Time and Time Again, page 10
Stanton stared out of a car window and decided that nothing was going to happen that night. The twenty-first century was just too real, too solid. It was the weekend and the city was in a party mood. Music could be heard through the doorways of restaurants. There were smiling, laughing faces everywhere. It didn’t seem possible that so much living, breathing, tingling life could suddenly cease to exist on the stroke of midnight.
Once more McCluskey seemed to read his thoughts. Perhaps they mirrored her own.
‘The world looked solid and unchangeable in the summer of 1914 too,’ she said. ‘Never more so. People thought no world had ever been more secure or enduring. But it evaporated into thin air. It disappeared from the universe within a few short summers. Don’t you think this one could vanish just as suddenly?’
‘Their world was destroyed by hot lead, poison gas and high explosives,’ Stanton replied.
‘Gas. High explosives. Gravitational shifts in space and time,’ McCluskey answered. ‘All physical phenomena at a subatomic level. A single shell from a big gun in the Great War could vaporize any number of men. Literally reduce them to cellular level. Transform their matter and send them spinning across the universe. I suggest that your component parts are about to embark on a journey no more dramatic. Gravity is without doubt the most consistent force in the universe. Everything exerts it, everything is affected by it. Why should time be an exception?’
As they got closer to their destination the crowds began to thin. This was not a fashionable area. The shouting, smiling faces had disappeared and the noise of carefree youth and partying was ever more distant.
‘Nice and quiet,’ McCluskey muttered. ‘Just how we like it.’
But it wasn’t to be. As the car turned into their street they were confronted by throbbing trance music. The pavement outside the previously deserted building was pulsing with light.
‘Oh fuck,’ McCluskey said.
The single security man was standing outside in the street looking extremely sheepish.
‘I’m sorry, professor,’ he said. ‘They just invaded. It’s somebody’s twenty-first birthday. There must be two hundred of them inside.’
‘Oh Christ in a box,’ McCluskey said. ‘Flash rave. Pop-up party. Newton didn’t think of that.’
‘You want me to call the police?’ the guard asked.
‘No!’ McCluskey said quickly. ‘Absolutely not. No time. It’d take hours to shift this lot and there’d probably be a bloody riot if we tried. Come on, Hugh.’
They pushed their way through the stoned and loved-up partygoers who were milling around the front door and made their way into the house. It was completely transformed from the afternoon. There were strobing, flashing lights, pulsating music and dancing, kissing, squirming bodies everywhere.
‘You see, Hugh,’ McCluskey shouted, ‘it’s like I always said to those bloody Marxist dialectical materialists. History is about people. Coincidence and capricious chance. This bunch of pissed-up ravers may turn out to be the reason the Great War happens and Europe is destroyed. Because of a fucking birthday party! But not if we can help it. Come on.’
McCluskey pushed her way through the sweating throng. She was, as usual, carrying a large handbag. In fact, this particular item was more like a small holdall and she wasn’t shy in swinging it about to get people to move out of the way. Stanton followed on as best he could, struggling with his own heavy bags.
Finding their way was difficult; the rooms and corridors had all been hung with painted sheets and murals and looked nothing like they had done that afternoon. At least there was light, supplied by a generator that seemed to have been placed in the back garden since the cables were running out of the windows.
‘They’ve got it bloody well organized,’ McCluskey shouted back over her shoulder. ‘Can’t believe they’ve set this up since we were here. If they were as creative and innovative getting themselves jobs they wouldn’t all have to be bloody anarchists.’
Stanton could hardly hear her. There were speakers hung in every corner of the building and the DJ was not shy with the volume dial.
Eventually they found their way down into the cellar, descending the little stairwell towards the battered and broken door, still hanging on a single hinge. The same door that Newton’s men had locked three centuries before.
Any hope that the rave might have confined itself to the upper part of the house was quickly extinguished. There was a separate and if anything even wilder party going on in the basement. A different DJ, naked but for a tiny pair of glittering shorts, was dancing crazily behind his decks.
‘The guy upstairs was steady drum and bass,’ McCluskey shouted, ‘but this bloke is real old school Hi NRG trance. Fucking awful, if you ask me. All music was shit after the kids switched from spliff to E.’
Whatever drug it was that the revellers were on, they were certainly having a fantastic time. Bounding and leaping about and throwing shapes with absolute abandon.
‘My place-marker’s gone and the chalk’s been danced off the floor,’ Stanton shouted into McCluskey’s ear. He pointed at the broken chair, which had been kicked into a shadowy corner of the cavernous room. ‘We’ll have to re-establish the coordinates.’
If any of the young Turkish party people found it strange that an old lady in a woolly cardigan and a man dressed vaguely like a character out of King Solomon’s Mines were pushing their way among them staring intently at a satellite navigation device, then they did not let it show. This was a flash rave after all and there were no rules. People could act as they pleased. As if to demonstrate this very point, a young woman with a shaved and tattooed head leapt suddenly in between McCluskey and Stanton.
‘Guts!’ she shouted in heavily accented English. ‘I love you, Guts!’
Then having paused momentarily to bare her breasts, she clasped Stanton by the head with both hands and kissed him.
Fortunately the music was too loud for anybody but Stanton and McCluskey to hear the girl, otherwise Stanton might well have been mobbed. These were young people after all, Stanton’s web constituency. McCluskey grabbed the girl and pushed her away.
‘Bugger off, you disgusting slapper,’ she shouted. ‘And put your tits away. What would your mother think?’
Stanton looked at his watch. ‘Two minutes to midnight!’ he shouted, before focusing once more on his sat nav. ‘The place is just over here, where those two are making out.’
Stanton pointed at a position on the floor where a young couple were dancing cheek to cheek and groin to groin, locked in a passionate embrace, mouths gnawing at each other.
‘Blimey!’ McCluskey yelled. ‘We’ve got to clear a space for the sentry box or else you’ll be staying here and a couple of drunk, half-naked students are going to find themselves locked in a cellar in 1914.’
Stanton struggled with his bags and his sat nav among the cavorting bodies while McCluskey attempted to make room for him. Having tried tapping the passionate couple on the shoulder and got no reaction, she resorted to twerking them out of the way by backing her substantial bottom into them and pushing. ‘Quick!’ she shouted. ‘Before they snog their way back.’
The DJ interrupted his music to shout excitedly in Turkish. There followed a great cheer from everyone in the cellar.
‘Oh my God,’ McCluskey said, looking at her watch. ‘One minute. They’re counting down to the birthday.’
Stanton was staring intently at his navigation guide, holding it in one hand while he fended off dancers with the other. Taking one final extra step, he threw a thumbs-up to McCluskey to indicate he was in position, and put his bags on the floor, one on either side of his feet.
‘Don’t move!’ McCluskey shouted while pushing away the star-struck and still topless girl who was attempting to steal another kiss. Stanton stood his ground as McCluskey circled him flailing her arms, spinning like a Whirling Dervish and shouting furiously at the bemused and amused crowd.
‘Fuck off! Fuck off! Keep back! Clear a space! Fuck off!’
‘Fuck off! Fuck off!’ the smiling crowd chanted back merrily at the mad old lady.
‘Twenty! Nineteen!’ came the Turkish countdown as the DJ led the crowd through the last seconds of 31 May 2025.
The topless girl threw herself at Stanton once more, intent, it seemed, on the prize of kissing him on the stroke of midnight. Perhaps she was the birthday girl and had decided Stanton was her present. He pushed her away but she just came at him again, wilder now, arms wide and pupils contracted, reaching into the space McCluskey was trying to protect. Into Newton’s sentry box.
She grabbed Stanton round the neck. She was strong and determined. He felt her lips on his; he smelt spearmint lip gloss.
Then the lips were gone, leaving only the gloss behind.
‘I said fuck off!’ McCluskey’s voice bellowed. The girl’s whole head jerked backwards and a fat, mottled, broken-veined, liver-spotted fist swung through the air and into her face. He saw the girl’s shocked expression and the spurt of blood that leapt instantly from what may well have been a broken nose. Then suddenly McCluskey appeared in front of him, putting her own arms around his neck. Clasping him. Crushing him to her. Now it was McCluskey’s lips against his; he could feel the bristle of her moustache as she spoke.
‘I’m coming with you!’ she shouted. ‘Hold me tight!’
‘Fourteen! Thirteen!’ the crowd was chanting.
‘You’re crazy!’ Stanton shouted into her face. ‘Think of the Butterfly Effect! Every step will change history. The more disruption, the less chance we have.’
‘I’ll be careful. I won’t flap my wings much. I just want to see the Diaghilev at Covent Garden.’
‘Nine! Eight!’ came the chant.
The bloodied girl appeared behind McCluskey, her hands reaching round and clawing at McCluskey’s face, her nails digging into McCluskey’s cheeks and eyes. Stanton felt himself spinning. McCluskey held him, the Turkish girl held McCluskey. The three of them toppled over together, cannoning into other dancers as they collapsed to the floor.
‘Six! Five!’
Stanton was on his feet in an instant. His bags hadn’t moved. They marked the spot. The two women were also struggling to their feet.
‘Three!’
He had only to step between the bags to be back in position.
But as he did so he saw that McCluskey was trying to step into the very same position. Her face, illuminated in the flashing lights, seemed maniacal, evangelical. Her fists were up once more. One was holding her big leather bag. She was reaching back, ready to swing.
At him.
She wanted to go with him but if necessary it was clear she’d be prepared to go without him.
‘Two!’
He stepped between his bags, bracing himself against McCluskey’s expected blow. Then there was an explosion of glass around her head, backlit from the strobe in the corner like a throbbing halo of twinkling stars.
McCluskey dropped out of his vision, revealing behind her the topless party girl, blood falling from her chin on to her breasts, the neck of a broken champagne bottle in her hand.
‘One! Happy birthday, Feyzah!’ the DJ shouted. ‘Mutlu yıllar!’
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.
