The figure smiled. “I have many names and no name. Who am I indeed?”
Still there was the odd dislocation between the sound of the words and the shapes his lips made.
David watched in scared fascination as the trickles of shining liquid reached his wrists and ran down his hands to hang from his fingertips.
Somewhere far off, thunder growled, and the man with blue eyes began to walk across the surface of the lake, the wind that wasn’t there ruffling his robe.
“I can’t do this. I’m too frightened,” David muttered desperately to himself as the distance between them melted away.
The man reached the shore and stepped onto the pebbles. Thunder cracked, much nearer now, and lightning flew up from his hands to the sky.
Not water, David thought: a lake of lightning. Help me please, someone.
The man stopped on the edge of the shore. “Don’t be frightened. We mean you no harm. Come to us. Be one with us.” And all the time the gleaming tendrils of lightning crawled across his robe and leapt crackling from his fingers.
“I’m not frightened,” said David, in a voice that didn’t even convince himself.
Unexpectedly the man smiled, showing white teeth. It was the sort of smile a wolf might have given. In a fluid movement he sat down cross-legged on the pebbles and was still, but for the lightning dripping from his hands.
“The man who calls himself a Guardian of Time has spoken of us, has he not?”
“John Flowerdew? Yes.”
“John Flowerdew.” He ran the words around his mouth as though he was tasting them. “So that is what he calls himself. Doubtless he has told you terrible things of us, told you that we want to use you to destroy your world, to destroy time.”
“Yes.”
“And doubtless you believed him. He is very plausible. They all are in pursuit of their own ends; but did he tell you how he plans to use you?”
“Yes. And he told me that you can’t harm me. You’re just an illusion.”
The man raised an eyebrow. “Then at least he has told you something that is true. Of course I cannot harm you. This is a dream. But even if you and I were really here, I would not seek to hurt you. I need your help. Why then would I harm you?”
As he spoke, his voice lost the buzzing undertone and his words and his lips finally matched.
David shrugged. “I don’t know. What do you want? Why are you in my dream?”
The man’s eyes widened in seeming surprise. “You ask me why? It is you who have called me here.”
“I did not,” protested David, taken aback.
“Ah, but you did.” The man settled himself more comfortably on the shore, shedding small bolts of wildfire as he did so. “I could not be here otherwise. Your dreams all come from within you. Did your Guardian of Time —” he shaped the words as though they were distasteful “— not tell you that when you asked him about this dream?”
David shook his head slowly.
“You did not call on me by any name, but your longing called me as a magnet calls to iron.”
“What longing?”
He narrowed his eyes, looking intently at David, then raised a quizzical brow again. “You truly do not know? I had not thought it possible when there was such strength in your call. Who else is in this dream with us?”
“No one.” He remembered. “I mean I don’t know – I haven’t seen them.”
“Has the Guardian put such fear into you that you will not look up in your own dreams?”
“No! He told me not to be afraid, that I should face you.”
“He was right. You see, nothing has happened to you. But did he not tell you to face your other dream people too?”
“I suppose he meant me to.”
“Perhaps not. He may have realised what it would mean for you.”
“What do you mean?” By now, David had almost forgotten to be frightened.
The man shrugged. “I do not know. Remember, this is your dream.”
From behind David came a noise of slow footsteps on the pebbles, coming closer. The lightning man was looking past him. “Well David, will you look?”
Don’t be afraid. Nothing can hurt you.
His gaze on the ground, David turned and slowly raised his head.
A hiking boot.
He kept his eyes on it for a dozen heartbeats, fearful and eager, then lifted his head further.
Jeans.
A red fleece.
A woman with brown hair brushing her shoulders.
She smiled. “Hello David.”
It was his mother.
He stared and stared until his eyes pricked with tears. It was his mother just as she was in the photograph on his own mantelpiece, as she had been before she had died, when he was only five.
He couldn’t speak.
He’d tried, so often, to dream about her, but he never could. He talked to her in his head at night, before he went to sleep, going over the times he remembered with her, trying to make it happen, but it never did, not once.
Until now.
“Who is this, David?” asked the lightning man.
He didn’t take his eyes from her face, but he found that he could talk again. “It’s my mum.”
Still his mother smiled at him, not moving. He began to walk towards her slowly, fearful now that she would disappear, that he would wake up. As the distance between them grew less, his steps quickened, until he flung himself into her arms and they collapsed in a heap onto the pebbles.
Tears poured down his face as he held her tightly, and she stroked his hair and hugged him close, calming him as though he were five all over again.
Minutes went by, perhaps hours; he had no idea of the passage of time as he sat with her arms around him, hearing her voice again at last.
Behind her voice there grew a ringing, buzzing sound, different from the one he had heard earlier. It got louder, making it more and more difficult to hear his mother’s voice. For as long as possible he ignored it, but at last it drowned her out completely, and he opened his eyes to look for the source.
He opened his eyes: and was in his bedroom, alone, the alarm clock ringing.
“No!”
THE OLD ONES
Gordon was feeling happier than he had for weeks. He wasn’t jumpy any more, and had no sense that he ought to be looking over his shoulder, or worrying that he might glimpse something inexplicable from the tail of his eye.
Two gloriously uneventful weeks had passed since his unsettling conversation with John Flowerdew. There had been no mist, no sounds of oars. The mysterious rat, or cat, or … cat that no one ever quite saw seemed to have gone, and the cleaners had stopped whispering about strange handprints on the display cases.
Life was back to normal.
There had been a sudden late influx of tourists this year, and all the staff had been kept busy for the last week answering questions about the exhibits and reuniting families who’d become separated among the maze of stairways in the new part of the building. There was a new exhibition going up too, in the hall between the main gallery and the café, and although it wasn’t officially part of his job at all, Gordon always seemed to get roped in to hold something, or shift a case or check that a photo was straight. Not that he minded. A bit of variety was always welcome.
He checked his watch. Break time, thank goodness. He was gasping for a cup of tea.
As he pushed open the heavy Staff Only door he heard someone behind him and turned to find Andrew Nixon, briefcase under one arm, hair awry as usual.
“Afternoon, Mr Nixon. Haven’t seen you around recently.”
“Hello, Gordon. No. Took a bit of a holiday. Went to stay with my sister in Devon. I decided I’d been working too hard. I thought …” He paused.
“Yes?”
“Ummm … no, never mind.” Nixon smiled and shook his head. For a moment he looked as though he was about to say something else, but he must have changed his mind, and they went through the door in silence.
In the staff room, Sandy, who should have been back on the public floor five minutes earlier, was sitting engrossed in the football report in The Daily Record.
Gordon kicked his foot as he went past. “Come on, Sandy. I know it’s a rare treat to read about a match that Hibs have actually won, but you’ve still got a job out there you know.”
Sandy didn’t take his eyes off the page he was reading. “At least Hibs win sometimes. Remind me: where are Hearts in the league?”
Gordon put his hand to his heart as though he’d taken a mortal blow. “Oh, you’re a cruel man, Sandy” – he grabbed the paper from Sandy’s hands – “but our public could be away with half the exhibits while you sit here gloating. Get away with you.”
Sandy got to his feet grinning and went back to work.
Gordon started to read the match report on Hearts versus Aberdeen as he drank his scalding tea, but he gave up in disgust after a couple of paragraphs. Sometimes the score was all you needed to know.
***
In a corner of the room Andrew Nixon sat cradling a mug, staring out of the window at nothing in particular. He was thinking about going home, back to the tower house by the Cramond shore. He’d not set foot in it since the morning after he’d had the hallucination of the Roman camp, when, following a wracked and sleepless night, he had thrown some clothes in a case and set off for Devon, too scared to wait for darkness and mist again in that place.
He told himself he wasn’t worried any more, that he knew it was nothing more than a waking dream, the result of over work. Everything would be fine tonight. Indeed, sitting here in familiar day-lit surroundings, the whole thing seemed completely ridiculous, and he couldn’t imagine why he’d been so frightened.
What he ought to do of course was go there now, with hours of light left, and walk right round the site so that he knew exactly what everything should look like in darkness.
That was what he would do. He’d just collect his mail, then go straight home, and everything would be fine.
***
The old man stood face to face with the lion, which held a screaming figure clamped in its jaws. Neither of them moved: the lion because it was carved from stone, the old man because he was waiting. It did not trouble him to wait. He could have stood unmoving for minutes or years; it was all much the same to him. He wanted to talk to Gordon Syme and to talk to him in this part of the museum, where the power was greatest and the stirrings strongest.
So he waited, moving around only as much as was necessary to avoid drawing attention to himself. That meant hardly at all, for it was easy to make people’s notice slide over you as though you were hardly there.
There he was.
Gordon came slowly down the steps and began a professional dawdle through the tombstones down to the end of the gallery.
As he neared the lion, he realised that the figure next to it was John Flowerdew, apparently engrossed in studying some detail of the carving. He experienced a strong urge to turn and disappear round a corner before Flowerdew spotted him, but even as the thought occurred, the old man looked over and smiled.
Gordon’s face formed itself into an appropriate expression. “Mr Flowerdew. Good to see you. How are you?”
“Very well thank you, Gordon. Do please call me John. It’s a remarkable thing, isn’t it,” he continued, “that something as large as this could lie undiscovered somewhere as busy as Cramond for all that time.”
Gordon regarded the lion. “Makes you wonder what else is lying around undiscovered, certainly.”
“It does, doesn’t it? A lot of the things here,” – he waved his hand around to indicate the whole floor of the museum – “must have just looked like muddy rocks when they were found. I’m sure people find it hard to believe that they’ve found something out of the ordinary, or that something extraordinary could happen to them.”
Gordon had to try hard to take that as a chance remark.
“I came down here to look at the Duddingston Hoard, but I can’t quite remember where it is, I’m afraid.”
“Well, that’s certainly something I can help you with. It’s just down here.” Gordon led Mr Flowerdew to the short corridor that sloped down to the circular chamber, warded by its wooden figure. “Just round here.”
They stood together at the display case, which held the hoard of broken weapons.
“I wonder what they were like, the people who made these?” mused Gordon. “I often think about all the people who made the things we have, the glass and the steam engines and the swords and the furniture.”
“Probably they were very much like us, if you discount the differences that clothes and language make. People don’t change very much at heart.”
“I suppose not.”
They stood in silent contemplation of the drowned hoard from the loch. After a few seconds, Gordon looked up sharply, frowning.
“Is something wrong?”
“No,” he said uncertainly, looking up at the ceiling. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?” asked Mr Flowerdew, glancing about.
Gordon began to walk round the chamber, still looking up. “There must be something wrong with the air-conditioning.” He shook his head as though trying to clear it. “What an awful noise. That’s never the air-conditioning.”
Mr Flowerdew stood quite still in the centre of the room as Gordon moved around the edge, pale and looking more distressed by the second.
“Can you hear that? Can you hear them, the voices? What’s happening?” He was backed up against the curved wall now, eyes wide, sweating.
Mr Flowerdew looked up at the ceiling and closed his eyes.
The noise stopped.
Gordon licked his lips and swallowed, breathing hard. “What on earth was that?”
“There are things you need to know, but not here.” He glanced round. “We should leave this place now.”
Gordon walked on shaky legs back into the main corridor, faintly surprised to find that everything looked normal.
“You finish in what … two hours?” Gordon nodded dumbly. “I know that strange things have been happening to you. I can explain what is going on. Will you meet me in the Elephant House Café when you finish work?”
“All right,” Gordon sighed.
At twenty past six, Gordon pushed open the door of the Elephant House. He’d spent most of the previous two hours trying to decide whether to come or not, and he wasn’t sure he’d made the right choice. He had no idea what had happened in the round room, but he couldn’t deny that something had. Put that together with the other recent goings on and you had a puzzle that needed to be solved.
He walked through the busy café to the quieter area at the rear, with its big wooden tables. John Flowerdew sat alone at one of them, doing The Scotsman crossword. He looked up as Gordon approached, folded the paper away and rose, smiling. ‘Gordon, thank you for coming. Sit down. What will you have?”
“A coffee please.” He took his jacket off, suddenly conscious of the museum uniform beneath it, and sat looking round at the other customers while he waited.
Mr Flowerdew returned after a surprisingly short time with two mugs of coffee and a plate of shortbread. “They let me jump the queue,” he said. “I come in here a lot.”
Gordon stirred sugar into his coffee and accepted a piece of shortbread. “You know things have been happening. You said you could explain them.”
Gordon focused on the old man properly, suddenly seeing him quite differently. The nape of his neck prickled, and he found he had sat up straighter, as though under inspection. The man before him was old, certainly, but no fool, and not one to suffer them either.
“You’ve worked in the museum for some time. You know it well, know what it contains. There are many powerful objects from different times and places. Now there is too much power, and it has begun to seep out. The clock is part of it: it is acting like a lens, focusing this drifting power on the past, allowing it to leak into the present. That is wh
at has been happening. When we were looking at the Duddingston Hoard earlier you heard something that frightened you. You heard the spirits of the Old Ones – the people who made the things in that room. You heard the echoes of a great battle that took place three thousand years ago. You have seen the Nor Loch come back. You know that something moves through the museum at night; not a cat, nor a rat – they don’t leave handprints. It is the spirit of time loose in your building: the monkey from the clock.
“This is only the start of what will happen. It must be stopped or time will fly apart like a shattered plate.”
Gordon burst out laughing, causing people at neighbouring tables to glance up from their own conversations. John Flowerdew did not join in. He gazed at Gordon calmly enough, but in his eyes was a flicker of anger. Gordon’s own laughter spluttered to a halt, and he stared back, angry at himself for getting mixed up with this tomfoolery.
“Whatever’s happening, it isn’t that. Maybe I’m having some sort of breakdown, and that’s why I’ve seen and heard these things. As for what goes on the museum – it’s an old place; I’m prepared – just about – to believe in ghosts, but a wooden monkey coming to life and scampering around leaving hand prints? Come off it.” He pushed his coffee away and stood to put on his jacket. “I don’t know what made me think you could explain anything. It was a mistake coming here. Goodbye.”
As he turned to go, John Flowerdew said, “You came because you already know, deep down. You can only deny the truth for so long.”
***
In Cramond Tower, Andrew Nixon stood in front of his sitting room window staring at the red velvet curtain, as though trying to see through it. It was seven o’clock, already dark outside. He’d been standing here for almost ten minutes now, listening intently for anything that sounded like Latin or the clink of metal on metal, but there had been no sounds other than the normal ones of cars and the sea and a couple of dogs barking as their owners took them for their evening walk.
All he had to do was look out of the window and see everything normal, and the stupid thing would be over.
His hand shook as he took hold of the heavy red velvet. He eased it open a fraction and peered out, unaware that he was holding his breath, and then pulled it all the way back.
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