by Jason Ayres
“And can you tell me the year?” added Josh.
“Everyone knows that, mister,” said Matthew. “It’s the year of Our Lord, 1533.”
What was Josh to do now? He had a person on his hands from nearly 500 years ago. That meant no jumping in the time bubble – it would send him almost a thousand years into the future. In addition, what was he to do with Matthew? He couldn’t just abandon him here. He would be completely lost in this century. He would have to try and help the boy, somehow.
“Look, Matthew, I know this is going to be very hard for you to understand, but it’s not summer here or 1533,” began Josh. “Morveren I imagine is where you left her, in the cave. There’s a time portal in there, and it’s transported you forward to the year 2023. It’s Christmas Day, here.”
Matthew had a perplexed look on his face, his primitive mind completely unable to grasp this concept.
“You are a demon,” he said in a raised voice, starting to back away. “You brought me here, spirited me away from Morveren so you could have her for yourself.”
“No, I didn’t, Matthew. It was an accident, but I want to try and help you get back.”
“I don’t believe you!” he shouted. “I want Morveren. I love her. You said she’s still in the cave so I’m going back to find her.”
He turned on his tail and ran back towards the cave, as the largest wave yet crashed close to Josh’s feet. The tide was coming in.
“No, don’t!” shouted Josh. “You have to trust me.” He chased after Matthew, but he was too far behind. As Josh entered the cave, Matthew was too far ahead of him and before he could reach him, he vanished.
In despair, Josh realised that Matthew had just leapt ahead to the next millennium. There was no helping him now and he had to get out of this cave before the tide cut him off.
Leaving the cave, he trudged up the cliff path, with a crushing sense of failure washing over him like the sea over the rocks. This was turning out to be the worst Christmas Day ever.
Chapter Sixteen
August 2022
A week had passed since the dramatic conclusion to his visit to the cave in Cornwall. After spending a few more days in St Ives, Josh had returned to Oxford, preparing to embark on his next journey.
While he was down in Cornwall, he had uncovered some fascinating facts about his strange encounter on the beach. What he had unearthed solved a long-standing local mystery and explained exactly who the mysterious Matthew Trewella was.
Looking up the name online, he had uncovered the story of The Mermaid of Zennor, an old English folk tale about a boy of the same name who had vanished, never to be seen again, many centuries in the past.
The legend told of a beautiful woman who attended the church services in Zennor every Sunday. She was enchanted there by the beautiful singing of the young Matthew in the church choir. So entranced was she by him that one day, after church, she lured him down to the shore after which he disappeared without trace.
Over the years, it became folklore that she was a local mermaid, known as Morveren, who had lured young Matthew there to live with her beneath the sea. Some claimed that it was possible still to hear him singing from beneath the waves.
Now it seemed the mystery had been solved. Clearly there had been a Morveren, but Josh suspected she was just a mere mortal and the mermaid bit had been added later. The most likely explanation was that, like teenagers from any other generation, they had fancied a bit of nookie and gone down to the cave to have it off.
Presumably that was when Matthew had inadvertently fallen into the time bubble. What had happened to the girl was anybody’s guess. Perhaps she had drowned in the cave or run away. It was interesting that her name ‘Morveren’ had come to be associated with the legend of the mermaid. How had this story evolved the way it had? Presumably it was just superstitious locals trying to make sense of Matthew’s mysterious disappearance and building the story around it.
Josh didn’t like to think about what fate had ultimately befallen Matthew. Maybe he was now living in some incredibly advanced futuristic world sometime around the Year 3000. He hoped he had arrived safely, wherever he had ended up, and he hadn’t faced death by drowning, or encased in solid rock due to long-term changes in the shoreline.
He couldn’t ponder much further on Matthew’s fate, not when his own situation was so perilous. If he didn’t want to find himself living back in the Middle Ages, he was going to have to either find a way out of this situation fast, or resign himself to living in the past. He was almost tempted to stay right where he was, in 2023. At least this was an era he had lived through, and the world was very similar to his own.
What would happen if he jumped again into another unfamiliar or dangerous world? He would have to jump again and then maybe again. The years were going to start falling off pretty rapidly soon. It was like continually raising in a game of poker where you weren’t sure if you had the best hand. If he didn’t fold soon, he may end up going all in and losing everything.
He mulled it over but in his heart he knew that, while there was still a chance, he had to try again. He would allow himself two more jumps and look for help in both worlds. If none was forthcoming and he was somewhere safe, he would stay put.
Those two jumps would take him to August 2022 and October 2019. After that it would be 2014, by which time his younger self would be only thirteen years old and four years away from discovering the time bubble.
The time bubble would almost certainly be inaccessible in 2014 in any universe. It was prior to the commencement of work on HS2 and would therefore be buried under the tons of earth and mud that had been gouged out to create the tunnel. There would be no chance of escape there. The situation was clear. He had two more shots at this, and that was it.
He had used up a fair bit of money on his trip to Cornwall and was down now to about £800. To economise, he had finally caved in and taken a trip to a launderette on the Cowley Road. It was the first time in his life he had ever entered such an establishment and, after an entirely disagreeable experience, he vowed it would have to be his last.
His money ought to be good for one more trip. After that he would have to find a way of getting hold of some older currency. Either that or find a way to make money some other way. Gambling was the most obvious option. As long as he arrived in a world not too different from his own, hopefully the results of major sporting events and horse races would be the same.
In preparation for this, he went onto Wikipedia to check up on a few events, looking through the list of Premier League champions from the past few decades. Clearly this world was extremely similar to the original, as they all checked out as far as he remembered, including unusual results such as Leicester City’s triumph in 2016.
It was definitely worth recording some of this information for when he went back to the past. He spent the last evening before he left writing down the winners of various major events from 1980 to the present day. That would cover him for at least four jumps back in time in case the worst happened and he had to jump more than twice.
He also noted down the results of the EuroMillions for the week after the arrival of his next couple of jumps. If he was destined to end up trapped in the past, he was going to make damned sure he lived a champagne lifestyle while he was doing it.
Jumping from his usual spot behind the tree, his initial impressions were favourable. The skyline was as it should be and there were a few people around in the park – possibly not as many as he would have expected to see on a sunny summer morning, but seemingly nothing to worry about.
It was only as he reached the High Street and began to walk up towards the centre that he began to get a feeling that something wasn’t quite right. Whatever it was, it niggled at him, but he couldn’t initially put his finger on it.
Here, too, there were notably less people than normal around this busy part of town. The traffic was flowing freely, a rarity at anytime in Oxford, and the crowds of tourists were noticeable only by thei
r absence.
He also started to get an uncomfortable sensation that everyone was looking at him. Was all of this making him paranoid? He looked more closely. No, he wasn’t being paranoid – every woman he passed was staring at him. And then it clicked. They were all women. He couldn’t see any men.
He began to panic, casting his eyes around him, desperate to spot a male face. Relieved, he saw a slim guy, aged roughly late-twenties, on the other side of the road. He quickly crossed the street and approached the man, hoping to engage him in conversation.
“Excuse me,” began Josh, his intention to ask why there were so few males about.
“Wow, look at you,” said the man, in a voice that didn’t sound quite right. It wasn’t low enough. “Where did you get your op done? You look fabulous. That even looks like a real Adam’s apple!”
By the time he had finished speaking, Josh realised he wasn’t dealing with a natural-born male at all. This ‘man’ was transgender and had clearly had surgery at some point. While his features were undoubtedly male, he didn’t have an Adam’s apple. What he did have, was a slim, almost effeminate figure.
“Oh no, I’m not transgender,” protested Josh. “I’m a real man,” he added. After he said it, he winced, thinking this might have been an incredibly offensive thing to say, but the man didn’t seem fazed by it.
“Oh yes, that’s what we all say to try and pull the girls,” he said. “They know it’s not true, of course, but it works for me.”
“Well, it’s true for me,” said Josh. “Where are all the men?”
“Come on, you know as well as I do they’re all dead. Don’t you?”
The man peered closely at Josh. “Oh my God,” he said. “I think you really are a man. Here, girls,” he said, accosting two passing young women. “This guy reckons he’s a real man – what do you think?”
Josh was starting to feel rather uncomfortable as the two women stared at him as if they were examining a specimen in a zoo.
“Ooh, he looks real, doesn’t he?” said one of the girls.
“Come on, then, ‘Mister I’m a real man’, show us your bits,” said the other, and they both cackled coarsely.
“Look, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I am a real man,” protested Josh, slightly irked at having his masculinity brought into question. “I’m not about to whip my tackle out in the street to prove it, you’re just going to have to believe me.”
Unexpectedly, one of the women reached forward and grabbed at his crotch, giving his meat and two veg a good squeeze.
“Ouch! Do you mind, that’s my bollocks!” complained Josh. That had really hurt – she had given his left one a right bruising.
“EEK!” screeched the woman who had groped him, excitedly. “I think he really is a man!”
Then she shouted at the top of her voice, “Girls, girls! Over here! It’s a man!”
Suddenly there was an excited crowd of screaming women rushing towards him from all directions. This was getting seriously out of control. There was only one thing he could do now – run.
Any hope he had that sprinting away from the scene would be an end to the matter was swiftly dashed. As he ran up the High Street towards Carfax, he could hear the crowd screaming behind him. Now he knew how Lennon and McCartney must have felt. This was like some sort of Beatlemania.
He tried to figure out what was going on as he ran. All the men were dead, that guy had said. So did that mean Josh was now the only natural-born male left on the planet? It certainly looked that way from the reaction of the crowd.
As he ran, all he could see was a sea of women. There were plenty of women dressed up as men, and quite a few with varying degrees of transgender, certainly far more than in his own world. But he was pretty certain there were no actual men.
Some might consider this a fantasy come true. The only man left on Earth, in a world full of billions of horny women? It didn’t feel much like a dream right now – more of a nightmare if anything.
He wasn’t going to be able to outrun the pack: that was abundantly clear as they began to close on him. He may have the advantage of a male body that was in theory faster than the average woman’s, but that was cancelled out by being fifty-three years old compared to many of his pursuers who were half his age.
Desperate times called for desperate measures. He tried to avoid committing crimes on his travels unless he absolutely had to. Even when he did, it was mostly victimless crimes like defrauding cashpoints or not paying in chain restaurants. Unfortunately, this was an emergency situation. Spotting a woman on a bicycle waiting for the lights to change at a pedestrian crossing, he ran over to her, shoved her off and began peddling for all he was worth.
“Sorry!” he shouted behind him to the poor woman whom he had roughly manhandled to the ground, and he genuinely meant it. “My need is greater than yours.”
With pedal power, he turned into Cornmarket Street and weaved his way along, trying to keep his head down to avoid any more unwanted attention. As the sound of the crowd began to fade behind him, he upped his pace, passed Debenhams and the Randolph and continued on into St Giles’.
There was no point going to the college, as the Professor wouldn’t be able to help him, being dead, but he had to find somewhere to lie low. He couldn’t possibly stay out in the open after what had just happened, but where could he go?
Getting off the main streets, he turned left down Little Clarendon Street where it was quieter, and then right into Walton Street. It was an area he knew very well. Being there reminded him of a place close by where he might just find a friendly face and sanctuary.
Abandoning the bike outside the Phoenix Picturehouse, he walked, head down, the last hundred yards or so to the flat where in his universe, in 2022, Lauren used to live. By keeping his head down and not making eye contact with anyone, he managed to avoid being identified as a male by anyone else.
Ringing the bell of the flat, he kept saying to himself over and over again, “Please be in…please be in…”
“Thank fuck for that,” he exclaimed, as Lauren opened the door. She looked exactly like he was hoping she would – right hair, right clothes, and all-round right version, for once. He immediately pushed his way in, adding, “Am I glad to see you!?”
Unusually, he didn’t have to explain himself, as Lauren recognised him almost straightaway.
“Wow!” exclaimed Lauren. “I can’t believe it’s you. We’d pretty much given up all hope of you ever coming back.”
“You recognise me, then?” said Josh, a little surprised.
“Of course,” she replied. “I take it you found the cure, then?”
“The cure?” asked Josh, a little perplexed.
“The cure you went into the time bubble to look for about a year ago?”
“My memory’s a bit hazy,” said Josh. “You’ll have to fill me in.”
“You must remember,” said Lauren. “You promised you would go to the future, find a cure and bring it back to save all the men. Unfortunately, you’re a bit late…they’re all long dead. And by the look of you, it’s taken a hell of a long time to find a cure. How old are you now, exactly?”
“I’m fifty-three,” replied Josh. “Now, look, I think we’re at cross purposes here,” said Josh. “Why don’t you stick the kettle on and make me a nice cup of coffee.”
“Bit sexist, that isn’t it?” she replied. “Asking the girl to make the coffee? Still, it’s a long time since I had the opportunity to make a man a cuppa, so I suppose I can forgive you this once.”
Josh glanced around the flat, noting it was in the usual messy state he had come to associate with Lauren. They had lived together briefly in this very flat for a while, and he hadn’t been able to stand her slovenliness.
“You live here by yourself, then?” he asked.
“No, I have a partner,” she said.
“I thought you said all the men were dead,” said Josh.
“They are,” replied Lauren. “It’s a female part
ner.”
“Well, that doesn’t surprise me,” said Josh. “From what I recall, you were quite partial to taking the occasional sip from the hairy cup, even when there were men around.”
“You cheeky twat,” said Lauren, laughing. “You’d be surprised how many women have revealed their Sapphic tendencies since men became extinct. And just to correct you on your earlier comment, it’s not a hairy cup. She shaves.”
“Who is she, then?” asked Josh. “Is it Kaylee?”
“Gosh no, of course not,” said Lauren. “That’d be like incest. She’s practically a sister to me. I’ve been a shoulder to cry on since she lost Charlie, but that’s all. However, you do know her – or of her. It’s Seema.”
“The newsgirl?” asked Josh.
“The very same,” said Lauren. “We met years ago, that time Kaylee disappeared. I bumped into her again when she was here in Oxford reporting on the virus when the men started dying and we sort of hit it off then. We’ve been together ever since.”
“Where is she now, then?” he asked.
“She’s down in London for a few days, covering The Queen’s Speech and the State Opening of Parliament. You wouldn’t believe the mess all of this left the Government in. With over half the MPs dead, not to mention the Prime Minister, it’s taken a good year to get it all sorted out. Thank goodness The Queen’s still alive. She’s been the one constant through all of this.”
“But all her sons are dead, presumably?”
“Correct,” replied Lauren. “Princess Charlotte is next in line to the throne, can you believe? She’s going to be the youngest monarch in centuries. Now look, enough chit-chat. Why are you asking all these questions? It’s like you’re completely unaware of all of this. You knew what was happening when you went in that bubble, so what’s the story? Have you got amnesia or something?”
“Not exactly,” he replied, “But I don’t remember things the way you do because I’m not the same Josh you grew up with. I’ve come here from a different universe.”
With that, he began once again to relate his well-worn story, showing her his notes of his various trips through time and the damaged tachyometer. When he had finished, Lauren gave him her version of events.