‘Stark naked!’ interrupted Mia, who seemed to be taking the naked part rather personally.
‘Naked,’ agreed John. ‘But when you get to the time you’re aiming at . . . you would have to leave behind this image of you standing there, because it’s going to be there for a hundred years.’
‘It’s worse than that,’ said Mia. ‘Imagine there is one of these . . . what? Time trails? Of you. And you know about it. Then what happens if you decide, “No, I can see that I am supposed to go back in time in this spot, but I don’t want to.” What happens then?’
‘Or,’ I said, ‘if you do decide to go back but from some different place. What if you step into the time machine in London, somewhere where there has never been a sign of one of these time trails? I like that, by the way – I’m calling them time trails from now on. It’s official.’
‘Cool.’ Mia grinned. ‘It’s like I just named black holes.’
‘If black holes made zero sense at all,’ John added.
‘They kinda don’t,’ said Mia.
‘Anyway.’ I straightened up with a double armful of bedding. ‘None of it makes much sense, but what it’s hard to argue with is that there are a hundred and seven nudists heading back through time in a cave under a field not far outside Bristol, and I’m one of them.’
CHAPTER 7
2011
‘Mia Hayes – she was brought into A&E not long ago. Where have they taken her?’ I leaned over the reception desk at Addenbrookes Hospital, trying and failing to force myself to calmness.
‘Let me check for you, sir.’ The woman at the desk wore the neutral expression of someone whose job sets them face to face with a dozen desperate people every day, each of them sure that their matter of life and death is somehow more vital, more urgent, than those of the others all around them whose lives must be just as important to them and have been just as broken. ‘There’s no record of her being assigned to a ward. She must still be waiting in A&E.’
‘Still? But she was—’ I bit back the words. I didn’t know what the situation was. I had just assumed. I’d been waiting so long for ‘the accident’. And here we were in 2011, a quarter-century after Demus had told us it was going to happen. Only a few months remaining on the clock.
‘It’s through there, sir. Just follow the signs to Accident and Emergency.’ The receptionist pointed with her pen and gazed past me to the next in line.
I followed the signs, doing that almost-walk where all that holds us back from a flat sprint is the misplaced sense of embarrassment that so often keeps people in check. It’s as though somehow we think that if we throw decorum to the wind and run, the universe might disapprove and raise the stakes still further, greeting us with a greater disaster than we might find if we just walk there like civilised human beings.
I wound a long path past endless doors with cryptic names above them, coming at last to the A&E reception. I saw Mia immediately, sitting on a crowded row of fixed seating amid daytime drunks, young mothers with croupy babies and old folk nursing unspecified injuries or sucking on oxygen as if it were all that sustained them.
‘Mia!’ I rushed over, emotion suddenly catching up with me in the home straight. If I lost her, I didn’t know what I would do. Some vital part of me would shatter. Not enough to kill me, perhaps, but enough to leave me broken. Waiting for my days to run out.
‘Hey! I’m alright. I would have called you, but I broke my phone. And maybe this . . .’ She tried to raise her right arm, which I belatedly noticed was in a sling.
‘What happened?’
She looked confused. ‘It’s a bit of a blur. I got hit by a car.’
‘Christ!’ A cold sick feeling took hold of my stomach. ‘Did they catch the fucker?’
‘Well, it wasn’t her fault. The driver, I mean. I ran out into the road without looking.’
‘Why?’
Mia’s confusion became something closer to worry. ‘Someone tried to grab me on that little road behind the supermarket on the high street.’
‘What kind of someone?’
‘A young man . . .’ She frowned as if trying to remember. ‘It’s lucky I took all those Krav Maga classes. I don’t think he was expecting a fight . . . But he was so fast! I—’
‘What did he look like?’
‘He came at me from behind. I never would have got away, but two men came out of the warehouse door at the back of Tesco and they must have seen him just about to grab me. One of them shouted a warning. And after I’d elbowed the bastard in the face and twisted away, the other two rushed him.’ She shook her head as if trying to rattle more of the memory loose. ‘I should have stayed and helped, I know, but in the moment all I could think of was to run. Then when I reached the high street and looked back, I saw him coming down the alley after me, head down, limping but fast, no sign of the two warehouse men. I think they must have hurt his leg, though. So anyway, I kept on running. And a car hit me. Stupid, I know.’
I asked the only question that mattered. ‘Was it him?’
‘It’s been a long time. And I didn’t see his face.’ Mia shuddered. She stared at nothing as if trying to summon back that last image, her glimpse of the man chasing her. She spoke slowly, weighing her words. ‘I think it might have been.’
‘Shit.’ I looked around the A&E waiting room with fresh eyes, trying to identify anyone who might be more than they seemed. I’d worked hard to make sure that when they finally arrived, there wouldn’t be any help waiting for them; but these were resourceful men, and desperation is a powerful motivator. ‘He’ll have followed the ambulance to the hospital. We need to get out of here without being seen. And quickly. How’s your arm?’
‘The triage nurse said it wasn’t obviously broken, but I haven’t seen a doctor yet . . . I’m sorry, am I boring you?’ Mia punched my shoulder with her good arm.
‘Sorry.’ I looked up from my iPhone. ‘I’m on Google Earth, looking at the layout of the hospital. I’m going to call the lads in on this, and all the hired help.’
‘We might be overreacting?’ Mia frowned. ‘I mean, it was just a glimpse. Dark hair, slim, young.’
‘Maybe.’ I frowned, too. The police artist’s impression would fit about five million British men.
‘He was probably just after my handbag.’
‘I had two men following you, Mia.’
‘I told you not to do that!’ She punched me in the same spot, but harder.
‘Well, I did. I worry, and we only have a few months before we’re clear of this. Anyway, the point is, where were they?’
‘What are you saying?’
‘I’m saying that I think he took them out first. They were professionals. Hard men. Perhaps he got hurt. Perhaps that was why he was limping, and perhaps that’s why you managed to get away in the first place.’
‘Oh.’ Mia looked properly scared for the first time.
‘And if any of that’s true, we’re going to need everybody and everything if we’re to stand a chance of stopping him.’
CHAPTER 8
1992
For a week after confronting myself in Guilder’s secret cave, I ignored my usual work concerning how to crack the intractable problems of time travel to the past, a much trickier beast than simply accelerating travel into the future. Instead I devoted myself to figuring out the mechanics of the process, given the assumption that the difficult part of actually making it happen had been solved. Being presented with irrefutable evidence of a thing you’re trying to make happen having definitely happened always concentrates the mind wonderfully.
By the time Friday came around and I boarded the train to London, I had broken the back of the problem. I stayed with Mother that night and spent the evening dotting mathematical i’s and crossing mathematical t’s. By the time Saturday came around, I was ready to explain it to someone.
‘Hey, Simon.’ Simon always opened John’s door on D&D days. You could be forgiven for thinking that he lived there. Apparently, John disabled his doo
rbell every Friday night and around nine the next morning he would plug it back in, whereupon it would immediately ring and he would go to the door to find Simon waiting there for the D&D session starting at ten. Mia and I never asked quite how early Simon actually arrived, but the fact that John was organised enough to disable his bell suggested that the answer was ‘very’. It was just good fortune that Simon always put his faith in technology and never thought to knock.
‘I’m excited to hear about this cave,’ Simon said.
‘All will be revealed in a minute.’ I ushered him back into the hallway.
‘Good.’ Simon gave me an odd look, then smiled at Mia, before finally turning and leading the way into the luxury of John’s apartment.
John was waiting at his posh oak gaming table with bowls of snacks laid on and Coke cans at the ready.
‘The cave!’ said Simon, even before I’d properly settled into my chair.
‘Well, I guess John told you about it,’ I said. ‘I’ve got some proofs sketched out now, so I think I understand the mechanics of it all.’
Simon frowned. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘The secret cave with all the naked people in it . . .’ I frowned back. ‘What are you talking about?’
‘The cave all our characters were left trapped in at the end of last week’s session, of course.’ Simon blinked in surprise.
‘So you’re not interested in my—’
‘Fineous is trapped,’ Simon explained, speaking slowly as if I might not be able to follow, ‘in a cave. Mia said the air could run out at any time.’
‘I said it would last at least a week.’ Mia shook her head, smiling.
‘A week ago!’
‘I want to hear your proofs, Nick.’ John pulled the tab from a Coke and leaned back in his chair to slurp it. ‘Not the boring stuff, though. Just the edited highlights.’
‘Right, then.’ I gave Simon a look, daring him to object. ‘It’s a bit crazy, but that’s what happens when you mess with time.’
‘I noticed.’ John took another slurp.
‘Well, normally, if you go back in time you vanish and nobody – past, present or future – ever sees you in your timeline again. That’s because the act of you arriving back in the past splits off a new timeline. So you can murder your father before you were born, should you be moved to do so, and there’s no paradox because you arrived from a different timeline where he remained unmurdered.’
‘Is unmurdered a word?’ Mia asked.
‘Big picture. Keep your eyes on the prize.’ I tapped the table. ‘So, this stuff in the cave is because our timeline isn’t normal. It’s . . . knotted. Something very weird happened to it, which is why Demus was able to go back to 1986, talk to himself, i.e., me, and remember doing so. As long as he did nothing to contradict what he knew had already happened he stayed on the same timeline he left.
‘Now, people who go back in time and do so in the way that Demus did are the ones who then leave a trail through all the time they travel through. And that trail is the solid image of them, like the ones Mia and I saw in Guilder’s cave.
‘If you want to go back to your own timeline you have to go to the far end of a trail that you have already left through the years, a trail that has been waiting for you. And then it all works. So one day, it seems, Mia and I will go back to that cave, step into our timelines and travel back.’
John burped loudly. ‘Same question I had in Cambridge: what if there’s a trail with your name on and you refuse to use it?’
‘Good question. The answer is that it vanishes. But it does create a persistent low-level paradox field, and too many of those can be fatal, so it’s best avoided.’
‘How many of these persistent low—’
‘PLLP fields.’
‘How many of those things would it take to kill someone?’ John asked.
‘Oh, I mean fatal as in “to life in general”, not a particular someone. If they go critical, they would unzip all matter in a volume expanding at the speed of light.’
‘Right . . . how many?’
‘Don’t know. Paradox mathematics is too difficult for me. We’d have to ask the daughter I might have had. Eva did seem to have a real talent for it.’
‘Sounds a little dangerous,’ Mia said. ‘How are you going to fix it?’
Simon interrupted me. ‘I have an idea.’
‘Yes?’ I hoped it was better than the ones I’d come up with so far.
‘Fineous searches the walls of the cave for secret doors.’ Simon reached for his small mound of six-sided dice.
And just like that, he sidetracked us all into having fun.
Simon’s idea wasn’t actually that bad. Nobody had helpfully built a secret door to the outside world in the cavern we’d been trapped in by a cave-in, but there was a very hard-to-spot crack behind a small waterfall at the far end. By dint of a lot of squeezing and pushing, and later the judicious use of a shrink potion not unlike the one in Alice in Wonderland, we managed to emerge into the dungeons beneath the Tower of Illusion, just as we’d been planning all along.
My mage came through last. ‘You squeeze really hard,’ Mia said, rolling some dice behind her screen. ‘You’re certain for a moment that you’re going to be wedged in the crack forever. Things start going weird and blurry. And then, with a sudden pop, you’re through and clear with just grazed ears to show for it.’
‘That was the last of the shrink potion,’ I told the others.
‘What have we got left?’ John asked.
I looked down the long list of bottles we’d taken from the workshop of an alchemist who had tried to have us killed. Almost all were erased now. ‘A potion of fire resistance and . . . a potion of truth.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it.’
At first the Grand Illusionist’s dungeon appeared to be an actual dungeon for prisoners. It was all cells, their heavy doors lining the sides of dark and stinking corridors. We peered through the small barred windows into quite a few, but most were empty. Several contained the mouldering bones of previous occupants or, worse, their ghosts: translucent white memories of their misery, haunting the same place that they had haunted in the flesh during the last months or years of their lives.
‘A cheery place,’ John said. ‘Sir Hacknslay takes the lead with Boris.’ He pushed the small figure of painted lead that represented his warrior to the front of our group, and set beside it an axe-wielding barbarian in a bearskin cloak.
‘Fineous lurks at the back, behind Nicodemus,’ Simon said.
‘Boris?’ I asked.
‘He’s at the front with me.’ John tapped the figure.
‘Who the fuck is Boris?’
John and Simon both looked up from their study of the map.
‘What do you mean, “Who the fuck is Boris?”?’ John set his finger to the figure.
‘I mean, who the fuck is he? We’ve never met a Boris. I’ve never seen that figure before.’
Simon frowned. ‘Maybe he’s been ensorcelled.’
‘Boris has?’ I asked.
‘No, you. You, Nicodemus.’ He picked up a character sheet I’d not noticed before. ‘We’ve had Boris since just after the Tower of Tricks. He saved us all when the pirates had everyone captive. Boris! Mad axeman. Scared of rabbits.’
‘Oh, right. Scared of rabbits.’
Simon let out a breath. ‘Good, you remember.’
‘Bollocks I do. Mia set you two up to this.’ I glanced at her bemused smile. ‘Boris is some kind of illusion we picked up back in the cave.’
‘Or,’ said John, ‘Mia set you up to this. Told you to pretend that you didn’t remember Boris because something got to Nicodemus back in the cave.’
I snorted. ‘Nicodemus has the highest intelligence in the party and he’s a magic-user. He’s the one least likely to fail a saving throw against this sort of thing.’
‘Actually, it’s very slightly less likely that both of us failed together than you did
on your own,’ said Simon, doing his human calculator thing. ‘Basically, it’s fifty-fifty.’
‘Yeah, but I know I’m not acting. I know Mia didn’t put me up to this.’
‘I also know I’m not acting,’ John said, staring at me. ‘Boris is my favourite member of the party. A real man’s man.’ He blinked suddenly as if remembering something and turned to Simon. ‘Maybe Nicodemus has forgotten drinking that potion of forgetfulness.’
Simon shrugged. ‘Makes sense.’
I laughed. ‘Nice one.’
‘So you don’t remember?’ John leaned over and tapped the potions section on my character sheet.
I looked. ‘There’s just two potions and neither of them are forget—’
John tapped harder. ‘That just means you didn’t forget to rub it out.’
There, where his finger had been, were the rubbed-out traces of another potion. I could make out the ‘f’ at the start and one . . . maybe two ‘s’s at the end. ‘I admire your efforts,’ I said, shaking my head.
‘So, are we going to get on with this or not?’ Simon asked, leading from the back again.
‘I’m not going anywhere with this fake.’ I moved Nicodemus further from the barbarian. One swing of his axe could leave the party with two halves of a magic-user, and Nicodemus was definitely more effective whole than as the sum of his parts.
‘So use one of those scrolls of “dispel illusion” you bought,’ Simon said.
‘Hmmm.’ The two scrolls had cost an arm and a leg. That axeman still had me thinking about body parts. It had proved ridiculously hard to get hold of the ‘dispel illusion’ spell anywhere near the tower, and even more strangely impossible to get the less powerful ‘detect illusion’. There had been additional strife as the only thing that allowed Nicodemus to use illusionist spells from scrolls was a headband that Fineous had lost two fingers stealing and that sported an enormous diamond at its centre. Fineous had wanted to sell the thing and put the proceeds towards finding a cleric who could restore his missing digits. But, no, I needed it so that we stood a chance on this mission to the Tower of Illusion to restore Mia’s character to life.
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