by Ian McDonald
Not quite a whisper, not quite the wind. Not quite lights in the sky, not quite the lowering autumn sun. Not quite space, not quite time. I felt uncertain. I felt loosely tethered to the world. Everything seemed very close yet infinitely distant at the same time. I saw figures among the trees; I saw mountain bikers slipping past on their secret paths. I thought I might throw up. I stepped out of the triangle. Sharp in my mind was an idea that hadn’t been there before. Quantum events may occur spontaneously. And recur. Everything is a probability.
“You okay?”
I pleaded my long recuperation. This wasn’t the place. But it was tied to the place, entangled.
“Are there any other weird stories about this area?” I asked as we trudged back to the van.
“Can’t move for them,” Lee said.
“Say around the time of the Second World War?”
“Are you shitting me?” I wished Lee could answer just one of my questions without casting doubt on my wit or sanity. “We’re less than five miles from Shingle Street.”
I also hated his habit of half-answering my questions by inviting another.
“Shingle Street?”
“The sea caught fire. Charred bodies on the beach. Some weird shit went down on that Suffolk coast. They’ll tell you it never happened, it’s all rumors and urban legends. That’s the first level of cover-up. They’re clever, see? Then there’s the second level: it was really a botched German invasion and they set the sea on fire. Most people go away satisfied with that. They lift the mask and see what’s underneath, but what’s underneath, Emmett, is another mask. The truth is under that mask. The truth is out there, like the show says.”
“How would I see that truth?”
“What do you want it see for, friend?”
Lee’s commitment to paranoia was as legendary as his consumption of hydroponic skunk. I told him the truth. I was looking for time travelers. These things worked both ways. He could tell who he liked and no one would believe him. We were at the van now and Lee fished a Tesco receipt out of a car pocket and wrote a name and a number on the back.
“He’s the man. Shingle Street, born, bred and buttered. Wise in the ways. You know?”
On the drive back to Hirne House I researched Shingle Street on my phone. The place was right: the Sandings, the pebble coast between Felixstowe and Aldeburgh. The time was right: the legends around Shingle Street dated from 1940.
I had found my time travelers’ point of departure.
* * *
A sudden construction job came up for Lee, so Thorn drove me down to Shingle Street. She brought the dogs. They would enjoy the beach. It was a two-hour drive and they became fractious within ten minutes of home.
I had researched the location through images and maps, street view and Pinterest, through oral history and fake history and official history, conspiracy theory and fiction, through ghosts and legend, but the reality still surprised me. Words and pictures cannot carry the crunch of sea-rounded stone under the tires as we pulled into the car park, the salt-sweet perfume of the grasses, the scabbing dryness of the air, the knock of a hundred million pebbles rolling in the wave lap. I felt exposed and agoraphobic under a sky more huge than that of Lincolnshire, watched by unseen eyes. To the south, beams of sunlight struck through breaks in the cloud layer: God’s searchlights. The row of houses, the seaside cottages, the old Martello tower down the beach were the only verticals, yet they seemed to cower in this land of overwhelming horizontals. I could not imagine how anyone lived with any degree of sanity in such an unrelenting landscape. The dogs did not burst from the back of the car in their customary excitement. They clung close, weaving around our legs as we walked up the beach towards the Martello where we would meet Regenbald Howe. Thorn threw a stick into the sea to try to lift the dogs’ disquiet. Cwen, most aquatic of mutts, fretted up and down the shingle, whining, dancing back from the lap of water.
I had never been to such an uncanny place.
Regenbald Howe was a man of slate and wire, hollow faced, skin turned to leather, long grey hair tied in a silver ring. He was a Jarl of Hilderwic; he wore a pierced pebble on a thong around his neck, inscribed with the Ash rune. He wore technical outdoors gear from Decathlon and carried a long, twisted walking stick that he informed us was a dried bull’s pizzle, a powerful ritual object.
He marched us past the houses and the charred ribs of the Lifeboat Inn to the old Martello tower. I have always been fascinated by Martello towers, that chain of lookouts built along the coast of Britain and Ireland at the height of Napoleonic paranoia, but I had never been inside one.
“I just keep an eye on the place,” Regenbald told us as the tip of his bull pizzle clicked up the metal staircase to the door halfway up the leeward curve of the tower. “Let in the renters.”
The decor was London rural weekend: resculpted brick, furniture designed to fit the curving walls; spiral staircases and the glass cupola at the top where we sat on semi-circular benches, watched November spread like a bruise along the eastern horizon and hoped for the offer of something warming. The pizzle stick was propped against the wall by the light switch. The dogs slumbered on their sides in the kitchen, legs reaching straight out.
“So, what nonsense have they told you?” Regenbald asked. I told him the wartime legends: the sea set ablaze; the rumors of a botched German invasion, the bodies of dead Nazis strewn along half a mile of beach, hideously burned; the mysterious lights and sounds that traveled long across sea and shingle. The theory that the government had carried out an experiment so unholy that it had polluted even the stone, sea and spirit of Shingle Street, so ghastly that all knowledge of it had been rigorously suppressed and made incredible by a campaign of misinformation and rumormongering.
“And what do you believe?” Regenbald said.
Thorn and I shifted in our seats and exchanged secretive glances.
“That Shingle Street was the location of a secret government Second World War time-travel experiment,” I said.
“Time travel?” Regenbald said with a haughtiness that made me feel like sliding down the spiral stairs and running as fast and far as I could from this judgmental place.
“We found . . . evidence,” I said weakly.
“Chappell and Seligman,” Howe said. His Suffolk accent was as slow and broad as the horizon. “They were stationed at RAF Bawdsey during the war. It was the center of the Home RADAR network, but there were a lot of War Ministry research projects going on. I know nothing about time travel, but I do know there was something called the Uncertainty. Ben Seligman was a boffin in the research division, a Northerner, a Manc. But Tom Chappell, he’s proper Sandings. Local boy. There are still Chappells up in Bawdsey village. Used to run the ferry. You’ll find Tom Chappell in the parish records: baptized St. Mary’s June 12, 1914. He’s still up on the sports team boards at Felixstowe Grammar: cross-country running. Set the county under-sixteen record. Bit of a local poet.”
I was vertiginous with wonder. That is the only word in our language, but it cannot convey the emotion of those tectonic truths closing with a sound like trumpets, the physical sense of being at the same time huge and small, a feeling like acceleration of the universe receding and at the same time racing in towards me.
“You’re ready to read the diary now,” Howe said. He took a fabric-wrapped package from inside his weatherproof jacket, laid it on the conversation table and unfolded a great length of soft muslin. The diary was a soft tan wad the size of a cigarette packet. It was all I could do to keep myself from snatching it up and opening it. “The family didn’t get it back until 1980. None of the material to do with Bawdsey Manor was ever declassified, but someone left it on their doorstep.”
“Same year as the Rendlesham event,” I said.
Howe took a long pause before continuing.
“The family didn’t know what to do with it—the Chappells in Bawdsey were quite old by then; most of the younger generations had moved away—so they gave it to me, as the
last Jarl, and keeper of the coast.” He handed the diary to me; I took it like a sacrament. “I’ve marked some passages that might be of interest to you.”
Thorn huddled up beside me to read with me, but the book was tiny, the pencil handwriting minuscule and the light in the glass cupola fading. I threw on every lighting source in the round room and read aloud.
Shingle Street
Ben calls on the field telephone from the Martello tower.
“Get yourself up here, Tom.”
The boldness. On an open line. But this place has made us bold: open and exposed.
“Back of the tower.”
All the bikes are on standby to run messages back to Bawdsey in case of an unexpected breakdown in communications. The Uncertainty Squad thinks it a distinct possibility. The electrical and magnetic energies they will generate are powerful enough to disrupt radio communications, even telephone lines. I steal a pushbike from the back of the other-ranks mess, sneak it over the fence, and I’m off up Buckanay Lane. Not that anyone would care. There’s been a madness over Bawdsey all week, a crazed holiday spirit, a last-day-of-term wildness. Everyone has been up to see the barge moored off Shingle Street.
Tonight, for one night only: Before your very eyes! Abracadabra!
No one quite knows what to expect, not even Ben and his Uncertainties. The Ministry men saw him make a flake of sea salt disappear. This is a sea barge. Will the barge disappear from sight? Will it suddenly be surrounded by a hundred phantom barges? Will its double appear in the sea three weeks—or even three years from now? All of those? Bawdsey has dispatched observers up and down the coast for twenty miles.
The most likely, and most dull, result is that nothing will happen.
Ben is with the group in the Shingle Street Martello tower.
I see him light a cigarette in the tower door. I answer with a match flare; he nods and lifts his binoculars, camera, tin hat and clipboard. I hear him shout about checking the forward observation position. I follow him to one of the abandoned fishermen’s houses.
“This is insane,” I say.
“It’s always been insane,” Tom says. “Come on. Quick.”
I have known these houses and felt their disapproval for peering through the salt-streaked windows. To enter one is a violation. All the things I glimpsed are actual. I can smell the blue mold from the ancient loaf. I feel the chill from that damp, leaking corner of the kitchen ceiling. There is a coal scuttle and old newspaper, frozen in time, under the stairs.
Tom sets up the observation post in the kitchen.
“I wish you’d brought that Primus,” he says. “I could murder a cup of tea.”
I borrow Ben’s binoculars. The Uncertainty betrays little of its complex theory. The barge is moored a hundred yards offshore. Wires and antennae festoon the mast; I can easily make out boxy shapes under tarpaulins in the hold.
I shiver with excitement, not just from my thrilling elopement with Ben, but because I am about to witness the fruit of his work. He has explained to me time and again the theory and the engineering, but it is a secret world to me.
“Is that generator on the boat?”
“Auxiliary power,” Ben explains. “We’re running the main power down a cable from shore.”
A boat of age-greyed wood on a grey sea as flat as sheet iron, grey sky, grey stone, grey November. Two men freezing in an abandoned kitchen, watching for it to disappear.
I start to giggle at the silliness. Ben catches my gaiety and together we roar with helpless laughter, doubled up over the kitchen table.
Ben glances at his watch and hilarity flees.
“Two minutes. We should be counting down to initial power-up.”
“Have you any idea how sexy you sound?” I say, and move towards him.
Ben steps away. “Work to do, darling.”
Then the room, the house, every pebble of Shingle Street throbs. A mighty chord, deeper than any bass, shakes me to the marrow in my backbone.
“Initial power-up?” I say.
“That’s only twenty percent,” Ben says, and the house, the floor beneath my feet, the air itself throbs again to a new power spike.
“It feels like this place is going to come in around us,” I say.
We grab binoculars, clipboard, the accoutrements of Uncertainty, and flee. Outside, the dour November air is alive with energy. Sky, stone, sea beat with a vast primal song.
“Is it meant to be like this?” I shout.
“I don’t know!” Ben shouts back. “Isn’t it extraordinary?”
Even without the binoculars I can see something is happening to the barge. Balls of Saint Elmo’s fire roll up and down the masts, the sheets, the cables. The sea around it seems as transparent as glass, seems to glow from beneath. Mirage barges flicker in and out of existence; for whole moments windows seem to open in the sky, through which I glimpse what I can only describe as other seas, other skies.
Ben cranks up the radio.
“This is Coastguard cottage forward position,” he yells. “We are experiencing unusual atmospheric and electrical phenomena. Over.”
The radio crackles once in reply, then Ben cries out and drops the handset.
“I don’t think I’m going to be reporting back to the Martello,” Ben says. I hug him, pull him to me. The pulse of power almost knocks me to the ground. Every pebble seems to lift and separate from every other; every spear of sea grass blazes. Every object is haloed in the light. The glow from the sea is blinding.
“Eighty percent!” Ben shouts. “Magnificent!”
T minus twenty seconds, on my old wristwatch, though I can’t trust it, can’t trust anything.
“Full power,” Ben announces, and my bones thrum with power and I can see into everything, every cell and particle. I catch a flicker of motion in the house behind us. I look around. I see us, in the kitchen. And on the path from the Martello tower, and at the door to the Martello tower: us.
“Uncertainty,” Ben says.
* * *
We kiss and the sea catches fire.
Fenland
“They were lovers,” I said. “Time-crossed lovers. All the best stories are love stories.”
Thorn drove with savage concentration. By the time we left Shingle Street it was thick dark, we were down to one headlight and a warm front was moving in, with buffets of wind and rain that challenged the one working windscreen.
“All the stories say the sea caught fire. Flames leaping a thousand feet into the sky. But that’s just another way of describing what Amal saw at Gallipoli: the Lost Battalion marching up into the glowing cloud. It’s the same thing: a thing no one had seen before, that had never existed until they threw the switch up in the tower. There are no words to describe what they saw. They thought they were building a cloaking device; instead, they created a time storm—no, a time vortex.”
“Doctor Who, Emmett. Fuckin’ Doctor Who.”
“I felt it, Thorn, at Rendlesham. It’s the same thing: it wasn’t some alien spacecraft; it was the time vortex, touching Earth again.”
After Ben Chappell’s diary, Regenbald showed me the witness statements, personal records, annotations in family Bibles, letters, urban legends jotted down in draughty church halls, World War 2 re-enactor meets, greasy-spoon cafes, living rooms smelling of damp dog, over-heated pub inglenooks: the stories of the Time the Sea Caught Fire. The barge had disappeared; the barge had been seen at Harwich, Aldeburgh, Southwold, Great Yarmouth, as far afield as Cromer and Southend—all at the same time, the barge was waiting stogged in the sand when the Fiftieth Infantry went ashore at Gold Beach on D day. The observers were all sworn to secrecy. The observers all went mad. The observers all died. Burning bodies washed up on the tide. On days of strange calm and overcast, when sea and sky and shingle seemed to merge, burning figures could be seen standing on the water, just beyond the break line. On days of strange calm and overcast, on those days when the elements merged with one another, a cloud could sometimes be seen movi
ng in from the sea, low and dark and always driving against the wind, a cloud flickering with lightning and the mutter of thunder, though some witnesses claimed to have heard voices, or a terrible animal roaring from it.
They wanted to make a ship invisible. They wanted to make a ship insubstantial as a ghost. They wanted to open a portal to another universe. They wanted to open a gate to hell.
“They tried to make it uncertain in space and time,” Regenbald said. “They succeeded, but not with the ship.”
“One thing I still don’t get,” I ranted. “The book. Time Was. Tom must have had it with him, but I still don’t understand where it came from.”
“Emmett . . .”
“E.L. must have been some mentor figure, but who was he?”
“Emmett, I need to tell you something.”
“He turns up, gives Tom a book of his own poems, does the full Yoda, then disappears.”
“Emmett, I really—”
“Thorn, Thorn, maybe there are more than two time travelers!”
“It’ll do tomorrow, Emmett.”
* * *
There was no point at which I could be certain that that I lived with Thorn. There certainly was a point when I unlived with her.
The morning after we came back from Shingle Street she told me, over tea and Homes Under the Hammer on the big screen in the new extension, what had been so urgent in the car. She had been fucking Lee for six months. Lee and every member of Elder Würm except Phil the drummer, who was into stuff she didn’t like.
That was how the build had gone so quickly.
* * *
The English bloom in Rome.