Touchstone Season Two Box Set
Page 1
Table of Contents
About This Collection
This collection is dedicated to
BURIED IN TIME
Dedication
Introductory note
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— Epilogue —
Acknowledgements
Buried in the Archives: | Historical Notes and Ripperological Reflections
BRIGHT STAR FALLING
Dedication
Introductory note
Bright star fallen
We are all related
Tiyáta
Wówaši
The Men who are Talked About
Surrounded
The hills have eyes
Spotted buffalo
The horse thief
Walking up Wolf Mountain
The ladybird and the tornado
Wágli
The Great Father’s hand
The Battle of the Powder River
Grass fever
Monahsetah
The coming storm
Sun Dance
The Battle Where the Girl Saved Her Brother
The Battle Where the Winkte Saved his Sister
The Greasy Grass
Sitting Bull and White Buffalo Calf Woman
Song of the night
Gall
Thechihila
Buffalo hunt
Miniconjou Ford
A good day to die
Stirring gravy
A hungry man’s meal
Farewell to the squawman
The last stand
The cursed
A warning in water
The great fire
The white ghost
Once were warriors
Stray dog
Eating the ponies
The moon when the wolves run together
Fight no more forever
Peyote
Indian heart
Running Water
Steamboat
Yankton
Corn Palaces
Iron Horses
Locusts
Show Indians
God made me an Indian
Akicita
The sidewalks of New York
The lonely death of Red Flea
Buffalo Bull Who Sits Down
Without them, we are nothing
Thiánakitaŋ
Acknowledgements
Historical Notes
BUFFALO BILL AND THE PEAKY BLINDERS
BRIGHT STAR RISING
Dedication
Introductory note
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Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Historical Notes
Thank you
Next in the Touchstone saga
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About the Author
Copyright Notice
About This Collection
Jack the Ripper, Sitting Bull, Arthur Conan Doyle, Buffalo Bill and the Peaky Blinders all star in this, the second season of the hit time travel historical fantasy saga.
"Inventively brilliant alternative history.”
In the fallout from Touchstone Season 1’s epic finale, villains Danny Pearce and Kath Bright find their way in hostile worlds, blind to their true identities, struggling to atone for sins they can’t remember.
" As gripping as ever! Couldn’t put it down.”
From the streets of Birmingham to the sidewalks of New York, from the slums of Victorian England to the Great Plains, the Touchstone world reaches epic scale.
"Ripping yarns, meticulously researched and genuinely shocking when they need to be.”
This eBook Box Set (comprising a quarter of a million words and 1000 pages in the original paperback editions) collects the first three novels of Touchstone Season 2 and the prequel short story Buffalo Bill and the Peaky Blinders, previously only available in the anthology, New Street Stories.
"Touchstone saga at its best. Absolutely brilliant and highly recommended.”
This collection contains the following titles:
1. Buried in Time [1888]
2. Bright Star Falling [1874-1887]
3. Buffalo Bill and the Peaky Blinders [1887]
4. Bright Star Rising [1887]
This collection is dedicated to
Oonagh Beasley
who saw it second
BURIED IN TIME
Dedication
To Winifred
Introductory note
THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION, but it contains several real people and tries to be as true to their history as possible.
Catherine Eddowes was a real victim of Jack the Ripper on 30 September 1888 in Mitre Square, London. Thomas Conway was her estranged common-law husband and hawker of self-published chapbooks and gallows ballads. William Bury, who was hanged for murdering his wife in Dundee in February 1889, is a genuine and quite convincing suspect for the Whitechapel murders. Arthur Conan Doyle needs no introduction.
The fact that all of them lived and worked in the city of Birmingham at one time or another has inspired the fantasy of these pages. That fantasy emerged from two simple, irresistible questions: what if they all crossed paths in Birmingham in July 1888, just two months before the Whitechapel murders began? And what if they crossed paths with a character from my Touchstone time travel universe?
1
HE TWISTED THE RED handkerchief in knots around his dirty fingers till the blood ceased to flow. The pain and pleasure of binding and then release, enacted over and over again.
A shabby room covered in blood. Swathes of vermilion arced over the wall above the bed. Blood everywhere.
She smiled as she turned to him, slipping off her shawl, unpinning her bonnet, placing the long pin on the dressing table.
Her death’s head smiling to him from the pillow.
“Make yourself comfortable,”
she said.
Blood everywhere. Slashed across the wall like paint daubed across a primed canvas.
Time is jumbled up.
For she was dead and then alive. The walls were marked with her blood and then were clean. The consequence occurred before the action.
The gaslight glow licked the walls in dim, dour, brooding half light. It could make a hovel look romantic. The yellow wallpaper peeling, scratched and torn in places as if someone here had tried to claw their way out. Once. Sometime in the past. Maybe it was this woman. Maybe it was yet to happen.
He twisted the red handkerchief in knots around his stained fingers.
She disrobed, letting her long dress slip to the floor in a pool at her feet. Striped stockings tied above her knees with ribbon.
Naked on the bed she lies and says, “How do you want me?”
Slashing at her. Deep crimson spurt of vibrant colour.
She leads him up the wooden stairs and unlocks the door, pushing in, turning on the gas lamp. A few sticks of furniture destined to be burnt on the mean fire grate. One day in the future.
The past, the future, the now, all mixed, like paint on a palette, smeared on canvas, blending, mixing, conjoined. Then. Now. To be.
“Is that my payment?” she said, peeling off her corset. “Put it on the dresser.”
Pointing lazily over to the walnut dressing table. He saw himself in the oval mirror and hated the sight of his reflection. Saw himself exposed in all his desire.
He turned from her and heard the whisper of her undergarments slipping to the floor, and took the blade from his pocket.
Time. Blood. Paint.
Slashing at the canvas. Frenzied now. The patterns forming themselves. His hand doing their bidding, as if all of this was outside of time and was in the control of some malevolent God.
It was not him.
His hand merely did this God’s bidding.
She smiled and let go of his hand and took off her hat, placing the long pin on the dresser. An embarrassed smile and shrug that said So, here we find ourselves.
When it was over he stepped back, panting, his hands all red, and surveyed the majesty of the work he had wrought.
He took out the red handkerchief and folded it to a neat point, leaning in close to his work, to the river of dark crimson still running from her, and dipped it in. Just a tiny spot. To collect and add to the other spots of blood, all in a neat row, dotted along, red on red.
The smell of ordure and metal.
The abattoir he remembered.
She leaned up on one elbow, one leg crooked, the gaslight bathing her naked flesh in crimson gold, smiling coyly, shifting, and said, “Is this how you want me?”
“Perfect,” he whispered.
He shoved the red handkerchief into his pocket and surveyed his masterpiece one last time, fixing its image in his mind’s eye, before walking out and closing the door behind him.
2
DANIEL PEARCE WOKE with a start, as if falling, as if he was nothing, blown hither and thither on the breath of a tornado.
And he was aware of the room, aware of now. His empty bed. There was no wife’s hand on his shoulder to soothe him from his nightmare, but even in his terror, a momentary smile creased his lips at the thought that there soon would be a wife with whom he’d share his bed. He would never wake alone again.
He sat up, half out of the bed, his head swimming, reminding himself he was in the here and now. It was only another dream. His bare feet touched the thin rug and he gulped in the morning air.
My name is Daniel Pearce.
And already the unsteady feeling beneath his feet, as if the ground were moving, shifting. Most men could state their name, above all else, with certainty. He knew that to be his name. It was the only thing he’d known about himself when he’d come to consciousness fourteen years ago. He had, though, always wanted to call himself not Daniel but Danny. But that was the kind of name that no one recognized. It wasn’t even a name. It was a foreign word. People had heard the first syllable and settled on Daniel.
The wind rattled the wooden blinds and sighed down the chimney. The bedroom fire grate was a black mouth, whispering to him.
He thought of how Arabella might whisper to him, “All is well. It’s only a dream, my darling.” They would share this bed soon. He would be a bachelor no more and she would know his nightmares. He would nod and slow his breathing and reach behind him to place his hand on her warm thigh. His fingers that would say thank you, my love. She would inch across the bed and curl around him, her arms pulling him towards her, come back to me, come back to me, a mermaid pulling him into the sea.
He shook his head and rubbed his face, as if he might rub the dream and the fantasy away.
“Come back to bed,” she would say.
And he knew that he would shake her off and she would feel the awkward astonishment of his rejection. As if he’d slapped her.
And all because he had no idea who he was or where he’d come from, and no matter how hard he had tried, over the last year of their courtship, he still couldn’t remember. And he had only two days before he became her husband.
Bile rose in him.
He stood and staggered around the bed in the dark, and out down the quiet landing, running down the stairs, out through the scullery, cold tile on his feet and out into the close air of the morning, to the privy.
He hunched over the toilet, gagging, trying not to think of his future wife, in case he came to associate her with this vile experience. But he could not help but think that in a few days he would stand at the altar and it would all be a lie. Because he was only pretending to be this man she loved. How could he be the man she loved if he didn’t know who he was?
He retched into the toilet.
He should call off the wedding. It wasn’t fair to Arabella. She knew nothing of this turmoil within him.
He pulled the chain, the flush echoing on the privy walls, and crept to the summer house at the foot of the garden. He pushed the door open — he’d left it unlocked, again — and beheld the stacks of canvases, his latest on an easel draped in a white sheet, like a ghost.
He swept it off and gazed over his work. A nude draped across a bed, rendered in slashes and daubs of thick pigment. The smell of it in the air, that cloying scent of oil paint that almost made one dizzy. Her sallow fleshed limbs coiled, the canvas almost hacked with violent swathes of vermilion.
He covered the painting with a white sheet, wincing at its ugliness, and picked a sketch book from the pile stacked on the dresser, below the framed photograph of Arabella that stood guard over his creativity.
He skimmed through pages of quickly executed dream sketches — images from his nightmares — looking for a clue that might tell him who he was. But they seemed to be fantastical figures: a man who could summon up hurricanes and destroy cities; a red-haired woman swooping down on unsuspecting victims like an avenging harpy; a brown-haired girl with stars in her eyes standing by a gravestone. He had sketched the same figures again and again because he dreamed about them all the time, but this time he flicked through to another recurring dream. The one he’d dreamed again this morning.
Himself, standing on a train platform, wearing a derby hat, pointing a pistol at a clock, and fading from sight, so that he was half-transparent.
He had dreamed about this station many times and almost come to know it well. It had always seemed to be a mysterious place that didn’t really exist in any real time or place — it was outside of time, he felt — and he had come to calling it his Station at the End of Time.
He gazed over the charcoal drawing. The clock, the pistol, the fading man. It terrified him. This meant something. This was more than just a dream.
But there was no answer. Not this morning. Not any morning. He closed the sketch book and crept back into the house under cover of the dawn chorus.
In the kitchen, he examined his face in the mirror where he shaved every morning. His fair hair still thick and wiry
, a few greying at the temples.
It was a stupid fancy, just an issue he had, and then thought what a strange word that was; the kind that came to his mind all the time and seemed strange to everyone around him. What was an issue? How could it have any association with how a person might feel?
My name is Daniel Pearce and I am thirty-five years of age.
And here was where his certainty crossed over into supposition. He did not know for sure that he was thirty-five years old. He looked it. It seemed accurate. When he had found himself on the road leading into the village, that hot summer afternoon, he had been a man in his early twenties. He had chosen to be 21 years of age, because it avoided the necessity of needing parents. It made him ‘of age’: an adult. He had chosen the 26th of June as his birthday shortly after his arrival in the village because that was the date he’d arrived. That was the date he’d been born, in a way, for he remembered nothing before that date. It had been the easy thing to do. People expected you to know how old you were. They expected you to know your birth date. So he had chosen one.
And he had been living in Moseley for fourteen years, which meant he must now be thirty-five, or thereabouts.
I am Daniel Pearce, thirty-five years of age, and will marry Arabella Palmer.
This at least was some certainty. Everything that had happened to him since he’d arrived in the village had been lit with the clear beam of memory. Arabella Palmer was thirteen years his junior. He had been her tutor when she was a child. It was his first job after arriving in the village. He had watched her grow into a woman, noticed her fondness for him bloom into love. After his proposal last year, she had admitted to him that she’d always been in love with him and knew she would marry him, from the moment he’d called at her father’s house, responding to his need for a tutor for his daughter.
She had known from the start, whereas he had known nothing. Her certainty about the future humbled him, and it had come to be the raft onto which he clung.
Arabella believed in him. Her belief would make him normal. Her belief would end his nightmares.
He placed his tin shaving bowl in the Belfast sink and ran cold water into it, lathering his face with his horsehair shaving brush and reaching for his razor.
The pleasant scrape of it against his jaw. The keen trepidation, that he might slit his own throat and end his life immediately, his movements automatic, his hands guiding the razor without thought. He had done this for fourteen years, every day. It was as natural as breathing in and out.