Anachronist

by Andrew Hastie

  ‘What was this for?’ Josh asked as he tapped on the glass.

  ‘That would be the cutlass of Edward Teach. Interesting chap.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Edward Teach, more commonly known as the pirate Blackbeard.’ The colonel opened the cabinet and carefully took out the sword. He examined the edge with his finger and then began to swing it around his body in a series of deadly scything arcs.

  ‘Nice weapon for close combat,’ he observed, stopping it millimetres from Josh’s chest. ‘Well balanced.’

  Josh stared at the sword. ‘So you’re telling me you’ve met Blackbeard?’ He couldn’t quite hide the disbelief in his voice.

  ‘Yes, I’d been second mate on his flagship, Adventure, for nearly a year when Lieutenant Maynard finally caught up with him. Nearly didn’t happen. I had quite a job making sure she ran aground when she did — he almost made good on his escape.’

  ‘So why exactly did you have to stop him?’

  ‘See for yourself.’

  The colonel offered him the sword, and as soon as Josh grasped the hilt he felt that tingling sensation. The same feeling he got from breaking into cars, but a hundred times more powerful. As the lines of history began to unravel from it, he caught fleeting glimpses of ships, and smelt the gunpowder of a battle. As he concentrated harder, the past expanded around him — suddenly he was looking at a young man standing on the deck of a ship in the middle of a wide blue ocean. He could smell the salt air and feel the wind rushing through his hair. It was a strange, dislocated feeling, like standing between two worlds — one foot in each.

  ‘Our predictions indicated that Blackbeard’s fleet would have intercepted this particular gentleman before he reached his destination.’

  Josh didn’t recognise the tubby, bespectacled passenger dressed in knee breeches, waistcoat and white frilly shirt, but he didn’t look to be much older than himself.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Have you heard of Benjamin Franklin?’

  The name was familiar. He had a vague memory of his mother shouting it out in answer to a question on the TV. ‘Wasn’t he one of the American presidents?’

  The colonel took the sword back and placed it carefully onto the silk. Josh felt slightly dizzy, as if he’d just been on a waltzer. It took a while for the room to come back into focus.

  ‘Not exactly. More like the founding father of the United States. He liked to dabble in meteorology and electricity, and was one mean chess player. When he was about your age, he ran away to London. In one version of events the ship he was travelling on was boarded and sunk by Blackbeard’s fleet. Franklin would have died without ever realising his potential, and the USA would have been a very different place entirely.’

  ‘So you took out Blackbeard?’ Josh said, trying not to sound too astonished.

  The colonel shook his head. ‘No. We just selected one ending from a number of many possible outcomes. It is all planned very carefully to ensure we create the smallest number of side-effects. The sand bar at Ocracoke Island was calculated to be the least impactful event, even though it turned out to be one hell of a battle. I think it may be a little too hairy for your first planned excursion.’

  Josh walked around the room. The cabinets were filled with the most random collection of historical objects: scissors, eyeglasses, a letter, some old brass keys, a ship’s compass, four coins fused together by fire, a shoe, an old flintlock pistol. Each item had a date and a location, although some of the ink on the labels had begun to fade.

  ‘So do you get to keep these after each mission?’ Josh asked, thinking about how valuable some of them might be.

  The colonel chuckled. ‘It’s actually the other way round. We need the artefact to find the path.’

  ‘The path?’

  ‘To travel safely back through time you need a path, a map, if you like. We use the timelines of man-made objects like these.’ He waved his hand across the room. ‘They each have an inherent history, one that you can use to navigate back to certain events, like a kind of bookmark or waypoint. If the object was particularly personal, you could even use it to reach certain people.’

  Josh’s eye was drawn to an old sepia-toned photograph of a beautiful young Victorian woman posing in a tight-waisted corset.

  ‘So what was her story?’ he asked, pointing at the picture.

  The colonel walked over and produced a large ring of keys, which he fumbled through until he found the matching number and proceeded to unlock the cabinet door. He signalled to Josh to take the photo out, which Josh did tentatively, trying not to dislodge the other things that had been carefully arranged around it.

  When Josh turned the photograph over, he saw the colonel’s now familiar copperplate handwriting.

  ‘Mary Somerville, 11.833,’ he read slowly, trying not to reveal his dyslexia.

  ‘Now Mary was a most interesting lady. She introduced Ada Lovelace to Charles Babbage.’

  Josh stared at him blankly.

  ‘The father of the computer? She also inspired John Couch Adams to discover the planet Neptune. Something I have to take a little credit for.’ He performed a mock bow.

  Josh turned the picture back over to study her image close up.

  ‘Now I think that she would make the perfect test,’ the colonel continued. ‘Would you like to meet her?’ He plucked the photograph out of Josh’s hand and began to talk to it as if she were at the other end of a Skype call.

  ‘What kind of test?’ asked Josh, who was more than happy to meet such a good-looking woman; he just didn’t like the sound of having to do any kind of exam.

  The colonel stopped muttering and turned back to face Josh.

  ‘A test of your range, of course! Each of us has an inherent limit. We need to know how far you can go back. A hundred years makes you a Centurion, a thousand and you’re a Millennian. So far, we know you can travel back as far as 1944, which that means you’re at least a first-level Centurial, but I want to see if you can make it back to 11.833!’

  The ribbons of light were arcing about the photo now. Josh could see symbols dancing around it as the colonel moved his fingers over them.

  ‘Can’t do this kind of thing with digital photography, electrons too bloody erratic. Ah, there we are — nice safe point to drop into.’ He reached out and brought Josh’s hand towards the photo. ‘Can you feel it, boy? The pulse of history running through your fingers?’

  Josh put his fingers tentatively into the web of light and felt the tingling sensation like a cool burning over his skin. There were knots in the lines of light where the symbols were clustering. He moved one of his fingers and felt the knot slide underneath it. There was a feeling like remembering as he heard a voice, smelt the fragrance of a woman’s perfume, then it was gone again.

  ‘Did you feel it?’ the colonel asked again.

  Josh nodded. ‘I think I heard her speak.’

  The room twisted away, and the world dimmed for a second.

  20

  Fenians

  [London, England. Date: 11.833-02-21]

  As Josh’s eyes adjusted to his new surroundings, he realised that he was staring at the vaulted brick ceiling of a basement. The cold marble slab that pressed into his back made him shiver, and the sickly smell of chemicals did nothing to help the wave of nausea that swept over him. It was weaker than the last time and he managed not to throw up. He propped himself up on one elbow and saw that the colonel was busy rummaging through a wardrobe that was built into one wall.

  It was then that Josh noticed the pale, lifeless bodies that were laid out on the three remaining marble-topped tables. From the look of the surgical instruments and glass jars that were arranged along the other walls, he guessed that they had landed in some kind of Victorian morgue.

  ‘Glad to see you’re feeling better,’ the colonel said as he came back with a set of clothes.

  The jump had reduced both of them to their underwear; the ones the old man had insisted on wearing, describin
g it as a ‘Union suit’: basically a white cotton onesie, which would be good all the way back to the fourteenth century.

  The colonel laid out the clothes on the slab. ‘Sorry about that. Perfectly natural reaction. I still find the sight of corpses hard to stomach. I probably should have mentioned this was a house of the dead.’ He had picked out a white shirt and a green three-piece suit for Josh.

  ‘This is one of our temporal safehouses — an outpost. They usually operate as a business to explain the comings and goings of strangers, one that doesn’t raise too much interest from the general public. Funeral director is particularly popular — no one tends to pry into the preparation of the deceased. You can always rely on these places for sanctuary, food and an abundance of clothing relevant to the era.’

  The suit smelled of cologne and cigars, the shirt of carbolic. It obviously belonged to a dead man, but Josh was too cold to care and, besides, he figured the other guy didn’t need it any more.

  As he got dressed, he could feel the quality of his clothing in the beautiful silk lining, the tailoring that was so fine that he couldn’t see the stitching. Regardless of the jacket being slightly too big for him, he felt like a gentleman.

  ‘Now we’re both respectable, let’s see what’s left up in the pantry, shall we?’ the colonel said, rubbing his hands together.

  Josh could see from the weak light of the gas lamps that the colonel had selected a brown houndstooth suit with a red waistcoat. His hair was slicked back, and his beard combed. He reminded Josh of a portrait of Charles Darwin that he’d seen once on a school trip to the Natural History Museum. He remembered it well, especially the feel of Monica Fellowes breasts as they were snogging during the film about dinosaurs.

  ‘Why do I keep losing my clothes?’ Josh asked as he followed the colonel out of the morgue and up the dark cast-iron staircase.

  ‘It depends on their chronological inception. Man-made fibres especially don’t make it back past 1937.’

  ‘Why 1937?’

  ‘That was the year Carothers invented nylon. Whilst he was working at the Dupont Experimental Station.’

  It had never occurred to Josh that stuff like nylon had been invented by a bloke in a laboratory. It was something that he had read on every label he had ever washed of his mum’s things. To him it was nothing more than just another setting on a dial at the launderette.

  ‘The Order prefers older materials, like cotton and wool, materials that have been sourced from the seventh millennium — around 3000 BC. It’s called ‘jura’ and they use it in our standard-issue travelling robes. Can’t abide them myself — they just make you look like a damned monk.’

  As they climbed to the ground floor, Josh began to realise how different the house was to the one they’d just left. The hall was decorated in heavy velvet wallpapers and thickly woven tapestries. There was no electric light, and the whole effect was made more gloomy by the weak glow of the flickering gas lamps. The colonel walked along the hall and adjusted the valves of each one with an audible hiss. Josh smelt the peppery scent of unburnt gas.

  There was a bell near the front door and the colonel rang it once and then listened for some kind of response.

  ‘Seems we have the place to ourselves.’ The colonel shrugged. ‘Let’s find something to eat.’

  The dining room was panelled in a heavy dark oak with ornately carved sideboards and cupboards stretching the length of the room. It had a vast, highly polished dining table with places laid out for at least twenty guests. The cutlery looked as if it were made of solid silver. Josh had to restrain himself from slipping a few of the smaller spoons into his jacket.

  In the middle of the table and along the top of both sideboards was the strangest collection of stuffed animals in glass bell jars: Kittens playing with moths — frozen in a moment of intense play, bats in mid-flight, and many glass-eyed birds.

  ‘Taxidermy was also rather popular in this period,’ the colonel explained as Josh studied them closely. ‘You’ll find that the Victorians are more than a little obsessed with death,’ he added as he disappeared through a door.

  There were two oil paintings hanging at opposite ends of the long room: portraits of aristocratic figures. Josh thought he recognised one of them and went closer to read the bronze plaque that had been screwed into the gilded frame.

  In a fine italic script it read: Vc. Dalton Eckhart. 11.821.

  Josh stepped back to study the image. The subject was a good likeness of Caitlin’s arrogant friend. Dalton was portrayed in a hunting scene with all the accessories: deerstalker hat, shooting stick, cartridge belt and shotgun, there was even a dog by his side proudly guarding a dead pheasant. They both stared out from the image straight at Josh. It was unnerving and not a little spooky.

  A few minutes later, the colonel came crashing through the kitchen doors like a drunken butler, balancing a silver tray in one hand and his almanac in the other.

  ‘Change of plan,’ he blustered. ‘I have to get to 11.866!’

  The tray was piled high with cold meats: chicken, ham and some thick sausages. There were two large glasses of a dark beer strategically balanced at each end.

  ‘Causality crisis,’ he said, opening his notebook and pointing at a page of symbols and formulas that were constantly changing around a branching set of lines. He went to one of the drawers in the long sideboard, and took out a velvet-lined box full of watches.

  ‘Need to return you to the present. Give me your arm.’ He muttered as he began strapping it to Josh’s wrist. ‘This is a Tachyon Mark IV, a timekeeper. One of its more basic uses is functioning as a homing device. I have set it to return you to the most chronologically recent point in your timeline — the moment you left the present.’

  Josh examined the watch. It had a dial comprising clockwork gears and brass symbols, all encased in a series of concentric brass circles, each marked with fine lines and numbers. There was something underneath the dials that was emitting a faint blue glow, but he couldn’t make out what it was.

  ‘Why can’t I come with you?’ Josh asked, grabbing a sausage and following the colonel into the next room, which turned out to be another ‘Curiosity’ collection. The colonel was running his greasy fingers along a shelf of leather-bound books and counting off the years under his breath until he reached 11.866. He took the volume down from the shelf.

  ‘Encyclopaedia Britannica goes back to 11.768. Can’t beat it for chronology. Every safe house has one specially printed on twelfth century vellum.’

  ‘I said, why can’t I come with you?’

  The colonel shook his head. ‘Oh no. Far too dangerous. This causation involves Irishmen and explosives, never a good mix in my experience. I suppose you could wait here for Mary if you would prefer?’

  Explosives sounded far more interesting than meeting some Victorian woman, no matter how hot she was. ‘But I’m never going to learn anything if I don’t see it for myself. I’ve been to the heart of a Nazi bunker and survived — how bad can this be?’

  The colonel paused for a moment as if considering the consequences of taking Josh.

  ‘Nice try, young man. But I don’t think you’re ready for this.’

  ‘But if things get too hot I just use this,’ Josh said, pointing to the tachyon on his wrist and smiling, ‘and — boom — I’m back home safe and sound!’

  The colonel scratched his beard. Josh noticed he did that a lot when he was pondering over a problem.

  ‘You have a point. I’m probably going to end up regretting this, but I don’t have the time to argue.’ He placed the large leather book on the table. ‘Remember you die just as easily in the past as the present. The first sign of trouble and you push this. Understood?’ He pointed at the larger button on the side of the watch.

  While Josh was studying the watch, the colonel went over to a tall cupboard and unlocked it. The cabinet was a lot larger on the inside. It contained a room full of weapons, each one carefully displayed as if at a museum. There were swor
ds, daggers, blunderbusses and all manner of pistols and rifles from the last century. The colonel took a moment before selecting one particular pistol.

  ‘Colt single-action army revolver. Model P — also known as the Peacemaker. It has a revolving cylinder, takes six bullets,’ he said, snapping the chamber open and showing Josh the bullets inside. He handed one to Josh. ‘Do you know how to use one of these?’

  Josh had only held a gun once before: the one that Lenin had thrown into his lap. These were heavier than he expected. As held it, he began to feel its history — the men that it had killed — as though it were warning him of what it was capable of. Josh had never liked guns. He had known too many people end up dead because of them. He shook his head and gave it back.

  The colonel placed both of them into holsters inside his coat. ‘Ah. Yes, with training you can learn how to control that. There are some simple exercises that can help you.’

  Josh had never been that good at anything other than driving cars, something he had taught himself. This was different, like a superpower or an evil curse. He was beginning to wonder if this was something he could walk away from.

  ‘Do I have a choice?’ he asked. ‘Do I have to join your Order?’

  ‘I suppose you do have a choice, but I don’t believe anyone has ever turned us down. Most accept it as their destiny — they’re usually much younger than you. They tend to enjoy the thrill of their new abilities.’

  ‘So there more like me? Us?’ Josh looked back to the picture of Dalton at the other end of the room.

  ‘Yes, many more. Not all in this milieu of course, but spread out through time. We’re stationed at various points throughout the last twelve thousand years. I have particular fascination for the petroleum age; the twentieth and twenty-first-century obsession with fossil fuel has created some amazing technological advances, especially in space travel. So I was more than happy to be posted to the twenty-first, although there weren’t many other takers, to be fair.’