by Andy Gavin
Wagstaff helps me to my feet and I scan the crowd, every pair of eyes reflected back on me. Are Carrot and Yvaine’s old gang out there somewhere? Rapier has seated himself in the front row of the bleachers, about fifty feet away.
Jack Ketch joins us, staggers sideways, and almost falls back off the cart. Wagstaff was right: he does stink. Like piss and beer.
“Mr. Wagstaff,” the hangman says, his slur thickening the words, “me needs fill Oliver’s skull before droppin’ this one.”
The priest sighs. Jack Ketch slides back off the cart and into the crowd.
“You’ve a brief reprieve while our erstwhile publican relieves himself,” Wagstaff says.
Which gives me an idea.
“Could me and my girl go out at the same time?” I say.
He scrunches his face, which makes him look like a hamster.
“That would be irregular.”
I raise my free hand as if to speak, quieting the crowd.
“Seeing as me and my girl did rob the print house together,” I scream, “shouldn’t we hang together?”
The crowd cheers and someone starts up a chant:
“Printhouse pillagers, together! Together!”
Taking credit for a crime I didn’t do bothers me, but it’s all for a good cause.
“TOGETHER!”
“Let him have it his way,” the officer in charge tells the others, “lest the mob make short work of us.”
Yvaine’s cart is drawn next to mine.
Parked side-by-side under the gallows, we’re only eight feet apart. I step to the edge and reach for her while she does the same.
But the party pooper of a turnkey yanks me back. Wagstaff pulls the noose up from my chest, drawing the scratchy rope across my neck.
“If we can’t touch, go without me,” I call.
“I won’t leave you!” She bites at her captor and we make another lunge at each other. Fail. All we get is whacked. Hard. And Wagstaff tugs my noose tight.
“That swill-tub of a hangman be taking too long.”
He can take all day as far as I’m concerned. But a cheer erupts as Jack Ketch returns from whatever corner he found to piss in.
I feel like joining in when I get a look at him. He’s still wearing the black hood and pants, but the leather vest is stretched ridiculously tight over a torso even bigger than it was five minutes ago. After it ends his belly goes on, covered in thick hair. Every gray strand glints, sharp in the sunlight. Time traveler sharp.
The crowd cheers again as he lumbers up on the cart and checks my noose.
“I’ll get your girl,” Dad’s voice says from behind the mask. “Your aunt is around here somewhere.”
I’m so relieved my knees feel weak, but now’s a bad time to drop.
“Rapier!” I whisper. “Your three o’clock.”
We turn to see the Tick-Tock climb over the lip of the bleachers and jump down into the crowd.
He’s seen Dad.
“Mind if I borrow this?” My hangman-father yanks Rapier’s sword from my belt and leaps — none too gracefully — across to Yvaine’s cart.
He bends close to her, fitting the noose about her neck. He says something that makes her eyes snap and her mouth turn up at the corners, then scans the crowd. Behind him, the Tick-Tock fights through the mob that’s drawn in all around us.
“Crown the boy, the bitch ain’t worth it,” says the guard Yvaine bit.
I’m alone on my cart, but my dad stands next to Yvaine, a hand on her noosed neck, the other holding the Tock’s sword. Suddenly, he throws it high. Sophie leaps from the crowd, not far from me, and snatches it out of the air. I guess it’s been more than a week for her because that leg sure looks better!
The throng cheers and settles to an expectant hush as Wagstaff tries to prep me. Rapier is much closer now, just a few feet from Sophie, slowly working his way through tight-packed bodies he can’t move. Just like with the paper in the church, he has to wait for each little opening.
BRRIIIING! BRRIIIING! I hear the angry noise over the cheers and jeers: Rapier is ringing like a huge alarm clock. The crowd pays him no notice, but the horses tied to my cart rear and buck. They lurch forward, drawing the cart out from under me.
I drop — just a couple inches, but the rope around my neck is like a vise. My body feels like a thousand pounds dragging me down. I look for Yvaine, but my eyeballs seem to explode from my skull and my vision blurs.
I struggle to breathe. No air gets to my lungs. My chest burns and I swoon. My legs flail. I think of the man in the first cart and shudder: there’s nothing for my feet to find. The burning tightness around my neck gets worse and worse. The crowd spins as I twist at the end of the rope. Sophie’s nearly clear, but so is Rapier, and he steps between us.
Yvaine swims into view, still on her cart, mouth open like a fish. So little time, we had so little time together…. I’d have thought everything would go dark, but instead it’s growing white. Luminous and bright.
Spinning in place, I see Rapier and Sophie fighting, not eight feet away, just beyond the ring of constables. She feints, then bashes him in the face with the hilt of the sword. He spins, spilling two metallic pages into the dirt between the carts.
Sophie shoves past the guards to step around him. Rapier regains his balance and follows.
My dad surges toward the edge of Yvaine’s cart, his eyes locked on the pages not five feet from him. But he steps back and hurls something into the air. A cascade of golden discs rains down around the Tick-Tock.
Coins. The constables lose control of the crowd. Everyone surges toward Rapier and the money, burying him in a wall of flesh.
My father grabs Yvaine again, the sun dims, a hole opens beneath them, and they fall out of sight.
Sophie steps forward and grasps my bare ankle.
“Done hanging out?” she yells.
And we surge upward toward the bright, bright future.
Chapter Thirty-Eight:
History 3.0
London, June, 1759
WE LAND SOMEWHERE IN THE NEAR FUTURE along the muddy shallows of the River Thames.
When we start wading, Sophie limps. I give her a soggy hug on shore.
“How’s the leg?”
She’s trying to wring out her skirts. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen her in a dress.
“Getting there, Charlie. Personally, it’s been about six months since China.”
“This is the third time you’ve rescued me, you know,” I say, trying to ignore the maggoty dead dog bobbing to my right. Good thinking, installing that door in the church.”
“We were in Giza, looking for those extra pages, and we felt some small quakes. It wasn’t hard to guess where you’d gone, and your dad, brainiac that he is, remembered which building Ben Franklin had his workshop in. The problem was, we didn’t know the exact when, so we took a shotgun approach and added something permanent years earlier.”
I’d forgotten Giza. “The Regulator have anything new to say?”
“Your dad is still translating. We had to rush back to arrange that door, which put us on the downtime side of the big quake that got Franklin back on the map, but we crawled up to 1791 and got the scoop from his Autobiography. That’s when we found out you jumped from the frying pan into the fire, so we had to turn around.”
Good thing, too. Swallowing hurts, and I touch the raw ring of skin on my neck.
“Do I have a Godfather voice now?”
Sophie chuckles.
“We checked out the prison the day before your execution and found your time-ghosts. After that, get the hangman drunk was the best plan we could come up with. Did you arrange for that change to Franklin’s book the night before?”
“I had about six desperate plans going myself.”
“If you try that again,” she says, “remember other travelers can never find the real you before the moment when you roll a timequake forward to signal them.”
For us, before is a pretty subjective ter
m.
“Do we have a plan to meet up with Dad and Yvaine?”
“Safe house in London, 1759.”
Traveling with Sophie is really different than with Yvaine. We only have thirty-four years to go, but it takes us about a month to get there. Despite my aunt’s short cooldown, jumping takes a lot out of us. She can only manage five or six hops a day, covering about two months each.
Part of the wear and tear is the landings — ditches, sewers, brick walls, basements, sweatshops, brothels, and such. When we finally make it to June of our intended year — on the roof of some barn outside the city — I insist we walk the rest of the way.
“We arranged this place on our way downtime,” Sophie says as we turn onto a tree-lined street of beautiful Georgian homes and let ourselves in through a little iron gate.
“Mom would call this a Palladian facade,” I say. “Do you think she’s back to normal?”
“We’ll find out soon enough.” She knocks on the door.
We look pathetic enough in our filthy rags that it takes a bit of work to convince the servants to fetch the owners.
“Charlie!” Yvaine comes streaking through the grand entrance hall in a silk dress four feet wide. Her hair is powdered, clean, and tied up with ribbons. Plus she’s wearing shoes.
But she walks right into my arms all the same.
Dad insists on having the servants bathe and dress us before debriefing me. He looks good, even in a baby blue silk waistcoat and a powder white wig. He’s lost some weight.
Yvaine’s put on some, just enough that she looks less waify and a little filled out. She sits on my lap in the drawing room and laughs when I tease her about it.
“Your da’s been havin’ ’em cook for me,” she says.
“How long has it been for you two? I’m surprised you haven’t been at each other’s throats.”
“Just a month. An’ he ain’t so bad once I figured out what t’do with him.”
I chuckle. “And what’s that?”
“Regale him with me past and smile when I dinna do what I’s told.” She motions at a servant. “George, be a dear.”
Despite the white wig, he can’t be more than twelve. He fetches a tray and two glasses of wine.
Yvaine hands me one and takes the other. “Claret be even better than ale.”
“Dad lets you?”
“He dinna like it, so I smile when I takes it.”
Sophie and my father return. She cleaned up well too, although she’s done a half-ass job of going period — men’s knickers and unpowdered hair in its usual braid.
“Thanks, Dad,” I say. “Again. I know trying to save Ben was against your principles, but it’s good to be alive.”
He laughs and offers me a meat pie from his pocket.
“Messing with history is still dangerous business, Charlie.”
“Your Giza raid shed light on anything?”
He slumps into a chair with feet like eagle talons. “A cache of fifteen pages, including some of the Regulator’s oldest known writings.”
“And?”
He looks down. “I always assumed the history we grew up with was — more or less — the original. But now I’m not so sure. It’s clear from the pages that the Regulator may have been involved in early manipulations.”
I swallow the urge to say ‘I told you so.’ He did save my ass in a pretty big way.
“Everything I believed has been thrown into question.” He walks over to me. “And letting my only son die over a debatable doctrine hardly seemed right….”
“We make of it what we will,” Yvaine says.
“Your foundling might have a point,” he says, “but we have more research to do. Careful research.”
Yvaine sneers at him, but it seems a good-natured sneer.
“Did Ben Franklin’s life get back on track?” I ask. “Is Mom going to remember us?”
Dad rises to go. “As to your second question, I hope so, and Yvaine can answer the first.”
Yvaine hauls me halfway across town, but it’s an easy trip — we just take the coach. Four men in Dad’s powder blue colors bring it around.
“It be so peculiar t’have money and servants,” she says.
The coach is pretty sweet inside, too, all silk and gold trim, but the ride is still bumpy.
It stops at a handsome brick house. The sun is setting and candlelight spills out from inside. We walk past the front windows, peering in.
“This room,” she says.
I step up to the sill and look. Two men and two women are eating dinner. The younger man is in his thirties. He’s wearing a white wig and has a rather pronounced forehead, just like his father.
At fifty, Benjamin Franklin looks exactly like his portraits. His peppered gray hair runs down long from the sides of his head and not at all from the top. His round spectacles are on the table by his plate, and not far away is a copper and glass contraption that looks all old-school scientific.
“Me Billy’s a William now,” Yvaine says.
Wow!
“Have you talked to him?”
She sighs. “Fink dinna think it be a good idea. His life is as it should be. He’s a barrister an’ works for his da. Ben’s a famous philosopher who represents the colonials in parliament. A real important man now, just like you said.”
She leans in and kisses me.
“I telled you so,” I say.
She swats at me. “Dinna make fun of me talk.”
But she kisses me again.
Returning to the house, we decide to head uptime in the morning. Sophie and Dad will follow — in their own slow-ass barn-and-ditch way. I’m eager to get going but in dire need of sleep.
Not to mention the fact that Yvaine and I haven’t seen each other in a month.
“What about Bréguet?” I ask Dad after dinner. “Would the timequake from fixing Ben’s life have cleaned up his inventions?”
“I think so,” my father says. “Large-scale time changes are complicated, but the Regulator’s Bréguet page indicates that in timelines with the French Revolution, he flees to Geneva, not his country home. When history is recomputed, any interactions with the Tick-Tocks should be nullified since their residuals will be in the wrong place.”
“In English, Fink.” I grin at him. He scowls.
“Basically, I hope it’ll work out. And Charlie, if you don’t mind, please call me Dad.”
“Sure, Dad.”
“You two are sleeping in separate rooms,” he says.
But that doesn’t stop Yvaine from leaving those new shoes of hers and tiptoeing over to my bed after the candles are out.
After breakfast, we gather our things. Rapier’s sword I leave with Sophie. After all, she earned it. But Yvaine gives me one of her daggers, making sure the other is strapped to her hip.
We hug Dad and Sophie goodbye and go.
My aunt’s cooldown might be handy in a fight, but traveling with Yvaine is way more comfortable. Not only does she make it back to 2011 in one jump, but we land right in the middle of the entryway to my house — on our feet!
I’m relieved to see the two names on the mailboxes: Montag and Horologe.
“Ready?” Yvaine says. She’s wearing tapered jeans, Keds, and a cute little red hoodie.
I knock on the door.
And Mom answers! She’s standing on her own two feet and looks just like I remember, but the minute she sees me, a puzzled expression crosses her face.
My heart drops into my groin.
“Did you lose your key?” she says.
I rush forward and practically crush her in a bear hug.
“I missed you, Mom!”
“Was the field trip that bad?” she asks.
The orange afternoon light streams in behind us. Yvaine must’ve nailed the date — while it’s been months for me, for Mom it’s only been hours.
Which is fine by me.
“Introduce us,” she says.
“This is Yvaine, my girlfriend.”
&
nbsp; Mom looks at Yvaine, gives her a smile that would make a serial killer feel right at home, and winks at me.
“Hi, girlfriend. Did you two meet at school?”
“In history,” I say.
I glance at Yvaine, who lets out a delightful giggle.
“Dad called my mobile,” I tell Mom. “He and Sophie are coming home soon.”
I hate lying to her, but she literally won’t understand the truth.
“That’s a relief,” she says, “I was really worried after that strange incident with the police. I’m surprised he didn’t call me, too.”
She pulls her phone from her pocket. It looks weird — round and flat, about the size of a donut. She taps it, and the circular LCD on the front comes to life. Pixelated clock hands give the impression of an old-fashioned dial.
“No messages,” she says.
“What kind of phone is that?” My voice squeaks.
“My iWatch?”
I rush into the room and over to the window, drawing back the curtains.
Down the street is the Philadelphia skyline. Skyscrapers and all. But where the Comcast Center should be is a hundred-story tower. Up its side in scrolling glowing LEDs runs the text:
Franklin-Bréguet Electro Data Corporation!
TO BE CONTINUED…
Find
Untimed
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Also by Andy Gavin:
The Darkening Dream
online at:
the-darkening-dream.com
As the Nineteenth Century gives way to the Twentieth, modern science and steel girders leave little room for the supernatural. But in dark corners the old forces still gather. God, demon, and sorcerer alike plot to regain what was theirs in Andy Gavin’s chilling debut, The Darkening Dream.