Touchstone Season One- Complete Box Set

by Andy Conway

  Then everything was white and he was standing on gravel. He stumbled, terrified he was going the same way as Wegs, but it was a rail sleeper he tripped over.

  He was on a train track. White fog everywhere. Cold. The faint outline of a platform and a hut beyond it.

  The rails hummed beneath him.

  He stood frozen as a blast of wind parted the sheet of fog and a train came hurtling out of the mist towards him.

  He had no time to scream.

  There was no one to hear it, anyway.

  — 2 —

  RACHEL TRIED TO KEEP her hand steady as the thick, black make-up coated her eyelids. Her hand trembled more and more lately, she noticed. She poured another Bacardi and Coke. Something to steady the nerves.

  She felt the warm, hazy fog fill her head and grinned at her face in the mirror. She looked like Siouxsie Sioux. Very gothic. She reached out instinctively for the iPod and shuffled forward to Paradise Place, cutting Bowie’s Be My Wife dead. The furry driving beat filled the room. Furry. That was how to describe it. The guitars sounded furry.

  She admired her face, plastered in make-up, and her brown hair, bleached with Mallen streaks and sculpted into a quiff. Very 1980s does 1940s. She posed side on, pouted, and admired her face some more. She admired her face for the whole song.

  The Model came on after and she danced in the middle of the room, drinking her Bacardi and coke, dancing that 1980s club dance she’d seen on New Romantic music videos on YouTube. It was a strange rhythm and had taken her a while to get used to, but after a few weeks, she had found she couldn’t remember dancing any other way. It had become her natural rhythm.

  When Today I Died Again started, she slumped on the sofa, tired and light-headed. She felt annoyed suddenly. She massaged the sharp pain that throbbed in her forehead and wondered if she should wipe her make-up off, throw off her Katherine Hamnett parachute silk dress and fall into bed.

  She went to the kitchen and found the Nurofen in the bottom drawer. Her eyes fell on the pile of photographs splayed on the work surface.

  She swallowed the tablets with the Bacardi and Coke and spread the photos on the sideboard.

  Today I died again, I died again today...

  She swept aside the photos of her grandparents and great-grandparents: Mary Lewis, Winnie Hines, Olive, everything from before the 1980s, leaving a handful of her parents as teenagers.

  She stared at them as if she’d never seen them before, never looked at them for hours.

  Her dad, Martyn Hines, absurdly small and baby-faced, with a wedged fringe falling over half of his face, wearing a cricket jumper and a bow tie, posing against someone’s living room wall during a party. His eyes looked strangely dark. Was he wearing mascara?

  Her mum, Lorna Foster, frozen forever as a brown-haired teenager with high cheekbones, big hair and the same Katherine Hamnett parachute silk dress, at the gig where they first kissed.

  She flipped the photo over and read in blue ink: Lorna. Cedar Club (Ultravox). 15 Aug 1980. Her mother would be there and she would be wearing this same dress, which Rachel had ordered online from PomPom Vintage in Connecticut, along with a giant leopardskin fur coat whose collar turned up into a hood. The coat made her look like a New Romantic princess, and the dress was the dress in the photo of her mum she’d had her whole life. It had only occurred to her after she’d bought it that it was the actual dress, because she was going to go to 1980 and make sure her mother and father had their first kiss. She was going to go there and give her mother the dress.

  Some day. Soon.

  It made her laugh and want to scream. She was nothing but a plaything of malicious gods with nothing better to do. They had mapped it all out for her.

  When she was drunk like this, she wanted to sabotage it all, to refuse to return to 1980, spoil it, show them she would not conform to their plan. Whoever they were.

  The frightening thought was there was no one out there at all. No pattern to it.

  Her dad had told her little — rarely willing to talk about it — but she knew they had been old childhood friends, reunited in 1980, their romance kindled at that concert her dad had once talked about.

  He had rarely talked about her mum. Cancer had taken her when Rachel was four. But sometimes a song would come on the radio — always an old ’80s song, usually something electronic or new wave — and it would stop him dead. Once it had been Japan’s All Tomorrow’s Parties, and another time she’d found him wiping a tear away to Joy Division’s Atmosphere.

  But he would never tell her anything. Would laugh and move on, always putting on a brave face, getting on with life. Which was probably the only thing he could do: a man with a dead wife and a little girl to bring up.

  She had collected the memories, dug the records out of his vinyl collection, played them when he wasn’t in the house — listened to every note, looking for her mother somewhere in the shimmering chords.

  But she’d never found her.

  Nothing beyond the vaguest of memories: a blur of Christmas morning and a watercolour impression of her mother’s face, smiling to her.

  She collected the photos in a neat stack, swept them into her handbag and drained her Bacardi and Coke.

  She didn’t want to go. But the painkillers would work soon and her headache would be forgotten. Just like her mother.

  On her way out, she paused at the photo on the wall: a dapper suited man with glasses, the young girl in her black dress, a picnic in the Lickey Hills. England had won the World Cup, Amy Parker had been buried in St. Mary’s churchyard, and the man in the photo had sort of proposed to her.

  Charlie.

  She had said goodbye to him in 1934. Said goodbye to him for the last time.

  She felt the keening voice in the pit of her stomach. You can go back to him. Pick a year. Any year. Go find him. Go live with him.

  She laughed bitterly and shook her head.

  You can’t stay where you don’t belong...

  It wasn’t what she was supposed to do. She was supposed to find a way back to 1980 and make sure her parents fell in love. She was supposed to get back to the life where she’d been born to Martyn Hines and Lorna Foster.

  She wasn’t sure she wanted to do that either.

  She staggered and had to steady herself, hand to the wall. She was a wreck. She giggled and said, “I’m so drunk!”

  “Then stop.”

  She wheeled round, scanning the room, shrinking into a defensive crouch.

  There was no one there.

  She’d heard a voice.

  Had she heard a voice?

  She was drunk. She must be hearing things. Her heart raced and she held onto the wall for a while, breathing slowly, trying to calm herself.

  There was no one there. But she couldn’t shake off the feeling that someone was watching her, someone always standing just behind her, just out of her eye line. It had happened so many times recently.

  She wondered if the place was haunted. Perhaps it was Charlie. Maybe he was dead now, she thought. He must be. He’d be, what? Born in 1914. Oh God, he’d be a hundred years old.

  She laughed bitterly. Charlie had left her his apartment two years ago. He was obviously dead. Maybe his ghost was watching over her here. Maybe they could live together like that.

  “I’m so sorry, Charlie,” she said, as she pulled on her leopardskin coat, walked out and slammed the door.

  But there was no one there to hear it.

  — 3 —

  MITCH TAPPED AT THE glass pane of Mrs Hudson’s vintage clothing hire shop, peering through a gap beneath the CLOSED sign to the racks of costumes. Don’t call them ‘costumes’, he thought. She hates that. He shivered from the frost, the busy Moseley village rush hour traffic almost drowning out the evening bells from St. Mary’s.

  He stroked his waxed moustache tips, pulled his scarf tighter around his throat, coughed again, tried to calm himself. He’d been coughing his guts up all through winter. Two courses of antibiotics making
no difference to the dogged Time Flu he’d suffered ever since their 1934 mission.

  He was too old for this. He needed a long break in a hot place. A villa with a swimming pool, somewhere in the Med, and roasting hot sun all day to warm him through to his bones. He needed to lie on a lounger for a few weeks and be reborn.

  He pulled a tissue from his pocket and blew his nose.

  He normally recovered quickly. It was all taking it out of him so much he’d started thinking about Keats a lot. He was going to die like a Romantic poet, pining away on a velvet sofa, like The Death of Chatterton painting in the gallery in town.

  A volley of coughs racked his whole body and he staggered, tears streaming down his cold cheeks, his chest burning like he’d been shot.

  Time travel was killing him. Being an empath was like a course of radiation treatment. He needed a long holiday from other people’s emotions.

  He rapped the glass again.

  He could go right now, transport himself to a Mediterranean villa. It wouldn’t even need to be another time. It could be now. He could walk across the road and walk into the travel agents and pick up a brochure and use the photo of a villa that was vacant, and transport himself there right this minute.

  He smiled at the thought, wheezing, breathing carefully, trying not to cough again.

  The problem with travel brochures, though, was that the photographs of the villas bore little relation to the actual locations, so they were pretty useless to use as tracers. You could stare for hours at pictures of a beautiful villa and never arrive.

  Would the Med be warm enough? Maybe he needed the Caribbean? Maybe Australia?

  He folded his snotty tissue over and wiped the tears from his eyes with a clean patch.

  No, there was still work to do: still lives to be saved.

  Mrs Hudson shuffled to the door. He scooted in, relieved to find his face bathed with a flush of warmth.

  “Mitch,” she said. “You look awful.”

  “Thanks.”

  She walked over to the kettle, which was steaming and bubbling angrily. It clicked itself off.

  “Just in time,” she said.

  He noticed the packing cases and that half of the racks were empty, but he said nothing, just huddled by the kettle and watched her make a pot of tea. It was only after she had poured him a cup and he’d felt its warmth course through him that he nodded to the empty racks and said, “What happened? You’re packing away all your cos— clothes.”

  “I’m selling up,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Mitch. You’re more observant than that.”

  He noticed now how bad she looked; how old, how tired. He felt guilty for not noticing it, unable to see anything beyond his own illness. “But you’re—”

  “Old,” she said. “Very old. And very tired. I’ve had enough.”

  He wondered if she meant only the shop, or if it was their work too. He was afraid to ask.

  “Where will you go?”

  “I rather fancy Bournemouth. If it’s my time, I’d like to go with the sound of the sea in my ears.”

  He reached out and touched her hand. She looked up with surprise and smiled weakly. She was going to die soon. He could feel it in her bloodstream, in her aura. He felt it the way a normal person might sense that someone was sad, or annoyed, or depressed, without them saying anything. Just that feeling you got about someone. She was going to die very soon. She was ready for death.

  He wondered if he could take much more of other people’s sadness. It was killing him.

  Perhaps this was the escape he’d been longing for. It was over. Their work was finished. But it had finished with everything in pieces.

  They had policed the ruptures in time for years, noting each new person with abilities as they appeared. Sometimes they succeeded in co-opting them to their mission. Kath had been like that: a young, red-haired librarian who’d taken to their mission with enthusiasm. A sweet girl.

  Sometimes they’d failed. Nick Fenwick, an obsessed University professor, had been against them from the start, always fighting them, always trying to turn each new person with abilities against them.

  And then Rachel and Danny had appeared.

  Mitch stifled a bitter laugh. One good, one bad. It was almost as if they were destined to always either fall on one side or the other, in equal amounts. They would never win.

  “But we promised Rachel we’d help her,” he said. “It’s only fair. She helped you when you were in danger of being wiped out.”

  “I know what she did, Mitch, and I’m grateful.”

  “We can’t let her face Danny on her own. Not when he’s so dangerous.”

  Danny’s obsession with Amy Parker, the girl whose life he’d saved in 1912, had rippled through a century and cancelled out Rachel’s life. The poor girl had tried to find that moment when Amy Parker’s descendents had somehow prevented her from being born, and she’d finally tracked it down to Amy’s granddaughter — Esther Parker. In 1980, Esther was going to kiss Rachel’s father, Martyn, instead of Rachel’s mother, Lorna. Rachel’s parents would never come together, never marry, never have a baby girl called Rachel.

  “We can’t give up now,” he said. “You know what’s happening to Rachel. You know what she’s becoming.”

  “No, Mitch. I don’t. And neither do you.”

  “These powers she has. They’re growing. They’re greater than anything we’ve seen before.”

  “Then she’ll be able to look after herself.”

  “There’s Danny too. Look at what he’s becoming. He’s turned into a monster.”

  “Has he? I’m not sure. I didn’t know him before all of this. He might have been a nasty piece of work all along.”

  “And was Kath?”

  This stung the old woman. She didn’t answer. They both knew what a sweet girl Kath had been, and how she had so quickly turned into...

  What, exactly?

  Was it evil? Was it that simple?

  Mitch went to speak and caught the syllable on his tongue. Mrs Hudson had been dismissive of his theory. There was no point raising it again. His growing belief that they were all somehow re-enacting ancient myths; that the superheroes and gods of old were forces of energy forever swirling around the Earth and were merely finding an outlet through them, possessing them. Danny was some kind of wind god. Kath was a Lidérc. God knows what Rachel had become.

  “She’s not coming, is she,” said Mrs Hudson. It wasn’t a question.

  Mitch shook his head. “Kath?”

  Mrs Hudson chuckled bitterly. “I meant Rachel, actually.”

  The old woman pushed herself up, groaning with the effort, and gazed at the piles of boxes all around and the last of the vintage clothes hanging on racks. Mitch wondered if she’d even have the strength to finish packing them away; if she’d ever make it to Bournemouth.

  “Is this really the end of it all?” he asked.

  “I rather fear we have lost them both,” she said. “Kath and Rachel. Do you think I was harsh with them?”

  Mitch shrugged. “You could have been a bit nicer. To both of them.”

  “I realize that now.”

  “We’ll just have to mend things,” he said, trying to sound optimistic.

  “I really don’t think either of us have it in us,” she said. She turned and smiled at him and there was no bitterness in her at all. “Poor Rachel. She only wanted her life back.”

  “Then she should be here,” said Mitch. “She knows we can help her get her life back.”

  He noticed the thread of anger in his voice and knew that it was the anger of the harassed worker coming into the office with flu and moaning I shouldn’t even be here!

  “Perhaps she’s changed her mind?” said Mrs Hudson, searching his face for an answer.

  He shook his head. “No, she hasn’t.”

  Mrs Hudson smiled sadly. “You’re a great empath, Mitch,” she said. “But, strangely, that makes you a very bad liar.”

/>   — 4 —

  DANNY LOOKED BOTH WAYS before walking through the lychgate of St Mary’s and stealing round the back of the church to the graveyard.

  His breath frosted in a cloud around his face. A bright winter afternoon.

  She was there, sitting on the gravestone.

  Amy Parker.

  He halted and watched her for a moment, delighting in the sense of spying her alone.

  Her velvet gloved hands folded primly on her tweed skirted lap, her blonde hair falling around her shoulders, illuminated by the sinking sun behind her.

  What was this? he wondered. The late fifties. It must be.

  Yet she looked young: somewhere between the Amy Parker he’d seen in 1912 and 1934.

  Young and beautiful.

  She saw him and rose, uncertain, half waving a velvet hand.

  He walked to her, drinking her in, and smiled as she blushed and looked at her feet and clutched her brown leather handbag closer to her.

  What was this? he wondered.

  He rushed to her, nervous of his absurd grin. She scanned his face, only the faintest flicker of a smile breaking through her frown.

  Then she half closed her eyes as he took her in his arms and she succumbed to his lips on hers.

  Together again.

  He woke.

  The delicious fog of the dream lingered and he fought to stay in its grip, feeling it slip through his fingers like water.

  No, no, no. Not this time. That time. Go back to that time!

  Her face faded, the touch of her, the scent of her perfume, the taste of her lips.

  Music pounded from somewhere in the house and he knew it was Jessica, his student house mate. He was in his room. His student room in the present.

  He shut his eyes and tried to go back to Amy Parker, but she was gone. It was a dream. Nothing but a dream.

  He screamed and punched the pillow and threw it across the room. It hit his desk lamp and it smashed on the floor.