Touchstone Season One- Complete Box Set

by Andy Conway

  “It’s just a dream,” she said. “Just a stupid thing I dreamed about.”

  He ruffled through papers again. “Your professor at university says you confronted him about his role in this touchstone.”

  “He’s got no right,” she snapped. “Ask him about his secret report.”

  Doctor Ferguson’s face crumpled in on itself; the face of a man trying to hide a self-satisfied smirk because it might not be appropriate.

  There was no hope anymore. She knew she was lost.

  “You have a recurring dream in which you are trying to prevent your maternal grandmother, Deirdre Foster, committing suicide by throwing herself under a train. Is that right?”

  She gripped the wheelchair armrests. Everything she said put another brick in place and cemented the wall that would imprison her.

  “But surely you know that your maternal grandmother didn’t die in 1959. She gave birth to a daughter in 1960. Her name was Lorna Foster. Your mother. If your grandmother had killed herself in 1959, you wouldn’t be here.”

  Rachel stared at her lap, holding it all in, refusing to let anything out.

  He seemed to sense she would say nothing more and pressed a button on his desk. A pair of burly orderlies came in and wheeled her away down the long corridor. She heard screams and moans and the noises grew louder and louder till they reached a corridor of isolation cells.

  They wheeled her into one of them, a padded cell, and swiftly unhooked the straps that held her wrists and ankles in place. She was emptied out and collapsed, her feet all pins and needles, unable to stand.

  The door slammed shut and she was alone and knew she would never get out of here again.

  — 25 —

  SHE LAY ON THE COLD canvas for a while and tried to sleep. If she slept, she might get back to the station and maybe find a way to escape this place. But she couldn’t sleep.

  The floor was hard and irritating. She had always thought padded cells would be made of soft leather, but this was canvas stuffed with horsehair and painted white. It felt rough against her skin.

  She’d also always thought they put you in a strait-jacket. But now she realized that didn’t make sense. A padded cell was enough to keep you from harming yourself until you’d calmed down and could go back to the general wards.

  Someone was screaming in the next cell and slapping their body against the wall. Then they quietened down and she could think clearly about how to get out of this mess, but just when she thought she might be able to sleep, they started screaming again, running at the walls and slamming against the horsehair-stuffed canvas.

  In the moments of silence, she thought about what Mitch had tried to tell her. Did she have control over this? If there was no touchstone, if it was all her own doing — if she were the touchstone — could she think her way out of this cell?

  She closed her eyes and slowed her breathing, trying to imagine herself back to all the times she’d passed through to another time, trying to feel exactly how it felt, to taste it and smell it. She screwed her eyes up, tried to will herself out of there, and ended up with nothing but a migraine. It was no use. She could no more control it than she could make Winson Green Insane Asylum rise up from the ground and fly across Birmingham like an airship.

  Had they given her something to keep her awake? She felt her heart racing. So far from sleep.

  She remembered the first time she’d gone back in time, to 1912, when mad Mr Parker had tried to kill his daughter. She’d tried to let him do it, when Danny had intervened to save her. She’d wanted it to happen, because it had happened and it seemed wrong to change it just because you could. And she’d been right. Danny had prevented Mr Parker from murdering his daughter and it had somehow wiped out Rachel’s life.

  She’d been right to stop it, but now she was exactly where Mr Parker had ended up. She laughed. Then stopped herself. Crazy people laughed. Mr Parker had probably laughed. Possibly in this same cell. He’d died in this asylum and how fitting it was that she’d ended up here too.

  She would die here, her existence a terrifying round of days in the asylum where he’d died, and nightmare nights at King Heath station being stalked by his psychopathic ghost.

  The light died slowly. A high window, impossible to reach, told her night had fallen. She couldn’t sleep.

  She ran over in her mind the research she’d looked up in the Central Library archives on Edwardian treatments for syphilis. The fits, heightened states and delusions, were most often treated with Calomel, a mercury compound that caused the exact same symptoms it was supposed to cure until it drove him to his death. Surely they were more enlightened now? Surely they wouldn’t be pumping her with drugs that would drive her insane when she never had been?

  She fell asleep.

  Screaming woke her. And the slapping of limbs against a padded cell wall.

  She had slept and not gone to the station.

  Could she be totally trapped here? Was this the end of it all?

  It was cold. She climbed to her feet, knees aching, sore, and paced around, rubbing her arms. A shaft of blue moonlight shone through the window, mocking her. She walked around in circles till she felt warmer. An owl cried out from somewhere in the night.

  The cell door creaked.

  The door was open. Only slightly. She walked over. Was someone coming in? She craned her neck to see.

  A slit of empty corridor. No one in sight. Had they forgotten to lock it all this time and she hadn’t noticed?

  She pushed it further open, slowly, trying to make sure it didn’t creak anymore. No one there. But was it a test? Were they observing her? Was someone waiting behind the door to pounce on her, drag her back inside, playing a sick game to raise her hopes and crush them?

  She leaned out of the door and took a quick peek behind it. The entire corridor was empty. This was it. She could get out. All she had to do was find a door to the grounds and run for the gates and be away. She could walk across the city under cover of night, back to Moseley and the touchstone. Down the canals. No one would see her there.

  She was already trying to map out the correct cross-city canal route as she crept down the blue-lit corridor, her bare feet making no sound on the marble floor.

  The corridor seemed to be an isolation ward for difficult inmates, secluded from the rest. She wondered which way she was facing and how to get to the front of the building again.

  A door slammed and echoed, a woman’s footsteps click-clacking towards her.

  Rachel pressed herself behind a marble pillar, willing herself thinner. The footsteps passed and echoed away. When they had faded, she crept out and padded onwards.

  The corridor changed. She must have been in one of the original Edwardian parts of the building, not the modern additions. She saw Doctor Ferguson’s name on a door. This must have been the way she’d come. She was wondering if she should sneak into his office and try to get out through his window — there had been a window, hadn’t there? — when she heard footsteps again, rushing towards her. A man’s.

  She had no time to think. She ducked into Doctor Ferguson’s office and closed the door behind her, almost kissing it closed.

  The footsteps rushed on down the corridor.

  She breathed again and turned to find the window. Doctor Ferguson was sitting in a pool of light at his desk.

  “Mental state on admission,” he said. “Memory very bad. Restless, unsettled and confused.”

  He hadn’t seen her. She stared at him from the darkness. Was she even here in the same time as him? Was she a ghost?

  He was speaking into a shell that was attached by a pipe to a walnut box in which a cylinder rotated. The window was behind him and she could see moonlit lawns and freedom.

  “Statement to commissioners. He is confused and deluded.”

  She thought to open the door again and sneak out into the corridor, hoping he wouldn’t hear her. She could try the next office along. But she realized suddenly that he couldn’t see her. Was she dr
eaming? Had she transported herself through time or space somehow, just as Mitch had told her she could?

  “For example,” continued Doctor Ferguson, “he tells me he is a teenage girl named Rachel who is living in the year two-thousand-and-thirteen, and is time travelling to various years in order to correct some kind of temporal anomaly.”

  Her hand fell from the brass doorknob, suddenly limp, bloodless.

  “At other times he fully admits he runs a small Chartered Accountants’ business in present day 1912 Birmingham and has been admitted to our hospital due to attacking his own daughter.”

  She turned and slipped back against the cold wall, her legs buckling under her. This wasn’t happening. This couldn’t be happening.

  “His paranoid delusion is highly detailed. For instance, when he is the girl, he talks convincingly of fantastical future events — which to her are the past — such as a great war with Germany in the 1940s during which the city of Birmingham is bombed from the air, or a football World Cup tournament, again with a final battle against Germany, during the 1960s, when the city is being rebuilt with outlandish new structures.”

  The floor became quicksand under her and just before she slid into blackness she knew that she wasn’t in 1959 or 2013 or any other time. She was in Winson Green Insane Asylum in 1912.

  And she was Richard Parker.

  — 26 —

  SHE WAS ON THE PLATFORM again. The shock of ice on her bare feet. She was standing on the platform in her asylum smock, the fog swirling angrily around her.

  Parker was whistling.

  She peered through the mist and saw his outline in the blackness. He was standing close to the rest room entrance, just standing there, whistling, leaning on his cane. His bowler-hatted head turned and saw her.

  “I’m not you!” she shouted. “I’m Rachel Hines! I’m not a figment of your insane mind!”

  He stopped whistling and came at her, hobbling swiftly.

  She ran for the footbridge, slipping on the ice that burned the soles of her feet. Her ankles had already turned blue. She skittered over the bridge as he was plodding up the steps. Somehow she ran without slipping.

  She was going to run right up the platform and out through the opposite exit, keep on running till she got to the touchstone in St Mary’s graveyard and pray that it worked. But she saw the outline of Sergeant Webster just as he turned to see her, pointing his torch at her.

  The stationmaster’s hut. If Mitch was in there he would help her.

  She skipped up the steps, legs stiff with cold and barrelled through the flimsy door, shoving the chairs and table against the door, barricading herself in.

  Richard Parker hobbled up the platform towards her, the unmistakable click of his cane on the ice, crawling like a three-legged insect.

  The radio was playing Mack the Knife but the wood-burner was dead and cold, the room lit only by moonlight. Her breath panted out of her and formed clouds around her face. Where was Mitch? Where was Mrs Hudson? Why couldn’t they come and help her?

  She fell to the floor, hugging her knees, tears falling down her face. Please let me go home. I want this to end.

  Parker’s face blocked out the moonlight and formed a shadow on the wall. His voice leered through the glass.

  “I have to kill you, Rachel Hines. Don’t you see? I have to cut you out of my mind. Then I’ll be cured. That’s what the doctor says.”

  He wasn’t real, she told herself. He was another ghost she’d summoned up. This was a mirage. A place in her mind where all her deepest fears lived.

  Or was it a place in Richard Parker’s mind? Was she just one of his split personalities? A dream of a madman dying in an Edwardian asylum.

  “I’m not a part of you!” she screamed. “Leave me alone!”

  He shuffled around the hut and pushed at the door.

  She leaned against the pile of chairs and the table, determined he wouldn’t push through.

  The radio crackled and a voice replaced the music. Doctor Ferguson’s voice.

  He is very indignant at being kept here and is always asking that his memory should be tested. He is, in fact, exceedingly confused, for example, when asked when he was admitted, he says ‘Tuesday’, although five minutes previously the fact of his coming on a Saturday afternoon had been discussed. He is very pale and his bodily health poor.

  “No!” she screamed. “That’s not me! I’m not him!”

  She covered her ears. She had escaped to the station only to fall into a trap. How could she get out of this nightmare — trapped in a ghost dream, haunted by a false reality that no longer existed?

  Parker shoved at the door, again and again and again. There seemed to be no method to it. He pushed at it each time expecting it to give; a mad man stuck in a repetitive reflex, pushing at the door again and again and again.

  After what felt like hours, he stopped. She took her hands from her ears. The radio was playing music again. Had he gone? She got to her feet and peered out at the station through the cloudy window.

  The station was dead.

  The fog had cleared a little but only the moon lit the opposite platform. There was no sign or sound of Parker. Nothing moved.

  She couldn’t stop her body shuddering violently. It is only the cold. It is not Richard Parker having a fit in his padded cell. I am here and I am cold.

  She heard footsteps on the opposite platform. A man in a black suit strolled up to the rest room window and peered inside. It wasn’t Parker. His suit was slimmer, sharper. She thought for a moment of joy that it might be Charlie, then she saw the petrol can in his hand and the cigarette glowing in his mouth.

  He turned and looked right at her. The cigarette glowed.

  Then he headed for the footbridge.

  She listened to his footsteps cross the bridge and walk right up to the hut. She tried to stop breathing.

  He peered through the glass and looked into her soul and she recognized him. It was Bernie Powell.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” he said.

  She shrank back from the window, shaking her head.

  “You’re not real,” she said. “You’re a gangster from 1966. We put you in prison. You can’t be here.”

  He lifted the petrol can and unscrewed the cap, his cigarette glowing fiercely in his mouth, smoke curling around his face.

  “I don’t believe in you!” she screamed. “Go away!”

  The petrol was sloshing all over the hut, smearing the window. She could smell it, cloying, suffocating. No, not like this. I don’t want to die like this.

  A voice from down the platform shouted, “Oy! Put that light out!”

  Bernie Powell smirked and took a last drag on his cigarette. He stepped back from the hut, took the cigarette from his mouth and flicked it. It glowed in the cold air as it flew towards her.

  Then there was nothing but amber flames.

  — 27 —

  SHE STRUGGLED AND WRITHED as her body burned, desperate feral panic, trying to break free. Voices shouting at her. She screamed and screamed, blinded by flames.

  Cold air hit her. Blue light all around.

  She was in the padded cell. Hands holding her down, dragging her inside. She fought against them. Scratching, kicking, biting. The big man, the orderly, flinched as she scratched his face. A moment of shock and then he slapped her hard across the jaw. It stung and she reeled, stunned, her face numb and burning.

  The door slammed and she was alone.

  She sobbed in a heap on the floor. She was in the padded cell again, trapped in Richard Parker’s mind again. But she had escaped the burning station master’s hut. She lay for a long time, panting, trying to recover her mind, but her feet were still icy cold and her whole body bruised and she could still smell singed hair.

  If she fell asleep again would she be straight back into the flames to burn alive? Was this Richard Parker’s death, writhing violently in his padded cell as he was burned alive?

  Am I him now? Is this me? What is me?
>
  She lifted her hand and stared at it in the blue moonlight. It was her own hand, a girl’s hand.

  I am not him. I exist.

  She lay on the padded floor for a long time, humming to herself, scared of sleep. There was a blanket in the corner of her room. She wrapped it around herself and curled up in the corner, shivering.

  She could see no way out. She had no energy to fight anymore.

  The cell door creaked open.

  She didn’t look up. They could be bringing her food or coming to inject her with something to make her sleep or stay awake. She didn’t care anymore.

  A hand gripped her shoulder and shook her.

  She curled up tighter in her blanket. Maybe if she shut her eyes tight and ignored them they would go away. Maybe it would all disappear. Maybe this was what Mitch had tried to tell her. She could make it all disappear and wake up on Charlie’s old sofa back in 1966, or in 2013 in that life without her father.

  The hand shook her again.

  “Wake up, Rachel.”

  A woman’s voice. One of the nurses. At least she’d called her by her name, not Parker’s. That was something.

  “Come on, Rachel. I don’t have much time. I need to get you out of here.”

  She flinched awake and stared at the girl’s face in the dark. It took her several heartbeats to work out who it was.

  The redhead who’d tried to talk to her at the university demonstration. The girl she’d seen back in 1966 with Danny, and in 2012 working at the Central Library. She was dressed like one of the nurses but it was unmistakably Kath Bright.

  “I know you.”

  “And I know you,” said Kath.

  Rachel gripped her suddenly. “Tell me I’m not him. Tell me I’m not just part of a mad man’s mind.”

  “Of course you’re bloody not. You’re Rachel Hines from 2013. I’ve met you. I’ve handed you fiche records at the Central Library.”

  Rachel cried with relief. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  Kath dragged her to her knees. “Now we need to get you out of here. Are you listening?”