The Time Travel Diaries

by Caroline Lawrence

  The Father said something, and suddenly everybody roared like lions. I nearly had a heart attack.

  Now the worshippers were doing a strange kind of noisy fast breathing, in and out through their noses.

  For a moment silence fell like a blanket on the Mithraeum. Then everyone started hissing and – as if that wasn’t weird enough – making popping sounds, using their tongue in their cheeks. I have never heard anything like that before and hope I never do again. It made all the little hairs on my neck and arms stand up.

  At last it was time for the initiation. This is what Mithras-scholars had been waiting centuries to discover.

  The Ravens pushed the naked guy forward. He fell to his knees, his hands still tied behind his back and the sack on his head. Torches held by the Persian helpers threw his giant wobbling shadow up onto one of the pillars. The Father came closer, his face lit spookily from below, like when you shine a torch under your chin at Halloween. He still held the sword in one hand, the metal glinting in the flickering light.

  The Ravens pulled off the sack to let the naked guy see the sword, before putting the sack back over his head.

  The Father addressed the naked guy in a low voice. The naked guy bowed his head as if in assent.

  I wasn’t the only one who gasped as the Father took a step forward and pulled back his sword.

  Dinu was gripping my wrist so hard that it hurt.

  The torch-bearers moved closer, holding their torches up. Their fluttering capes hid the stabbing from sight, but when they stood back the naked guy stood facing the Father with his back to us. The sword was stuck right through him, from side to side, and blood dripped down his legs, from both the entry and exit wounds.

  Now all the worshippers were making the strange hissing noise again.

  One of the torch-bearers went to one side of the statue of Mithras and held his torch up. Naked Guy, somehow still alive, staggered up the steps and disappeared behind the statue of Mithras on the bull.

  Now everyone was chanting, ‘Nama Mithras! Nama Mithras!’ At the same time they were shaking their Egyptian rattles. The chanting and the rattling and the strong smell of burning pine cones was making me dizzy. The chanting got faster and faster, louder and louder. As they reached a crescendo the other torch-bearer went behind the bull and pointed his torch down.

  A great cheer erupted as the naked guy appeared from behind the cult statue. But he wasn’t naked any more. Now he was wearing a new red tunic and a floppy orange hat. He looked dazed and happy and totally unharmed.

  Dinu and I gawped at each other, wide-eyed.

  ‘It must be magic!’ said Dinu.

  ‘Or a clever trick,’ I replied.

  That was when I noticed something.

  The statue of Mithras had begun to glow with a pale shimmery light.

  I came to my senses.

  ‘Dinu!’ I hissed. ‘The portal is on! Go now – strip off and jump through. I’ll be right behind you!’

  He looked at me with big panicked eyes. ‘I can’t!’ he said. ‘I cannot get Lollia’s ring off!’

  51

  Stella Sum

  Whenever I think back to that moment, my skin crawls with horror. So many things could have gone wrong. So many things.

  Dinu was looking at me with terrified Cleopatra eyes. ‘I do want to go back!’ he said. ‘But I don’t want my finger to explode.’

  I looked at his left hand. The little finger was pink and swelling around the ring. I brought his hand closer as it was hard to see in the dim light of the smoky Mithraeum. I could see the ring was made of gold and was quite delicate. Could I bite through it?’

  ‘Be brave!’ I said. ‘I’m going to try to bite it off.’ I heard his gasp of pain as I closed my mouth around it and bit. This was no good; my teeth were pushing it in. I needed to cut through from inside. The knife! I pulled Mud Woman’s knife out of my tunic belt and put the tip between the ring and his flesh. Blood oozed out and he whimpered and squeezed his eyes shut.

  ‘Please God,’ I prayed silently, ‘help me do this and get us both back and I promise I will believe in You.’ Then I gave the tip of the knife a violent twist. Dinu gasped. Blood spurted. Still the ring was not off.

  But it was bent.

  ‘Just once more,’ I said, horribly aware that we were running out of time.

  I pressed and gave the tip of the knife another twist. The ring snapped and fell to the stone floor with a ping.

  Dinu’s eyes were full of tears and his finger was bleeding, but at least he was still whole. ‘Go! Go! Go!’ I hissed.

  As Dinu pulled off his tunic, I saw a second initiation was taking place in the central nave, right between us and the portal. A new naked guy was kneeling. This time the Father had a bow and arrow. As Dinu stepped out of his gladiator nappy and ran down the central nave, the Father pulled back the bowstring and let fly, aiming right at him.

  By some miracle the arrow missed. I heard it strike the double oak doors of the Mithraeum with a thunk!

  Meanwhile, Dinu had veered around the Father and the naked guy and jumped through the portal.

  I almost cheered as he disappeared in a flash of green light.

  Some of worshippers yelled in fear. Others cried out, ‘Nama, Mithras!’

  A few of them fell forward in prayer. Or maybe they had just fainted.

  The Father’s dark eyes were as round as coins.

  ‘Please, God!’ I whispered. ‘Please help me get through too, and please may we not have messed up the future!’

  I dropped the bloody knife, untied my belt, peeled off my tunic and streaked down the central nave.

  Don’t ask me why, but just before I dived through the glowing disc of the time portal I yelled, ‘Stella sum!’ I am a star!

  52

  President Trump

  I forgot how awful it had been to go through the portal.

  Once again every cell in my body felt like it was burning with cold fire.

  Once again my eyes were glued shut.

  But I was focused enough to yell, ‘Turn it off! Turn off the portal now! The temple is full of men,’ I added. ‘One of them might try to come after us!’

  I could barely hear my own voice above the high-pitched squealing noise that filled my head.

  ‘It’s OK,’ said a female voice. ‘It’s off. Nobody else is coming through.’

  I felt a woman’s hands put a towel around me. Something cool and damp mopped my face and I caught the familiar smell of a wet wipe. Praise God! I was back in the twenty-first century!

  But was it my twenty-first century? Or a twenty-first century where Germany had won World War Two, or maybe the Roman Empire had never fallen and everyone still spoke Latin.

  Then, beyond the bat squeal in my ears, I heard more voices and a strange crackling noise. It sounded strangely like police walkie-talkies.

  ‘Dinu! Are you here? Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes, Alex. Are you?’

  ‘I think so. Only my eyes are still stuck shut.’

  ‘You probably want to keep eyes closed,’ said Dinu. ‘Is not pretty sight.’

  ‘What’s not a pretty sight?’ I moaned. ‘Didn’t they have a towel big enough for you?’

  I heard him laugh. ‘Police are arresting Mr Daisy.’

  ‘What?!’

  ‘Yes. Also headteacher Miss Okonmah.’

  I managed to open my right eye enough to see two policemen putting handcuffs on Solomon Daisy. Miss Okonmah was already in cuffs, with two WPCs standing nearby. A third was looking after me. The two tech guys, Geoff and Jeff, were not yet in cuffs, but they looked miserable.

  ‘Are you sure the portal is off?’ said a posh voice. A man in a suit stepped into my blurry field of vision. ‘We don’t want any extra-temporals coming through after them.’

  ‘It’s off, sir,’ said Jeff with a J.

  ‘Probably forever,’ said Geoff with a G. ‘It wasn’t designed for two travellers.’

  ‘Alex,’ shouted Solomo
n Daisy as the police manhandled him out of the Mithraeum, ‘did you find her?’

  ‘Yes, sir!’ I called back. ‘Her name was Lollia Honorata. Her father was a retired auxiliary soldier turned spice merchant and her mother was a witch. She grew up in Lepcis Magna.’

  ‘She was beautiful,’ said Dinu.

  ‘But Martin lied!’ I added. ‘He never left the Mithraeum. And we ended up interacting a lot. So you’ve got to tell us, did we change the future? Is Donald Trump still president?’

  ‘You can rest easy,’ said the man with the posh voice. ‘Donald Trump is still president.’

  ‘Thank God,’ I breathed, as someone handed me a bottle of water.

  The posh guy was looking down at me through his glasses. ‘Tell me, did you really travel back in time?’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ I said between gulps of water.

  ‘And you couldn’t have changed that one small thing?’

  53

  Hazmat Men

  Once when I was about eight and my parents were still alive, my dad was cleaning the cellar and he found a dead rat squashed under an old bed-frame. The rat had been dead so long that it was practically mummified. When my dad called the council to ask how he should dispose of a mummified rat, they said they would send someone right away.

  Half an hour later the doorbell rang and when I opened the door I saw two spacemen in bright orange boiler suits with helmets on. I thought aliens had come to abduct us but Dad told me they were just men wearing hazmat suits. ‘Hazmat’ stands for ‘hazardous materials’ of course. Maybe they thought the mummified rat could be a carrier of bubonic plague or something like that.

  Anyway, that memory came rushing back into my mind when they made me and Dinu put on bright orange hazmat suits. Then they helped us up the black marble time-stairs to a waiting ambulance. A quick glimpse of the dawn sky told me it was about eight o’clock in the morning. The area between the London Mithraeum and the Daisy Building was deserted and I remembered it was Saturday. Or maybe Sunday.

  Once we were inside the ambulance, they put on the siren. I could tell we were going fast because we had to hang on around every corner.

  After about ten minutes we went down a ramp and into an underground car park. Dinu and I were taken along a maze of concrete-floored corridors and finally into a windowless room where we had to take off the hazmat suits to be examined by doctors with their hazmat suits still on. The doctors checked us all over, using powerful torchlights on their foreheads and magnifying glass visors. They took swabs from inside our mouths. They tweezed the dirt from under our fingernails and toenails. They scraped stuff from behind our ears. They examined our heads like monkeys searching for ticks. They even took blood samples.

  They also cleaned and bandaged Dinu’s left pinkie finger where I had cut off the ring.

  Then they ushered us into a kind of changing area with lockers and showers and toilet cubicles. They made us pee in cups and then left us alone with orders to take a very hot shower and scrub ourselves all over. Even in our ears.

  Once we were dry, we found clothes laid out for us on a bench by a big mirror. We each got clean underwear, a brand-new pair of jeans, a black T-shirt and a grey hoodie. There were also some socks and black Adidas trainers. Everything fit us both perfectly.

  ‘This is excellent,’ said Dinu, pulling on his hoodie. ‘I have never worn such nice new clothes before.’

  We looked at our reflections in a big mirror.

  I said. ‘We look like mismatched twins. Like in that movie with the muscular bodybuilder and the little bald guy.’

  ‘No,’ said Dinu, running his fingers through still-damp hair, ‘we look like Dionysus and Eros.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I grinned. ‘You get to be a sexy grape god while I’m a dumb baby with wings.’

  A man in a suit opened a door. He held the old-fashioned version of a touch tablet: a wooden clipboard.

  ‘The doctors have given you the all-clear,’ he said. ‘Follow me.’

  He led us along a corridor to a lift and sent us up about five floors. We emerged into another corridor – this one had carpet – and finally into a semicircular room with a very high ceiling. There was a round table in the centre and six chairs around it. Straight ahead of us were some tall, pale-green windows set on a curve and overlooking the river.

  ‘Hey!’ I said, going to the window. ‘That’s Vauxhall Bridge. I think we’re inside MI6!’

  ‘What is MI6?’ asked Dinu.

  ‘It’s where the spies work, when they’re not kissing beautiful double agents or getting cool new gadgets from Q.’

  ‘What are gadgets from Q?’

  ‘You know – from the James Bond films!’

  ‘I know James Bond, but I do not know MI6.’

  ‘It’s famous,’ I said. ‘It’s even in one of the recent Bond films. It’s this modern building made of pale yellow stone and jade-green glass with a ziggurat vibe going on. People call it the Spy Building. Every Londoner knows it.’

  Dinu went to the window and looked out. ‘I have never heard of a Spy Building before.’ He turned and looked around, then pointed at a CCTV camera in one corner of the room. ‘But I know they are watching us.’

  A moment later Mr Posh came in. He held the door open for three women to enter too. One had shoulder-length light brown hair. Another had short grey hair and a notebook. The third had a tray with tea things including biscuits and sandwiches. She put this on the table and went out, closing the door behind her.

  ‘Please,’ said Mr Posh with a smile, ‘sit.’

  I said, ‘Is this the MI6 building? And is this a debriefing?’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Mr Posh, his smile getting broader. ‘It won’t take long. I promise to have you both home in time for tea. Speaking of which,’ he went to the teapot, ‘milk and sugar?’

  We both nodded and he poured.

  ‘Sophie?’ he said.

  ‘White please, no sugar,’ said the woman with light brown hair.

  ‘Jean?’

  ‘White with two sugars,’ said the grey-haired lady.

  I’m pretty sure American secret agents get champagne and caviar for their debriefings. But the tea was hot and sweet and there were also those posh biscuits with chocolate on one side and also a plate of sandwiches cut in fancy triangles and with no crusts, so I didn’t complain.

  I looked around. ‘Is it Saturday or Sunday?’

  ‘Saturday lunchtime,’ he said. ‘You were gone twenty-four hours.’

  As I bit into a cucumber-and-tuna sandwich on white bread, I realised it was the first food I had eaten in three or four days. I closed my eyes and savoured every bite.

  When Dinu and I had taken the edge off our hunger, Mr Posh introduced the two women and then they questioned us for about two hours. The one with light brown hair was an archaeologist who told us to call her Dr Sophie. She asked us questions like ‘What industry did you see in Southwark?’ And ‘How many people could the amphitheatre seat?’

  The grey-haired woman’s name was Jean. She said she was a nurse from social services. She asked if we had been in danger at any time or traumatised by anything we had seen.

  Dinu and I glanced at each other and then began to laugh.

  I counted on my fingers: ‘I was chased by slaves, tripped up by a goat, nearly drowned in the Thames, attacked by a knife-wielding mud woman, kicked by kiln-slaves, pursued by angry female bath attendants and compared to Cupid.’

  Dinu said, ‘And I was dragged out of river, put in cell with smelly gladiators and made to fight.’

  I added, ‘That was only the beginning.’

  Then we told them about our adventures, glossing over a lot.

  About an hour into our debriefing, Dr Sophie leaned forward. ‘You say Lollia’s slave-girl was named Plecta?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘I think that name appears on an inscription I’ve seen. I’m just going to ring a colleague at Mortimer Wheeler House,’ she said. ‘That’s the Museum of Lon
don Archaeology Department.’

  While she was out of the room Dinu and I slurped some more tea and wolfed down the last of the sandwiches, while Nurse Jean and Mr Posh scribbled notes. I was just brushing crumbs off my new jeans when Dr Sophie came back in.

  She looked pale and the phone in her hand was trembling. But she was also smiling.

  ‘I know what happened to Plecta,’ she said.

  54

  Spirits of the Dead

  ‘I was right,’ said Dr Sophie. ‘It’s a very rare name, but it is attested in an epitaph from Londinium’s northern cemetery.’

  She showed us a photo on her phone. It was a tombstone and read:

  DIS MANIBVS

  LOLLIAE PLECTAE

  ANN XXXXII

  UXORI INCOMPARABILI

  MULIERI SANCTISSIMAE

  AELIUS CLAUDIUS EPAPRAS

  MARITUS OB MERITIS

  H S E S T T L

  ‘What does it mean?’ said Mr Posh. ‘I only did Latin to GCSE level.’

  ‘To the spirits of the dead,’ said Dr Sophie, ‘and of Lollia Plecta …’

  ‘Lollia?’ said Dinu, sitting up straight.

  ‘Not your Lollia, I’m afraid,’ said Dr Sophie with a sad smile. ‘We still have her bones in the Museum of London and we know she died not long after you met her, perhaps within weeks.’

  Dinu slumped in his seat.

  ‘Do we know how she died?’ I asked.

  ‘No. And we may never know. But this inscription shows that Lollia, or perhaps Lollia’s father, set Plecta free. According to the usual Roman practice, Plecta took Lollia’s first name and kept her slave-name as her second name.’

  Suddenly the sandwiches I’d eaten were going around in my stomach like clothes in a tumble-drier. ‘Did she marry that fluffy-bearded lawyer who helped us set Dinu free?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dr Sophie, ‘I believe she did. Let me translate the whole thing. To the spirits of the dead and of Lollia Plecta aged forty-two years, an incomparable wife and very clever woman. Her husband Aelius Claudius Epapras and her children did this because she deserved it.’ She took a breath. ‘The last seven letters are an abbreviation for Here she lies. May the earth lie lightly on you.’