Touchstone Season One- Complete Box Set

by Andy Conway

  “What is it?” asked Rachel.

  “I’m a silly old woman,” said Mrs Hudson. “But don’t hold it against me. I’m just naturally cautious. And I’m scared. Especially after what happened to...”

  She stopped herself. Again the quick glance at Mitch, who nodded.

  “What is it?”

  “There are abilities that, er, become apparent,” said Mitch. “We don’t know what they are, but we’ve seen them. And they seem to be different with each person. My own personal theory is—”

  “And it is just a theory,” said Mrs Hudson.

  “Is that the old myths and legends are constantly being replayed in human form. As if they are fields of energy, and we’re becoming their conductors. That mad man killing women with a hammer is Thor; that girl haunting graveyards like a rejected lover is a Lidérc, a succubus.”

  He gestured hopelessly, embarrassed. It sounded like a foolish theory out loud.

  “Are you saying we’re... gods?” said Rachel.

  “No. Maybe. I don’t know. These things we call gods are ancient, primal forces, and sometimes they might inhabit a human. And then that human has to choose if they want to become a god or just remain their human self.”

  “I want my old life back,” said Rachel. “I want it all back to before this happened. I don’t want to be a god or a goddess.”

  “Let’s hope you get to make that choice,” said Mitch.

  Rachel chewed her thumb, her eyes glazed over, staring into the past. “Danny is Szélkirály,” she said.

  “What’s sail key rye?” asked Mrs Hudson.

  “Oh. I’m sorry. It’s Hungarian. A lovely chap in 1934 said it to me. A lovely chap who died. Szélkirály is from Hungarian mythology. He’s the Wind King. Danny unleashed a tornado in the Kingsway cinema in 1934. I saw it. It came from his fingers. It was terrifying. I think he did it again at the concert, backstage. Do you remember how there was a gale blowing that night? I think he’d learned to control it by then.”

  Again, that look passed between Mrs Hudson and Mitch. She didn’t know what it was, but she could see there was fear in it.

  “I don’t know what it is with Kath, but she seems to be able to control your mind somehow. Make you do things you don’t want.”

  “What did she do?”

  Rachel shook her head. “With me it’s fire. I sent Danny through time, made him disappear. I think I might have burned the cinema down as well. I don’t know what it is, but I keep having this dream where I’m standing at the foot of a volcano and it’s about to burst and the lava is rushing towards me and I can’t do anything to stop it...”

  She held out her palm and barely had to concentrate, it came so easily. A flame sputtered to life in her hand and lit the room. She snapped it out and sought their faces, scared they’d think her a freak.

  “The thing that really scares me,” she said, “is that all those people who die in those nightclub fires in London, the same night I’m there in Birmingham...”

  “I’ve told you,” said Mitch. “You can’t stop that.”

  “I know, but what if I caused it?”

  “How could you?” said Mrs Hudson, waving it away with a flutter of her hands.

  “I started a fire in 1934, and the same cinema burned down eighty years later. Who knows how it works? Who knows what I am?”

  Mitch looked at Mrs Hudson. Mrs Hudson cleared her throat.

  “There were others who didn’t survive what happened to you, Rachel.” Her glance fell on the cluster of framed photographs on the wall. “There was another one of us.”

  Rachel walked over and stared at the photo. A teenage boy, beautiful, with a shock of blonde hair. Caught, surprised, laughing to someone just beyond the camera.

  “Kieron Fickley,” said Mrs Hudson. “Such a lovely boy.”

  “What happened to him?”

  Mrs Hudson looked at Mitch. Mitch looked at his lap.

  “The same thing that happened to you. He was unmade. Unborn. He disappeared. And there was nothing we could do to bring him back again.”

  “But when it happened to me, I just carried on,” said Rachel.

  “That’s why you’re so special,” said Mitch.

  “But I’m not special,” she said. “I just discovered some crazy time portal by accident. In fact, it wasn’t even me who discovered it. It was Danny!”

  “There is no touchstone, Rachel,” said Mitch. “You’re the touchstone.”

  “But it was Danny who found it before me. I just followed him. What does that make him?”

  “It wasn’t really him at all,” said Mitch. “It was your power that sent him to the past before you.”

  Rachel shook her head.

  “Your ability plays all sorts of tricks on your conscious mind to make it seem simple to you; to explain it to you. It’s such an extraordinary ability that it would fry your mind if you thought it was you.”

  “It’s not me,” she whispered.

  “It will make you think a gravestone is your portal to the past...”

  She shook her head.

  “It will make you think it exists entirely independently of you...”

  She shook her head.

  “It will make you think that some boy for whom you feel an attraction is the one who found it, not you.”

  “No!” she cried.

  “Rachel, my love,” said Mrs Hudson, “You know it’s true.”

  “I’m no different to either of you, or Kath, or Danny. I just found it.”

  Mitch came to her and put his hands on her shoulders. She was surprised to see tears rolling down his face. Of course, he was an empath. He felt her pain like it was his own.

  “Rachel, when I said you are the touchstone, I didn’t mean the touchstone was an ability that could be found inside us all. A few of us have that ability. We can all shift through time and our minds tend to make us externalize it to a particular place, like your gravestone, your touchstone—”

  “And Kath’s Dovecote.”

  “But you have something else too. You have an ability greater than all of us. Greater than me, Mrs Hudson, Danny, Kath, all of us. You’re special, Rachel. You are the touchstone.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” she moaned.

  “None of us know what it means,” said Mrs Hudson.

  “Yet,” Mitch added.

  Mrs Hudson stood up suddenly. “And we may never find out. You’re going to 1980, and if you do what you have to, get your life back, and only that, perhaps you’ll be normal again and whatever ability you have will be gone.”

  “That’s why she should stay,” said Mitch.

  Mrs Hudson took her arms, as if to protect her from him.

  “Just think about it. It’s her destiny. It might all go if she returns to her old life.”

  “But I want my old life back,” said Rachel.

  “You didn’t,” said Mitch. “For the past few weeks you’ve been avoiding it. I’ve felt it. There’s a part of you that doesn’t want to go back to being Rachel Hines, the normal girl in 2014, the History student who lives with her dad and nan, the girl who’s nothing special.”

  “But I do want my dad again,” she said.

  “And lose what you are? Lose this power you have?”

  “Mitch. Leave her,” said Mrs Hudson.

  Mitch waved a weak hand. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to confuse you. I just feel your own confusion.”

  “Are you saying I don’t want my dad back?”

  “I’m saying you want that volcano to burst. In your dream, maybe the volcano represents what’s inside you. Maybe you are the volcano? The power you have is bursting out of you and you want it to happen.”

  “I don’t.”

  “You don’t know what it is, but there’s a part of you that wants to know,” he said.

  She remembered the old Hungarian man in the Jewish social club in 1934, explaining to her what Henry had called her.

  “Délibáb means mirage. I don’t kn
ow why he would say that to you. Perhaps he think you are not real?”

  She nodded and tried to smile. “Perhaps I misheard him.”

  “Oh, Délibáb is also a character. From the mythologia. She was a mortal girl. The Wind King loved her but she didn’t love him. She loved his brother, the Sun King.”

  Was she Délibáb? A mirage? The mortal girl who could be the Sun Queen?

  “She wants to go home,” said Mrs Hudson. “She needs to, and she deserves to, the poor girl.”

  She hugged Rachel to her breast.

  “I’m sorry,” said Mitch. “Of course she has to do that.”

  Mrs Hudson held her out at arms’ length and smiled brightly. “Let’s get you back to 1980, before he talks you out of it.”

  “Now?”

  “You brought your case and you’re dressed for it, so no point waiting any longer.”

  Mitch stood up with a sigh. “Do you have a photo or something from that year? Something to use as a tracer?”

  “Can’t I just go to the touchstone and find my way there?”

  “Might not work.”

  “It’s me doing it, not the stone. You said. So if I decide to go there, surely I’ll end up there?”

  “Well,” said Mrs Hudson, “because it’s the thing you want most of all, it’s perhaps the thing you fear most too?”

  “We’ll send you there,” said Mitch. “Just to be on the safe side.”

  “Aren’t you coming?”

  Again that look passed between them.

  “You said you’d help me in 1980 if I helped you in 1934.”

  “We can’t go,” said Mrs Hudson. “I’m afraid we’re at the end of it all. I know I’m no use to anyone any more, and Mitch. Well, look at him. He’s like an old carthorse who’s only good for glue.”

  “Thanks.”

  “So I’m on my own?” said Rachel.

  She nodded, steeling herself. Of course, it made sense. She was supposed to be more powerful than either of them. Why did she need an old lady and an exhausted middle-aged man?

  “I’m sorry,” said Mitch. “You’re on your own.”

  Rachel reached inside her handbag and riffled through her stack of old photographs. She pulled out the one of her parents to be: Martyn and Lorna smiling together, lounging in some bedsit, brown flock wallpaper behind them, Martyn with his arm over her shoulder, some albums spread out beside them on the bed, a lava lamp on a table to the side.

  On the back it said Martyn and Lorna, Aug. 1980.

  “Will this do?”

  “Looks perfect,” said Mitch. “Pick up your case.”

  She reached out for it, held it, like she was waiting on a platform for a train, and the photo was her ticket. Mitch pulled a brown envelope from his jacket pocket and shoved it into her handbag.

  “You’ll need that.”

  She nodded, knowing it would contain money, and snapped her handbag shut.

  “It has the key to this flat too. That’s where you’re living.”

  Mitch placed his hands on her shoulders from behind. Mrs Hudson took her arms. Rachel stood with her handbag over her shoulder, suitcase in one hand, photograph in the other.

  “I feel silly,” she said.

  “Just concentrate on the photo. That time.”

  She was worried suddenly that she would get a fit of the giggles.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t think I can do—”

  All four corners of the room folded in on themselves and popped her into the middle of a crowd. There was a stink of cheap perfume and dry ice and she was in 1980.

  — 10 —

  SOMEONE PUSHED HER and she stumbled, almost dropping the suitcase. She thought it was Mitch, at first, but Mitch wasn’t there. And Mrs Hudson had been replaced by a girl in a wedding dress that was slashed and hitched up, showing off an entire white-stockinged leg and most of her knickers. Her eyes were painted black and were glaring at Rachel.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  The girl in the wedding dress carried on dancing to the ear-splitting music that shook the room.

  She was in the middle of a dance floor. Bodies were moving to the beat in the white smoke all around her, dressed in a wide variety of costumes.

  The girl in the wedding dress was dancing with a guy in a top hat and tails, who could have been from 1888 if it weren’t for the black lipstick and stark white foundation plastering his face. Another boy was dressed as a German explorer, with a white rope wrapped round his torso and an ice pick dangling from his waist. There were girls in black veils, with long cigarette holders and silk gloves; extras from a Hollywood forties noir movie; a guy in a pith helmet; a woman dressed like Ali Baba; plaid and puffy shirts and ruffles and frills everywhere.

  She was at a New Romantic night. I Travel was blasting out a barrage of laser bolts and handclaps. A few people stared at her. She was a woman in a 1940s suit with a pillbox hat, carrying a suitcase. But they looked her up and down and then looked elsewhere. In any other era, it would be an unusual get up for a nightclub, but here it was fine. A little out there, but fine. You could have come from pretty much any era and looked at home here, as long as it was stylish.

  She pushed through the crowd, trying to get her bearings in the clouds of dry ice, and found the edge of the dance floor. It was a dark upstairs room. A Victorian pub. The Hare & Hounds, she realized.

  She felt the wall against her back, trying to get her bearings, panicked by the crowd of bodies all around, choking. It was smoke. Not the dry ice. Everyone was smoking.

  She wanted to run; find the way out and run, but she stood frozen, clutching the handle of her suitcase, scared to move. This was not like coming through the touchstone where you could have a few moments to get your bearings, emerging into pretty much the same environment. This was a shock. She would get over it in a moment. If she could just stay here and stay still.

  She saw her father.

  Martyn walked past her. Not the dad she knew but the younger version of him: the boy on her photos. He looked her up and down and moved on. This was her chance. The Martyn who would one day be her father was this boy. She only had to make sure he ended up with Lorna Foster and not Esther Parker, and then Rachel could be born and get her life back.

  She unpeeled her body from the safety of the wall and pushed through the crowd, chasing him, the suitcase knocking legs as she shoved through. He was walking out to the corridor, pushing through the door.

  She was trapped in the crush of bodies. Couldn’t breathe. She was going to lose him. She barged through, ignoring shouts and curses, and tottered and fainted right against him.

  She was aware of voices around her, arms that pulled her, lifted her, the dank smell of toilets, someone patting her face gently.

  Her eyes blinked open to find herself sitting on a toilet, the cubicle door open. Her case by her side. Two faces were staring up at her.

  “Are you all right?”

  Martyn was one. There were a handful of men behind him, all doing their make-up, fighting over a tiny wall mirror. She was in the Gents.

  “You fainted.”

  There was a girl too, kneeling by Martyn, dressed in a blue chiffon nightie, black cape tied provocatively at her neck, heaving bosom, waves of luxuriant blonde hair: a vampire countess. They were both squeezed into the cubicle with her. She felt relief that she wasn’t the only girl in the Gents. None of the men seemed at all perturbed by her being there.

  “No wonder you fainted in that fur coat,” said the girl. “What’s your name?”

  “Rachel,” she said, trying to focus, desperately hoping she wouldn’t puke.

  “I’m Martyn. You’re all right.”

  The vampire countess looked at him with sudden curiosity. “Martyn Hines?”

  “Yeah,” he said, surprised.

  “No way,” she said. “I thought I recognized you.” Her face was covered in black make-up. “It’s me. Esther Parker.”

  They had forgotten she was there now. She sat with
them crouched at her knee, trying to focus, realizing she’d done the last thing she wanted to do.

  “Esther Parker? You kidding? Haven’t seen you in years!”

  “You must have been ten!”

  “Oh God,” said Rachel.

  “You okay?” said Martyn. “You’re not gonna puke are ya?”

  Esther ignored her. “This is so weird. If it wasn’t for this girl falling on top of me...”

  One of the men doing their make-up gave Rachel a look and nodded approvingly. “Suitcase. Nice.”

  “Maybe it’s fate,” said Esther, still gazing at Martyn.

  I really am going to be sick now, thought Rachel.

  The door to the Gents swung open and a guy with bleach blonde spiked hair leaned in.

  “Martyn! We’re on. Come on!”

  “All right,” said Martyn. “In a minute.”

  “Now!” shouted the guy, before running off.

  “I’ve gotta go onstage,” said Martyn.

  “You’re in the band?” Esther crowed, with mock surprise.

  “Yeah. Stay and watch.” He turned to Rachel again. “You gonna be all right, Rachel?”

  He’d remembered her name. That was nice. She nodded.

  “Gotta go,” he said, and ran out.

  Esther looked her over, standing up. “You’re all right. Thanks for that. Did me a favour there.”

  She laughed and flounced out.

  The men doing their make-up were all staring at her now.

  She snatched up the suitcase and pushed through them, tears filling her eyes, stupid, stupid, stupid, bouncing along the tiled wall of the corridor and falling into the Ladies.

  “Damn it!” she shouted, tears rolling down her face. She had come to keep Esther Parker away from her father but had pushed her into his arms.

  Someone was sniffling. A girl. Rachel turned and wiped her face, embarrassed.

  “You too, eh?” The girl was laughing, but she was crying too.

  Rachel turned to look: a brunette with gorgeous eyes and sculpted cheekbones. She was dressed as a sort of punk ballerina. A friendly face. She recognized her instantly.

  It was her mother.

  Rachel tried to answer, but she could only stare. It was her mother. This is what she looked like in the flesh, not frozen in a photograph or a blurred memory.