Let me know if there’s anything I can do,
Doug
So that explained why the flat in Mulberry Crescent was unoccupied then.
Sam clicked the link at bottom of the email and was redirected to a page on the website of the New York Centre of Psychoanalytic Studies. It described recent advances made by a Dr Rosen in the field of optogentics, which, as far as he could work out, involved using light to stimulate a person’s neurons. He scrolled down a bit, his jaw dropping when he saw that the treatment was priced at almost fifty thousand dollars. There was no way the family could afford such a cost, especially when they couldn’t even manage the monthly mortgage repayments.
After bookmarking the page, he shut his computer down and then leaned back with his hands behind his head. Things could be so different if only he had access to Tetradyamide again. With it, not only was Sam able to control his seizures but could turn them into something useful. He’d been capable of almost anything under its influence, even bringing his sister back from the dead. Compared to that, raising the funds for his mum’s treatment and keeping a roof over their heads should be a doddle. But in this timeline Lara McHayden was dead, and his only connection to Tetradyamide lost.
He shook his head, reached for his drawer again and then pulled up sharply. Perhaps there was another connection he hadn’t thought of before.
9
Lewis sat shivering in the back seat of Lance’s Volvo, his hood up and his coat pulled tightly around his body. The heating control was on the blink, leaving them with the choice between slowly freezing or a blast of hot air so loud it was impossible to hear anyone speak, and they had alternated between the two extremes at ten-minute intervals throughout the journey.
In all honesty, Lewis felt more than a little uncomfortable about the venture. Obviously it was good that Sam had opened up at last, but the garbled phone call Lewis had received a few hours ago had filled him with dread and contained phrases such as ‘parallel timeline’, ‘government research facility’ and ‘top-secret drug’. So when he’d reluctantly agreed to tag along, it was more to keep an eye on Sam than because he believed anything his friend had told him.
‘Can we switch the heating on again?’ he asked, leaning forwards. ‘I’m turning into an icicle back here.’
Lance grunted and reached for the switch, when Sam (in the passenger seat) suddenly grabbed his arm. He jerked the steering wheel to one side, causing the car to veer into the middle of the road.
‘That’s it!’ Sam yelled.
‘Dude, are you sure?’ Lance arched his eyebrows at Lewis in the rear-view mirror. ‘You’ve said that, like, three times already.’
‘This time I’m positive,’ Sam said, and pointed to an approaching side road that led into a thick wood of pine trees. ‘Look, if I’m wrong again we can turn round and go home, and you have my apologies for wasting your time.’
‘That’s good enough for me,’ Lance said. He slowed and turned onto the road, which was really no more than a heavily furrowed track. Lewis could hear various nuts and bolts rattling in the car’s bodywork as the rickety suspension failed to absorb the uneven ground.
‘This is it,’ Sam muttered, grinning to himself. ‘This is definitely it!’
Lewis couldn’t remember the last time he had seen his friend smile. Since collapsing at Matthew’s funeral the month before, Sam had seemed so different – distant and quiet, like all of the joy had been sucked out of him – and while it was good that he appeared to be in better spirits, there was something vaguely disturbing about that grin.
‘Listen,’ Sam said, ‘would you believe me if I told you that the answer to all our problems might be at the end of this path?’
‘No,’ Lewis said, catching Lance’s eye in the mirror again. ‘Not really.’
‘How about riches beyond your wildest dreams?’
‘Riches beyond my wildest dreams?’ Lewis scratched his chin. ‘You’ve got me interested there. Go on.’
Sam opened his mouth, but before he could say anything the headlights revealed a metal fence topped with razor wire up ahead. Lance stopped the car.
‘Kill the lights,’ Sam hissed.
‘Why are you whispering?’ Lance asked.
‘Just do it!’
Lance rolled his eyes. By the time he had turned off the engine and pulled his keys from the ignition, Sam was already out of the car and hurrying towards a wooden hut set next to a gate in the fence. Lewis climbed out too and stepped straight in a puddle. Mud splattered over his trouser leg and his new trainers, and, for the umpteenth time that evening, he found himself wishing he’d stayed at home.
‘I’ve got a bad feeling about this,’ he said, stepping over another puddle to join Lance.
‘Why? Not scared, are you?’
‘Me?’ Lewis huffed. ‘No chance, it’s just…well, uh, it doesn’t really look like we should be here, does it?’
Lance only shrugged and began following Sam.
By the time they’d caught up with him, Sam was tugging at a padlock securing a thick chain around the middle of the gate. Lewis stood on tiptoes and peered through one of the hut’s broken windows, wincing at the whiff of stale urine. The interior had been stripped bare and the walls were covered with graffiti.
‘Doesn’t look like anyone’s home,’ he said, settling back on his heels. ‘Can we go now?’
Sam shook his head. ‘We need to get to the other side of that fence. Somehow.’
‘Unless you remembered bolt cutters, I don’t see how we’re going to do that.’
‘Look,’ Lance said, pointing to a section about ten metres down from where they were standing.
At first Lewis couldn’t tell what he was supposed to be seeing, but then a gust of wind shook the fence, exposing a small gap about two feet high in the bottom of the metal links.
‘Good work,’ Sam said, and set off towards it. He ducked his head, scrambled through on his hands and knees and then straightened up on the other side. ‘See, nothing to it!’
Lance tied his hair back before ducking through too.
‘Guys, wait!’ Lewis called, his throat strangely dry. ‘Is this even legal?’
‘We’re not doing anything wrong,’ Sam said, and helped Lance up on the other side.
‘What about trespassing?’
‘We’re just having a look around. Come on, there’s no one here. Stop being a wuss.’
Lewis stayed where he was for a few seconds, watching Sam and Lance slowly disappear into the darkness on the other side of the fence. Something had changed about his friend, a new reckless streak that he didn’t recognise, but short of waiting on his own he didn’t have much choice but to follow them, so, with a heavy heart, he dropped to all fours and crawled through the gap in the fence, muttering curses as strand of loose wire pierced the material of his coat and tore a hole in the shoulder.
After another hundred metres or so they reached a low concrete building with metal shutters drawn over the windows and doors. A sign with the words KPP&R Logistics lay flat on the ground, covered with muddy footprints.
‘What is this place?’ Lewis asked. He kicked the sign with his toe, breaking off a chunk of rotten wood.
‘It’s the place I told you about earlier,’ Sam said, ‘the government research facility.’
‘Doesn’t look like much of a government anything anymore.’
Sam frowned, squatted on his haunches and began tugging at the bottom of the shutter covering the main door. ‘Give me a hand, will you?’
Lewis joined him but it made no difference: the thing wouldn’t budge.
‘Dudes, you’re wasting your time,’ Lance said eventually. ‘It’s locked. And anyway, like Lewis said, whatever it used to be, this place is, like, totally abandoned.’
‘Thank you, Lance! At least I’m not the only one seeing sense,’ Lewis said.
Sam shook his head, his lips pressed together. ‘No. I didn’t come all this way just to give up the minute things got diffi
cult. Come on, let’s check around the back. If it’s locked, what I’m looking for might still be here.’
Lewis traipsed behind the others as they circled the building, his relief growing with each shuttered window they came across, until, on the opposite side, he let out a groan; there were no windows back here, only a single, narrow door. In the moonlight he could see that the shutter was bent and buckled, and had been forced halfway up its track.
Sam let out a whoop and scurried over. He crouched to reach under the shutter and then looked back with a grin before pushing the door open and ducking into the pitch-blackness behind it.
‘I’m pretty sure breaking and entering is illegal,’ Lewis called after him.
‘Technically we haven’t broken anything,’ Lance said and followed Sam in. ‘The shutter was like that when we found it.’
‘Great, just wonderful!’ Lewis said, throwing his hands in the air. ‘In that case I stand corrected. Please, carry on.’
‘A-ha!’ he heard Sam say, and yellow light suddenly poured out from under the shutter.
Lewis stooped to peer inside. Sam and Lance were standing in what looked like a cleaning cupboard, with a mop and bucket in one corner and an industrial-sized pack of loo roll on the floor. Set in the far wall was another door, which Sam was about to open.
‘Sam, wait!’ Lewis said. But it was too late; his friend had already disappeared into the next room, followed by Lance. ‘Fine then, I’ll just stay here, shall I?’
His question was answered by a loud howl in the distance behind him. Glancing back, he could just about make out the wire fence, and, beyond it, the tops of pine trees silhouetted against the night sky. Whatever was making the noise sounded large and hungry, but Lewis had no intention of sticking around to find out what it was, so he scrambled under the shutter too.
On the other side of the cleaning cupboard he entered a small room that looked like it had once been a kitchen, although all of the appliances had been ripped from the walls and the sink was full of broken glass and cigarette butts. Sam and Lance were standing on the other side of a third door, on the edge of a dark expanse that reeked of stale smoke. As Lewis stepped through to join them, Sam hit a switch on the wall and a row of fluorescent tubes flickered on overhead.
The place looked like the venue of a party that had got seriously out of hand. A large, overturned desk lay just in front of them and, to their right, several metal-framed chairs had been wrenched from the floor and stacked in a heap. There was an empty vending machine with a broken glass panel against the wall to their left, and, in the far corner, the burn marks of a fire that had reached high enough to scorch the ceiling.
‘What is this place?’ Lewis asked again.
Sam ignored him, approached the vending machine and started trying to prise it away from the wall, which seemed pretty pointless given its size. Eventually he gave up, walked back and began examining the underside of the desk.
‘There used to be a button that activated a lift behind that vending machine,’ he said, ‘but it’s gone now, only a bunch of snapped wires.’
Lewis stepped forwards, his palms up. ‘Okay, Sam, you know I want to help, and until now I think I’ve been pretty patient, but spending the night poking around in a derelict industrial unit isn’t my idea of a laugh. Please, can we go now?’
For a moment it looked like Sam was about to object again, but then he sighed and shook his head. ‘I’ve made a mistake,’ he said. ‘It was a long shot, I suppose, but it doesn’t look like we’re going to find anything here.’
‘At last!’ Lewis said. ‘I thought you were never going to—’
He was interrupted by the hiss of a hydraulic piston. With a grinding noise the vending machine slid to one side, revealing the interior of a lift, just as Sam had said. A stocky man with eczema on his face was standing inside, a cardboard box under one arm. He stepped out, looked up and then froze, his hand over his heart.
‘Malcolm,’ Sam said, ‘it’s me.’
The man dropped his box and broke into a run, headed straight for the door to the kitchen through which Lewis, Sam and Lance had just entered.
‘Stop him!’ Sam yelled.
Lance vaulted the desk like a hurdler, tackled the man around the waist and knocked him to the floor in a tangle of flailing limbs.
Lewis stepped around the desk to see Lance sitting on the man’s chest, pinning his arms to the floor. ‘Trespassing, breaking and entering, now assault?’ he said. ‘Thanks a lot, guys, this is going to look great on my university application next year.’
10
‘Er, sorry about that,’ Sam said, watching as Malcolm Fairview dabbed his bloody lip with a handkerchief.
Lance tugged at his collar, his cheeks reddening. ‘Yeah, sorry. I don’t know what came over me there.’
Sam remembered a reality in which his sister’s boyfriend had launched himself at a pistol-wielding Agent Steele in a similar manner to the way in which he’d just taken Fairview down. It seemed there was more to Lance than first met the eye.
Fairview loosened his tie and pulled a strip of tablets from his jacket pocket. ‘You almost gave me a heart attack,’ he said, and popped one under his tongue. ‘Now, correct me if I leave anything out here, but you expect me to believe that you were recruited by Dr McHayden back in December, after which I trained you for the best part of a month, at this very facility no less, and now I don’t remember any of it?’
‘That’s because I altered the timelines on Christmas Eve,’ Sam explained. ‘In the original timeline – the one I remember but no one else does – I prevented the Thames House bombing by tipping off the police. That’s what got me noticed by Dr McHayden.’
‘But why would you then go and undo such a thing?’ Fairview asked. ‘More than a hundred people were killed that day, including Dr McHayden herself. What are you, Sam, some kind of a monster?’
Sam took a deep breath as a familiar ball of self-loathing spread through his gut; it was a question he had asked himself many times over since Christmas. ‘I don’t want to speak ill of the dead, but Dr McHayden wasn’t what she seemed,’ he said eventually. ‘She had plans for the Tempus Project that went far beyond exploring time travel, and when I tried to leave she threatened my family. Reversing my discovery was the only option I had at the time. Believe me, I’m trying to put things right.’
Lewis, who had been standing by quietly until that point, suddenly sprang forward and started scooping up the papers and personal effects that had spilled from Fairview’s cardboard box. ‘You’ll have to excuse my friend,’ he said, handing the scientist back his wedding photo. ‘I know how bonkers this all sounds, but Sam’s been under a lot of stress. He was injured in a plane crash in September last year. He lost his dad and—’
‘A plane crash?’
‘British Airways Flight 0368,’ Sam said. He turned his head to the side and parted his hair to reveal the scar behind his ear. ‘It’s how I got this.’
Fairview took a step closer, squinting at the scar. ‘September, you say? But that looks years old, not months.’
‘The doctors tell me it’s healing really well,’ Sam said and let his hair fall back. ‘A piece of metal pieced my skull and got stuck in my brain. They had to operate to remove it. According to Dr McHayden, it’s the reason I’m able to manipulate time.’
‘Excuse me, but time travel?’ Lewis cut in. ‘I mean, how is that even possible?’
Fairview let out a nervous giggle and scratched the side of his neck, showering his shirt with flecks of dead skin. ‘According to certain theories, time is not a linear, continuous thing, but a series of eternal “nows”, each separate but connected. Our sequencing of those nows is what we humans perceive as the passage of time. The work of the Tempus Project was based around the hypothesis that, were a person to suffer an injury that affected the regions of the brain associated with time perception, this might alter the way they perceive these nows, enabling him or her to move around in time much the way
you or I might physically move about in the other three dimensions. With chemical enhancement, it was speculated that a person might be able to make conscious decisions about when in time they experience, much like you might choose where to stand in three-dimensional space. The problem being, of course, that brain injuries have a tendency to kill people, or at very least incapacitate them to such an extent as to render such questions moot.’
‘Not me,’ Sam said.
‘No,’ Fairview conceded, ‘not you. Honestly, this is what I’ve spent the best part of the last decade researching. I can’t tell you how thrilling it is to meet you, Sam.’
Lance exhaled loudly, loosened his ponytail and swept his hair back with his hands. ‘Dudes, this is totally making my head hurt.’
‘The thing I don’t get,’ Lewis said, ‘is why the rest of us don’t have any memory of this other timeline you’re talking about.’
‘Parallel universes,’ Fairview told him. ‘According to quantum theory, any time you make a decision a new, separate universe is created. Say you’re walking down a path with a fork in it. You’ve got two options – turn left or turn right. If you chose the fork on the right, the universe will branch in two separate directions, just like the path. A parallel universe will be created in which a version of you took the left fork instead. In theory, there’s a universe out there where you made a different choice in every decision you’ve taken in your entire life.’
‘But that must mean there’s an infinite number of universes,’ Lewis said.
‘Not quite infinite, but a number so large it might as well be. The point I’m trying to make is that if someone were able to alter the decisions they’ve made, they might conceivably be able to switch their consciousness from one universe to another.’ He shot Sam a glance and let slip another giggle. ‘It would appear that your friend here is from a parallel universe.’
‘Woah, trippy!’ Lance said.
‘So you believe me?’ Sam asked Fairview.
Ripples of the Past Page 9