A Tale of Time City

by Diana Wynne Jones

  “Yes, Father,” Jonathan said in a subdued mutter. It was no wonder Jenny had said Jonathan was tired, Vivian thought as they went across the hall. Jonathan was white and his head hung.

  “Is something the matter?” she asked.

  But Jonathan refused to speak until they had reached his room. Then he flung himself into an empty-frame chair so hard that his pigtail bounded, and threatened to make an emotional scene. “Curse those two time-ghosts!” he almost shrieked. “They made me quite sure you were the Time Lady! But you’re not, are you? I could tell you were a real Twenty Century person with every word you said. Mickey Mouse!” he yelled. “And I’m stuck with you while she’s still out there messing history up!”

  “Well, I told you,” Vivian said. A great relief was growing in her. As soon as Jonathan mentioned the time-ghosts, she knew how she was going to get home.

  “I hate feeling a fool like this!” Jonathan snarled with his face in his fists and his pigtail draped over his arm.

  Vivian took a long happy breath. “I bet I know,” she said, “how you can find the real Time Lady.”

  5

  TIME-LOCK

  “No, you don’t,” Jonathan said flatly. “My father and Mr. Enkian and Sam’s father went to that station in 1939 and she gave them all the slip. And me too, for that matter.”

  “Yes, but I know how she did it,” Vivian said.

  “Prove it,” said Jonathan.

  “All right,” said Vivian. For lack of anywhere better, she sat on the empty-frame table. The nothing creaked a bit, but it held her up. “She was on that train, wasn’t she? That was why you were all there.”

  “I don’t know. All I overheard in the Chronologue was the place and the time. I worked the rest out from seeing our time-ghosts,” Jonathan said. “And I got it wrong,” he added morbidly.

  “Just listen,” said Vivian. “Everyone else on that train went straight along to the exit to be shared out to homes. And they were all children on that train—I know that for a fact. So she must be quite small—small enough to pass herself off as an evacuee, mustn’t she?”

  Jonathan nodded. He had taken his face out of his fists and was trying not to look too hopeful. “All right. She puts her hand trustingly into a farmer’s wife’s hand and off she goes. How do we find out which farmer’s wife?”

  “Easy,” said Vivian. “We go and see Cousin Marty. She lives there. It’s a small place and she’ll know everyone. She can tell us who took in which children, and we only have to go round the houses like detectives to find her.”

  Jonathan half sprang up. Then he flopped down again. “It’s no good. She’s time-travelling by now. Didn’t you hear what Sam’s father said about the war in the nineteen-eighties? That must mean she’s got as far as that now.”

  As far as Vivian knew, this might have been true. But if she let Jonathan think that, she would never get home. “Not if we go back to the precise moment on the station,” she said persuasively. “We can catch her before she sets off.”

  Jonathan sprang up properly. “It might work!” Then he flopped down once more. “It’s no good. We can’t get near a private time-lock after Sam got found with the keys.”

  “Can’t we use an ordinary time-lock? Say we’re going to—to the Hundredth Century and change it secretly?” Vivian asked.

  “Not a chance!” said Jonathan. “The public locks are all monitored. They don’t let people our age anywhere near the Unstable Eras.”

  So this meant Vivian had to use the idea the time-ghosts had given her. Though she had meant to lead up to it all through, it seemed very shaky now she came to put it into words. “But what about our time-ghosts?” she said. “We were coming from somewhere. And we had a look—I mean, we’d be all excited like that if we’d just found a secret time-lock, wouldn’t we?”

  “You’ve got it!” Jonathan shouted. He leapt up, crashed out of his room, and went racing downwards through the Palace. Vivian flew after him to keep him excited. The little ghostly blue flowers circling round her white sleeves kept reminding her that she and Jonathan were in different clothes from the time-ghosts. She was fairly sure they would not find a time-lock. But she did not point this out in case Jonathan got depressed again.

  Jonathan probably knew something was not quite right. He turned to her with a nervous smile as he moved the chain across to open the old door. “This is too easy. We can’t be going to find anything.” The door creaked open. Jonathan shut it securely behind them and turned on a light that Vivian had not known was there. The stone walls and floor stretched in front of them, very blank and empty. “You walk down here,” Jonathan said. “And I’ll tell you to stop when you get to the place where the ghosts start.”

  Vivian paced slowly towards the door to the Chronologue at the other end. A few yards before she reached it, Jonathan called out, “Stop! Can you see anything?”

  Vivian looked at the stone floor, the arched stone ceiling, and the bare stone walls. They were all plain, except for a place in the left-hand wall where an old archway had been stopped up with smaller stones then the rest. “There’s a—” she began, pointing. But she found herself speaking through the thump of sprinting feet and Jonathan arrived before she could say another word.

  “Let’s see! Let’s see!” he said, shaking and wild with excitement. He put both hands to the smaller stones of the blocked arch and shoved. He pushed this way, and he pushed that. Nothing happened. “I know it must open!” Jonathan cried out, and he kicked the stones the way he kicked the church-organ in his room. “Ow!” he said, hopping on one foot, holding the other in both hands. “I forgot I was wearing sand—!”

  The wall of stones swung round pivoting in the middle of the archway, to leave a narrow black opening on both sides. A dry, dusty smell came out. Jonathan let go of his foot and stared, so white with excitement that his face seemed all flicker from his sight-function.

  “We found it!” he whispered.

  “How do we know it’s a time-lock?” Vivian said. Her plan had worked so easily that it scared her. And she felt very nervous of those yawning black slits.

  “We go and look,” Jonathan said. He pressed a stud on his belt and it suddenly gave him a halo of light, as if he were yet another ghost. “This only lasts about five minutes,” he said, sounding quite as nervous as Vivian felt. “We’ll have to be quick.” He started to edge his way into the nearest opening. The light from his belt showed that the back of the swivelled wall was made of something old and grey that was not stone. The stones were just a disguise.

  He was halfway through when the door from the Palace creaked. Sam’s voice boomed down the passage. “What are you doing?”

  I might have known! Vivian thought. There had to be a reason why those ghosts were in different clothes! “Hush!” she called. “It’s a secret time-lock.”

  Sam came down the passage at a rolling, pounding run and got to the archway just as Vivian was edging through after Jonathan. “Just at the right moment!” he said gleefully, in what was meant to be a whisper. “I have all the luck!”

  “Shouldn’t you be in bed?” Vivian whispered hopelessly as Sam squeezed through the slit on the opposite side of the wall.

  “Of course not!” said Sam. “Hey! There are stairs going down!”

  Jonathan was halfway round the turn of a spiral stair that was the only thing in the square stone space beyond the archway. Vivian and Sam followed the unearthly greenish glow from his belt, round and down, and round and down again. The stone steps were steep enough to give Sam trouble and, as they went lower, the steps got steeper still. Each one was a massive block of old stone. By the end, Sam was sitting down, sliding from block to block. Vivian was holding on to the huge wedge-shaped stairs in the ceiling overhead and lowering herself gently, and even Jonathan was having to go carefully. The place felt awfully old. Oldness pressed quietly in on them from all round. It was a cold, non-human feeling.

  Vivian thought of the giant stone shape of Faber John, sleepin
g under the City. Could he have made the bottom stairs long ago? she wondered. And ordinary-sized people built the top ones later?

  “I’m down,” Jonathan said softly.

  They slid down the last step to join him in a small room built of the same enormous stones. Facing them was a plain sheet of slate, let into the wall like a door. It was glimmering faintly, with little flickers chasing across it. Beside it, one of the stones of the wall stuck out a short way. There was a hollow in the top of it and a thing like a grey goose-egg lay in the hollow. There was nothing else in the room at all.

  “Is it a time-lock?” Vivian said.

  “I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like it before,” Jonathan said.

  “No controls,” said Sam. “No chronograph, no way to set it, no activator, no emergency phone—it’s been dismantled, or it’s not a time-lock.”

  “It doesn’t look as if there ever were any of those things,” Jonathan said. “But that flicker looks active. Do you think this is a control?” He put his hand to the grey goose-egg in the hollow and jumped a bit when it turned out to be quite easy to pick up. He weighed the thing dubiously in his hand. “It’s heavy,” he said. “And it feels active too. But it’s smooth. There aren’t any control studs or finger-grips anywhere. Look.”

  He held the egg out and they all bent over it in the green light from his belt. It might have been a real egg. There were no joins in it. Sam began to breathe even more loudly than usual. “It’s weird!” he said. “Where were you trying to get to?”

  “The station, when Jonathan kidnapped me,” Vivian said.

  The moment she spoke, the glimmer of the slate blazed into yellow daylight, the colour of a hot day late in the afternoon. They all blinked and sniffed smells of chaff and cow-manure and coal-smoke, When the dazzle went off, they stared along the platform of a railway station. It was full of children at the far end, a mass of scraggy legs and necks and old suitcases mixed with square brown gas mask cases, with school hats and caps bobbing above. Nearer to them, beside the train with all its doors standing open, a hot-faced distraught girl was just turning to look at a lanky boy in glasses.

  The sight did not give Vivian any jolt of fear, like seeing the time-ghosts had, but it was not pleasant either. She had no idea her nose was that shape from the side. And the hot coat made her backside bulge. “Don’t we look awful!” she said, looking at the disguised Jonathan instead. “I know what was wrong with you—I couldn’t think at the time! You should have been carrying a gas mask. It’s illegal not to. I knew something was odd.”

  “We can’t go through now,” Jonathan said. “We’d look even odder.”

  “My dad would spot us,” Sam whispered, pointing.

  Vivian searched among the crowd of adults waiting up by the station exit. The first one she recognised was Sempitern Walker, looking thoroughly peculiar in plus-fours and a tweed cap. Mr. Enkian was standing beside him in a raincoat and trilby, looking even odder. Sam’s father was one of the men wearing armbands. He was efficiently dividing the evacuees up into twos and fours and, somehow, he looked far more convincing.

  “I can’t think how she escaped, with your father doing that,” Jonathan said to Sam.

  Vivian, to tell the truth, wondered too. “But she did—” she began.

  At that moment, the lanky disguised Jonathan picked the hot Vivian’s suitcase up off the platform. Vivian’s earlier self dived for it and both of them started to turn round to face the small stone room. Sam, Jonathan and Vivian, with one accord, all backed away towards the stairs in order not to be seen. It was a silly, instinctive thing to do. The marvel was that it worked. As soon as they moved, the station disappeared and left them only the green glow of Jonathan’s belt to see by. The slate was solidly there again, still glimmering faintly.

  “How did that happen?” said Sam.

  “I’ve no idea,” said Jonathan. He rolled the smooth grey egg from hand to hand before he put it back in the hollow. “But the point is that it does work. Let’s go and get our Twenty Century clothes. Then we can go through.”

  Sam’s voice rose in a roar of protest, filling the little room. “It’s not fair! I haven’t got any clothes! You have to wait for me to get some. I’m not going to be left behind this time! It’s not fair!”

  Vivian said nothing. She hoped Jonathan would tell Sam to get lost. But Jonathan—after a moment when he obviously wanted to—said fair-mindedly, “Well—can you snitch some clothes in time for us to go first thing after breakfast tomorrow?”

  “Yes!” Sam danced about, hugging himself. “Whoopee! I’ve never time-travelled! Whoopee!” He scrambled for the stairs. “I’ll go and get round the Costumes Patroller now!” he called. “I won’t need to snitch them. She gave me yours to play dressing-up in.”

  As Vivian and Jonathan climbed the stairs after him, Jonathan said consolingly, “It only feels like a long wait. But now we know that the lock works, we can go back to that precise moment any time we want.” Vivian thought he was trying to console himself as much as her.

  Here the light from Jonathan’s belt turned dim purple and faded out. There was a strange noise from up in front. “I’m not frightened,” Sam called down. “I just can’t see.”

  “Neither can we,” Jonathan called back, in a voice that was too carefully calm. It was not just dark. It was a thick blackness that made you feel the world had gone away. “You’ll have to go by touch.”

  They fumbled their way slowly up the steep stone blocks. In that dark, it was hard to believe they were climbing at all. And Vivian suddenly had the horrors. She was certain that a spider was going to drop off the roof and down her neck any second. She hated spiders. She had not noticed any spider webs on the way down, but then of course she had not been looking. She shut her eyes and kept her neck scrunched down. She wanted to scream.

  “Bring a torch next time,” Sam said, in a wavery wanting-to-scream voice.

  “Yes. Do,” said Vivian. “Are—are there many spiders in Time City?”

  “Only in Erstwhile Science museum,” Jonathan said from below. He sounded properly calm now. “I’ve found what to do. Think of something quite different. I’m doing timefield equations in my head.”

  “I’ll do Roman script spelling,” Sam called, suddenly cheerful again.

  Vivian tried the seven-times table, but she had always had difficulty with that one and, besides, school things seemed very far away from a hole in the floor in Time City. She was forced to think of something nearer at hand. Tomorrow, she thought, she would be back in her own century staying with Cousin Marty. Except, if you went by those time-ghosts, Sam shouldn’t have been there. There were only herself and Jonathan, and they were coming back, not going. Perhaps that meant that Sam would not be able to get any clothes, or catch measles or something. But even if Sam didn’t come too, that still did not explain why Vivian had to come back, or look so excited doing it.

  The stairs were becoming shallower. They must be getting near the top.

  “Eff, Eh, Bee, Ee, Are,” Sam’s voice came down. “Jay, Oh, Aitch—I can see!”

  By the next step, Vivian could see too, enormous stones in a very dim light that must be coming through from the passage in the Palace. She stood up and galloped the rest of the way, with Jonathan jostling her behind and Sam’s shoelace flipping the stones in front of her face. In seconds, they were squeezing through the gaps beside the pivoting false wall and into light that seemed so bright their eyes watered. Jonathan had to switch off his eye-flicker in order to scrub his eyes with his rather smudged white sleeve. Then he swung the false door carefully shut again so that it looked once more like an archway that was walled up.

  “Oof!” Sam said, as they went along the passage. “That was exciting!”

  Almost too exciting! Vivian thought, but she did not say anything because, now she had started thinking about those puzzling time-ghosts, she could not stop. What could be going to happen? she wondered, while Jonathan slid the chain back to the ri
ght place on the door and while he was telling Sam to turn up at nine the next morning or they would go without him. Perhaps Sam turns up too late, Vivian thought, but she was not really sure. Sam went trotting off. Vivian went on wondering until Jonathan interrupted her thoughts at the top of the polished stairs.

  “V.S., I’m sorry,” he said awkwardly. “I really am. It was stupid of me to keep on believing you were the Time Lady. I know you’re not now. And I know I’ve got you into a mess. You can go home if you like, when we’ve found the real Time Lady.”

  That was pretty surprising from a proud boy like Jonathan, Vivian thought. “Thanks,” she said. “But won’t people wonder if Cousin Vivian just disappears?”

  “We’ll get round that somehow,” Jonathan said confidently. “Good night.”

  “Good night,” Vivian said, but she said it rather absent-mindedly because now she was thinking: if even Jonathan thinks I can go home, why did—I mean why will—I be coming back?

  This was still a complete mystery to her next morning when she got up. After thinking about it all over again, she decided that, as a precaution, she ought to wear the same clothes as her ghost. So when I do come back for whatever reason, she thought, that will be got-over-with and I can go home straight after that.

  She unfolded the wall cupboard and looked at the row of suits hanging so strangely on nothing. And she had not the foggiest idea which of them her ghost had been wearing. She remembered the diamonds on Jonathan’s suit, but all she knew about her own was that it was coloured, and not the white one with the ghostly blue flowers.

  “Bother!” she said.

  The only thing to do seemed to be to shut her eyes and pull out the suit she touched first. If it’s the right one, it’s going to be right however I choose it, she decided. And not, if not. Her hand met a suit. She opened her eyes and discovered it was electric yellow and violet, in zebra-like stripes that moved this way and that of their own accord.

  “I don’t think this is right,” she said. “I’d have remembered this.” Still, it was chosen, so she put it on fatalistically. As soon as the suit sealed itself up the back, it became even more memorable. Big scarlet hearts lit up on her knees, her elbows and her front.