by Mark Morris
They came at us, whether to kill or maim or simply drive us away I wasn’t sure. Clover screamed and clung to me, and for a moment I braced myself, certain we were about to be overwhelmed.
Then the heart kicked in – both the hearts kicked in – and they created what I can only describe as a protective barrier around us. As when I had duelled with the Dark Man – me with the old and crumbling heart, he with the younger, more vibrant heart that he had stolen from me – I felt the heart sucking up the energy inside me and then spitting it out in a crackling blast of light and power. At the same time, in a display of perfect synchronisation, my older self’s heart did exactly the same thing at exactly the same moment, the two eruptions of energy curving over and around the three of us until eventually meeting above our heads, where they formed a sort of arc or halo.
It wasn’t this in itself that repelled the Dark Man’s forces, though. His creatures kept coming at us, but now, whenever one or another of them got too close, thrashing, black, whip-like tendrils would shoot out from the arc of energy, like lightning bolts from a storm cloud, and drive them back. Several of them collapsed, or scuttled away, screeching in agony. One, a flying mechanical thing with a cat’s face stretched over a metal frame and a row of spines along its undulating back, crashed and burst into flames, the organic parts of it bubbling and melting like cheese on a griddle.
‘Come and speak to us, Dark Man,’ my older self shouted into the foggy, smoke-filled blackness. ‘Come to us or we’ll come in there and drag you out, kicking and screaming.’
We waited as the Dark Man’s creatures, having been given a taste of our resistance, now shrank back, cowed, into the darkness. We could still hear them, though, clicking and whirring and mewling, as though preparing to take advantage of any opening, any opportunity, that might arise. And we could smell them too – or at least those whose putrid flesh had been burned by heart energy. The smell was so abominable that all three of us couldn’t help but put our free hands over our mouths and noses. Clover in particular looked as though she was having to draw on every ounce of willpower not to throw up.
The final echoes of my older self’s challenge were on the point of fading when there came a shrill, metallic screech from the blackness in front of us. The screech culminated in the clank of something metal and heavy thumping down on the floor, which was then followed by another screech and another metallic thump, and then another, and another.
I knew what it was, of course. I had heard these sounds before. In fact, my younger self, whose unconscious form was now doubtless slumped in a carriage rattling through the fog-bound streets of London, had heard them minutes earlier.
It was the Dark Man’s ‘spider chair’, the huge, clockwork conveyance on which his raddled body travelled from place to place. I had seen it on a couple of occasions, the last time in my own house on the night Hawkins died. Despite this, I couldn’t help but feel a shiver pass through me as the first of its thin, jointed front legs emerged from the shadows, a gleam of brownish light from the murky sky outside slithering along the blade-like surface. The appearance of one leg was quickly followed by another, and seconds later, the mechanical conveyance, still mostly shrouded in shadow, was standing in front of us, poised as if about to spring. The Dark Man sat hunched and motionless on the dais in the centre of the conveyance, his emaciated form shrouded in an opaque, net-like substance.
There was silence for a moment, each side assessing the other. Then my older self said, ‘Do you know who we are?’
The netting rustled as the Dark Man turned his head slightly. ‘Of course,’ he rasped.
‘And do you know why we’re here?’
The thin, brittle voice was just as flat, just as weary. ‘As my executioners?’
My older self and I exchanged a glance. I wondered what he was about to say.
‘Would you care if we were? Would you defend yourself?’
The Dark Man didn’t respond immediately. I wasn’t sure whether he was considering the question, or summoning up the energy to reply. Eventually he said, ‘The heart would defend me.’
My older self snorted. ‘That old thing? It wouldn’t have the strength to defend you against a rat.’ Then he shook his head. ‘But we’re not here to kill you. We’re here to redress the balance. You know who we are. Now we want to know about you.’
This time there was a hint of surprise in the cracked voice. ‘You want to talk?’
‘Yes. And I know you do too.’ My older self spread his hands. ‘So. Tell us about yourself. We’re here to listen.’
‘Where should I begin?’ There was an element almost of shyness in the Dark Man’s voice. Wariness too.
‘Tell us who you are,’ I said before my older self could reply. ‘Tell us where you came from.’
The netting rustled as the shrouded figure inclined his head towards me. It made me think of insect movement, of the frantic seething of a cockroach nest.
‘You had an accident,’ he rasped.
I assumed he was referring to my neck brace, to the cast on my arm. ‘So?’
‘I was… born from that accident.’
I frowned. I sensed Clover and my older self looking at me. ‘What do you mean?’
The netting rustled again. ‘I am… a splinter,’ the Dark Man said. ‘A shadow. You were almost… killed, Alex. You were… teetering on the brink. Your injuries were so… severe that the heart tried to… save you by opening up another timeline and… propelling an alternate version of you into eternity. I was… that alternate version. But you survived. You… clung to life. Which meant that I was… surplus to requirements.’
Was the Dark Man’s breathy, tortured voice now tinged with bitterness? It was difficult to tell.
‘I tumbled through eternity for millennia… clinging to the heart… to my heart… With your survival I should have been extinguished… wiped from existence… but I clung to life… I clung always to life…’
He made a thin, shrill sound that sounded like splintering glass, and that it took me a moment to realise was a laugh. It was a chilling sound, a mad sound.
And you went insane, didn’t you? I thought, horrified at the notion of falling through time for what must have seemed like forever. Horrified too to think there was a part of me that was capable of becoming… this.
As if reading my mind, the Dark Man said, ‘The process… scarred me… mentally and physically. It… fragmented my thoughts, my memories. I was… broken. But I survived.’ His voice became an insectile hiss. ‘I survived.’
‘How?’ I asked.
The netting rustled. A shrug? ‘By accident… by willpower… who knows? But I survived… and found my way back. By this time my heart… the one I had been lost with… that I had travelled with… was as broken and as old and as hollow as I was… And so I found you, Alex. My strength was… failing. But with the last of it, I created my army… my Wolves… and I used them to take your heart… the younger heart… from you.’ His voice suddenly became a vicious hiss. ‘It was my right! My right to live… to exist… I had just as much right to life as you…’
‘I’m not denying it,’ I said.
He continued as if he hadn’t heard me. ‘In time, this heart too… became old… began to wither and waste away… My link to this world… to this reality… is tenuous… When I sleep I slip away… I travel… I tumble through decades… sometimes centuries… in a single night…’
‘And so your plan was to steal the heart here,’ my older self said. ‘The heart that we created, that’s been moving through the centuries towards this moment – towards a time when it and we are reunited.’
‘Before it’s used properly for the first time?’ I said.
My older self nodded.
‘The virgin heart…’ the Dark Man rasped. ‘Seized in its infancy… it would sustain me… for centuries…’
‘What’s the point?’ my older self said brusquely. ‘What’s the point of carrying on, of surviving? Look at you. You’re a wreck.
You’re clinging to life by your fingertips. So why bother? Why not just let go? Find peace?’
‘Peace!’ sneered the Dark Man. The netting shuddered, as though he was agitated, angry. ‘Peace is for the dead… I want life… The life I’m owed… The life that was created for me and then taken away… before I could live it…’
‘It’s too late,’ Clover said. She spoke softly, almost sadly. ‘I’m sorry, but it is. You’ve missed it. It seems to me that you were never built to sustain it.’
‘No!’ This time the Dark Man’s voice was almost a snarl. Then, as though he had expended too much energy in that one word, it became softer, weaker. ‘No, it will work… it must… with the new heart… the unused heart…’
‘It won’t work,’ my older self said. ‘You’re too weak to contain the heart’s energy. It’ll destroy you.’
‘It will… rejuvenate me,’ the Dark Man hissed.
I felt an urge to be spiteful, to tell him he was wrong, that I’d seen the heart destroy him, but I didn’t want to tempt fate by giving him a glimpse into the future – besides which, I had another burning question on my mind, one from which I didn’t want to get sidetracked.
‘What about the innocent people you’ve destroyed? Hawkins, Mary, countless others? What about Lyn? You took away her sanity, and for what reason? Because you were jealous? Because you were resentful of the life she and I had together? Is that it? You wanted to get at me, and so you did it through her?’
I felt almost choked with anger and horror – to think that I, a version of me, was capable of this. The Dark Man’s response, though, surprised me.
‘No!’ Though little more than a croak, his denial was vehement. ‘I wanted only… acceptance… love… I wanted to regain what was rightfully mine… You and I are the same, Alex…’
‘We’re not the same,’ I retorted.
‘We’re the same,’ he said adamantly. ‘I never hurt you, Alex… I never hurt your loved ones… though I could have done… I could have killed your daughter… this one… when you knew her as Clover… but I didn’t. I captured her and imprisoned her… but I didn’t harm her… because she’s part of us… she’s part of all of us… I love her… as I love you… as I love all of us…’
‘Love?’ I sneered at him. ‘What do you understand about love? You killed people. You tortured people – you tortured children – to create your Wolves. What about their lives?’
‘Their lives… don’t matter,’ the Dark Man rasped.
‘Of course they matter!’ I was almost screaming now. Not only because I was furious, but because of the Dark Man’s association with me, the awful knowledge that deep inside me was… what was it he had said? A splinter. A splinter that, given the right circumstances, was capable of such atrocities, and such a lack of compassion, of morality.
Clover squeezed my hand, as if to calm me, to reassure me. It helped. I reined in my anger, shook my head. I didn’t want to believe what the Dark Man was saying. I thought back, trying to find a chink in his armour, desperate to prove he was lying.
‘If you’re telling the truth, then what about the visions I had?’ I said defiantly. ‘In those I saw Clover – Kate – die. I saw Candice die…’
The netting was rustling and twitching; he was shaking his head. ‘I know nothing about those… it must have been a construct… a false future… created by the heart…’
To keep me on my toes, I thought. To instil in me the imperative to manipulate my present and future so as to fit in with my past as I remembered it. In truth, it was something I’d already half-suspected.
‘But you still drove Lyn mad,’ I persisted. ‘Why would you do that to someone you claim to love?’
‘It was a mistake,’ he rasped, and there was such sorrow in his voice that, despite myself, I found it hard to disbelieve him. ‘I never intended… for it to happen… I loved her… I wanted to prove to her… who I was… what I’d been through… how my love for her had sustained me… helped bring me back… I thought if I gave her a glimpse… of the eternity I’d endured… it would prove… I was telling the truth… but it was too much for her… the effect was…’ His voice tailed off.
‘You drove her mad,’ I said.
His reply was barely a whisper. ‘Yes…’
I glared at the shrouded figure, but although I still couldn’t shake off my anger, my revulsion at what he had done, there was also a part of me that felt utterly horrified – that perhaps even pitied him – because of what he had had to endure, and what it had driven him to.
‘You see,’ my older self said gently.
I turned to him. ‘See what?’
He smiled. ‘I know what you’ve been thinking about, Alex. I know what’s been keeping you awake at night. You’ve been thinking that your life would be perfect if it wasn’t for the threat of the Dark Man. You’ve been worrying that he’ll sneak into your house at night and take away everything you’ve fought to protect.’
‘He means me,’ said Clover.
‘But he won’t,’ my older self continued. ‘Because he’s part of us. He’s part of this. And although he’s desperate he’d never intentionally harm us, our family – not physically anyway.’
‘So it’s over?’ I said, feeling a growing sense of… of release maybe. Even wonder.
‘Oh, it’ll never be over,’ my older self said. ‘But this bit is. From here on in, it’s a fresh start. For both of us.’
Clover linked her left arm gently with my broken one, then leaned in to give me a kiss on the cheek. ‘Go back home, Dad,’ she said. ‘And bring me up properly. And just remember to give me everything I ever want.’
Despite our surroundings I laughed. ‘I’ll do my utmost to ensure that you turn out like my good friend Clover.’
‘That’ll do,’ she said. ‘Clover’s cool. I’m sure you’ll make a brilliant job of it.’
EPILOGUE
TUESDAY 2 OCTOBER 2012
So here I am, and here we are.
Tonight’s the night I die. But that’s okay.
I’m old now. Older than old. Not exactly ancient, but something like a hundred and fifty, a hundred and sixty. Jumping between time zones, living here and there for days or weeks or months at a time, it’s hard to keep track. But I reckon the nanites have at least doubled my natural life span, kept my bones and organs strong, kept me cancer and infection free.
But everything has its time, and everything dies. Even nanites give up the ghost eventually. Even the obsidian heart will one day crumble to dust.
That night all those years ago, when I discovered the true nature of the Dark Man, did not mark an end to the story, because real stories never end, they just go on and on. But it did mark the end of my battle with him. It allowed me to draw a line in the sand, to live my life without being haunted by the fear of what he might do.
The Dark Man was so obsessed with prolonging his life that his ultimate plan, after only partially succeeding in stealing the heart from my younger self before I could find out its true worth, was to go further back and steal the heart in its infancy – or at least at the point when it emerged from its centuries-long journey to be reunited with its ‘creator’. But the power of the heart was too strong for him, and it destroyed him – an action undertaken by the heart that I still see as a mercy killing. The Dark Man was the embodiment of the very worst that I could have become. And as well as being insane, I believe he was in terrible torment. I know that at this particular moment he’s out there, ready to make his bid to steal the heart from my younger and far more innocent – or at least unknowing – self. But in the great scheme of things I hope the Dark Man managed to find peace. I truly do.
As for his Wolves, I have no idea what became of them. Perhaps they died when he did. Perhaps the shape-shifter lost its abilities. Perhaps Tallarian went into hiding. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
They too are still out there right now, though, of course. My younger self is destined to encounter them in this time period, and others.
To me they’re long gone, but to him, who is also me, they’re about to become a real and terrifying threat. Such is the elasticity of time. Such is its nature.
As I say, real stories never end.
If you’ve journeyed with me this far in the hope that everything will be tied up in a neat bow, then I’m afraid you’re going to be disappointed. Even now I don’t have all the answers. I don’t know, really, how and why the heart came into being, what its ultimate purpose is – or even if it has an ultimate purpose.
As human beings we like answers, don’t we? And we like patterns. We’re frightened of randomness, of chaos, and therefore we like to believe that everything has a purpose, a meaning; that somewhere, just out of sight, is an ultimate truth, a Grand Design.
But we’re flailing in the dark. We’ll never find what we’re looking for. If we did one day discover all the answers, what would we do with them? I doubt we’d be satisfied. We’d only set out to discover the answers behind the answers. Or we’d slump into despair. We’d think: Is that it? And then we’d wonder what to do next.
But time is short, and I’m beginning to ramble. I make no apologies for it – I’m old, I’m allowed to ramble – but if I’m going to say what I want to say before the Reaper comes to claim me, then I’d better get a move on.
As I’ve already said, my story didn’t end on the night I discovered the true nature of the Dark Man. There was still plenty to do, plenty to learn. I had my little black book to work through, things to set in motion.
I had to learn stagecraft, so that I could become the Great Barnaby. That took a while. And I had to train the Sherwoods, so that they could comfortably cope in the twenty-first century and play their part in my story. That took even longer.
As Barnaby McCallum, I lived through the ’40s, the ’50s, the ’60s and the ’70s, and it was glorious and exciting and unexpected and surreal. I learned that a man with foreknowledge can make huge amounts of money – and I did. I made pots and pots of the stuff.