by Tim Heath
His childhood experiences were what had shaped him. Born in a tough inner-city council estate, an only child, he was named Mark Smith after his father, who worked two jobs trying to provide enough for his family. Mark grew up fast, out and about on the streets, and was forced into a gang at the age of ten, the only way of avoiding being beaten up when walking around the area. At school, he was bullied quite a bit as well, and this made him retreat more and more.
After a gang battle just after his fifteenth birthday in which he saw two young men bleed to death, he turned his back on all of it and with his family moving from the area anyway, he tried to put it all behind him. He had been doing well at school, despite all the problems, and was fast-tracked in History and Science, taking these A-Levels a year early and getting top grades.
His educational successes still got him into trouble with bullies, and he regularly got into fights that he couldn’t have a chance of winning. His father wasn’t around to help him out as he was working all hours trying to pay the mortgage. His mother was sick and spent all her time in bed now, with some unresearched illness that doctors didn’t know how to treat, the drugs she was being given only seemingly making her worse with no apparent signs of any improvement to her health.
Having been accepted into Oxford University to study Physics, Mark Smith left home with high hopes, though a slightly heavy heart. But he soon put the past behind him and expected things to be different at Oxford, which they were in many ways but still, there was isolation, this non-connection with people and before long he felt as emotionally bullied as he had been physically before.
Until then he had got through his studies mainly on the fact that he had a near photographic memory, which gave the impression of intelligence but without the lateral thinking. He was soon found out by some of his new university peers and this only added to his isolation. They all said they’d got there with hard work, but he had done so with a sly technique.
Physics at Oxford proved a lot more difficult for him than he had expected. Without that depth of knowledge that comes from a genuine understanding of one’s subject, he was often caught out, and this was not missed by his fellow students, nor by the lecturers. Mark knew he needed some help and he, therefore, worked his way into an intellectual but socially inept group of young men. They too, on their own, had been subject to bullies but had grown close. Allowing Mark into their realm, they had the chance to learn how to attract girls; a skill Mark had offered to teach them.
Mark retained his natural interest in History and opted for a course in the History of Science in his third year. It was in one of these lectures that he first came across the Wentworth brothers, and he went away and read all he could on them. With their strong link to Physics, Mark Smith studied the two brothers in depth and was fascinated by them.
He would entertain his new group of pals after Physics lectures with all the exciting facts he’d learnt about the brothers and between them they dreamed of knowing as much as the brothers did one day.
But it wasn’t until Mark stumbled across something once written about the brothers that his pulse really started racing. He went away and did more research, scanning the internet, looking for further clues as to what the article was proposing. He never did understand the science of it; he could only recite the facts to sound as if he did understand it. When one evening he shared everything with his group of scientist friends, they went through the night talking, hypothesising, dreaming about finishing the brothers’ work. Written in an unfinished set of notes before his tragic death, Christopher Wentworth, the oldest brother and double Nobel prize winner, had started to describe a doorway between two points, but not in the conventional sense, but between two points in time. Written down were his own detailed workings of the first point, like an anchor being dropped down to which you returned one day once you had worked out how. The work from Christopher remained unfinished, and it wasn’t clear whether he knew if it would be possible, but it was clear that he’d finished the first doorway and he detailed its position, time and location exactly.
Mark was lost for words but felt excited. His friends just thought he understood and between them, they talked of nothing else. They wanted to be the ones to work out how to build the second doorway, constructing it, only to then walk back out through that first one at some point. It seemed a distant and magical dream to Mark, but his friends, working along the same lines that Christopher Wentworth had started, got to work writing new equations never seen before. Mark Smith didn’t understand much of what they said. His mind, though, began to think about what he would do if it could be achieved and he started to gather information together to give himself the best life possible. His friends focused only on the project and the world fame that would come with such a breakthrough. They left Mark to himself most of the time, not concerned with what he might or might not have been doing.
It took three years and several failures to finally crack the science and start to build the technology needed to construct the second doorway. By now they were coming to the end of their studies, and although their results wouldn’t be as good as they could have been, this breakthrough would put all those failings behind them once and for all. They had told no one about what they’d been working on all this time, and because they never got invited to any parties, no one really cared what they were doing. By the end of things, Mark Smith still knew no more about how it worked or why but the first test that they had done seemed to work, though it would need someone to go through the door, and then come back, to know if it really did work. Mark, being the one who first mentioned things, as well as the most vocal now, volunteered to go with John, another one of the group. The machine was fired up, a straightforward process but still Mark watched every step to be sure of how to do it. There was some debate as to what they should use to test things out properly. They decided to just take with them some food items that would deteriorate over time but hopefully not smell or attract rats.
Walking through the Door that first time, Mark Smith only felt the excitement as he took the steps through it and then all too quickly arrived back out through the original doorway. At first, they thought it hadn’t worked, but they suddenly realised they were standing in a motor workshop, which seemed to no longer be in business. The windows were boarded, and the place was empty. With a little force, they managed to open the side door. It was then that they recognised it as the same building that had stood empty in their time for so many years, always having been described as the old garage but not once did they imagine they’d ever actually see it as it had been. To their knowledge, the building had been empty for many years, maybe as many as five decades, but they could work that one out later. The main thing was that the doorways had worked, but they planned to test it further. They found a safe place to hide the food under some floorboards in the office up some steps on the back wall. Then they returned through the door. They’d arranged to be just ten minutes, and when they walked back through, they had indeed been gone ten minutes.
The room was alive with excited and amazed chatter. Mark collected his thoughts and stayed to one side while the guys quickly started to work out how it had worked, coming to the conclusion that a fixed width was now established and that the two points in time in which each doorway now stood would always remain the same distance apart. To finally finish the experiment, they all got in a car and drove the short distance to what was now the very derelict garage, where the original door had brought them out. They worked their way through the broken fencing designed to keep people out, eager to see what remained of the food that they had only left there some sixty minutes before, though if it were true, it should look as if it had been there for years.
As they pulled up the floorboards in that upstairs office, there was silence as they gazed at what that morning had been freshly purchased from the supermarket. The packaging, because of the darkness under the floorboards, was still quite fresh and the best before date showed up the same, going out of date in twelve mon
ths’ time. What remained of the food, though, was way past its best. They dropped it into a bag to take with them, not wanting to leave it there to be found someday, raising some questions, and they all went back to the room they now rented together and which housed the world’s latest piece of breakthrough science technology.
Mark Smith suggested they have one final party together and purchased loads of drinks before the big announcements tomorrow and the world coverage that would come with such a breakthrough. They drank hard and before long were laughing uncontrollably. Mark had by now drugged their drinks so that they would all be unconscious in a few minutes. He’d gone out to reverse a hire truck against the side door, and by the time he was back in the room, it was completely quiet, all of them lying unconscious on the floor. Mark struggled to get the side door open and then to move the Wentworth Door into the back of the truck. Having done so, he locked up the truck and drove it out of sight just around the corner. He walked back into the room which was still quiet, shutting the doors behind him. Picking up three of the left-over bottles of whisky and other drinks, he poured the contents all over the room, including the guys, until the bottles were empty. He then went into the kitchen and turned on the gas. On his way out, he stopped briefly in the room with the drunken men in, saying nothing but having one final look, before striking a match, which jumped into life. He dropped it onto the alcohol soaked rug, flames lapping up and spreading quickly.
Mark Smith turned and was gone, his face expressionless. Unemotional about the fact that he had just killed the four closest people to him in the entire world. Unmoved by the fact that now he’d always be on the run. Unnerved by the thought of what he’d done. He got to the truck and started to pull away and heard the explosion as the gas had obviously reached the burning room.
Mark drove on regardless, his face fixed with the same blank stare. He’d finally got what he wanted. It was his. It worked. After a few minutes he started to smile, the thoughts of all the things he could now do and who he could now become. The planning of the last three years and all the research he’d done would now all be worth it––the adventure was about to begin.
16
Jessica had gone through a complete range of emotions over the last few days and now just couldn’t stop thinking about seeing Tommy again. She was starting to feel nervous about how she would react. The event was meant to be a charity dinner after all, and she didn’t want to make a scene, but on the other hand, she wanted to impress Tommy, to see him, to have everything back as it was before.
To that end, she knew that she’d have to speak to him and maybe see him before the event. After all, arriving at such an event together would be far better than just leaving together. Jessica had paced around her room for a long time, then went out for a run and got home and showered before actually calling Tommy. But as soon as she’d heard his voice, all the fear was gone, melted away by the warmth that she felt, the calming sound of her Tommy on the other end of the line. They chatted for a long time, keeping to the edges of conversation by avoiding any of the meaty stuff that one day they knew they’d have to tackle but that day wasn’t now. They’d arranged to meet for dinner before they finished up and Jessica put the phone down far more relaxed than when she’d picked it up. It had been several years since she’d spoken to him and for most of those years, there had just been anger and hatred there, so much so that she’d needed counselling for four months which had helped her to pull through.
And so she sat down in her cotton pyjamas, drinking her tea slowly, the happiest she’d been in years. And yet again, she had Brendan Charles to thank for that. Once more he’d thrown her a bone, a lifeline. Once more he’d come through for her and given her exactly what she needed, even if she had not known it herself. Brendan had become a father to her, and though he had his own children, who were all a little younger than she was, she was sure that he too felt the same by the way he looked out for her, always being there when she most needed it when life was at its hardest.
She went to bed early that night, taking a book to read while she finished her tea, happy that things were finally working out for her again and desperate this time to not let things go wrong.
Robert Sandle had worked for the Agency since he was twenty-one. Having grown up in a children’s home after his parents’ deaths when he was just an infant, he worked hard at his education and was one of only a few success stories to come out of such a terrible start to life.
Known only as Craig, he’d always battled with loneliness and the need for answers. At heart, he was also an adventurer. It was while at university that Craig first met Sir Simon Allen, an old and noted lecturer who’d recently established an elite government department which became known just as the Agency. After graduation, Simon offered Craig a role within the new organisation and with no family connections to worry about he jumped at the chance and moved away, cutting off all links that had been his troubled childhood.
It was in his first few months at the Agency that the deaths of four male Oxford students, burned alive while they lay in a drunken huddle in their room, came to light. Due to the nature of the fire, it was impossible to identify three of the bodies. The fourth victim was possible, and when it was established who he was, it was soon reasoned that the group who were always together had indeed died together, though the whereabouts of the fifth member, as yet unknown, meant some questions needed answering.
In the age of internet research and chat-rooms, two of the men, twin brothers, had openly discussed their research and after eleven months of digging, Craig and his team had started to piece together the sinister nature of the events that had unfolded.
Of course, without knowing it, things had started to change around them, but because they knew nothing else, these changes went unnoticed.
The Agency realised the importance and implications of such a discovery and everything linked to it became highly classified. Considerable research was done into the Wentworth Brothers and especially into the younger brother, Nathan. And in time they too found similar details of his own doorway that he had gone on to make. The timing detailed was twenty-three years later than that of the original one made by Christopher, and a skilled team was put together to go through the near-complete notes detailed on the students’ own computers, their records and hard drives having been taken for analysis following the discovery of the bodies.
With such detailed notes, it was only three months before their own doorway was complete and Craig was only too eager to test it out, going through the door and reporting back that indeed it had worked as they had hoped it would.
Due to the highly secretive nature of what the Agency was now doing, the whole operation was kept entirely confidential, and only three men knew about its success. Craig was to be the only man to use the device, taking on the name Robert Sandle to keep his presence secret. There was also continuous research being done on the internet by the remaining two, looking back at everything that came out from that period in case his name cropped up in any unwanted places. Had that happened, little did they know, but it would already have been too late.
The Agency would do all the research they could at their end, feeding Robert with as much helpful information as possible. It was only after a few longer trips of about a week each time that Robert started to notice a pattern and things started to go wrong. Having gone through the doorway, the changes made by Nigel Gamble meant that on his return things had been different––not widely so, but different. Some companies didn’t exist, and other groups were called something else, things were changing. And because only he now had memory of how things had been, having been back in time, his colleagues were unaware of the changes and therefore were unable to be of any further help to him. He realised that he was now on his own, as his information was coming from a source that was always shifting, and therefore the info changed with it and so was compromised. There was nothing to determine how things were and consequently, he had no way of knowing how things were different.
The Agency was unaware of this, and Robert kept it from them as he didn’t know how they would react to him if he told them what he knew. But the longer he spent through the other side of the door, back in time as it was, the more things had changed and ultimately the more on his own he became. Rarely did Robert, therefore, report back to his team. Instead, he used internet cafés where he was able to quickly find a lot of information before returning through the door in the constant hunt for the man who had started it all, Mark Smith––the man who now, and currently unknown to Robert Sandle, called himself Nigel Gamble. Robert had known the dangers that could follow such a new scientific breakthrough, and now he was experiencing first hand the damage that could be done following the murder of Simon Allen. That was the same Simon Allen who had previously mentored him after establishing the Agency––an agency that now it seemed never even got set up, never got started. And if this was the case, Robert thought, it was therefore probable that the very existence of Nigel Gamble, or Mark Smith as he had been, was now unknown by anyone other than himself.
If his time up to now had been hard, Robert realised that from now on things could only get much worse. Having felt alone since his earliest memory, he had previously at least found a new family in the Agency, and this had given him a hope and a future. Now even this was gone, and he was left feeling more alone than ever. On top of that, he was now a wanted criminal, with all the false publicity that had been put around about him, and not only now in this new place but even back at what once had been his home, his own time. He had nowhere to go, it seemed, no one who knew him, no one who cared. This thought sat heavy on him that evening, reaching deep into the depths of his soul, pulling at every emotion he had in his body and making him very depressed. After an hour of tossing around the bed, in which he was somewhat unsuccessfully trying to sleep, he gave in and pulled out a bottle of Scottish whisky that stood in the sideboard and having drunk three large glasses of the stuff, and he finally dropped off to sleep not long after two.