Ripples of the Past

by Damian Knight

  George nodded, withdrew his Glock and held it up, the barrel between his thumb and forefinger. ‘Only a precaution, I assure you.’

  ‘Naturally. Never leave home without it, eh? Now, be a good chap and pass it over.’

  George dropped the pistol onto the carpet and, using his good foot, toe-poked it towards Esteban’s chair.

  Keeping the shotgun trained on him, Esteban stooped to retrieve the pistol, then leaned back and placed it on the table beside him. ‘Still have a penchant for the leather gloves, I see.’

  ‘It’s cold outside,’ George said.

  ‘Very true. Nothing to do with unsatisfactory sanitation levels in the wider world then?’

  ‘Would it be unwise of me to remind you that I’m not the only one to suffer from such a disposition?’

  Esteban laughed. ‘Touché! Still, it’s nice and toasty in here, and my own standards of hygiene are exemplary, as you rightly point out. Please, there really is no need for the gloves. Take them off. I insist.’

  George forced a shrug of indifference, removed his gloves, folded them and slid them into his coat pocket. ‘There, better?’

  ‘Much,’ Esteban said. ‘So, Michael Humboldt sent you to kill me, did he?’

  ‘Quite the opposite,’ George said. ‘All is forgiven, Esteban. He wants you to come back in.’

  Esteban spluttered on another mouthful of scotch. ‘Please, George, the man has already sent his assassins after me on three occasions. As you can plainly see, I am still here and they are not. You can tell him where to stick his forgiveness, if you’ll forgive the expression.’

  George sighed. ‘Anything I can do or say to change your mind?’

  ‘No, too much water under the bridge for that. But Flight 0368, Thames House, Malcolm Fairview…have you stopped to consider why I did these things?’

  ‘Revenge, I assumed.’

  ‘In part, yes. But what did Humboldt offer you in exchange for your allegiance? Wealth? Power? The chance to change the world?’

  ‘Amongst other things.’

  ‘Or your missing leg back, perhaps?’

  George lowered his gaze, his chest tightening.

  ‘You do realise he is no longer capable of such feats?’ Esteban said. ‘That is why I did what I did, to stop him finding what he searches for.’

  ‘The drug, you mean?’

  ‘And the blood relative he so craves. Without these things, Humboldt is powerless and the empire he has built is there for anyone with the courage to take it.’ Esteban leaned forwards, his eyes bulging. ‘Help me, George, and together we can share the spoils.’

  ‘Help you? What could you possibly want from me?’

  ‘You know where he is, I think, otherwise you would not be here. You could get close enough to strike the blow that I cannot.’

  George hesitated and adjusted his cuffs. ‘The idea has some merit,’ he said at last. ‘You know, maybe I will join you for that drink and you can explain what you want me to do.’

  ‘I never thought I’d see the day!’ Esteban exclaimed. ‘The glasses are in the unit next to the sink. Please, help yourself.’

  ‘Would you mind?’ George asked, and hiked up his trouser leg to afford Esteban a glimpse of his prosthetic. ‘Getting about isn’t as easy these days, and after the walk from the pub I could do with the rest.’

  Esteban hesitated, his expression hardening in tandem with his grip around the shotgun.

  ‘What, not afraid of an unarmed, one-legged man, are you?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ Esteban stood, slid George’s pistol into his pocket and, with the shotgun balanced in the crook of his arm, retrieved another tumbler from the kitchen. ‘Forgive me, but it would appear my recent experiences have left me mistrustful,’ he said, and filled it from the bottle beside his armchair. ‘But mark my words, George, Humboldt is a snake. He cannot give you the things he promised, and will turn on you the moment he thinks you have outlived your usefulness.’

  ‘You may be right,’ George said. He reached forward to take the tumbler, but instead grabbed Esteban by the wrist, drawing him to his chest and simultaneously raising his knee to knock the barrel of the shotgun away. Esteban’s eyes widened in bewilderment as George withdrew a syringe from his pocket and plunged the needle into his old friend’s neck. ‘However Michael Humboldt also promised me your life, and on that point it seems he was true to his word.’

  Esteban’s eyes drifted closed and his body went limp. The tumbler slipped from his hand, spilling its contents as it rolled across the carpet.

  10

  Sam swallowed his last mouthful of leek and potato soup and placed his spoon in the empty bowl. The dining room on the ground floor of Michael Humboldt’s sprawling, rickety old house was several times larger than the bedroom in which he’d woken but had the same smell of dry rot, plus a matching fireplace at the far side, this time with a mangy zebra’s head mounted above the mantelpiece. A grandfather clock was gathering dust in one corner, the cobweb-tangled pendulum unmoving behind the glass panel and the hands perpetually stuck on ten minutes to three.

  Back in the bedroom, Sam had been shown to a wardrobe and then left to change, granting him a few minutes alone to gather his thoughts before dinner. Although he was still struggling to get his head around the implications of everything Humboldt had told him, the main thing was he’d been offered the chance to save his dad, and that was something he could never turn down.

  After browsing the contents of the wardrobe, he’d selected a pair of canvas trainers, jeans and a navy blue zip-up hoodie, all with the labels still attached. As he’d finished dressing there had been a knock on the door and a grey-haired old lady had entered, introducing herself as Donna, Humboldt’s assistant. She had shown him along a hallway and down a creaking staircase that looked like something out of a haunted house. Sam had tried asking questions as he’d followed, but she didn’t even glance back, making him suspect that she was probably hard of hearing. At the bottom of the staircase they’d turned down another hallway before entering the dining room. Waiting at a long table with a line of three-pronged candlestick holders down its middle were Humboldt and a little man with sideburns and a handlebar moustache, who was introduced as Sebastian, Humboldt’s lead researcher.

  ‘How was the soup?’ Humboldt asked, looking up from the opposite end of the table.

  ‘Er, not bad thanks,’ Sam said. ‘I must have been hungrier than I realised.’

  ‘That’s hardly surprising,’ Sebastian said. ‘You haven’t eaten in two days.’

  ‘What?’

  Humboldt dabbed the corner of his mouth with a napkin. ‘I’m afraid he’s right, Sam. In order to safely extract you from Knotsbridge, I instructed my associate to administer a drug that an old friend of mine developed several decades back – an antiserum, if you will. Obviously I didn’t want you slipping into a seizure and doing anything that might interfere with our plans. Its effects are the polar opposite of Tetradyamide, essentially preventing a person like you or me from travelling through time. On me it lasted for forty-eight hours, give or take, but you started coming around after only a single day. We kept you sedated for another twenty-four hours, just to be sure the antiserum had left your system and you’d be ready to use Tetradyamide again. You were nourished through a drip the whole time, of course.’

  Sam gawped back, but it actually explained a lot, such as why he had lost control of the pages of time and then whited out when he’d tried to undo Fairview’s murder. But considering that all he had really achieved was to incriminate himself again, perhaps Humboldt had actually done him a favour.

  He took a sip from the glass of water next to his placemat and cleared his throat. ‘So, you said you have Tetradyamide?’

  ‘That I do,’ Humboldt said and grinned. ‘Donna, would you mind?’

  Humboldt’s elderly assistant nodded, pushed her chair back and left through a door at the end of the room, returning a moment later with a silver platter covered by a domed lid.r />
  ‘Much appreciated,’ Humboldt said as she set it before him. ‘How’re our main courses coming along?’

  ‘Shouldn’t be long now, sir,’ she said, then collected their empty bowls and exited through the same door, which Sam realised must lead on to the kitchen.

  Dispensing with the walking stick, Humboldt carried the platter over to Sam’s end of the table. ‘Funny how you can spend your whole life looking for something and then, once you find it, not be able to use it,’ he said, lifting the lid. ‘Fate has a twisted sense of humour, it would seem.’

  In the middle of the platter was a brown pill bottle. The label was beginning to peel away in one corner and there was a chip in the glass near the lid. Sam stared at it in disbelief; it was so like the one confiscated from his house as to be almost identical. Scratch that, it was identical.

  ‘That’s the bottle the police took when they searched my house!’ he blurted out. ‘How did you get it?’

  Humboldt chuckled. ‘It wasn’t easy, but with enough money and the right people in the right places, almost anything can be arranged. So what do you say, Sam? My life in exchange for your father’s, do we have a deal?’

  It briefly occurred to Sam that he might be alone in the house with only Humboldt, Donna and Sebastian, and that if he made a break for it there would be little the ancient trio could do to stop him. But with the prospect of saving his father dangling before him, he immediately dismissed the idea.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘I’ll do it.’

  ‘Excellent!’ Humboldt said, and passed the bottle over.

  Sam flipped the lid open and shook out a sticky little pill. After rolling it between his thumb and finger, he washed it down with a sip of water.

  At that moment Donna backed through the door with a tray supporting four steaming plates.

  ‘Ah, our mains!’ Humboldt returned the pill bottle to the platter and lifted it away to make space for her to lay a plate in front of Sam. ‘I hope you like lamb cutlets. They’re one of Donna’s specialities.’

  Sam felt his stomach growl. The cutlets looked mouth-wateringly good, but the soup had only whetted his appetite and he would have eaten pretty much anything put in front of him.

  Humboldt deposited the platter on a serving table and returned to his seat, draping his napkin over his lap. ‘Please, go ahead. I’m not one for formalities.’

  Sam didn’t need a second invitation and tucked in, while Donna served the others and then took her own seat again.

  ‘You know,’ Humboldt said after a while, ‘it’s a real treat to be able to share a meal with family. Not something I’ve done in years, in fact. My mother died when I was a child, and I lost my brother and father the same year as my injury. Since then Donna and Sebastian are pretty much the closest thing to a family I’ve had. It may be just the prospect of my own death, but often I’ve found myself wondering what it would have been like to have had children of my own. Maybe even an heir to inherit everything I’ve built.’ He shook his head, his smile fading. ‘But I suspect we now have a few minutes before the Tetradyamide takes effect. What do you say we discuss the details of our arrangement?’

  ‘All right,’ Sam said through a mouthful of cutlet.

  Sebastian lowered his knife and fork. ‘Mr Humboldt has recently made several alterations to his will stipulating that you, Sam, are to be accommodated and provided for in the event of his death. A meeting has been scheduled with Dr Claybourne, Mr Humboldt’s private physician, for noon on the first day of August, during which I’ve instructed her to feed back the results of the first course of treatment we plan to proceed with.’

  ‘That’s all you have to do, Sam,’ Humboldt said. ‘When the Tetradyamide kicks in, I want you to travel forward to that meeting, listen to what Dr Claybourne tells you and then report her findings back to us in the present. Once cured, my ability to travel through time should return and I’ll be in a position to prevent the incident in which your father was killed.’ He spread his hands. ‘That’s the deal – you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.’

  ‘Hang on,’ Sam said. ‘What if none of the treatments work? If you can’t be cured, my dad will still be dead, won’t he?’

  ‘In which case you’ve lost nothing,’ Sebastian stated, his voice high and reedy.

  ‘But that’s a worst-case scenario,’ Humboldt cut in. ‘And at least you can rest assured in the knowledge that you’ve done everything in your power to bring you father back. But if the plan fails the first time, we’ll just repeat the process, bringing back information from August over and over, refining the lines of enquiry until we have a working cure.’

  ‘I see,’ Sam said. Suddenly a warm tingle climbed his spine. The edges of his vision had become tinted with colour, and the grain of the wooden tabletop seemed to ripple and swirl before his eyes. ‘It’s starting to take effect, I think.’

  ‘Good,’ Humboldt said. ‘Ready when you are.’

  Sam closed his eyes. After a moment the first stabs of coloured light appeared. As he watched on they swam and swirled, multiplying and merging to form the image of the table before him, stripped bones and a circle of grease all that remained of his plate of food.

  He focused on his destination: noon, the first day of August. With a jolt the scene skipped ahead. He briefly saw Donna collect his plate and then the turning of the pages grew so fast that all detail was lost.

  Unlike back at Knotsbridge, there was clearly nothing wrong with Sam’s control this time around; however he now had over six months to cross. Steeling his mind, he ploughed forward, and soon the passing days and nights became discernible only as intervals of light and dark. One by one he counted them off, until somewhere around the two hundred mark the pages began to slow.

  Sam had tried to travel this far into the future once before, when he had come around as McHayden’s prisoner, drugged up and strapped to a trolley in the Tempus Research Facility. He braced himself as the scene slowly ground to a halt before him, wary of where he might end up, but gradually the image of a white-sanded beach leading down to a clear turquoise ocean took shape. The leaves of a palm tree encroached on his view. A sleek white yacht was anchored about a hundred metres out and, far in the distance, he could make out the cone of a volcanic island poking just above the line of the horizon where the ocean met a bright blue sky flecked with wispy tendrils of cloud.

  Sam blinked and the murmur of gently breaking waves filled his ears. Before him the ocean sparkled and glistened as it rolled in the bright sunlight. He was sitting on a lounger in the shade of a large umbrella. The intense heat was alleviated by a gentle inland breeze. Glancing down, he saw that he was wearing a white t-shirt, swimming shorts and flip-flops. The exposed skin of his arms and legs was coated in a thick layer of oily sunblock.

  ‘Well now, by my watch it’s just gone midday, the time of our so-called meeting,’ a female voice said. ‘Has your alter-ego arrived yet?’

  Sam looked up to see a young, dark-skinned woman on a sun lounger to the right of his own. She was wearing an orange bikini and sarong, and was so breathtakingly beautiful that she would have made most catwalk models seem drab and unspectacular by comparison.

  ‘Dr Claybourne?’

  The woman peered over the top of her sunshades, her mouth dropping open. For a second she struggled to close it, then grinned at him with perfectly straight, perfectly white teeth.

  ‘Ha, that’s a good one!’ she said. ‘Next you’re going to tell me you’re the Sam Rayner from January, here to collect my results for Mr Humboldt.’

  ‘Er, that’s right. I think.’

  She swung her legs from her lounger, pushed her shades to the top of her head and sat staring at him as though transfixed. ‘You’re serious, aren’t you?’ she said at last. ‘I can see it in your eyes, there’s something different.’

  ‘A few minutes ago I was eating lamb cutlets in the dining room of Michael Humboldt’s house in south Wales,’ he told her. ‘I’ve got to say, I prefer it here.�
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  She threw her head back and laughed, pounding the sun lounger with her fist. Eventually she managed to pull herself together and stood up. Wiping tears from her eyes, she slid her feet into a pair of flip-flops lying in the sand. ‘Sorry, but I was rather expecting the whole thing not to work. Since it has, I suppose I should introduce myself. Dr Clarrisa Claybourne, at your service.’

  ‘Sam Rayner,’ he said, standing as well. ‘From January. And where is here, by the way?’

  ‘Why, that’s easy, Sam-Rayner-from-January.’ She spread her arms wide and spun in a slow circle. ‘This is Swordfish Island. We’re in the Pacific Ocean, a couple of thousand kilometres south of Hawaii.’ She stopped spinning, lowered her arms and turned that dazzling smile on him again. ‘It’s one of the most remote places in the world, and part of the estate Mr Humboldt left you in his will.’

  11

  ‘Oh, right,’ Sam said. Then: ‘Hang on, what?’

  Instead of answering him, Claybourne turned and made towards a flight of rough stone stairs carved into the face of a low cliff at the back of the beach. The peak of another volcano towered high above them, its sides lined with a dense covering of vegetation.

  ‘Wait!’ Sam called, and hurried after, the soles of his flip-flops slapping against his bare heels. ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘Mr Humboldt passed away in March,’ she replied, glancing over her shoulder without slowing her pace. ‘Let’s get out of the sun and I’ll explain.’

  As Sam began to climb, a tiny lizard with blue streaks down its sides scurried out from a crack and darted across the step beneath his falling foot. He pulled back, stumbled and had to grab hold of a thick, weathered rope hanging from a series of brass loops to steady himself. Up ahead, Claybourne turned a corner in the stairs and disappeared out of sight.

  Sam followed, hauling himself up by the rope balustrade before emerging onto the terrace of a huge, colonial-style mansion. It was dominated by a vast swimming pool in the shape of an oasis, complete with a central island where several palm trees grew. The mural of a dragon’s head like the one on Humboldt’s walking stick was visible at the bottom through the clear, shimmering water. In the distance, a pair of armed guards patrolled the edge of a garden bursting with bright tropical plants Sam couldn’t even begin to guess the name of.