by Mark Morris
Once the spider-chair had been broken down and taken away I’d had the carpet – which had been saturated with Hawkins’ blood right through to the floorboards – ripped up and replaced. Though even after the floorboards had been scrubbed and the new carpet laid I’d still caught the occasional coppery whiff of blood on the air.
It was all in my imagination, of course. What I was really smelling was my own guilt. I felt wretched about the fact that I’d been unable to save Hawkins, or bring him back. I blamed myself, told myself he was dead because I hadn’t cared enough about him. Clover, during one of our rare murmured exchanges, told me that that was bollocks, said that maybe nothing had been able to save Hawkins, and that maybe it was simply his time. I couldn’t be swayed, though. I was haunted by the thought that he was dead because of me. And the fact that a future version of me had rescued him from his condemned cell and gifted him a few extra years of life did sod all to ease that conviction.
Foregoing the tea and sandwiches and little cakes that Mrs Peake had laid on for after the funeral, I sloped away and installed myself in the armchair before the fire in the drawing room. It was here where I’d been spending most of my time, brooding and thinking, since all trace of the Dark Man’s visit had been eradicated. The Christmas tree in the corner was like a mockery of happier times; it turned my stomach just to look at it. But we’d left it up for Hope’s benefit, thinking, rightly or wrongly, that if it had disappeared along with Hawkins, she might subsequently associate Christmas with death – assuming, of course, she was still with us twelve months from now.
After stoking up the fire I sat back, staring into the flames. Now and then my eyes strayed to where the shape-shifter had slithered around the upper lip of the fireplace and up the flue like an oily snake. Several times over the past few days I’d wondered whether the thing was still up there, licking its wounds, biding its time. I’d become so obsessed by the idea that yesterday I’d got down on my hands and knees, lit a match and stuck my head up the chimney. As I’d done it I’d thought about how people in horror films always seemed such dicks when they did stuff like this. If I was a viewer I’m sure I’d feel I deserved to have some monstrous, tentacled thing rush at me out of the darkness, piranha jaws stretched wide to devour my face.
In my defence I did grip the heart tight in my left hand while raising the match in my right, hoping that if the shape-shifter was up there, either it would sense the heart’s proximity and keep its distance or it would attack and the heart would protect me. As it happened, the chimney seemed empty of everything but soot – not that I found that reassuring. What if the shape-shifter was higher up than I could see, hidden in the darkness? Or what if it had crawled back out of the fireplace while the room was empty and was now somewhere else in the house, disguised as a lamp or a pot plant or one of Hope’s dolls?
Obsessive thoughts, I know, but I couldn’t help myself. The irony that the Dark Man’s death had made me more paranoid than ever wasn’t lost on me. Slumped and introspective in front of the fireplace by day I’d taken to prowling the house by night. I carried the heart with me at all times, in the hope it would alert me to danger. Although I’d known the Wolves had been capable of it, the ease with which they’d invaded my home and killed Hawkins had shaken me to the core. And the fact that their leader (I assumed he was their leader) was dead – or at least, the decrepit version I’d met in this timeline, which didn’t mean there couldn’t be younger, more vigorous versions in other timelines – proved to be no consolation at all. In fact, it made me more afraid for Kate’s welfare than ever. If the Wolves were leaderless, in disarray, would that improve her chances of being released or put her into greater danger? What if the Wolves wanted revenge for the Dark Man’s death? Or what if his immolation had finally proved to them that they and the heart were incompatible, that any further attempt to seize ownership of it was futile, and that Kate was no longer of any use to them?
I wasn’t exactly a stranger to dark thoughts, but the ones that swirled in my head in the days after Hawkins’ death were among the blackest I’d ever known. I felt rudderless, unsure what to do next. I felt as if I was becoming obsessed by my own fears, and as a result was isolating myself from the world around me.
There was a knock on the drawing-room door. I scowled into the fire, hoping that if I ignored it, whoever was there would get the hint and go away.
The door opened and I sighed, but still I didn’t look up. Footsteps came towards me, soft on the carpet. I hunched down further into my armchair, focusing on the dancing flames. Then I pictured the shape-shifter in its most basic form – black and oily and vaguely humanoid – moving across the room towards me, intent on revenge, and that was enough to make me turn and look up.
‘I come bearing gifts,’ said Clover.
She had a cup of tea in one hand and a slice of cake in the other.
‘I’m not hungry.’
Undeterred, she crossed the rest of the distance between us and placed the tea and cake, with a tinkle of bone china, on the hearth. Then she lowered herself with a rustle of bombazine (she was still wearing her floor-length mourning dress) into the armchair opposite me and gave a dismissive flap of her hand.
‘Whatever. I’m not really here to feed you. We need to talk, Alex.’
‘I’m not in the mood.’
‘So you’ve given up on finding Kate, have you?’
She paused, and when I didn’t reply she said airily, ‘Yeah, you’re right, it’s probably a waste of time. Might as well just forget about her and get on with your life.’
That stung. I gripped the arms of the armchair, digging my fingers in.
‘Fuck off! Do you honestly believe I don’t think about her every minute of the day? But I can’t see a way forward. Can’t see a way of finding out where she is.’
‘You could use the heart.’
‘How?’
‘I don’t know, do I? I’m not its keeper. But we know that in certain circumstances it responds to you. Maybe you should be putting your energies into trying to… I don’t know… communicate with it, get it to show you the way.’
‘It didn’t respond to me when I wanted it to save Hawkins.’
‘No,’ she conceded. ‘But like I said, maybe it couldn’t. Maybe Hawkins is no longer part of the story.’
‘Story?’ I scoffed. ‘This isn’t a story, Clover. These are lives. Messy, complicated, unpredictable lives.’
‘But everyone’s life is a story. Everyone has a beginning, a middle and an end.’
I grunted.
Leaning forward, she fixed me with an intent look, as if she was trying to hypnotise me, impose her will on mine.
‘I would have thought you, of all people, would concede to the notion of destiny, Alex. Don’t you think it’s at least possible our lives are mapped out for us?’
I stared back at her. ‘If they are, then who’s to say it isn’t the will of God, or Allah, or old Father Time, or whoever, that I sit here and…’
‘Sulk?’ she said.
I scowled. ‘Don’t try to goad me, Clover. My point is that, going by your argument, we can do no wrong, because whatever we do is only what we’re meant to do. According to that way of thinking, our thoughts, our decisions, our mistakes, aren’t ours – they’re just planted there by… by fate, or a higher force.’
Now it was me who wafted a hand dismissively.
‘But seeing as you’re asking, then no, I don’t believe that. I don’t believe in destiny. Maybe once I might have considered it as a possibility, but not any more. Life is too much of a fuck up. Which means this conversation is irrelevant.’
She responded with a half-smile, as though pleased with herself for drawing even this much out of me.
‘Go on.’
‘Go on where?’
‘Let’s talk about this properly. Destiny versus free will.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I think it’s important.’
I sighed, though in truth it was something I’d
been thinking about a lot over the past few days. Although we’d discussed the circularity and inconsistency of time travel numerous times before, most of our previous conversations on the subject had been sketchy, guarded, hypothetical. For various reasons we hadn’t yet discussed the circumstances surrounding Hawkins’ death – partly because we were too shell-shocked by what had happened; partly because I hadn’t been willing to externalise what I saw as my guilt (despite Clover’s insistence that I was blameless) any more than I had to… and partly, I admit, because, purely and simply, I was scared of digging too deep.
The fear I had of voicing the wildly veering thoughts in my head was almost superstitious. I had the notion that if I could keep those thoughts contained, all would be fine, but that once I started to give vent to them, to bring them into the open, it would be like… I don’t know… like unleashing a swarm of voracious insects or a deadly virus.
I know how crazy that sounds, but what you have to grasp is that whereas time travel is a fun and exciting idea in books and movies, in reality it’s terrifying. It shouldn’t work. It can’t work. It’s impossible. And yet the fact that, regardless of that, it did work meant that I either had to accept and try to come to terms with a concept no human mind was designed and equipped to cope with, or go completely insane.
‘All right,’ I said, and promptly passed the buck to Clover. ‘You first.’
I saw her draw herself in, saw her adopt the focused expression of a sportswoman about to run a race, or throw a javelin, or perform a high dive.
‘Okay,’ she said carefully. ‘Well, we know, don’t we, from what happened the other night, that small things can be changed? We know that a reality existed in which the Dark Man asked for the heart, and when you hesitated, or refused to give it to him, he had what you thought was Kate killed, which then created the… the emotional charge, I suppose, that the future you needed to travel back in time and warn the you of a few minutes earlier not to make the same mistake. But because you – the you that’s sitting here now – was given that information, you didn’t hesitate, and so the future was changed. You gave the Dark Man the heart and it killed him – and here we are.’
She paused, looking breathless, even fearful, which made me suspect, despite her goading, that she was also wary of stirring up whatever might be lurking in the pool of time. Already I felt as if my mind was bending and hurting, as I contemplated how, by changing the future, I’d created a paradox, an impossible situation, whereby, because the events that had forced the future me to travel back in time had subsequently been altered due to the future me’s warning, it meant that the future me had no longer experienced them, and therefore had no reason to travel back in time to warn his/my past self to change them.
‘So,’ Clover continued, ‘let’s think about what this means. Is this reality now the only reality, or is there a reality running parallel to this one where you don’t hand over the heart to the dark man and he carries on living?
‘Or are there not just two realities, but lots of them? Are there, in fact, a multiverse of possibilities, where circumstances are constantly changing? Is reality like a tree, branching off in all directions, infinitely splitting into smaller and smaller shoots?’
Almost grudgingly I said, ‘Even with what we know it sounds mad to say it, but… yeah, maybe. But that’s not even the question we should be asking. What we should be asking is whether, because of what the heart can do, it’s possible to travel between these alternate realities, if they exist, skip from one to the next like… like moving between lanes on a motorway.’
Both of us were silent for a moment, digesting the concept.
Then I said, ‘Personally I think we can. Or at least I think whoever has the heart can.’
‘Because of the crumbling heart that the Dark Man showed you, you mean?’
I nodded. ‘Unless the Dark Man stole the heart from a future version of me, and was lying about owning it ever since the shape-shifter took it from me at the police station, he must be from an alternate timeline, one where I never got the heart back after ending up here and probably spent the rest of my life looking for it. In that timeline I might even have died in Tallarian’s laboratory because Hawkins wasn’t there to rescue me. But if that’s true, then I’d never have been in Tallarian’s laboratory in the first place, would I, because the future me would never have been able to resurrect Frank Martin, who would never have rescued me from the crypt in Queens Road Cemetery that Benny took me to? And so it goes. Take away the future and the past collapses like a pack of cards. Unless, as you say, there are a ton of alternate realities – what did you call them?’
‘A multiverse.’
‘Multiverse, yeah. If there’s a multiverse, and if whoever has the heart can jump between them, then literally anything is possible, isn’t it? It’d mean that different versions of this story could be played out over an infinite number of timelines, each of which could affect any of the others.’
I paused, my mind again boggled by the concept. Was this really the only way to make sense of things, to fit all the misshapen pieces of the puzzle together?
Certainly it was the only explanation I could think of, crazy though it seemed. The idea of an infinite number of mes living an infinite number of separate but interrelated lives was almost too massive an idea for me to get my head round. Yet at the same time it was an explanation, of sorts, for the impossible and contradictory tangle that my life had become. It was something, at least, to cling to.
Clover looked as though she was clinging to it too. Face pale above her high-necked mourning dress, she said, ‘So where does that leave us?’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t see that it changes anything. However many versions of us there might be, it doesn’t alter the fact that we’re still us, and that here, now, in this reality, we still have to do whatever we can to get Kate back and put things right.’
Clover turned away, staring into the fire.
‘Or we could just mooch around and do nothing, let all the other versions of us from all the other realities, if they exist, take responsibility and do all the stuff the future you has set up.’
Frowning, I said, ‘But if all the different versions of us thought the same way, nothing would get done anywhere, would it?’ Then I realised she was having another dig at me for spending the last few days brooding, and gave her a wry smile. ‘All right, point taken.’
She smiled back, then looked thoughtful again.
‘If the multiverse does exist, do you think all the other versions of us are as clueless as we are?’ Before I could respond she amended her question. ‘Well, not clueless. Maybe that’s a bit harsh. But do you think they’re all winging it like we are? Or do you think there are other Alexes out there, future Alexes maybe, who’ve cracked how the heart works, and who can use it at will, zipping from one reality to another, shoring things up, papering over the cracks?’
I took the heart out of my pocket and hefted it in my palm. It was an interesting question. I’d always assumed I’d be the one to pay off Candice’s debt, and buy this house, and rescue Hawkins, and befriend and resurrect Frank (I even carried a notebook with me in which I kept a To Do list of all the things I needed to set in motion in the future) – but what if it wasn’t me? Or rather, what if it was a version of me from an alternate reality? Did that mean that all bets were off where not only my future actions but also my personal safety were concerned? Might that mean I could die here without it adversely affecting what had already happened, because an alternate version of me would take up the slack?
I didn’t know. Again it was too mind-boggling a concept to take in.
Shrugging I said, ‘I think we have to assume that we’re it, because if we assume anything else we’ll start to believe in superhero versions of ourselves who can cross realities at will, clearing up anomalies and righting wrongs, and that’ll make us complacent.’
Clover narrowed her eyes and nodded slowly.
‘Agreed. Because even if there a
re versions of you who are more adept with the heart than you are, it doesn’t necessarily mean they’ve got an overview of the multiverse, and that they can hop about through time, from one reality to another, changing things at will, does it? Because if they are constantly changing things, then they become part of the reality, don’t they? So they can’t have an overview of something that’s constantly in flux, because the particular timelines they’re setting out to change won’t actually exist until they go in there and change them…’ She paused. ‘Does that make any sense? It kind of did when I was thinking about it, but now I’ve said out loud what was in my head, I feel like it’s kind of got away from me.’
I laughed. It was the first time I’d laughed since… well, since before Hawkins and I had set out to investigate the Thousand Sorrows in Limehouse over a week ago. I can’t exactly say it felt good to laugh, but it was a step forward, I suppose.
‘Tell me about it,’ I said, jabbing at the fire with a poker and stirring the smouldering logs into life. ‘Talking about this stuff feels like opening a safety valve and releasing the pressure that’s been building in our heads. Now the pressure’s been released I reckon our best bet is to shut the valve off again and just concentrate on our immediate problems, and on how to move forward.’
Clover gave me an appraising look.
‘So you’re ready for that now? To move forward?’
I felt a bit ashamed under her scrutiny.
‘Yeah, I think so… Sorry for being such a selfish prick these past few days…’
She raised her hands. ‘We all need a bit of space now and again. I haven’t exactly been proactive myself.’ She grimaced. ‘There is one thing we’ve been neglectful of, though. Or one person rather.’
I felt another pang of shame. ‘Hope?’
She nodded.
‘Yeah, you’re right. I need to spend more time with her. I’ll take her to the park this afternoon. A walk in the fresh air will do both of us the world of good.’
Clover shook her head. ‘I’m not sure she’ll be up to that, Alex.’