by Dale Smith
Title Page
TIME HUNTER
THE ALBINO’S DANCER
by
Dale Smith
Publisher Information
First published in England in 2006 by
Telos Publishing Ltd
17 Pendre Avenue, Prestatyn, Denbighshire, LL19 9SH, UK
www.telos.co.uk
Digital Edition converted and distributed by
Andrews UK Limited
www.andrewsuk.com
Telos Publishing Ltd values feedback. Please e-mail us with any comments you may have about this book to: [email protected]
The Albino’s Dancer © 2006 Dale Smith
Cover artwork by Matthew Laznika
Time Hunter format © 2003 Telos Publishing Ltd
Honoré Lechasseur and Emily Blandish created by Daniel O’Mahony
The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
Acknowledgements
Due to the inability of my lovely fiancée to comprehend a simple non-linear storyline, this novella actually brought me into contact with a whole new band of friends. It would make a lot less sense without the kind input of Mark Michalowski, Simon Forward, Ian Potter, Nick Wallace and Philip Purser-Hallard, as I’m sure would life in general. Thanks are also due to David J Howe, Dr David Butler, and Jon de Burgh Miller. And also Jon and Helen Roberts: congratulations!
Dedication
For Mum and Dad. Thanks.
The Time Hunter
Honoré Lechasseur and Emily Blandish... Honoré is a black American ex-GI, now living in London, 1951, working sometimes as a private detective, sometimes as a ‘fixer’, or spiv. Now life has a new purpose for him as he has discovered that he is a time sensitive. In theory, this attribute, as well as affording him a low-level perception of the fabric of time itself, gives him the ability to sense the whole timeline of any person with whom he comes into contact. He just has to learn how to master it.
Emily is a strange young woman whom Honoré has taken under his wing. She is suffering from amnesia, and so knows little of her own background. She comes from a time in Earth’s far future, one of a small minority of people known as time channellers, who have developed the ability to make jumps through time using mental powers so highly evolved that they could almost be mistaken for magic. They cannot do this alone, however. In order to achieve a time-jump, a time channeller must connect with a time sensitive.
When Honoré and Emily connect, the adventures begin.
Prologue
8 April 1938, 07.03.
Honoré Lechasseur stood at one edge of a great scar in the black earth of London, and looked down briefly at the ground. Overhead, grey clouds let a fine drizzle fall down on him. The city slept, but not he.
‘Goodbye, little Emily,’ Honoré said, over the makeshift grave.
Chapter One
1A. 4 November 1951, 18:12
They said if you wanted to eat well in England, you should eat breakfast. At least, Honoré thought they said it: if they didn’t, they would. Breakfast, lunch or dinner – so they’d say, or had already – if you were in England, it was breakfast time. Honoré could appreciate that: for him, time was moody and unreliable, coiling itself like a cobra and daring him to tame it. Day didn’t always follow night, and lunch wasn’t always followed by dinner.
It was six in the evening, and Honoré was eating breakfast. Almost as if to prove his point.
The serving boy had made no comment – they all knew Honoré here, and were used to the hours he kept. Besides which, he was still a man who knew where to find a bit of bacon going spare: six years on, and meat was still rationed. But Honoré knew it wouldn’t last. The points system had gone now, and the rest wouldn’t be far behind. Soon, you’d be able to get all the meat you needed delivered to your door by the butcher’s boy, and bacon wouldn’t need much help to get found.
The rest of the café didn’t care: a few young kids hovered around the counter, because John the Till would sometimes sell them a snifter or two, if the police weren’t watching too close. At the tables were seated distinct islands of gnarled little men, all trying to hide themselves behind a nicotine smokescreen. Why they were here and not in the Sportsman, Honoré couldn’t say, but wouldn’t ask. Perhaps that alone was the reason. There couldn’t be anywhere better to hide in London that night: the air in the café was a greasy fog, the lights on the tables barely smears.
Honoré stuck his knife into his sausage and cut himself a bite. Perhaps this would be the last one he’d eat that he’d provided. It tasted fatty.
‘Mr Lechasseur?’ said a voice.
Honoré chewed his sausage, and wondered whether to look up or just run: in his business, a stranger wasn’t always a friend you hadn’t met. But he was loath to leave his breakfast – he never knew when his next decent meal might be – so instead, he looked up.
A tall woman of about 20 looked down at him. Her outfit was designed for a warmer night than this: a light summer coat, and a long dress too thin to stop the gooseflesh from rising on her arms. To be honest, Honoré couldn’t imagine where such a wisp of a dress would keep her warm – certainly not on the streets of London, with her legs and belly showing like that. Her hair was auburn and neatly bobbed and, despite the darkness outside, she wore thin-framed glasses with smoky-grey lenses. Honoré didn’t like not being able to see her eyes – it made him nervous.
She placed a newspaper down on the table in front of him, which in itself wasn’t an unusual opening gambit: whispers of Honoré’s abilities were starting to spread through London. Here was a man who could find bacon without too many questions. He had started to attract grey-haired, broken men, showing him obscure stories from newspapers decades old and asking if he could help. He generally feigned ignorance, but that wouldn’t be necessary on this occasion: the paper was that morning’s Mirror, and anything inside would be taken to the police, or one of the more well-known investigators. The here and now weren’t Honoré’s speciality.
Without asking, the woman sat down opposite. Honoré pretended to be more interested in the paper: they’d finished the clean up after the Festival on the South Bank. Attlee’s brainchild, it had tried to remind Britain of its former glories, spur her on to future successes. Honoré hadn’t bothered going: he couldn’t get nostalgic for the past, any more than he could have hope for the future. Both were too immediate for that.
‘It’s terrible, isn’t it?’ said the woman.
He almost asked her to be more specific – the news was generally so bad it wasn’t just the country slipping into a depression. But his eyes fell on the main story: British troops were being sent into Egypt, and British families were being sent out. Something Attlee had failed to see: Britain’s Empire was crumbling all around her, and the War had left her without the stomach to keep hold of it. Perhaps that was why they had voted Churchill back in, hoping he could push them to victory in another fight they didn’t want to have.
If things continued like this, soon Britain would survive only because it clung on to the coattails of America. And the city knew it: people had always treated Honoré with caution when they heard his faded Louisiana lilt – now they glared at him like all this, this grime and dirt, was his personal fault.
The woman was still staring at him, as if expe
cting an answer.
‘It is Mr Lechasseur, isn’t it?’ she said.
‘That depends,’ Honoré said cautiously. He set his fork down on his plate, but his knife stayed in his hand.
The woman looked confused.
‘You can’t have forgotten,’ she said emphatically. Honoré resisted the temptation to retort. ‘You saved my life.’
Honoré looked at her face again. The smoked glasses weren’t confusing him: she was nothing but a stranger. He nodded slowly, setting his knife down next to his fork.
‘I guess that’s not just a figure of speech,’ he sighed, motioning for the greasy boy behind the counter to bring more coffee. ‘When?’
‘February,’ she said, her head cocked to imply confusion. ‘Last February.’
Honoré nodded slowly. Last February, the most exciting thing to have happened to him had been England losing the rugby: he’d managed to shift a ‘disowned’ case of whisky to a large group of Scots who’d urgently wanted to toast France’s victory.
But just because February 1951 had come and gone, didn’t mean it couldn’t come again.
‘Okay,’ Honoré said. ‘How about how?’
The woman raised an eyebrow, and Honoré didn’t need to be able to see the future to know that she wasn’t going to hang around much longer.
‘How much did I tell you about me?’ Honoré said softly. Draw her back in. ‘When we last met, I mean.’
A brief flicker of something. Almost a smile, reined back.
‘I’m sure I don’t know what you mean, Mr Lechasseur,’ she said. Her accent troubled Honoré: it was almost as carefully studied as his own – she even pronounced his name in a New Orleans drawl, without a hint of French in it. Another foreigner in this dark city, then – another ex-pat American?
Honoré decided not to reveal all his cards at once.
‘My memory’s shot to pieces,’ he said. ‘So you’ve got me at a disadvantage.’ He liked to throw these little English phrases in where he could. Show how well he was assimilating. ‘Far as I know, I’ve never set eyes on you before.’
The woman looked suitably sympathetic.
‘Oh!’ she held a slender hand to her lips, her mouth a lipstick-painted circle. ‘Was it the explosion?’
It was Honoré’s turn to cock his head.
‘My name is Catherine Howkins, Mr Lechasseur,’ she said; and after a brief hesitation she held out a pale hand, as if they were being introduced at a cocktail party in Bloomsbury. ‘You would have known me as Kate? There was an explosion at a building my employer owned. You got me out. I didn’t know about... about your trouble. I never had the chance to thank you properly. And to tell you how sorry I was.’
‘Sorry?’ Honoré’s heart paused for a moment, before deciding that perhaps it would carry on beating after all. ‘That I saved you?’
Silence.
‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘About your friend. Miss Blandish.’
Honoré looked for a moment at Catherine, hoping that maybe he’d misunderstood. But there was no confusing the look of polite compassion on her face: something had happened to Emily – something... fatal? No, not again: no matter what this woman might think had happened, Honoré wouldn’t let it. Never. All he had to do was keep breathing.
Okay. Breathe.
‘I’m sorry,’ Catherine was saying. ‘I thought you knew. I didn’t –’
‘Where was this building?’ Honoré said. He was surprised how cool his voice sounded.
Catherine looked shocked.
‘Oh no, I couldn’t!’ She looked around. For witnesses? Or an escape route? ‘I’m sorry, really I am. I... My employer, Mr Lechasseur, isn’t a... They call him the Albino. You must have heard of him.’
The name rang quiet bells. One of the little barons who had divided London up between them. Fixers who weren’t too squeamish to move into guns and drugs.
‘Thanks for the name,’ Honoré said, making as if to stand. ‘I’ll go ask him myself, then.’
It was hard to tell, but behind those smoked lenses, there seemed to be an expression that showed Honoré he’d touched a nerve. She got a hold of herself quickly, though – reaching for a pen and the Mirror.
‘This is the address,’ she said under her breath, looking again over her shoulder. ‘But you won’t find anything there. It’s all gone now, all destroyed: it was bombed at my employer’s instruction.’
Honoré reached for the newspaper, but Catherine didn’t move her hand.
‘The Albino is a stickler for loyalty. If he finds you snooping, I’ll deny this conversation ever took place,’ she said emphatically. ‘I want you to understand that.’
Honoré nodded solemnly.
‘There’s no chance...?’ He stopped: he didn’t trust himself to finish the question.
Catherine touched his arm briefly with her hand.
The skin was cool and soft.
‘We watched them pull the body out together,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry.’
Okay. Breathe.
1B. 4 November 1951, 19:42
They called him the Albino, and frankly Emily was a little disappointed by their lack of imagination. ‘Harpo’ would’ve at least shown a little lateral thinking. But no, the Albino it was: plain, simple, predictable.
He sat at one end of the office, studying her intently with calculating pink eyes. He was, as they said, an albino: there wasn’t a lick of colour anywhere that she could see, from hair to hands. Even his skin was a cold, porcelain grey, criss-crossed with fading scars that gave his face a patchwork quality. Emily guessed that she didn’t want to know the story behind those scars.
Still he sat in his chair and regarded her, silently.
His fingers tapped spider-like on the chair arm. He was impatient for something, but Emily didn’t rightly care to know what: as she and Honoré had made their cautious way through the club, weaving their way between silver spoon gentlemen who liked to affect that they knew better, it had become clear what the Albino was. Like his club, he liked to hide it behind an expensive veneer, but scratch away the façade and you’d reveal his true face. On a brightly lit stage, women danced – sometimes in uniform, sometimes in slight dresses of some so-nearly-see-through material, and sometimes dispensing with the pretence of clothing entirely and displaying the merest scrap of silky underwear.
When the music stopped, the women slinked from the stage in the direction of the yahoo with the fattest wallet: Emily had seen at least two disappear discretely with members of the audience into back rooms, where no doubt the dancing truly began. And meanwhile, white-coated waiters scuttled between tables, keeping the over-priced liquor flowing.
‘Miss Blandish,’ the room’s other occupant said. So intense was the Albino’s gaze, that Emily had almost forgotten that she wasn’t alone in the office with him.
‘How do you know my name?’ Emily asked politely. ‘I don’t remember being introduced.’
The tiny man smiled, and leant forward a little on his cane.
‘My name is Schreck, Miss Blandish. I am a lawyer.’ His handlebar moustache bristled self-importantly as he said the words. The smile on his face suggested both the pride he felt at his station in life, and the contempt he had for any other. ‘I represent the owner of this establishment. An establishment that you and your friend have violated, and that my client has a legal right to defend. Do you understand me, Miss Blandish?’
Emily wondered where they had taken Honoré, and how exactly they might be exercising their ‘legal right’ on his flesh. She felt the lawyer’s and the Albino’s eyes on her, waiting for some sign of weakness.
She lowered herself gracefully into a plush leather chair, primly folding her hands in her lap and holding the Albino’s curious gaze.
‘Of course,’ Emily said calmly. ‘I recognise you have a right to protect your property. W
hy don’t you do what you see fit, and you can explain it to the police when they arrive.’
The Albino smiled thinly.
‘You think my client wouldn’t welcome the police at his premises?’ Schreck chuckled phlegmatically. ‘Believe me, Miss Blandish – any police that arrive here will have no interest in putting my client in jail. Am I understood?’
The Albino leant forward in his seat and tapped briefly at some kind of typewriter set into the desktop. The keys made a harsh, metallic click as they were pressed, but that was soon drowned out by another sound.
Enough. THERE will –clik– be no POLICE.
There was a hiss of static, and the voice cut abruptly. Or voices, rather – the words had all been spoken by different people, or at least been cut at random from longer sentences and then strung together. Looking more carefully, Emily could see dual phonograph speakers set into the far wall. Somehow, they must be connected to the typewriter on the desk: a computer to put Manchester’s ‘Baby’ to shame.
Schreck cleared his throat.
‘Miss Blandish,’ the lawyer said pointedly. ‘You are a woman of most impressive abilities. My client would be willing to overlook your trespass – and your companion’s trespass – if you were likewise willing to use those abilities on my client’s behalf, on this one occasion.’
Emily didn’t need the picture drawing: the lawyer’s mute client wanted her, wanted to possess her and use her for his own gratification. She had been here before, and she didn’t much want to go back.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ Emily lied.
The Albino tapped into his keyboard again. Emily caught sight of a small cog set into the far wall beginning to turn. Looking more closely, she realised it wasn’t in fact a cog but the end of a wax cylinder. They lined the walls of the office, embedded in the architecture with only the minimum of effort made to disguise them; a curtain here or a wooden panel there. All around the room, the cylinders began to turn: Emily could imagine that each had only a single word recorded on it, and they span in whatever was the required order at the direction of some vast, invisible computer. No wonder the Albino didn’t want to hide its workings: it was incredible.