Prelude to Eternity: A Romance of the First Time Machine

by Brian Stableford

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  FURTHER ENCOUNTERS IN THE LANGSTRADE MAZE

  Escott’s ghost was not yet ready to resume its perambulations, so Michael stepped through the hedge on his own in order to discover what the filtered light was. It was the light of a single lantern: a material lantern, held aloft by a material person, who seemed all the more material by virtue of who she was.

  “Lady Phythian?” he said, in frank astonishment.

  The widow, who was still clad in her evening-dress, peered at him in frank disappointment. “Mr. Laurel?” he said. “I was looking for ghosts. Tonight, I thought, I would be bound to find one.”

  Michael thought for a moment that he might have returned to solidity without being aware of it as he stepped out of the hedge, so he thrust his lantern into the branches yet again, meeting no resistance. The phantom light was snuffed out.

  “I am a ghost,” he said, not to annoy Lady Phythian but to express his puzzlement. Then a thought occurred to him. “What year is this?” he asked, thinking that this might be one of the earlier years in which the ghost-seers had come in search of her fugitive phantoms. He realized even before she answered, however, that he was being foolish. Lady Phythian had not known his name prior to 1822, and would surely have mentioned a meeting like this one in the story she had told in the railway carriage.

  “Don’t be silly, Mr. Laurel,” the widow retorted. “Where are the others?”

  “I don’t know,” Michael told her. “Mr. Escott was close at hand a few moments ago, but the maze keeps shifting. It’s a long time since I’ve seen Hope or Lord Langstrade.” He had to suppress a giggle as he noticed the double meaning in his last remark.”

  “I meant the others with whom I came into the Maze,” Lady Phythian said, irritated by his mistake. “Emily, Cecilia, and Signorina Monticarlo. We heard music. Emily said that it must by Signor Monticarlo’s violin, but Carmela swore that she would know her father’s playing anywhere, and that it must be the ghost of Pietro Locatelli. She seemed very frightened—we should not have brought her with us, I suppose, but Emily had decided that there ought to be four of us, and she did want to come. She told us on the train, if you remember, that she would like to see a ghost. I must have taken a wrong turn somehow, for we became separated. The Maze seems exceptionally confusing tonight, although I confess that I have never been entirely sure of myself while within it. Even Cecilia, who knows it so well, seemed uncertain of her direction.”

  “Cecilia is lost in the Maze?” Michael queried, feeling a sudden stab of alarm.

  “Yes. I think it was Cecilia who first proposed to her mother that if the ghosts of Langstrade were actually images of real individuals, cast back in time by the effects of Mr. Marlstone’s time machine, there ought to be four of us. Heatherington provided us with lanterns, although he clearly disapproved, and we set off bravely, as I have done before on many an occasion. I must confess, however, that my bravery has faltered slightly since I found myself alone. That has never happened before.”

  So there really were eight lanterns in the Maze, Michael thought, divided into two groups of four, seemingly following one another as they progressed through the Maze. But what did the Mistress want with Cecilia, Lady Langstrade, and Carmela? What has she done with them? Or has the Minotaur caught and devoured them? The idea of Cecilia gorgonized in bronze was too horrible to contemplate.

  “Don’t worry, Lady Phythian,” he said. “I’ll search for them, and I’ll find them, with the music’s aid. Can you find your way to the center?”

  “I think so,” the dowager replied. “If I can’t, will you come back and find me too, Mr. Laurel?”

  “Yes I will,” Michael promised—and stepped back through the hedge from which he had emerged a few moments before, with only one thought in his mind: to find Cecilia. For the first time, he addressed the Mistress of the Labyrinth directly, and addressed her as if she really were a goddess and not a machine: “Please,” he said, in an agonized whisper. “I’ve done your bidding—now take me to Cecilia, I beg you.”

  He stepped through another hedge, and found himself face to face with the object of his desire. Like Lady Phythian, she was made of flesh and blood, and seemed far more relieved than frightened by the sudden sight of him.

  “Michael!” she said. “Thank God!”

  He did not take the trouble to correct her. “Are you all right?” he asked her, urgently.

  “Yes, of course,” she said, “but how.…” That, presumably, was when she realized what he was. After a brief and fearful pause, she added: “Are you dead, then?”

  “I certainly hope not,” he said, but swiftly added: “and I have no reason to think so. I have temporarily mislaid my flesh, it seems, but I believe that it is safe and sound—probably asleep, though fully charged with some kind of Mesmeric magnetism, and dreaming with more authenticity than it has ever dreamed before. Marlstone’s time machine is gaining power, it seems, and reconstructing history to ensure her own invention—but what her further ambitions are, I have no idea, nor do I know what kind of climax she anticipates at noon tomorrow, when she is fully activated.”

  “Catastrophe is inevitable,” Cecilia quoted, “but the world might yet be saved. The invasion of the present by the future, and the past by the present. The world as we know it might be saved, but if heroic action falls, the Era of Change will commence, and its dread empire will not easily be set aside. That’s what your future self said in the séance. It was all real, wasn’t it? Dr. Carp was angry, but that was just because he didn’t realize what was happening. It was all real. It is real.”

  “Yes, it is—for the time being,” Michael said. “The present has invaded the past…and the future, I suspect, has begun to invade the present, setting ghost-traps that might capture some of us and impede the progress of the rest. The Maze has become direly difficult, my love, and we shall not easily find our way through it, even with the aid of Ariadne’s thread.”

  “My love?” she echoed. Her tone was unusually—and, indeed, uncannily—sober when she added: “Yes, I am your love, am I not? But we have not yet contrived to find a moment to ourselves alone, in the flesh—and if I were not convinced that this is some kind of waking dream, I would be terrified even by that thought, the most desirous of all.”

  “Do you know how to reach the center of the Maze?” Michael asked.

  “Yes, of course,” she replied. “It’s through that gap just a few yards behind you. Someone must have got there ahead of us, for I can see the glimmer of at least one lantern.”

  “I have to go back,” Michael said. “I promised Escott, and Lady Phythian, and must honor my word—but I will meet you there as soon as humanly possible.”

  “Humanly?” she challenged—but there was actually a chuckle in her supplementary voice, and a sparkle in her eye that might as easily have been a gleam of phantom light as a reflection from her lantern.

  “Or superhumanly,” he assured her. “I’m a hero now, and invulnerable to common harm.”

  “Be careful of your heel,” she said. “Everyone has a weakness.”

  He was impatient not to delay any longer, and tried to step back into the hedge in order to return to Lady Phythian—but the music that had been enabling him to move, and assisting him to find his way, suddenly stopped. It did not seem to him that the capriccio had reached its end, but rather that Pietro Locatelli’s ghost had been interrupted in its playing. Michael thought the latter more likely, for he felt that there were things still undone, preparations still unmade. He thought that he could sense the frustration of the Mistress of the Labyrinth, a hitch in her painstakingly-laid thread. Suddenly, the life of the Maze seemed discordant, as if some evil spirit that had been lurking within it had begun to breathe fire.

  Instead of fulfilling his promises, as he yearned to do, Michael’s consciousness was rudely precipitate
d back into his flesh.

  It was a horrid sensation.

  For a long moment, suspended somewhen between instantaneity and eternity, two variant consciousnesses battled for possession of the moist grey matter of his brain. They were both versions of himself, far less alien to one another than he and Escott had been when their ghosts had briefly fused, but they were nevertheless not the same, and their fusion was direly difficult. To call it nightmarish was an understatement, and the process flooded the fleshy host with dire alarm and awful sickness.

  The body that was trying to contain that hellish combat collapsed unconscious, and would not consent to wake up again until the conflict was settled—but awaken it eventually did.

  This happens every time I wake up, Michael reminded himself. Every dream-self that forms in my sleep battles briefly for possession of my mind before I wake—but those dream-selves are easily banished, and mostly easily forgotten. This time, it is the dream-self that has prevailed. I am still, in greater part, the ghost I was, and the less adventurous individual that kept possession of my flesh has faded from memory. If only the process were not so cruelly exacting…and if it happened often, how could I help but go mad?

  Slowly, he sat up, and rubbed his sticky eyes.

  He was in the Maze, exactly where he had just met Cecilia, a few yards from the gap that gave entry to the center. His lantern was set on the ground beside him. It was one of four. Three other men were sitting up, just as he was, in similar bewilderment.

  “What was that?” Lord Langstrade demanded, looking down sorrowfully at his soiled dinner-jacket. “I’ve had the strangest dream—but I’ve never woken up feeling as bad as this before.”

  “Something knocked me down,” said Quentin Hope. “A blast of wind, or a chord in that strange music—which has now fallen silent, I see. I’ve never experienced such shock, or such agony—but I don’t seem to be injured.”

  Escott merely groaned, as if to imply that his own agony must have been far worse, since he could not even speak of it.

  “Where are we?” Langstrade asked. “Are we lost?”

  “No,” Michael said. “We’re not lost. We’re only a few yards from the exit to the center. There’s lantern-light visible, slanting obliquely through the gap. Let me go first, to see what there is to be seen—if the sight is too terrible to behold, the rest of you will be able to beat a retreat without confronting it.”

  “That’s all very well,” said Escott, gloomily, “but how shall we find our way out without you to guide us?”

  “Trust yourselves,” Michael advised them. Presumably, they did, because when he stood up and moved forward to cover the last few yards to the exit, none of his companions went with him.

  There was a lantern set on the ground, no more than a dozen feet away from the exit. Three others were held aloft on the edge of the lawn, in front of the drawbridge to the Keep. Michael stepped forward into the gap, raising his own lantern above his head in order to increase his field of vision.

  Someone immediately picked up the lantern that had been set down, and held it up so that her face was as fully illuminated is his.

  “Michael?” said Cecilia. “Is it really you?” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “When you…when your ghost didn’t come back, I was worried.…”

  “Yes, it’s me,” Michael said. “In the flesh.”

  The other three lanterns within the central area of the maze were being carried by the younger Lady Langstrade, Lady Phythian and Carmela Monticarlo. Evidently, Lady Phythian had found her own way to the center, and had been able to rejoin her companions.

  “We were expecting ghosts from the distant past,” Cecilia said, in a tone that held more disappointment than relief. “We were promised Harold Longstride, Edward Kelley and Pietro Locatelli, but we’ve seen no one unfamiliar, although we’ve heard the strains of a phantom violin.”

  “We had slightly more success,” Michael told her. He raised his voice. “Come forward, Lord Langstrade, Hope and Escott—let us do what we must and scatter as we emerge, so that Lady Phythian might see us, more-or-less dimly, three, seven and eleven years ago. We ought to be grateful, I suppose, that we are now the shadow-casters, and no longer the fugitive shadows.” The past is in place now, he thought, but the battle to sustain it has not yet been joined.

  “How brave you are!” said Cecilia, as the other three maze-walkers emerged, breaking formation as they did so. “You must have thought that we were ghosts, and yet you came into the heart of the maze anyway!”

  “How brave you are,” Michael riposted. “You must have thought that we were ghosts, and yet you stood your ground as a sentry at the entrance to the maze, waiting to watch us emerge and challenge us.”

  Lady Phythian meanwhile, had turned to confront Hope and Escott, and to scold them like the naughty boys there were. “Did I not tell you, in the carriage, that there were eight lanterns, held aloft by human forms? Fireflies, indeed!”

  “The fireflies were none of our invention, my dear lady,” Hope reminded her. “We always knew that the suggestion was ridiculous.”

  Perfectly ridiculous, Michael thought.

  The door of the Keep opened then, as the ladies must have been expecting it to do before Michael and his companions arrived, and Gregory Marlstone stepped out. He was no ghost, but he was no less terrible an apparition for that. His eyes were haggard, his features drawn, and his movements were oddly jerky, like those of a marionette impelled by invisible strings.

  Michael noticed that there was a tray on the drawbridge just outside the door, which bore a small stack of empty plates and two stone jugs. Someone—presumably a servant, acting on the bidding of the ever-thoughtful Heatherington—had brought food and drink to the beleaguered inventor in order that he might not be driven mad while he worked by hunger and thirst. A suggestion of madness seemed to have attained him anyway, alas.

  “You must all go away,” Marlstone said. “Far away. The demonstration is cancelled. The problem now is not to start her working but to stop her. I’ve been trying all day to disengage the mechanism, but I can’t do it. She keeps playing tricks with time, and everything I do is undone, everything I attempt anticipated, everything I think of falsified. She’s running amok, and I’m helpless. You must all leave—in the diligence if you can. If you can reach York before morning, you must catch the train to London. You can’t escape her reach entirely, but her power must diminish the further you are from the center of her field. You will doubtless be subject to any alterations she can induce in the past, but you might still escape the full intensity of her grip, if you flee. Go! Go now! I must stay, but I have a moral duty not to expose anyone else to the peril of my error. I must try to save the world, but you must save yourselves. Run, I implore you, as fast and far as you can.”

  “I think, Mr. Marlstone,” Lord Langstrade said, steadily enough, “that you have had a nightmare. We have had strange dreams ourselves, but the ghostly music has stopped now, and the world has set itself to rights again. You ought to come back to the Hall with us, and get some sleep.”

  “You don’t understand,” Marlstone said. “The ripples have calmed, for the moment, but it’s only a pause. Noon tomorrow has yet to arrive, and she no longer needs me to activate her field. She’s in control now—and I have no idea what she intends to do, or why. Indeed, I doubt that she is capable of intention or motive. She’s only a machine, after all. It’s possible—probable, even—that she is being manipulated, guided by some other intelligence, elsewhen in time. I don’t know how, because it shouldn’t be possible, given the pitch of the fundamental and the temporal distribution of available resonance-points, but something has got into her—something terrible, I think. I have no idea what will happen at noon tomorrow, but I fear that it might destroy the world as we know it, once and forever.”

  “We’ve already discussed that at some
length,” Hope informed him, serenely, “but there’s nothing to fear, provided that we put our faith in progress. If your dark mistress requires any further assistance to secure that progress, I shall be only too glad to help. Langstrade’s right—you’d do better to go to bed and get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow might be a long and arduous day.”

  “As your hostess,” Lady Langstrade put in, “I feel entitled to demand that you do as you’re asked, Mr. Marlstone. This is my husband’s party, after all—you’re a guest, and have the obligations of a guest, just as we have the obligations of a host and hostess. Come back to the Hall, and start afresh in the morning, when you’ve rested and had breakfast.”

  Marlstone opened his mouth as if to reply in anger and anguish. What the inventor almost said, Michael felt certain, was: “You’re all mad!” He did not pronounce the fatal words, though. He must have realized, just in time, that Lady Langstrade was absolutely right. He was a guest in her home, and he did have obligations under the rules of etiquette, just as she had—and without the rules of etiquette, civilization would collapse, just as surely as it would if the threads of Time were cut, and all its human marionettes simply collapsed. Besides which, any such remark would have been bound to smack of the pot calling the kettle black.

  Carmela Monticarlo took a step forward on to the drawbridge, and smiled at the inventor. “Will you take my arm, Mr. Marlstone?” she asked. “Will you be kind to escort me through the Maze.” It was the first slight slip she had made in her use of the English language, so far as Michael could recall.

  It was the kind of request that a gentleman could not refuse. Meekly, Gregory Marlstone stepped forward. He was evidently exhausted, and befuddled by lack of sleep, but he understood the obligations that one fellow guest owed another, according to the code of politeness.

  “That’s right,” said Lord Langstrade, approvingly, waving his walking-stick in the air. “Let’s all get some sleep, and worry about the end of the world in the morning.”