Tempus Fugitive

by Nicola Rhodes

  ‘Unfinished business,’ said Denny calmly.

  Tamar got the point immediately. ‘You can’t’ she told him frantically. ‘You mustn’t change the past.’

  Denny ignored her; he was damned if he was going to get beaten up again – again? There was that confusion again, after all, if he did this he would not have been beaten up in the first place, would he? Whatever, it was his past and he would change it if he wanted to.

  ‘It’ll create a paradox,’ Tamar said.

  ‘I think it already has,’ Denny told her. He could still remember the past as it had been, even though he had already decided to change it.

  What Tamar knew instinctively but was not able to explain, was that since everything happens somewhere there would be a time line where Denny changed the outcome of this encounter and one where he did not – possibly because he never had the chance. If he did this now, there was a high probability that he would be shunted into an alternate reality, particularly in view of the unstable nature of their presence here. Actually, it was almost a certainty.

  Andy had missed most of the actual words of this exchange and had, quite naturally misinterpreted Tamar’s concern. He now pushed Denny aside and grabbed her round the shoulders. ‘How about you and me have a little fun after I finish off this crap rat,’ he suggested. ‘Bet you’d rather be with a real man, eh?’

  Denny, who knew Tamar rather well, looked enquiringly at her. Her face was a study in outrage. ‘Okay,’ she said, ‘finish him.’

  As an ironic touch, the words: “Peace in the valley – peace in the city – peace in your soul” were swelling in the background.

  Andy cracked his knuckles. ‘Right,’ he said, ‘this shouldn’t take long.’

  ‘It won’t,’ Tamar assured him.

  ‘She wasn’t talking to you,’ said Denny.

  Thirty seconds later Andy crawled away on his face. ‘I never even touched him,’ said Denny, disappointed. ‘Well, hardly, anyway.’

  Behind him Darren Barnes (known as Daz, if memory served) pulled out a flick knife and pointed it at Denny’s neck.

  There was a blur and Denny had Daz by the wrist. He looked at the knife contemptuously. ‘That’s not a knife,’ he said and drew out the Athame with his free hand. ‘This is a knife.’ (he had wanted to say this line ever since acquiring the Athame) and then it was all over. The gang vanished like, as Tamar pointed out later, ‘gorillas in the mist.’

  ‘I always wanted to say that,’ said Denny happily, as the strains of “Dreams can come true” rose over the dance floor. ‘Dance?’

  Tamar nodded. ‘This I can dance to,’ she told him

  * * *

  When the lights came up shortly after this song had ended, it was a lot harder to simply vanish without people noticing. Suddenly, as if someone had hit a switch, the majority of the people in the place turned into rational beings, sitting about looking slightly unfocussed with dark rings under their eyes and untidy hair. The cavern of Hell became merely a slightly scuffed looking room, littered with empty bottles and dirty ashtrays. It had a tawdry, forsaken look about it, but it no longer looked in the least sinister. Tamar felt a little foolish – and a lot sticky.

  There was nothing for it but to allow themselves to be herded outside with the others by the bouncers. They were met at the door by three police officers, one of whom seemed extremely familiar. From behind him, bobbed the excited head of Darren (Daz) Barnes. ‘That’s him, Sergeant,’ he pointed at Denny from the safety of the Sergeant’s broad shoulders. Actually they were not all that wide, the sergeant was about medium build, but they were positively hefty when compared to Daz’s.

  ‘He’s got a weapon, a great big knife, I saw it, he threatened me. Go on. You search him.’

  The sergeant gave Daz a look of contempt, with just a pinch of withering scorn.

  And suddenly Tamar recognised him. She nudged Denny. ‘Hey,’ she whispered. ‘look who it is.’

  Denny focussed on the Sergeant’s face. ‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ he said quite loudly, he was still quite drunk.

  Behind the Sergeant, Daz was dancing about excitedly. ‘He attacked my friend too,’ he said. ‘Put him in hospital, well nearly.’

  ‘Really?’ said the Sergeant. ‘What had he done to him?’ he added almost absently.

  ‘Nothing,’ protested Daz indignantly. ‘Unprovoked attack. Aren’t you going to search him?’

  The sergeant sighed. ‘Yes, all right. Son,’ he turned to Denny, who he really rather liked the look of. Denny looked to the sergeant like, what he would call in his rather old fashioned parlance, “a good sort”, and the sergeant prided himself on being a good judge of character. ‘I’m afraid we’ve received a complaint against you,’ he continued. ‘I’m going to have to search you.’

  Denny grinned; he could not help himself. ‘Okay Sarge,’ he caught Stiles eye. ‘– ant,’ he added and held his hands up, swaying slightly.

  Tamar thought it was about time she stepped in here. She grabbed Denny and hissed fiercely in his ear. ‘Sober up now.’ Denny concentrated and his head cleared. He found himself staring into the perplexed eyes of a very young looking Jack Stiles. ‘Oh,’ he said.

  ‘Okay,’ said Tamar, ‘I’ll handle this, he used to fancy me when he was older.’ She reviewed this sentence in her head. ‘You know what I mean,’ she added. ‘But get rid of that knife, just in case.’

  Stiles stepped forward now, ‘I’m sorry about this, Miss,’ he said, his eyes carefully blank. ‘But I have received a complaint. I have to search your …’ he looked from Tamar to Denny. ‘… friend?’

  Tamar suddenly felt intensely indignant on Denny’s behalf. People always assumed that they were only friends. As if Denny could never find an attractive girlfriend. Denny, a man without any personal vanity of any kind, never seemed to take exception to this attitude, but Tamar was fed up with it. She grabbed Denny by the arm and said pointedly ‘My boyfriend.’ She fixed Stiles with an unfriendly eye. ‘You know, as in my lover,’ she added, just to make her meaning unequivocal.

  ‘Nice flirting,’ said Denny with a grin.

  Tamar skidded in mid umbrage. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Denny. ‘He’s wearing a wedding ring in any case.’

  Tamar looked. ‘Oh yes, of course.’ She remembered now, Stiles had been married. He just never talked about it.

  ‘Okay Sergeant,’ said Denny raising his arms again. ‘Go ahead, sorry about that.’

  The search turned up no more than a few pounds in his wallet, a packet of chewing gum and a rather nice fountain pen, which had a strange, dull sheen in the dim light. There was no sign of a knife, large or otherwise.

  ‘Okay, son,’ said Stiles, stepping back. ‘Sorry to have bothered you. You can go now.’

  ‘Hey,’ objected Daz, ‘you can’t just let him go. He must have hidden it somewhere. What about what he did to my friend? He must have…’

  He dried up as Stiles gave him a look that would have crinkled iron. ‘He’s clean,’ said Stiles. ‘There’s no crime here. Of course, I could always arrest you for wasting police time,’ he added dryly.

  Daz gulped.

  ‘Go on,’ barked Stiles. ‘Hoppit, before I change my mind.’

  Daz threw Denny a look of pure venom before hopping it.’

  ‘Could be trouble there,’ said Stiles. ‘I know his type.’

  Denny nodded. ‘It’s okay,’ he said, ‘It’s not as if he knows where I live or anything.’ They turned to go, and Denny turned back for a moment. ‘Thanks Jack,’ he said, then walked swiftly away, leaving Stiles looking puzzled and a little worried.

  * * *

  ‘I didn’t know you chewed gum,’ said Tamar, referring to the contents of his pockets. She was determined not to mention Denny’s ill-advised parting comment, if he did not know how stupid that was, she was not going to be the one to tell him.

  Denny grinned. ‘I don’t,’ he said, tucking the packet of gum back into its sheath.

&nbs
p; * * *

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ Denny said to her back in the file room. ‘I know you didn’t like it, but at least they didn’t play any “Take That”.’

  ‘I rather liked “Take That”,’ she said, causing Denny to feel superior to her for the first time since they had met. He contented himself with a look of contemptuous disbelief, making Tamar feel as if he had looked through her record collection and found an A-ha LP.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said quickly to cover her discomfort. ‘What I’m worried about is you changing your past like that. You shouldn’t have done it, you know.’

  ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘We’re okay aren’t we? Nothing happened did it?’

  ‘We don’t know yet what the consequences will be,’ she said seriously.

  * * *

  ‘Who the hell are all this lot then?’ stormed Stiles – who was clearly working himself up to a heart attack.

  ‘Displacement,’ said Hecaté wearily.

  Six new people all clearly from different periods of history were ranged about the room in varying states of distress and/or fury.

  ‘Jesus!’ screeched Stiles. ‘What the …’ He stopped when he caught her eye. She was clearly close to tears. ‘Okay,’ he said in a much milder tone. ‘Send ’em to sleep and we’ll try to work it out.’

  ‘I made a terrible mistake,’ she told him. ‘And it looks as if it is not going to be as easy to put it right as we thought.’

  ‘We can do it,’ Stiles said reassuringly.

  He thought for a moment. ‘Okay, it seems to me that what happened was this: Denny and Tamar would enter a file and cause the displacement, therefore, sending some random person from that file to where there was a gap for them, i.e. – here. When they left the file – the person was naturally taken back to where they came from. But – when that person did not get taken back to where they belonged – someone else from here was put there instead to fill the gap that Tamar and Denny left behind and to make room here. Right so far?’ he asked.

  Hecaté nodded.

  ‘Okay, so when you sent the people back to their own files, there were already people there filling the space and … and…’ he floundered.

  ‘It caused another displacement,’ said Hecaté. ‘A random displacement, just as before,’ she clarified just to make certain he understood.

  ‘So it’s all just a colossal mess,’ summarised Stiles. ‘Just because a person started off here, doesn’t mean they will be “displaced” back here. Oh Christ!’ another horrible thought struck him. ‘We don’t even know if the people we sent back ended up in the right files.’

  ‘Please!’ begged Hecaté.

  ‘But they probably did,’ amended Stiles, still thinking out loud. ‘No, what’s happened is, that instead of sending back the people who replaced the ones we kept here – the people from here – the universe “compensated” randomly as before and sent this lot here instead.’

  ‘So, we have a maximum of six people from here, who are out of time somewhere,’ he said. ‘Maybe even five or only four if one or two of them were big chaps, or possibly the odd horse or something … Well, that’s not so bad really, is it?’ he smiled encouragingly at her. ‘We can sort that out. ’Course we can.’

  ‘It’s not just that,’ she told him.

  ‘Oh?’ Stiles frowned.

  ‘There will now be historical anomalies in many different files,’ she told him. ‘We have no way of telling one from another, no way to find the monster and no chance, any more, of tracking Tamar and Denny. They are on their own now.’

  ~Chapter Nine ~

  ‘How much longer are we going to keep this up?’

  The thin man looked at his subordinate in surprise. He might well be a little taken aback. Such a question from a mere lackey was an unprecedented occurrence in his experience. He blamed the one called Clive, he had begun it, and now an insidious culture of free thinking was spreading slowly through the entire organisation.

  He considered a sharp reprimand and then decided against it. It might, after all, in some circumstances, be considered a fair question.

  He frowned, therefore, to show his disapproval, but answered reasonably enough, ‘I take it, you are asking why, with all our resources, we do not simply give them their answers?’

  ‘Or at least, send them in the right direction instead of letting them wander about history in this untidy manner,’ affirmed the lackey. ‘They are making a terrible mess of things,’ he added.

  ‘Nothing that they can’t clean up,’ said the thin man tersely. ‘It’s good experience for them, all of life is a learning curve.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘There is no “but”,’ broke in the thin man. ‘You asked a question, and I am going to give you an answer and then let there be no more of this matter, understand?’

  ‘Yes sir,’ said the lackey meekly.

  ‘Very good. Now then, firstly we cannot simply give them the answers. That would be to violate their free will. We are not even supposed to be helping as much as we are.’ He looked shrewdly at his subordinate. ‘But of course, we both know that that is a lot of nonsense really. It is the official line, and we must be seen to be adhering to it. The reality is, that we are helping them so why, you are wondering are you not, do we not simply help them a little faster and get this thing over with? I will tell you.

  ‘We give them clues, knowledge etc. For example, they always know when they are in the wrong place. If we can do so much, why not simply tell them where is the right place? We can’t!

  ‘There are two reasons. One: they are being steered on a course that has its own inevitable end, and it is simply not time yet for the answers to become apparent. You will note that I said “steered” and not “driven”. Ultimately they have to do this on their own, but given the right amount of help at the right moments, they will reach the correct solution at the correct time. What you perceive as a lot of messing about and time wasting is, in fact, a carefully controlled and timed sequence of events that must take place in order for the desired result to occur * and the consequences will reach much farther into the future than just the outcome of this one pursuit.

  [*And if you believe that you’ll believe anything]

  ‘Destiny,’ said the lackey, catching on.

  ‘Exactly, that is what they call it. We have a whole department on it, as you know. “The planning department” as it is more properly called. They have sent us a detailed analysis of the projected outcome of the situation, and we are working to that. But you never heard me say that, understand?’

  The lackey nodded.

  ‘However,’ continued the thin man, ‘you have heard of the saying “The best laid plans of mice and men …”?’

  ‘Yes,’ was the eagerly given answer, ‘It postulates the admittance of random and unforeseen events which can disrupt the working of the destiny – I mean the planning department’s er … plans.’ He screwed up his face in confusion. ‘But how…’ he began.

  ‘Even the planning department cannot control the will of humans, unfortunately,’ The thin man told him, ‘especially these particular humans I have to say, who are incorrigible and unpredictable to the nth degree. And indeed it is a fact that the whole concept of so called “destiny” hinges on the implementation of free will and vice versa actually. The many worlds theory depends on it – the concept of choice you see. But we won’t go into that now. And so, occasionally, it does happen that a “spanner” to make use of a humanism, is hurled into the works and “destiny” takes a sharp turn in the wrong direction. Which brings us to our second reason.’ He steepled his hands and looked judiciously at this audacious questioner of authority. ‘Human behaviour cannot be that closely controlled. Give them too much information and who knows what they will choose to do with it.’

  ‘But haven’t we already given them the answer,’ interrupted the lackey. ‘Well, indirectly anyway,’ he amended.

  ‘Some information has been “delivered” yes,’ said the thin man c
autiously. ‘As you say, indirectly – not to them. But it is of no use to them at present, and it is not in their hands as yet anyway, it’s not time yet as I believe I already told you,’ he added with a hint of impatience.

  ‘The stage has been set, and the players positioned,’ he ruminated, ‘and all else is in the hands of the gods – so to speak. Destiny and the planning department are not as fixed nor as absolute as the pawns – I mean the humans involved seem to believe.

  ‘Humans can be steered however, and often with better results, as we have seen, than when they are told what they must do, in which case sheer human perversity usually makes them do the exact opposite.’ he rolled his eyes. ‘We have made such mistakes before and even when that is not the case, things can still go wrong. We do not know for example, what this Askphrit character might suddenly decide to do, he has fooled us before. The truth is that in dealing with humans, anything at all can, and often does, happen. Best we do not interfere too much in case something of the kind happens again. In this way, we leave our options open to change our plans if necessary, even up until the last minute.’

  ‘And we can disclaim all knowledge if it all goes horribly wrong,’ added the lackey shrewdly.

  The stern and humourless face of the thin man creased suddenly into a wink.

  ‘Now you’re getting it,’ he said.

  * * *

  On the other side of the next door, they found themselves in Liverpool, circa April 1912 according to Tamar.

  ‘How do you know?’ asked Denny ‘Hey, what’s wrong?’

  For answer, she pointed a shaking finger at the dock, and he followed her gaze and saw … The Titanic.

  Denny nodded. ‘You know that ship then?’ he surmised.

  Tamar stared at him in bewilderment. ‘It’s the Titanic,’ she said eventually.

  Denny shook his head. ‘Whatever it is,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry I’m not picking it up from you this time. What about it?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, apparently thinking hard. ‘It’s the TITANIC.’

  ’I’m going to shake you in a minute,’ said Denny. He was picking up on her distress, but no facts were coming through at all. ‘What about the bleeding Titanic,’