by George Mann
‘Are you there? Come out; I only want to talk to you.’
His voice echoed emptily around the square.
He turned about, intent on leaving, on getting out of the situation before everything turned into chaos. He felt like he was being drawn into something dangerous, like he was acting out a predestined role that he had no way of altering or affecting.
Just like a puppet...
Then he heard the scuff of the shoe from behind him. He turned about, slowly. The child was scampering around the corner, just like in his dream. He cursed himself for playing into the trap, but then went after him anyway, anxious to know what would happen next.
If Emily is around this corner, I’m going to...
He rounded the corner.
Everything remained dark.
The child was tired now, and Lechasseur could see he was struggling to keep up the pace. He hesitated, standing at the bottom of the road, watching whilst the kid scrambled over the wall into the graveyard and disappeared from view.
So, no light.
That was an interesting, if unexpected, development.
He paced slowly up the road in the direction the boy had taken, and stopped by the wall, trying to catch sight of him. He was too late; the boy had gotten away. He scanned the overgrown tombstones in front of him, looking for any clues. He was going to have a hard time explaining this to Emily, when he eventually got round to her place.
He looked up. For a moment, he had the distinct impression that he was not alone. Was the boy still hovering around somewhere near? He scanned the area around him. In the distance, between the aged trees on the other side of the graveyard, he could just make out a figure, standing amongst the headstones, watching him. He looked more closely, straining to see in the dim light thrown down by the streetlamps and the silver sliver of the moon.
The tramp.
The tramp was there too, watching him. The severed man, with his broken time worm and bright, shining eyes. Lechasseur steeled himself. The man’s severed history described concentric rings about his person, flickering as though electrically charged, warped images sliding past the nexus points at the end of each stump like a procession of random photographs. The man’s entire place in time was hazy, indistinct. Yet somehow, it seemed as if part of his history was still alive, as if certain points in time were still active, still inhabited by this man. He had no idea what to make of it all.
They stood facing each other for a few moments, neither making any move towards the other. Then the tramp began laughing to himself again, a strange, sinister chuckle that left Lechasseur with a deep feeling of unease. It was too much. He leapt over the wall, shouting out to the man to stand his ground.
‘What? What do you want?’
He pulled himself over the other side of the old stone wall, catching the hem of his trousers on a bramble bush and having to right himself before turning around.
As he’d anticipated, when he had righted himself, the severed man had once again disappeared from view.
He paced backwards and forwards for a moment, unsure what to do, and then clambered back over the wall, deciding it was time to fill Emily in on the details and attempt to find his hat. His hands and clothes were wet from scrambling over the dirty wall, and he needed a drink. The boy and the severed man would have to wait until the morning.
‘So, you saw the boy, too!’
Emily sounded dismayed, but not, Honoré considered, for entirely the right reasons. He knew how desperately she needed to learn more about herself, about her own past – and her own nightmares – and the fact that she had been at home in the bath whilst he had been chasing the boy around London meant that another piece of her puzzle had just got thrown out with the trash. She wasn’t about to do another magical reappearance in Spitalfields market.
Dreams, it seemed, couldn’t predict everything.
Lechasseur had discarded his heavy coat and hat – which he had recovered from a puddle just a few feet from where he had lost it – and had taken a seat whilst she fetched him a coffee. Her voice echoed through from the other room.
‘I’ve been thinking about our severed man. Why do you think it is that he’s been following you around?’
Lechasseur studied the wall, trying to unravel the elaborate patterns on the wallpaper with his eyes.
‘I’m not sure that he has been following me. It may be that we’re both just interested in the same thing, whatever that might be. It could be that we keep bumping into each other by coincidence.’
Emily padded back into the room, her bare feet making little sound on the soft carpet. She handed him his drink, which he accepted gratefully. He allowed the hot mug to warm his hands.
‘But what about the dream? He knew your name, and he knew about me. I think there’s something deeper running through this that we still don’t understand.’
Honoré was contemplative. ‘You’re right, of course, but I still can’t see how we can look for any further explanation. I need to catch one of them to try and find out what’s going on. The boy was almost the opposite of the tramp – too much going on in his timeline. But I think it’s the tramp who’s going to reveal the key to all this.’
Emily ran her hand through her hair. ‘There is another way...’
He looked at her steadily, levelling his gaze. He knew exactly what she was referring to. ‘Do you think that’s such a good idea? Particularly since we know there’s something wrong with his time-snake.’
Emily smiled, and sat down on the sofa opposite him, crossing her legs beneath her. She was wearing a pretty floral dress, and it fell about her as she sat, tumbling over the top of her knees and down to the floor.
Honoré sipped at his coffee.
‘You said that he still had parts of it whipping around him, broken but still there. Is there no way we could try to jump to some time period that you can still see?’
He sighed. ‘Actually, I saw more today when I caught him watching me in the graveyard. It looks as if there are three points of time that are still active, one at the end of each strand of his severed time worm. I don’t know when they lead to, and I’m not sure that I really want to risk finding out. I mean, with a guy who’s been cut off from his own timeline like that, how do we know that we’re going to be able to get back?’
Emily shrugged. ‘We don’t. But we can probably rely on there being someone else around who would enable us to jump again. It might take us a few attempts, but I’m sure we’d get home.’
‘I don’t like it...’
‘You never do. But if we don’t get to the bottom of this, you could end up chasing that boy around forever! Not to mention your lack of sleep.’
Honoré sat back in his chair, brooding. ‘I’ll think about it.’
He swilled the last of his coffee around in his mouth, and watched Emily as she collected his mug and paced back out to the kitchen. There was a brief clatter as she rinsed the crockery in the sink, then she popped her head back around the doorframe.
‘Did you want something to eat?’
‘Just something light. All that running around has made me hungry.’
‘A sandwich? Cheese and ham?’
‘Sounds great.’
She set to work in the kitchen. Honoré flopped back in his chair. He knew Emily was right about trying to jump around in time, but he just didn’t want to admit it to himself. The idea of it made his flesh crawl. He’d be taking a huge risk; he had no idea what would happen when he tried to step into the timeline of a man who no longer existed within it himself. The repercussions could be horrendous. After all, the tramp wouldn’t have severed himself from history, so there had to be someone else behind it. And that meant there was someone else out there with a lot more understanding of the time streams than Honoré Lechasseur. He scratched his leg absently as he thought it through. Not only that, but Emily had her
own reasons for wanting to take another little trip.
Still, he couldn’t see any other way.
When Emily came back into the room a few minutes later, he raised himself up in his seat. ‘I think we should take a better look before we decide what to do. Scout around a bit, observe him for a while. You never know, we might find out what it is that links him with the boy?’
Emily put a hand on his shoulder, a gesture of complicity. ‘We’ll start looking for him first thing in the morning. Tonight, you can sleep on the sofa.’
Honoré was pensive. ‘Oh, I don’t think we’re going to have to do much in the way of looking... I think he’ll be waiting for us to make the next move.’ The last words were muffled as he bit into the sandwich that Emily had placed before him on the table, and he looked out of the window, using his hand to brush the curtains back from their frame.
Outside, darkness had engulfed the streets, and all he could see was the faint yellow glow of the city as its denizens retreated to their warm homesteads.
Somewhere out there, the severed man was waiting for him.
The Tramp
The morning came slowly, and when it did, Honoré was waiting for it, watching the sun rise through the drab grey curtain of clouds that had settled over London during the night. He’d sat for most of the night by the window, watching the world pass by. When he had slept, it had been fitfully, in short bursts, but thankfully there had been no reoccurrence of the previous night’s bad dreams. Although that wasn’t to say that he hadn’t kept running it over and over in his mind, trying to work out what was going on.
He heard Emily stirring, and made his way into the kitchen, brewing them both some coffee. He made it strong, to prepare them for the long day ahead.
He was anticipating the worst.
An hour later, they headed out to Spitalfields market. The weather seemed to have broken, and the storms of the previous day had dissipated, leaving the air fresh and clear. Emily had nevertheless wrapped herself up in a large woollen overcoat. Lechasseur himself was attired in his customary black leather trench coat and hat. He was unsure how he was going to attract the attention of the severed man, but guessed that Spitalfields was the place to go. Everything seemed to centre on the marketplace and the old churchyard, and he hoped that if he waited there long enough, the severed man would come to him.
Emily was jumpy. She kept looking over her shoulder, as if she expected to see someone coming up behind them, taking her by surprise. Lechasseur did his best to reassure her, but he was feeling more than a little on edge himself. He scanned the road ahead of them, expecting at any time to see the grey scarf and black coat of the boy edging down the street towards them, or else the tattered rags of the lonely tramp who had found himself cut out of time.
They stopped to buy some breakfast rolls at a bakery they passed, enjoying the warm scent of the freshly baked bread, and sat on a wall nearby while they ate them. Emily asked him about his life as a ‘fixer’ before they had met, when he had made his living as a work-for-hire, often employed to track down a missing person or pass on some ‘questionable’ goods. These days, he walked a little closer to the line of the law, although he wasn’t beyond using his own moral judgement when the police seemed unable to galvanise themselves to act.
He didn’t tell Emily much, though, preferring to look forward to the future than to dwell on the past. Things had changed for him dramatically during the last few months, and he was still trying to unravel it all in his head. He was hopeful that, one day soon, he would wake up and suddenly everything would make sense.
He knew from his experiences in the War, however, that things were never actually that easy.
After they had finished eating, they walked the last few yards to the marketplace. The square was thriving with activity. Traders raised their voices to compete with one another over the abundant drone of the crowds.
‘Oranges and pears. Get your oranges and pears here!’
‘Stockings for the ladies!’
Emily led them through the press of people, winding her way between the stalls as they drew closer towards the churchyard. Lechasseur tried to take it all in, breathing deeply as they passed a stall selling herbs and spices from the Orient. The pungent aromas of another world filled his nostrils, the peculiar names on their little tags adding to the sense of the exotic.
Around him, children squabbled, pushing a ball backwards and forwards into each other’s hands. He stepped around them as best he could, trying to avoid disrupting their game.
‘Excuse me...’
Emily grabbed for his hand and pulled him forward, trying to hurry him on.
They entered the churchyard by the main entrance. Emily paused just inside, in the shade of a large tree, her face dappled with spots of sunlight.
‘Where was it you saw him standing last night?’
Lechasseur pointed. ‘Over there, between those two gravestones next to the trees. But I hardly think...’
Emily looked over to where he was pointing. ‘It’s all we’ve got to start with, Honoré. Let’s just take a look.’
They wove their way through the maze of gravestones. Flowers, desiccated with time, poked their way out of little pots beside many of the overgrown graves. Honoré tried not to step on any of them as he clambered through the long grass. He came to rest beside Emily, who was leaning against one of the more elaborate gravestones he had pointed out from the gateway. His boots were damp from kicking his way through the long, wet grass.
‘So now what?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know. Perhaps we should split up, take a better look around?’
‘No. I think we should wait. If we hang around here long enough, I’m sure that he’ll turn up.’ He stepped back, examining the weathered lettering on the headstone in front of him.
Barnaby Tewkes.
1892.
He Lives On.
The lettering was engraved on the slab in an elaborate gothic script typical of the Victorian period, with a number of garish embellishments such as cherubic heralds and religious icons. Very different from the graves that Lechasseur had helped to dig in the fields around Normandy during the War. He shuddered at the sudden, unbidden thought.
He looked up at Emily, who was screwing her face up in disapproval at the thought of waiting around for the tramp to show up.
‘Look’ she said. ‘We’ll make ourselves comfortable by that clump of trees. If he doesn’t show up in a couple of hours, we’ll head home and rethink the plan. There’s no point searching the streets for hours on end, as we’ll only miss him if we do.’ Honoré edged around beside her, putting a hand on her shoulder.
‘Besides. It’s him who’s been stalking me, remember. I’ve got no idea where to even start looking. I know it sounds strange, but something keeps drawing me back to this place, both in the dream, and in reality. It’s like he’s trying to tell me something. That is, unless you can think of anything better?’
She met his gaze. ‘No, I don’t think I can.’
‘Right then, wait it is.’ He used his foot to clear a patch in the mossy grass around the base of the tree, and lowered himself into a squat. ‘Looks dry enough here. Come on.’
They sat in the shadows of the old sycamore tree, waiting. Behind them, the bombed out ruins of the old church loomed overhead like a scorched fragment of broken bone. They both sat in relative silence, neither of them having too much to say.
When Emily did finally speak, nearly an hour had passed, and she was clambering to her feet, wrapping her big coat around herself and pacing backwards and forwards in front of Lechasseur.
‘I don’t think we can wait around here any longer, Honoré; it’s just too cold, and I think if he was going to show up, he would have done so by now.’
He looked up at her, nodded, and climbed to his feet beside her, a look of resignation on his face. ‘I gues
s you’re right. I think we’re just going to have to wait for him to make the next move.’ He put a hand on her shoulder to steady himself as he brushed himself down, flicking strands of damp grass from the back of his trench coat.
He felt Emily shift beneath his grip.
‘Honoré...’ Her voice sounded suddenly tremulous.
There was a rustle from over by the ruined church. He glanced up. The severed man was standing about ten feet away, his long hair flapping around his face as if he were standing at the centre of a tempest. Honoré had just enough time to notice once again the shimmering gleam in his eyes before he and Emily were swallowed in a brief electrical haze and everything disappeared from view.
Part Two: Mors Mortis Regina
The Darkness Of Men
Night.
Enveloping darkness stifled Lechasseur like an oppressive blanket. He shook his head and tried to gather himself together. Complex webs of time described undulating patterns of complexity everywhere he looked.
He tried to focus. A bird, hopping down from a nearby railing, left a trail of spiralling depressions in the time streams, stretching out behind it like a wave. He could see how that bird would die, two months from now, choked to death in the thick smog of a London alleyway.
He clambered to his feet.
‘Emily!’ He steadied himself for a moment, trying to hold himself still. ‘Are you there, Emily?’ He could see barely more than three feet in front of him. The ground was cobbled underfoot. In the distance, he could hear the clopping sound of horses’ hooves on hard stone.
He felt a hand on his shoulder, steadying him. ‘I think we’re still in London, Honoré. It’s late. I can’t see anyone else around.’ Emily’s breath made little funnels in the air between them. Lechasseur drew himself in against the cold.