Dispel Illusion (Impossible Times)

by Mark Lawrence

  I started to shiver. The warm clothing I’d been wearing had been left . . . or would one day be left . . . as a shapeless heap resting on top of the shoes I had been standing in. If I had arrived on time then the cave would currently be undiscovered, and none of the elevators or stairs that first Guilder and later myself had installed would be present. I knew the way out. Long ago, or in a few years’ time, depending on your point of view, I’d done it blind and panicking on the basis of a quick look at the map. Now, having shown each of over a hundred travellers through the tunnels several times, it was second nature.

  I made my way back to the rear wall and set off, trailing my fingers over the familiar contours of the rock. The damp stone was chilly underfoot, the occasional drips a shudderingly cold surprise. I knew that Matthew Hartinger had been this way just a few weeks before me and that Giselle LeJeune was due to follow later in the year. I wished them both luck as I made my way towards the as yet unseen daylight.

  Somehow, despite the number of times I had previously navigated the way in the dark, I still managed to bang my elbow, graze my forehead and lose some skin from my hip. I squelched barefoot through the mud and, remembering at the last moment the plaster cast footprint Ian Creed had discovered, I took care to make one deep impression right in the corner of a turn where nobody else was likely to step on it, at least not for the next seven years.

  The numbing coldness of the mud made me very glad not to have to wallow through the half-flooded passages I’d used on my first escape. A wider, drier tunnel paralleled that particular section and brought me at last to the exit where the grey light of dawn splintered in through the fissure in the cliff.

  Late December in England is not a good time for nudists. I had considered arriving in the summer of ’85 to a warm afternoon and living the high life for a while, but the longer I left between arriving and my appointment with Rust and the others at the microchip factory the harder it would be to do, and the greater the chance that I would somehow slip from the timeline by doing something that had never happened in my past.

  Naked and shivering I eased out into the forest. It was ridiculously cold. The oh-I’m-going-to-die kind of cold that thankfully very few of us ever get to experience. On the bright side, I doubted that I could be done for indecent exposure. Freezing weather is never flattering to a man and my power to offend appeared to have retreated inside my body, leaving a reminder so shrivelled that it was more likely to provoke hilarity than outrage.

  I knew where the nearest farmhouses lay, but Mia and I had long ago decided that the regular arrival of naked, mud-smeared strangers at the homes scattered among these particular Somerset fields would create not only suspicion but a significant amount of press coverage that was singularly absent in the historical record.

  Instead of trekking through the forest barefoot, I went to one of several locations where I knew that with a degree of random poking about with a stick I would find, buried in a shallow grave, a large plastic box containing an array of clothing and a modest amount of money.

  There were more than one such caches, since we hadn’t known in advance how far back the furthest traveller would go. It turned out to be 1957 in the end, but to start with all we knew was that if Demus went – and that was a big if – there would be a cache placed in 1985. So when Melissa Reede, the world’s first reverse time traveller, went back to 1980 she really did have to make her way to the nearest farmhouse and throw herself on the mercy of whoever lived there. We did make some efforts to establish which farms had housed families at the time, rather than potential serial killers living on their own.

  Melissa had been asked to return and bury clothes and money for later travellers at a pre-agreed location close to the exit. It turned out that after four more customers we got Hector King, a grey-haired and rather rotund multi-millionaire who very much wanted to return to 1968; so Melissa had unknowingly walked right past the cache he’d buried in the swinging sixties. But of course, there was no helping that, just as there was no helping the fact that Hector had hobbled his way barefoot and naked in a February gale right past the cache of clothes buried in 1957. But the arrangement did drastically cut down on the number of nude arrivals in family homes around the area.

  To my great delight, I struck plastic after only a few minutes’ digging around, and had soon unearthed a box from which I was able to dress myself in a curious but warm assembly of garments. I pocketed half of the £100 available and reinterred the box as best I could. Making a mental note to return and restock the box as soon as possible, I walked off, relishing my warm stripy socks and ill-fitting brown shoes.

  The date remained unclear. I trudged along the country roads accompanied by the raucous dawn chorus, wishing that I had my smartphone so I could summon a taxi.

  Depending on your side of the equation, Demus had turned up first in the January of ’86, then again in the summer of ’86, or vice versa. The events of the upcoming summer were more than a little confused owing to the fact that they arose from a paradox that had been destructively anchored into two timelines, and that we had successfully resolved with the judicious application of a time bomb.

  The resolved paradox left a confused jumble of partial memories and the strong conviction that none of it had actually ‘happened’, at least not in the accepted way, which involved it becoming part of the history of our timelines. It had happened, but in a time and space uniquely its own.

  All of which left me very confused as to whether I really needed to go back to the summer first, act out the parts where I recalled Demus and then build another time-rig to bring me back to January. Eva would have been able to do the sums to resolve the issue, but Eva had vanished with the paradox, as if she had never been, which technically she hadn’t. And that paradox, which in my timeline had never happened since we shook it free with our bomb . . . was the only reason Demus had accidentally arrived in that summer in the first place.

  In the end I had concluded that my fractured memories of that summer were not memories from my own timeline and therefore did not need my cooperation in order to be formed. I recalled Demus being fatally irradiated in Bradwell nuclear power station. I recalled him being stabbed by Charles Rust. I recalled him dying. I really had no desire to experience any of those things, especially not to let Charles Rust, who I had seen my mother kill, stab me and . . . kinda . . . kill me before I had to come back six months later and let his little brother finish the job.

  No, it was sufficient that I play Demus in January and let a paradox-free timeline run its course thereafter without me.

  The only niggling worry was that I had, after that summer, always assumed that Demus’s baldness and apparent ill health the first time I saw him were the result of his radiation poisoning at Bradwell.

  I walked on amid the shortening shadows, starting to limp as I got my first blister from the too-small shoes, and wondering what strange stroke of fate was going to make me go bald over the course of the next few weeks before letting young Nick catch his first sight of me.

  I spent the next few weeks over the Christmas period getting rich again. I got a lift into Bristol town centre and hit the first betting shop I saw. I’d memorised appropriate horse race results, along with some more general sporting results spread out across quite a few years, just in case I hadn’t arrived at my destination time. I mean, I would have been rather stuck if I’d arrived pre-1970, but my technical knowledge could have been converted into money, albeit on a slower timescale. I was fairly confident of arriving when planned, especially since I remembered doing it, but you never know with science. A decimal point can always be missed, and who knows if I had accidentally slung a few of our travellers back into the Jurassic? The twentieth century I felt equipped to deal with. Before that, no, I wasn’t going to last long. And had I emerged from the cliff face to find a primordial swamp, I would have just gone looking for a T-Rex to make a quick end of it.

  I spent the week before Christmas mailing carefully worded letters t
o medical researchers all across the globe. Not to the most prominent figures, but to the men and women who were the stars of neurological regeneration in 2011. I guess in some way I might be seen as having stolen from them the chance of independently making the discoveries I was steering them towards. But I didn’t tell them everything, just as I wasn’t going to tell young Nick everything. I just pointed them in good directions and hoped that the rest would take care of itself.

  For Christmas I bought myself a black BMW, and on the day itself I sat back with a bottle of tequila, a mound of snacks and a tower of VHS cassettes to watch on my new, state-of-the-art video recorder.

  On New Year’s Eve I went to hear the chimes of Big Ben and see in 1986 with the crowds. I missed all twelve strikes of the clock beneath the roaring of my fellow Londoners, but it felt good to be part of that throng. The weeks before had been a rush of getting established, getting ready, setting up a lab to make the memory eraser and storage device. I’d been too busy to dwell on the strangeness of it all, but it had been strange. I was walking about in my own past. I knew what was going to happen next. Not when each person opened their mouth or when any given casino dice were rolled, but I knew the headlines, I knew the fates of film stars, sportsmen, politicians. I knew that in four days Phil Lynott, the Thin Lizzy singer, would die. That in nine days the secretary of state for defence would resign his position. That on the last but one day of the year Ellie Goulding, whose songs I had listened to on my drive from Birmingham University to the castle, would be born, and that two days earlier a former prime minister would shuffle off this mortal coil. I’d felt that knowledge sitting there between me and everyone else, a kind of distance that couldn’t be breached no matter how many hands I shook.

  In that New Year’s crowd, though, for the first time since my return, I felt a part of the world. And I didn’t want to leave it.

  CHAPTER 19

  1986

  It is a curiously distressing thing to meet your own mother and to be older than her when you do so. It’s an upsetting of the natural order of things, and I hadn’t come prepared for just how unnerving it was going to be.

  I stood waiting for her in the hospital foyer. I knew the time and the place. I knew the outcome. I knew all the facts. I just had no idea what to say or do.

  She looked so goddamned young. Hair long and dark and thick. The lines of her age fallen away, the delicacy of her movements, shaped over the years by arthritis, replaced with a determined certainty. Surely my mother had never been so . . . fresh. She had been for my entire life perpetually twenty-four years my senior, burdened with additional decades of life, weighed down with responsibility for me, unable to step clear of the shadow cast by a dead husband who she never stopped loving even though he left her. And now I had left her, too. Abandoned her in a suicide not so different from my father’s.

  She walked towards me, unseeing, head high, her face a trembling mask that had to hold only long enough for her to reach the privacy of her car. I could see that in her now. She was one kind word away from crying. For me. She was walking away from her son, leaving him with his cancer, both of them caught in the straitjackets of their lives, of who they were.

  Suddenly I knew what to say. I stepped into her path and, before she could protest, I took her hands in mine. ‘Nick is going to be fine.’

  She tried to pull away, until she saw my face. Even then, her body kept on struggling, left on autopilot while her eyes widened and widened again and her mind went into free fall.

  She knew me. Even with my shiny scalp and a quarter of a century wrapped around me. I had worried that she might mistake me for my father resurrected, but a mother knows her son. She set one hand to my face, covering my mouth as if unable to let me speak, and the other to her own.

  Of course, knowing and accepting are not the same thing.

  ‘Who are you?’

  She was crying. We both were. I led her to a row of chairs by the exit and we sat without words.

  It took a while to explain. I hadn’t known what to say, but instead of trying to prove my story I suddenly knew how to start. At the end.

  ‘When I left it was the year 2011 and I wrote you a letter to say goodbye. I put in it all the things I couldn’t ever say because of the way we are. Both of us a little broken. Some of it because of how my father left us, but mostly just because not everyone is good at this stuff. Me and you, we’re good at a lot of other things. But, if you’ll let me, I think I can tell you what was in the letter.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Only you can’t ever tell Nick that you know, or I’ll never be able to write it.’

  Another nod.

  ‘And it can’t change how you are together. Not too much, anyway. It’s complicated. I’ll get to that later.’

  And so I told her. I read the letter that I still had right there in my mind. And because it was already written and I was just reading, I found I could do it; my tongue let me.

  ‘You have questions,’ I said when at last I was done with the letter, with the explanation. I glanced up at the clock. ‘You can ask as we walk. We need to go back to the ward.’

  ‘We do?’ Mother stood up with me.

  ‘Nick sees us talking in the corridor. I remember it. We have to make that memory.’ I set off for the stairs and she followed.

  ‘First question,’ she said behind me. ‘What happened to your hair?’

  The truth was that I had shaved my head. I’d grown bored of waiting for whatever mysterious event was supposed to come along and suddenly rob me of my locks, so I took matters into my own hands. On New Year’s Day I’d shaved my head in the mirror of my bathroom. A final act of capitulation. I’d watched as the dark locks fell into the sink, and from behind them the Demus of my memory emerged looking vaguely surprised.

  I had a role to play, after all; and actors don’t just deliver lines, they shape themselves to the part. They put on the appropriate costumes. They accessorise. And when necessary they slap on a false moustache, gain twenty pounds, plaster a ‘broken’ arm, whatever is required. I’d learned this from Mia, who chameleoned her way from one role to the next with a magical ability to become new people as easily as change wigs. You’d think a talent like that would make me doubt who she really was, but somehow it never did. I think she gave me everything she was within the first seven days of us meeting beneath that street lamp, and I had loved her for it ever since.

  After the meeting at the hospital I turned up for my date as ‘vampire’ in Richmond Park, and then lurked around the back of Simon’s house towards the end of D&D the next day, waiting to be seen.

  I stood in the cold, staring up at the window of Simon’s bedroom. Occasionally I saw movement. Once I glimpsed Mia. The urge to go up there was a physical tug, pulling at my chest. Simon’s mother had moved after his little sister went to university. I hadn’t been in that house for decades, but it still felt like home. I knew what they were doing up there and how safe it had felt, even after the cancer arrived. How that sense of belonging had felt, of discovering that there were in the world people whose minds were like mine, open to something more than reality, ready to follow imagination wherever it went.

  I wanted that back. I wanted those days back. And even though I was standing in them, letting them flow by me hour after hour, I knew that could never happen. We get one shot. However you play it out. Fast forward it, rewind, it’s still the same: a single shot.

  I saw my own face at the window. The first real look I’d got at young Nick. A wave of déjà vu came over me, a memory of standing at that window and seeing me as I was now, looking up. Young Nick turned away to report the sighting and I hurried away, fighting to keep to a straight line as temporal distortions continued to mess with me.

  I had a week to kill before our next encounter, and while I may have spent it poorly, I did enjoy myself. I was on death row, waiting to die, only I was on the outside and my pockets were stuffed with money. I drank too much. I took up smoking and liked it e
nough not to stop. I ate the wrong food in expensive restaurants and cheap kebab shops. I took up residence in an arcade and dropped endless ten-pence pieces into Defender, Robotron, Joust, Galaxian, Gorf, you name it. I got asked to move on from the arcade before I grew tired of the games. I guess they assumed I was a paedophile, which was harsh but understandable.

  People often speculate as to what they might do with the last month, week, or day remaining to them, given that they are in good health and know what’s coming. The truth is that even though I’d had plenty of time to think about it, I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. In an awful way, I just wanted it to hurry up and happen. There’s a certain pain associated with doing even things you love and knowing that it is for the last time.

  Mostly I felt lonely, and wished that Mia was with me.

  A week passed and I turned up on schedule to punch Michael Devis in the mouth. Now that I really did enjoy. I arrived as he loomed over young Nick, who was doubled up over a pool of chemo vomit, and I just unloaded on him and watched him fall on his arse clutching his face.

  ‘You better run, because I enjoyed that and want to do it again.’ I kicked his outstretched foot. ‘Scram!’

  Devis got unsteadily to his feet, swore at me and ran off, saying he was going to call the police.

  I turned back and found myself facing . . . me. Impossibly young, a couple of inches shorter, a lot skinnier, mouth hanging wide open, hair at all angles.

  ‘Wow, that felt good!’ Though now the adrenaline was dying away my hand felt kinda broken. ‘I’ve been waiting twenty-five years to do that. Hurt like fuck, though!’

  I wasn’t remembering my script and speaking my lines; the words were the ones I wanted to speak – they came naturally. All I had to do was watch myself and make sure I didn’t stray from the preordained path.