter’s night was the least of the changes that Thomas Lloyd discovered on regaining consciousness. In what had been for him a few seconds he had moved from a world of stability, peace and prosperity to one where dynamic and violent ambitions threatened the whole of Europe. In that same short moment of time, he himself had lost the security of his assured future, and become a pauper. Most traumatically of all, he had never been allowed to take to its fruition the surge of love he had felt for Sarah.
Night was the only relief from the tableaux, and Sarah was still locked in frozen time.
He recovered consciousness shortly before dawn, and, not understanding what had happened to him, walked slowly back towards Richmond town. The sun had risen soon after, and as light struck the tableaux that littered the paths and roads, and as it struck the freezers who constantly moved in their half-world of intrusive futurity, Lloyd realized neither that in these lay the cause of his own predicament, nor that his very perception of the images was a result of having been frozen himself.
In Richmond he was found by a policeman, and was taken to hospital. Here, treated for the pneumonia he had contracted as he lay in the snow, and later for the amnesia that seemed the only explanation for his condition, Thomas Lloyd saw the freezers moving through the wards and corridors. The tableaux were here too: a dying man falling from his bed; a young nurse—dressed in the uniform of fifty years before—frozen as she walked from a ward, a deep frown creasing her brow; a child throwing a ball in the garden by the convalescent wing.
As he was nursed back to physical health, Lloyd became obsessed with a need to return to the riverside meadows, and before he was fully recovered he discharged himself and went directly there.
By then the snow had melted, but the weather was still cold and a white frost lay on the ground. Out by the river, where a bank of grass grew thickly by the path, was a frozen moment of summer, and in its midst was Sarah.
He could see her, but she could not see him; he could take the hand that was rightly his to take, but his fingers would pass through the illusion; he could walk around her, seeming to step through the green summer grasses, and feel the cold of the winter soil penetrating the thin soles of his shoes.
And as night fell so the moment of the past became invisible, and Thomas was relieved of the agony of seeing her.
Time passed, but there was never a day when he did not walk along the riverside path, and stand again before the image of Sarah, and reach out to take her hand.
August, 1940.
The German parachutist hung above the river, and Lloyd looked again at the freezers. They were apparently still criticizing the youngest for his action, and yet seemed fascinated with his result. It was certainly one of the most dramatic tableaux Lloyd himself had ever seen.
Now that the man had been frozen it was possible to see that his eyes were tightly closed, and that he was holding his nose with his fingers in anticipation of the plunge. But at the same time it was clear that he had been wounded in the aircraft, because blood was darkly staining his brown flying-jacket. The tableau was at once amusing and poignant, a reminder to Lloyd that however unreal this present might be to him, it was no illusion to the people of the time.
In a moment, Lloyd understood the particular interest of the freezers in this unfortunate airman, for without warning the pocket of frozen time eroded, and the young German plunged into the river. The parachute billowed and folded in on top of him. As he surfaced he thrashed his arms, trying to free himself of the cords.
It was not the first time Lloyd had seen a tableau erode, but he had never before seen it happen so soon after freezing. His theory was that the duration of the tableau was dependent on how close the victim was to the freeze-instrument; the airman had been at least fifty yards away. In his own case, he had escaped from the tableau while Sarah had not, and the only explanation he could guess at was that she must have been nearer to the freezer.
In the centre of the river the German had succeeded in freeing himself of the parachute, and was swimming slowly towards the opposite bank. His descent must have been observed by the authorities, because even before he reached the sloping landing-stage of the boathouse, four policemen had appeared from the direction of the road, and helped him out of the water. He made no attempt to resist them, but lay weakly on the ground, awaiting the arrival of an ambulance.
Lloyd remembered the only other time he had seen a tableau erode quickly. A freezer had intervened to prevent a traffic-accident: a man stepping carelessly into the path of a car had been frozen in mid-stride. Although the driver of the car had stopped abruptly, and had looked around in amazement for the man he thought he had been about to kill, he evidently assumed that he had imagined the incident, because he eventually drove off again. Only Lloyd, with his ability to see the tableaux, could still see the man: stepping back, arms flailing in terror, seeing too late the oncoming vehicle. Three days later, when Lloyd returned to the place, the tableau had eroded and the man had gone.
He, like Lloyd, and now like the German aviator, would be moving through a half-world, one where past, present and future co-existed uneasily.
Lloyd watched the shroud of the parachute drift along the river until at last it sank, and then he turned away to continue his walk to the meadows. As he did so he realized that even more of the freezers had appeared on this side of the river, and were walking behind him, following him.
As he reached the bend in the river, from which point he always gained his first sight of Sarah, he saw that the bomber had crashed in the meadows. The explosion of its impact had set fire to the grass, and the smoke from this, together with that from the burning wreckage, obscured his view.
January, 1935, to August, 1940.
Thomas Lloyd never again left Richmond. He lived inexpensively, found occasional work, tried not to be outstanding in any way.
What of the past? He discovered that on 22nd June, 1903, his apparent disappearance with Sarah had led to the conclusion that he had absconded with her. His father, William Lloyd, head of the noted Richmond family, had disowned and disinherited him. Colonel and Mrs Carrington had announced a reward for his arrest, but in 1910 they moved away from the area. Thomas also discovered that his cousin Waring had never married Charlotte, and that he had emigrated to Australia. His own parents had died, there was no means of tracing his sister, and the family home had been sold and demolished.
(On the da
y he read the files of the local newspaper, he stood with Sarah, overcome with grief.)
What of the future? It was pervasive, intrusive. It existed on a plane where only those who were frozen and released could sense it. It existed in the form of men who came, for whatever purpose, to freeze the images of their past.
(On the day he first understood who the shadowy men he called freezers might be, he stood beside Sarah, staring around protectively. That day, as if sensing Lloyd’s realization, one of the freezers had walked along the river-bank, watching the young man and his time-locked sweetheart).
What of the present? Lloyd neither cared for the present nor shared it with its people. It was alien, violent, frightening…but not in such a way that he felt threatened by it. To him, it was as vague a presence as the other two dimensions. Only the past and its frozen images were real.
(On the day he first saw a tableau erode, he ran all the way to the meadows, and stood long into the evening, trying ceaselessly for the first sign of substance in Sarah’s outstretched hand.)
August, 1940.
Only in the riverside meadows, where the town was distant and the houses were concealed by trees, did Thomas ever feel at one with the present. Here past and present fused, because little had changed since his day. Here he could stand before the image of Sarah, and fancy himself still on that summer’s day in 1903, still the young man with raised straw hat and bended knee. Here too he rarely saw any of the freezers, and the few tableaux in sight could have come from the world he had left (further along the path was an elderly fisherman, time-locked as he pulled a trout from a stream; a boy in a sailor-suit walked sulkily with his nanny; a young servant-girl, dressed in her off-day clothes, dimpled prettily as her beau tickled her chin).
Today, though, the present had intruded violently. The exploding bomber had scattered fragments of itself across the meadows. Black smoke from the wreckage spread in an oily cloud across the river, and the smouldering grass poured white smoke to drift beside it. Much of the ground had already been blackened by fire.
Sarah was invisible to him, lost somewhere in the smoke.
Thomas paused, and took a kerchief from his pocket. He stooped by the river’s edge and soaked it in the water, then, after wringing it out, he held it over his nose and mouth.
He glanced behind him and saw that there were now eight of the freezers with him. They were paying no attention to him, and walked on while he prepared himself, insensible to the smoke. They passed through the burning grass, and walked towards the main concentration of wreckage. One of the freezers was already making some kind of adjustment to his device.
A breeze had sprung up in the last few minutes, and it caused the smoke to move away smartly from the fires, staying lower on the ground. As this happened, Thomas saw the image of Sarah above the smoke. He hurried towards her, alarmed by the proximity of the burning aircraft, even as he knew that neither fire, explosion nor smoke could harm her.
His feet threw up smouldering grasses as he went towards her, and at times the variable wind caused the smoke to swirl about his head. His eyes were watering, and although his wetted kerchief acted as a partial filter against the grass-smoke, when the oily fumes from the aircraft gusted around him he choked and gagged on the acrid vapours.
At last he decided to wait; Sarah was safe inside her cocoon of frozen time, and there was no conceivable point to his suffocating simply to be with her, when in a few minutes the fire would burn itself out.
He retreated to the edge of the burning area, rinsed out his kerchief in the river, and sat down to wait.
The freezers were exploring the wreckage with the greatest interest, apparently drifting through the flames and smoke to enter the deepest parts of the conflagration.
There came the sound of a bell away to Thomas’s right, and in a moment a fire-tender halted in the narrow lane that ran along the distant edge of the meadows. Several firemen climbed down, and stood looking across the field at the wreckage. At this Thomas’s heart sank, for he realized what was to follow. He had sometimes seen photographs in the newspapers of crashed German ’planes; they were invariably placed under military guard until the pieces could be taken away for examination. If this were to happen here it would deny him access to Sarah for several days.
For the moment, though, he would still have a chance to be with her. He was too far away to hear what the firemen were saying, but it looked as if no attempt was going to be made to put out the fire. Smoke still poured from the fuselage, but the flames had died down and most of the smoke was coming from the grass. With no houses in the vicinity, and with the wind blowing towards the river, there was little likelihood the fire would spread.
He stood up again, and walked quickly towards Sarah.
In a few moments he had reached her, and she stood before him: eyes shining in the sunlight, parasol lifting, arm extending. She was in a sphere of safety; although smoke blew through her, the grasses on which she stood were green and moist and cool. As he had done every day for more than five years, Thomas stood facing her and waited for a sign of the erosion of her tableau. He stepped, as he had frequently done before, into the area of the time-freeze. Here, although his foot appeared to press on the grasses of 1903, a flame curled around his leg and he had to step back quickly.
Thomas saw some of the freezers coming towards him. They had apparently inspected the wreckage to their satisfaction, and judged none of it worth preserving in a time-freeze. Thomas tried to disregard them, but their sinister silence could not be forgotten easily.
The smoke poured about him, rich and heady with the smells of burning grass, and he looked again at Sarah. Just as time had frozen about her in that instant, so it had frozen about his love for her. Time had not diminished, it had preserved.
The freezers were watching them. Thomas saw that the eight vague figures, standing not ten feet away from him, were looking at him with interest. Then, on the far side of the meadow, one of the firemen shouted something at him. He would seem to be standing here alone; no one could see the tableaux, no one knew of the freezers. The fireman walked towards him, waving an arm, telling him to move away. It would take him a minute or more to reach them, and that was time enough for Thomas.
One of the freezers stepped forward, and in the heart of the smoke Thomas saw the captured summer begin to dim. Smoke curled up around Sarah’s feet, and flame licked through the moist, time-frozen grasses around her ankles. He saw the lace at the bottom of her skirt begin to scorch.
And her hand, extended towards him, lowered.
The parasol fell to the ground.
Sarah’s head drooped forward…but immediately she was conscious, and the step towards him, commenced thirty-seven years before, was concluded.
“Thomas?” Her voice was clear, untouched.
He rushed towards her.
“Thomas! The smoke! What is happening?”
“Sarah…my love!”
As she went into his arms he realized that her skirt had taken fire, but he placed his arms around her shoulders and hugged her intimately and tenderly. He could feel her cheek, still warm from the blush of so long ago, nestling against his. Her hair, falling loose beneath her bonnet, lay across his face, and the pressure of her arms around his waist was no less than that of his own.
Dimly, he saw a grey movement beyond them, and in a moment the noises were stilled and the smoke ceased to swirl. The flame which had taken purchase on the lace of her skirt now died, and the summer sun which warmed them shone lightly in the tableau. Past and future became one, the present faded, life stilled, life forever.
Whores
I left the war behind me, and travelled to the tropical northern coast of the continent. Fifty days’ sick-leave lay ahead, and my trouser pocket was heavy on my buttock with the high-denomination back-pay notes. It should have been a time for restful convalescence after the long spell in the military hospital, but I had been discharged too soon and I was still affected by the enemy’s synaesthe
tic gas I had inhaled. My perception was disturbed.
As the train clattered through the devastated towns and countryside, I seemed to taste the music of pain, feel the gay dancing colours of sound.
Waiting in the port for the ferry across to the Dream Archipelago, I tried to understand and rationalize my delusions in the way the medical orderlies had trained me. The brick-built houses, which between my perceptual lapses I saw glowed brown from the local sandstone, became synaesthetic monstrosities: cynical laughter, a deep throbbing sound, and cold to the touch like tempered steel. The fishing-boats in the harbour were less unpleasant to perceive: they were a gentle humming sound, barely audible. The army hostel, where I stayed overnight, was a warren of associative flavours and smells: the corridors tasted to me of coal-dust, the walls were papered with hyacinth, the bed-linen enfolded me like a rancid mouth. I slept poorly, waking several times from vivid dreams. One in particular was a familiar nightmarish companion, and I had experienced it every night since leaving the line: I dreamed I was still with my unit in the trenches, advancing and retreating, setting up a monitoring complex, then dismantling it, repeatedly, endlessly.
In the morning my synaesthesia seemed to have receded again. In the last few weeks I had sometimes passed a whole day without a relapse, and I was discharged because they claimed they had cured me.
I left the hostel and walked down to the harbour, soon finding the quay where the ferry berthed. There was an hour and a half to wait, and so I strolled pleasurably through the streets surrounding the harbour, noting that the town was a major centre of the importation of military and civilian supplies. I was allowed into one warehouse, and was shown several stacks of crates containing hallucinogenic grenades and neural dissociation gases.
The day was hot and sultry, the sky was clouded. I stood with about a hundred other people on the quay, waiting to board the ferry. This was an old, diesel-powered boat, apparently top-heavy, riding high in the water. As I stepped down on to the deck I experienced a wholly natural kind of synaesthetic response: the smell of hot diesel oil, salt-stiff ropes and sun-dried deck planking summoned a strong and nostalgic memory of a childhood voyage along the coast of my own country. The experience of the enemy gas had taught me how to recognize the response, and in moments I was able to recall, in great detail, my thoughts, actions and ambitions of that time.