The only explanation I could think of was that the girl, like Demus, was an interloper from the future, and because I had been the only one to see, and feel, the echoes of her presence it seemed that she must be connected with me somehow. The haunting, though . . . that was new and unexplained.
‘Nick! Breakfast!’ My mother wasn’t saying she’d made me any, just demanding that I make my own.
‘No time! I’ll eat at Simon’s!’
‘Crisps and Coke aren’t breakfast!’ She’d gotten more motherly since the leukaemia but she still wasn’t that good at it.
‘OK! OK! I’m doing it!’ I shook the cornflakes packet on my way through the kitchen and rattled the cutlery drawer. A moment later I was out the back door heading for the garage and my bike.
The garage smelled of spilled oil and spider-dust, all the shadows full of whispering. ‘OK! I get it. Haunted.’ I grabbed my bike, shoulders hunched against the possibility of a cold hand reaching from the darkness, and hurried out under the sliding door into the street.
‘You’re—’
‘Late. I know.’ I ushered Simon back along his hall and shut the door behind me.
‘Hi, Nick!’ Simon’s mum waved from the kitchen.
‘Hi, Mrs B.’ I waved back and started up the stairs, Simon in pursuit.
John and Mia were at the table in Simon’s room, character sheets, dice and snacks at the ready. I pulled a chair out and fell into it, still too hot from my ride. ‘Sorry.’
Mia eyed me over the dungeon master’s screen, a cardboard wall sporting all manner of game charts and designed to shield her secret notes from players’ prying eyes. ‘Rough night?’
‘Like you wouldn’t believe.’
Mia was our dungeon master since Elton’s departure. He never said he blamed me for the death of his father. He never gave me dark looks of recrimination. He just said that he had a mother and three brothers left and he wanted to keep it that way. I won’t claim it didn’t hurt, but I understood. I was a dangerous person to be around. All the stuff I knew about what was to come, and what my friends thought I might know about it, about things that might be waiting for them next week, next year . . . I guess it made me difficult company to keep.
Mia had been the natural choice to take over running the game. She had a devious imagination and a real talent when it came to acting out the roles of the people and monsters we met along the way.
‘Where were we?’ I asked.
‘Still at The University,’ Simon said.
The past two weeks’ sessions had seen our party of adventurers embroiled in a series of complicated tasks within a mysterious complex known as The University, a sprawling multidimensional edifice whose ivory towers poked into dozens of worlds and whose crumbling halls housed a multitude of eccentric academics, wizards, sages, and enough librarians to shush continents. It turns out that the rivalries between scholars can make orcish blood feuds seem like good-natured ribbing.
‘So, what next?’ John tapped the map. ‘Ideas?’ He pushed his warrior, Hacknslay, forward – a plate-armoured giant with a great-sword held in two hands.
Our party hadn’t changed. The same alter egos lined up to do battle with all the ills of an imagined world. Still John with his warrior, Hacknslay, an everyboy’s mix of hero, cowboy, soldier, policeman and football star. Still me with my mage, Nicodemus, my cleverness embodied, a spell for every occasion, my mind the key to every puzzle. Simon with his thief, Fineous. You didn’t have to know Simon for long to understand that choice. A thief comes and goes as he pleases. He slips unseen into the shadows, he scales a wall in a heartbeat and is gone. I’d never felt that I quite fitted into the world or indeed into my own skin, but Simon had all that turned up to eleven. His type of clever was not the sort that understood how other people work, or how to follow the rules of social interaction without seeming like an alien just trying it on for size. All his life he’d dreamed of being able to escape, of just having the shadows wrap about him and spirit him away. Fineous’s acrobatics and cat-like grace stood in stark contrast to Simon’s overweight lumbering. And that left Mia’s character, still a member of our adventuring party but now under her neutral control as the dungeon master, a non-player character or NPC. Her cleric, Sharia, was not an overly pious follower of The Man Jesus, but she was ready to brain an orc with her mace, heal the sick and work miraculous magics against our foes.
‘Saving throws first,’ I muttered.
My mage, Nicodemus, had tasted the contents of an unlabelled flask two weeks earlier, hoping to figure out what powers the enchanted liquid within might bestow upon the person consuming it. The brew had turned out to be a powerful love potion that had bound Nicodemus and Sharia together in mutual adoration, much to the amusement of our fellow adventurers. Each day of game time we both got to make a saving throw, a roll of the dice that would decide if the effects had worn off yet.
I took a twenty-sided die and threw it. The moment fractured in the way that had happened several times since yesterday’s running girl. I saw a dozen dice roll, two falling to the floor, most coming to rest against Mia’s screen.
‘Failed.’ Mia’s voice united all the paths into a single result. I’d rolled a one. She took the die and rolled it back, her character’s saving throw. ‘Sharia fails, too.’
She reached over to move the lead figures representing Nicodemus and Sharia close together.
‘Awwww . . .’ said John.
‘It’s not a joke,’ Simon said.
‘It is a bit.’ I wasn’t sure if Simon really knew what a joke was.
‘It’s serious,’ Simon insisted. ‘With our magic-user and cleric making cow eyes at each other instead of concentrating, our party is compromised, sub-optimal.’
John pursed his lips. ‘It’s true. Every time Nicodemus stubs his toe he’s getting healing spells while our actual fighter . . .’ He laid his finger on his warrior’s plumed helm, ‘ . . . would have to lose an arm to get a Band-Aid off Sharia these days.’
I grimaced. Although the love potion had been something left over from Elton, whose sketched-out plans of The University Mia had taken over and filled in, I couldn’t help but feel there was a message from Mia in it. She was asking me how I liked having my choice removed, how I liked romance of the bottled variety.
To be fair the real-world version that we were both stuck in wasn’t entirely of my making. After all, I imagine that it’s hard to feel responsible for things you did twenty-five years ago, and blaming this on me was asking me to feel responsible for things a much older me was going to do twenty-five years from now. And future me was only trying to save future Mia.
On the other hand, knowing that there are an infinity of future mes, and the same for everyone else, makes it harder to care about any particular one of them. This particular future me, Demus, had a special hold on me by virtue of having lived until forty. The doctors had, following my mother’s demand for brutal honesty, been brutally honest and at my lowest point were more or less measuring me for my coffin. If I did nothing to untangle my timeline from Demus’s then I would be him, and my next twenty-five years were a certainty rather than a long shot. Of course, untangling myself from Demus was difficult to do. In order to jump the tracks of his timeline I needed to actively do something I knew that he didn’t do, and I knew precious little about his life. I guess cutting my leg off would do the trick. Unless they could grow legs back in 2010 . . .
Mia’s motivations for keeping her association with the particular future that Demus represented were less strong. She would be tying herself to a future where she had a horrific accident in 2011 and the only reason for her not to try to avoid this fate was that Demus had sacrificed his own life to ensure she recovered. I could see that it was a heavy thing to lay on someone. I wouldn’t blame her for making her own future. But the only thing she knew about the future in question was that she and I were together in it. And so the only way she could avoid it was to avoid me. Which incidentally would take awa
y my guarantee of recovery, leaving me open to the leukaemia taking a second bite and dragging me down for good.
As I say, it was a heavy thing for Demus to lay on us.
‘Nick?’ Mia said my name as if she’d said it before and been ignored.
‘Sorry, yes?’
Mia frowned. She’d come wearing her Goth-girl war paint – white skin, thick eyeliner, black nail varnish. ‘You OK? John said you had some kind of fit yesterday.’
‘John should keep his mouth closed.’ I was tired of being thought of as sick. I was tired of her thinking that if she left me she took my health with her. Even if it was probably true.
John gave a snort. ‘Actually I said you met a girl. Then fainted.’
‘She wasn’t just any girl,’ I said, and Mia arched a brow. ‘I mean, weird stuff has been going on since I met her. I had crazy dreams.’
John shot me a look that said, Really? and added, You do realise you’re hanging yourself out to dry?
‘Not like that, you idiot. She was like Demus, only different. I saw time echoes of her and I’m getting these after-effects where every now and then time kinda fractures and I can see a whole bunch of possible futures.’ I folded my arms and leaned back. ‘Also I’m being haunted.’
‘Haunted?’ Simon edged his chair from mine. Despite his logical mind Simon had never coped well with the supernatural. We started watching Nightmare on Elm Street on video one time. Managed to get about fifteen minutes into it before Simon turned it off and refused to see any more. He had nightmares of his own for weeks after.
‘Not spooky haunting,’ I said. ‘Books moving. Mathematics on the windows.’
‘I call that pretty fucking spooky,’ Mia said.
‘I mean not skulls and fiery eyes and blood dripping down the walls spooky.’
‘Not helping.’ Simon moved his chair another foot away from me.
‘Anyway, there’s not much I can do about it unless she shows up again. So let’s play!’ I rolled my D20 out ahead of the figures representing our group, just to indicate we should get on with it. I got a one.
‘Do that again.’ Simon frowned. He had a scary mind of his own did Simon. He would, if you asked him, and sometimes even if you didn’t, run backwards through all of the dice rolls in a game. I was afraid to ask if he remembered them any further back than that. The idea that his mind might be clogged up with the results of all the dice rolls I’d ever made was one that I found rather disturbing. ‘Go on, roll it!’
So I did. I rolled another one, the third in a row. ‘As I said. Haunted.’
‘I’ll be rolling for Nick until he’s exorcised.’ John claimed my dice and rolled them all together, getting the usual scattered results.
The game got started and soon enough we were wholly focused on the world Mia unfolded for us. She lacked some of Elton’s sneakiness but made up for it with dramatic flair, proving herself quite the actress when it came to portraying the array of strange characters strewn between us and our goal.
In the vast university our group had fallen into, literally fallen into – but that’s another story – there were many seats of influence. The academics researching the fundamentals of magic wielded little destructive power themselves, but the mages and wizards who exploited their discoveries in new spells were very protective of these great thinkers. All of them had defences in place, from those who spent their lives amid grey oceans of dusty scrolls gluing together pieces of arcane law with their own genius to create something new, to the wild-eyed and scorch-marked alchemists tinkering with dangerous concoctions in fire-proof bunkers. In addition, between these great and often rather impractical minds and the outside world stood the hard-nosed business acumen of the guilds. There were five of these ancient organisations, each seeking to turn the discoveries of the scholars and potion-makers into commercial products that could, and did, suck into The University’s many coffers sufficient gold to make dragons look like paupers.
In addition to being a seat of learning The University was effectively a prison, one that we had repeatedly failed to find our way out of. The only safe way to leave seemed to be to graduate, and that took money. Lots of it.
The task that our thief, Fineous, had signed us up to was part of our effort to raise the money needed to buy our degrees and thus win us an exit. He described it as a spot of industrial espionage. We were to infiltrate the notoriously dangerous laboratories of one Mercuron Burnwit and recover samples of his most recent experimental potions along with whatever recipes we could steal. The guild employing us would feed any such information to their own alchemists. The guild financing Mercuron, on the other hand, would feed any such intruders to their sharks. For a large bonus we would return with Mercuron himself so he could find new employment with our paymasters.
It had grown dark by the time we stopped. I’d rolled seventeen ones on a whole range of different dice and we were currently being pursued around a vast library containing nothing but books that detailed a particular family of blue moulds. The librarian in charge of this repository of mouldy wisdom was a towering mechanical monstrosity with steel quills for claws and a seemingly endless supply of silence spells that left my magic-user unable to speak any of his spells, or indeed to curse his luck while sprinting away.
We tidied up quickly, dice into boxes, boxes and books into bags, Coke cans in the bin. Mia was the first to leave.
‘See you.’ She paused at the door for long enough for me to open my mouth but not long enough for me to speak. Did she mean see you next weekend . . . or see you in the week? I wanted to see her before our next game session. Hell, I wanted to see her every night. I’d never had a girlfriend before and Mia was ridiculously beautiful, which would have been more than enough motivation in itself if I’m honest, but I really really liked her too. She had a wicked sense of humour and endless imagination. So yes, no question, I wanted to see her. But every time I gravitated to the heavy black phone in the hallway of our house I felt Demus’s hand on my shoulder. I imagined myself talking into the receiver, not knowing what Mia was doing at the other end of the line, with me making those awkward dry-mouthed opening lines, acutely aware that my mother was probably listening from the living room. I imagined myself talking and knowing that every step Mia and I took towards each other was binding us to an already determined future, one to which we both had obligations. I didn’t know much about love but I didn’t think that was the way it grew.
John followed Mia out. They were both gone by the time I’d bagged my stuff and reached the front door. Simon came out as I unchained my bike from their railings. And Simon never left the house without good reason. Not even if he wasn’t going past his front gate.
‘You’re calling it a haunting?’ he asked.
‘Well, what would you call it?’ I stowed my bike chain in the saddlebag.
‘Science,’ Simon said.
‘OK,’ I agreed. ‘But the bit where books are moving around at night . . . that’s pretty haunty, whatever the reason is.’
Simon nodded. ‘The stuff with the dice though. That’s more like a statistical outlier.’
‘Um . . .’
‘I mean, it’s very, very unlikely rather than defying the laws of physics as we know them.’
‘I guess.’ He had a point. The books and the writing on the window were impossible for me to explain. The dice rolls on the other hand . . . on one level they didn’t need to be explained. They were a possible but incredibly unlikely event. ‘Does it matter?’
‘Maybe not. But if something has messed up the laws of probability for you . . . if you are now a statistical outlier, a one in a trillion . . . then what else might be waiting for you out there?’
‘Like?’ I had some unpleasant ideas of my own. I thought I’d rather hear Simon’s.
‘Statistically unlikely events. Like being struck by lightning, or murdered, or hit by a meteorite, or run over by a car full of clowns, or—’
‘Alright! Alright!’ I wheeled my bike through t
he gate and mounted it. ‘So, what do you suggest I do?’
‘Put your lights on for one thing.’ Simon reached forward to turn on my front bike lamp, which I’d forgotten about. ‘And be careful out there.’
‘I . . .’ This was the closest to friendly concern I’d seen from Simon in the whole time I’d known him.
‘I’m not having you die and leave us stuck in that damn library.’
CHAPTER 4
June 1986, Cambridge
I left Helen’s hall of residence by the main entrance and as I set my shoeless foot to the concrete path it happened again. That fracturing of time which, like the haunting, had occurred sporadically over the intervening four months suddenly flared into action. I saw the next few seconds play out in more than a dozen ways, but in all of them a heavy flowerpot hammered into the spot that my next step would take me to. In almost all of them the flowerpot smashed into my head, shattering my skull.
Simon had been right. Ever since the girl and the ghosts a series of very unlikely things had been happening to me. I’d become a statistical anomaly. And, just as Simon had guessed, they weren’t the good kind of unlikely. I won no lotteries, caught no falling babies. Instead I faced one bizarre accident after another. The only thing that had saved me was that on each occasion time had fractured, showing me a possible exit, and fortunately I’d always managed to take it. In the case of the exploding chip shop I had been set on fire and cut by flying glass, but only a little bit.
I dropped and rolled to the left. It required swift but not inhuman reflexes, and would have been totally impossible without forewarning. The plant pot hit the ground and sent out a hail of ceramic fragments. Several shards hit the back of my Moss Bros dinner jacket, followed by a shower of wet compost. I clambered painfully to my feet to see a blonde girl, possibly the one who had watched me in the hall, leaning from her window three storeys up with a sheepish expression. ‘Sorry!’
I limped away. Life as a statistical anomaly had already taught me not to waste time on recriminations. Of more immediate interest to me was the fact that both immediately before and hard on the heels of meeting Helen, the phenomenon that had started with the running girl and that was absent on most days had shown itself again. No matter what Helen had to say on the subject there was a connection here. I could stay away from her and hope that the effect faded back to ‘normal’ levels again, or I could pursue the connection and risk more unlikely deaths in the hope of finding an answer.
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