Touchstone Season One- Complete Box Set

by Andy Conway

  Torches. They were carrying flaming torches and they were coming to her.

  And from the cacophony of calls and chants came another sound: a lone guitarist picking off a repeated six-note melody as if learning it for the first time.

  And another guitar playing the same melody at twice the speed.

  And another at four times the speed.

  The slow melody was a simple refrain, the kind a child might pick out as they learned how to play, but something about hearing it played at three different speeds made it hypnotic, and she knew that this was the power that was inside her, the power that was overwhelming her, so complex and yet so simple, only just beyond the grasp of her still clumsy mind.

  The volcano groaned behind her, yawning, fire gushing down its giant cliff face, hurtling towards her.

  The village girls came running from the blackness, torch light flickering, chanting, singing, calling to her.

  And they were upon her, facing her, waving their torches at her, shouting at her, screaming, some of them crying. And she knew now that they feared her. They feared the volcano that was about to destroy them, and they thought she was the cause. They were offering her to the volcano. She would have to die, so the village could live.

  In her dream, the village girls had danced around a giant fire that protected them from the vast, dark plain that surrounded them. But now she was the fire, and they were offering her to the lava that flowed and hurtled towards them.

  The girls, in their embroidered folk dresses, dancing around her, singing at the night, crying, screaming, the music a blur all around her. Some of them fell to their knees, tears streaming down their faces, hands clasped in prayer, begging, pleading.

  They feared her.

  She was Délibáb, and they were begging her to save them from the volcano.

  She stared at their frightened faces, appalled, shaking her head.

  “No, I can’t. I’m just a normal village girl, like you.”

  They wailed and moaned.

  Thick, hot, golden, glowing lava hurtled towards them in a tsunami, a tidal wave of fire as tall as a church tower, lighting up the tears on their frightened faces.

  A lone man pushed through the line of girls, clad in indigo horse herdsman’s robes and a black tricorn hat, bent over a battered acoustic guitar, his fingers a blur on the fretboard, somehow playing all three melodies at once. She knew he must be the village elder. A wise man with a special message for her. And she knew he was also someone else.

  “Mitch,” she cried. “I want to go home!”

  He raised his face to her, still playing, and his keen eyes, lit by the glow of the advancing lava light, probed her soul. He opened his mouth and said, “But you are a goddess.”

  And she realized his fingers were now only picking out the simplest and slowest melody.

  The howl of pain that came from her reminded her of a pig being killed in the village when she was a girl. She had never been a girl in a village. She had been every girl in every village. The pig squealing its life out as its crimson blood ran from it like lava.

  This was not her own memory. She was not Délibáb. Yet she felt it. She knew it.

  She was a goddess.

  “I’m not Délibáb! I’m Rachel Hines!” she screamed.

  “You must choose,” he said.

  She shook her head. Being a goddess meant she saved the village, and could never be part of it. She looked at the cowering village girls. She didn’t want to hurt anyone, she didn’t want to strike fear into anyone. She wasn’t like Danny and Kath. She didn’t want this.

  The volcano wailed and she turned to face the ocean of fire that was hurtling towards her, hot on her face, like the blast from a furnace. She held her hand out and cried, “Don’t!”

  The tidal wave of white hot lava parted, as if met by an invisible force. It gushed on, all around them, surrounded the village girls, and as it pushed on, it lit up the village huts beyond, encircling, glowing white hot, ringing the village and flowing on down the plain, the village protected in a ring of light.

  The girls cried out, laughing, chattering, chanting.

  They didn’t want to throw her into the volcano, she realized. They wanted protection from it. She was a goddess.

  “I want to be a village girl,” she cried. “I want my Dad!”

  Mitch smiled, the giant wall of surrounding fire reflected in his eyes, and said, “You have chosen.”

  And night turned to day.

  Rachel cringed, awaiting the impact of fire, thinking the volcano had blown. The girls were no longer singing. Only a melody picked out on a guitar, simple and slow, fading off into the distance.

  It was day. Warm sunlight kissed her face.

  She was standing in the middle of a vast green plain that stretched to every horizon. There was no volcano. A gentle breeze caressed the long grasses. Bees mumbled in flower heads. Birds sang. Night had turned to day, and she knew that she had caused it.

  The man in the indigo horse herdsman’s robes was walking away, the guitar over his shoulder. The village had disappeared. There were no village girls. She couldn’t be certain, but she felt that this was before any village had been built here; before any humans had roamed this land.

  “Wait!” she cried.

  The man turned. It was Mitch’s face.

  “What is this?”

  He smiled but said nothing.

  “I want to go home.”

  The man nodded and seemed sad. “The choice is yours,” he said. “You can go home now.”

  Hope fluttered in her throat.

  “You can be the village girl again,” he said. “But you must know it cannot be forever.”

  She didn’t know why, but she felt the truth of it in her heart. Mitch had told her from the start what she could be. He had wanted her to choose the goddess, to be Délibáb, not go back to her old life with her father, the life where she’d been born, to be the normal girl who lived near the village.

  But he’d always told her she had a choice. And she knew that her choice — going back to what she was — would only be a temporary escape. She could go and live in the village. But she couldn’t escape what she was. And even though she knew the volcano was there — it would always be there, just out of sight, and it could one day burst and consume her — she would enjoy those precious days of village life.

  He tipped his hat to her and turned to go.

  “What am I?” she called.

  He turned once more and smiled and said, as if it were the simplest question in the world.

  “You are the touchstone.”

  He walked on, the guitar over his shoulder, and in a moment he was gone.

  Rachel lifted her face to the sky and felt the sun on her face, and she thought of home.

  — 49 —

  DANNY LOOKED TO HIS left at the mile or more of dirt road receding. It was a beautiful morning in the countryside, the air so clean you could drink it. He took in giddy mouthfuls and felt serenity seep through to his bones. He thought he should recognize the road, but he couldn’t.

  Why was he was in the countryside?

  He was very much a city boy and didn’t care for the country. It was a thing he always said to people to make him seem cool and detached. But he was standing there on a bright summer’s day on a hilltop and feeling so calm. And something else. Relieved. As if he’d come through a great turmoil and emerged unscathed on the other side.

  But he could not remember what that turmoil might have been. Nor how he’d arrived in this place. And though he knew he’d always told friends that he was a city boy and disliked the countryside, to make him seem cool and detached, he couldn’t remember who those friends might be.

  The dirt road dipped down to his left and ran straight for a mile or more, hazy in the distance, and to his right it bent around a corner, shaded by tall oaks. There were one or two dwellings along the road. He didn’t know why but he sensed there was a village around that bend in the road, just over th
e top of the hill, even though he knew he’d never been there before.

  Wasn’t this a dream he’d had? Yes, many times. A dream place he’d been to again and again without knowing it. He remembered waking up in a flat, a girl bustling around downstairs making breakfast. He’d dreamed it that same morning. Was her name Kath?

  He couldn’t remember.

  He could tell that this wasn’t a dream, though. It was all so real. The gentle breeze on his skin. The birdsong in the trees. He was here. Wherever here was.

  Whenever it was.

  He had a strong feeling that he should go up the hill and see what was on the other side, so he set off walking. It was a gentle rise and the road twisted right, then left, as it crested the hill and sloped down to a village.

  He walked on and saw the pub to his left. It was called The Prince of Wales. He’d been here before, he was sure of it. This was one of those déjà vu moments you experienced when you were in a strange place and somehow knew the place.

  He remembered an aunt who’d had this experience. She’d told him about the whole family being on a countryside walk in a place they’d never been before and she’d suddenly announced that everything was fine because there was a nice inn around the corner where they could get a drink. Had described it in detail. And it had been there. And no one knew how she’d known it.

  What was his aunt’s name? He couldn’t remember her. Only the story. It would come to him.

  But this was exactly like that story. He’d been here before.

  He gazed at the closed door of the pub and tried to remember when he’d been here before, but nothing came to him. He looked down at the village below. There was hardly another building to recognize, just a modest cluster of cottages under the familiar battlements of a church.

  He walked on down the gentle rise of the dirt road and came to the — not a crossroads but a T-junction. He didn’t know why he expected it to be a crossroads. He stared at the row of glum cottages lined along the west side and had an overpowering sense that there should be a gap there, another road falling down the hill, creating a crossroads at this junction.

  The junction was a dusty square, nothing but a triangular patch of grass. There was a pub called the Bull’s Head, a squat building that he thought should be larger. Hadn’t it been a taller building? Why did he think that? There was a forge next to it, and a row of cottages he recognized, curving up eastwards to the church that towered above the village square.

  Two gentlemen were standing outside the Bull’s Head, posing for a photographer who stood hunched over a box camera on a tripod in the middle of the road. An old man in a stovepipe hat and frock coat with white whiskers, and a younger man, possibly his son, in a waistcoat and a bowler hat. A carriage behind them. A plump woman wearing a white apron stood in the doorway of the Bull’s Head.

  He didn’t remember that he’d seen this photograph, this moment, and it did not occur to him that he was only here now because he had seen that photo: that it was the photos, his memories, which were sending him to these places.

  He didn’t think of any of that, just took in the sight and felt he’d arrived home, somehow, even though he knew he didn’t live here. He felt happy here, serene. The air he breathed was sweet.

  There was a young boy standing on the green selling newspapers. He strode over and Danny smiled at how grown-up the boy looked in his waistcoat and rolled up sleeves and peaked cap.

  “Hello, there.”

  “Hello, sir,” said the boy. “Bet you’d like a newspaper today, sir. Just an ha’penny.”

  Danny dug into his pockets and found he had no money at all, only an old brooch. He turned it over, curiously, with no idea what it was. A love token, perhaps? A zephyr blowing wind from furious cheeks. Elaborate engraving. The letters D and M.

  “I don’t have an ha’penny, I’m afraid. I’ve got this though. It used to be a penny. But someone turned it into a brooch.”

  The boy looked at it suspiciously.

  “That’s worth more than an ha’penny, perhaps? It’ll bring you luck, anyway.”

  The boy nodded and clasped the brooch in his dirty palm with delight. “I tell you what, sir. We’ll do business. If you’re staying here, you might be a valuable customer, but if you’re passing through, I don’t see what benefit you are to me.”

  Danny laughed. “You’re a pretty shrewd businessman.”

  “I’m new to this,” said the boy. “But I reckon I can make it my business.”

  “I bet you’ll be selling newspapers here when you’re an old man,” said Danny. “I’ve got a feeling about it.”

  Danny scanned the cover of the newspaper for the date and noted it with interest.

  1873.

  “I think I will stay here,” he said. “But I’ll need a place to stay, and maybe a job too.”

  “What’s your trade, sir?”

  Danny thought hard. He couldn’t remember. A vague impression of a university came to him.

  “Teacher,” he said. “I’m a teacher.”

  “I heard Jacob Palmer’s looking for a tutor for his daughter, Arabella. He lives up there to the left. You tell him Joe Rees here sent you, though.”

  “Thanks, I will.”

  Danny walked on, tipping his hat to the woman standing at the door of the Bull’s Head, and to the two gentlemen having their photo taken, passing behind them and up St. Mary’s Row, turning and facing the photographer for a second or two, but not long enough to appear on the photograph as anything but a passing ghost.

  — 50 —

  KATH BRIGHT’S EYES blinked open. She was lying down but couldn’t move. Her whole body so heavy. It was like being hit by a train.

  But she’d avoided the train. It hurt like all hell. No, it wasn’t the train that had hit her. Night had turned to day and it was like being fired from a cannon. Flying, falling, careering, lost in light.

  Gone.

  Her fingers twitched. Something pricking them. She gripped straw. Something wet and sharp.

  She tried to groan but gagged on razor blades in her throat. Wind whistled in her ear.

  Grey sky above.

  She gazed at it for a while, trying to move, the blood circulating to her body, her limbs twitching, awakening.

  Footsteps scrunching through grass, or straw, heading towards her.

  She raised her head, heaved herself up, dizzy, pain shooting through her, blinked and tried to see.

  A blurred girl standing before her came slowly into focus and it looked like the smudge of a mountain range behind her. She saw that the girl had brown skin, large white eyes, her black hair in pigtails. She was wearing a nightdress of linen woven in coloured stripes and some kind of breastplate made of beads and braids.

  Where was this?

  Kath smiled to the girl and tried to push herself up. The girl stepped back, her moccasins scrunching the sodden straw.

  When was this?

  She sat up, steadying herself till everything stopped spinning. Breathed in, breathed out, nice and slow. Fresh air, almost sweet.

  Behind the girl, the shape of the horizon pulled into focus. Not a mountain range but much closer.

  A cluster of wigwams.

  What the hell?

  The ground vibrating. Horse hooves thudding the ground. Coming close and closer.

  She tried to twist around and push herself up to her knees. Howled in pain.

  And as she stood unsteadily, arms out to balance herself, she stared in horror at the figure approaching.

  A brown horse thundering towards her, its flanks painted red and white, and atop it, a man in a buffalo hide tunic, with a headdress of angry feathers, a white stripe across his face.

  He yodelled a war cry as he galloped for her, teeth flashing white, and she felt herself fainting, sinking, falling and the last thing she saw was the tomahawk spinning above his head.

  — 51 —

  RACHEL OPENED HER EYES to find herself in Charlie’s flat above the village green. This wasn
’t right. She’d thought of home. She should have found herself outside her house, ready to knock the door and rush into her father’s arms.

  She glanced around the lounge, trying to work out when this was. Not 2014. She could sense that. It wasn’t the same flat she’d left with Mitch a few mornings ago in 1980. It wasn’t the flat she’d ever lived in since Charlie had left it to her. It was before that time. But only just.

  She rushed to the latticed windows overlooking the village green and she knew what she would see down there.

  Traffic backed up at the crossroads. The morning rush hour. Down on the village green a cluster of students waiting. There was Danny, Jessica, Stacy and the others.

  This was the moment when it had all begun. A morning in November, 2011.

  She would arrive herself soon. This was surely the moment.

  Pedestrians crossing to and from the bus stop on the green.

  There.

  She saw herself walk over the road, from just below, her shoulders hunched, clutching her bag to her side. The uncertain, shy girl she used to be. Her dad had just dropped her off.

  Her younger self crossed over and stood alone, apart from the others. She was younger by only two years, but she’d seen a century in those two years. She’d been through so much since this moment.

  Was she supposed to go down there and meet herself? No. No more messing with time. Her parents had finally come together and she would get her life back.

  She knew now that it was nonsense about the touchstone — there was no touchstone. She could will herself to any time she chose. She was not going to walk out of this flat and up to the church to walk through the lychgate and round to the rear of the churchyard to place her hand on a gravestone and find herself back some time after Danny had changed it all by saving Amy Parker. She could just think herself to that morning.

  So why was she here?

  Someone moved down the corridor. A woman’s footsteps.

  Rachel panicked for a moment, wondering where to hide. Then realized she could think herself away. But she hesitated. She was here for a reason.