The Mammoth Book of Time Travel Romance (60 page)

“It’s beautiful, but it’s dangerous.”

“It’s worth it. Come with me!”

When he didn’t respond, I gave in to the temptation and ran my fingers through his glorious, thick blond hair. “Come with me. We’ll take the left-hand path together. Don’t worry . . . your grandfather will never know.”

The left-hand path was wonderful in a completely different way, one that Mellon seemed to find less threatening than the dangerous speakeasy with the all-too-knowing barkeep. We found a walled garden after only two branchings of the path, and we emerged to rolling fields high on a bluff overlooking what would someday become Passaic, NJ. I recognized the view – it was the same as the one in my tiny bathroom window.

A single Indian woman with a baby on her breast sat cross-legged, and she nodded as we walked by. It was autumn, full daylight, and the leaves sprinkling down into Mellon’s hair were orange, white and blood red with purple streaks. I carefully filled in my map before we returned to the walled garden under the Columbia University chapel.

Over the next few weeks, my hand-drawn map got more complicated looking than the NYC subway map. I redrew it on to a much larger piece of paper, started naming the pathways so I could keep them straight in my mind, but even so, the twining paths and interlocked gardens crowded each other over the smudged page.

What adventures we had underneath the streets of New York City, Mellon and I. I could write a whole book about it, and someday maybe I will. From the days of Peter Stuyvesant to the Revolutionary War, to the Second World War to hazy futures beyond our own lives, Jonathan and I explored a city unfolding in time as well as space. We always came back, sometimes with difficulty but more often with a familiar, homecoming ease. But I always left something of myself behind.

In all these times and places I found a single constant, a central point more changeless than our own walled garden: Jonathan Mellon himself. Steadfast, mysterious, bearer of secret fears he was strong enough to carry alone. And no matter where and when we went, we agreed our favourite place and time was our own.

The day Mellon brought back his first A+ paper, we didn’t travel anywhere or anywhen, but stayed the night in my room. I double locked the door and put my desk chair up under the doorknob in the extremely unlikely event that Colleen would stop by – even she had given up on me, and now none of my old friends remained in my life. We ate turkey sandwiches by starlight with the window open, and the oboe player regaled us with something slow, sad and sweet, like Debussy blissed out of his mind on opium.

When I let down the window shade and took the clips out of my hair, the music seeped into my veins. The room was full of shadows; Mellon’s face shone like the moon. Mellon unlocked my body and my heart like a garden gate, and his loving caresses were the key.

Afterwards, we lay together on the bed, so close that the twin bed was plenty big enough for the two of us. I sighed and rested my cheek on his narrow, muscular chest, and I revelled in the calm cadence of his heartbeat.

“Why did you talk to me that day out by your beat-up Mercedes, Mellon? It was no accident we met, was it?”

I could feel that Mellon was holding his breath. He exhaled with a slow and ragged sigh, held me even closer. “You have a scent of magic, Mireya. I found you irresistible. Did from the first moment I laid eyes on you.”

He rolled me on top of him, arranged my bare limbs to twine all around him like a climbing trellis of roses. “And I intend to never resist you again.”

The night passed slowly and with a blooming sweetness. It was the purest, most uncomplicated bliss I have ever known.

Which only made the note nailed to my door all the more horrible when we discovered it the following morning.

The door itself was scored with scratches and deep grooves, and it looked scorched, like someone had tried to burn their way through it as we slept.

The paper pinned under the nail smelled rank, like piss and beer and smoke. It was ground in dirt. It smelled like Riverside Park in late September.

My body went cold as I reached up and ripped it off the door. I forced myself not to flinch as I turned the packet of paper over in my hands and opened it.

A small bundle fell into my open palm, and I heard Mellon mutter a foreign curse under his breath. It was a lock of my hair, matted and burned.

The note itself was written in that uncanny neat handwriting I had seen before, and it said only:

I handed the note to Jonathan and went back into my room without a single word to say. My fingers ached at their tips, and at every point where they had touched the paper.

“The words are a lie,” Jonathan said, his voice clean and clear and strong. “You belong to me. And to yourself.”

I sank to my knees and sat by the window facing the courtyard. A flock of starlings chattered noisily in the branches of the gingko tree.

“No, that note tells the truth, sweetheart.” The strength flowed out of me and into the floor under my feet. I sank to the ground, curled up on the floor, and covered my face with my hands. Focused on breathing slowly. In, out. Focused on the fact that I still breathed.

Jonathan knelt next to me, still wrapped in my sheet, and his hand traced a soft pattern on my back. “It was true once, perhaps. But not any more.”

“But the – bundle.” My words were as heavy as rocks in my mouth. I wiped at my eyes and lifted my head so I could look at him, the closed door looming over us like a gigantic tombstone. He was sleek and golden as a young stag in the springtime.

“It is a curse bag, my love. Do you know what that is?”

I swallowed hard. It hurt. “No. But it means I’m not free. All that time underground . . . none of it means anything. He’s still got a claim on me.”

“I must have called attention to you. It found you because of me.” He sat back, let the sheet fall from his shoulders. In the soft light of early morning, the pain in his eyes pierced me, sharper than the rusty nail driven through the paper on my door.

Suddenly, he shook his head, as though he were making up his mind about something important. “No. You will be free, my love. I’ll explain as we go. But we have to hurry.”

I knew what he meant. Whoever – whatever – had left me this note, he had gone back to hide at the bottom of the stairs under the chapel. I knew it, as surely as I now knew that I loved Jonathan Mellon with all my heart and soul.

Jonathan took an old-fashioned iron key out of a strange little leather fob he had strapped to his belt. He leaped up the stone staircase and fiddled with the enormous locked wooden doors until they silently swung open.

“Who attacked me that day, Jonathan?’’

He looked down at me, reached to me with an open hand. “You know the saying, I am certain. ‘Ignorance is bliss.’” And with a strange smile, he bowed and escorted me over the threshold and into the hot darkness of the chapel.

We headed at top speed for the back of the chapel, to the stairs leading to the Postcrypt, and I decided to get the truth out of him, before it was too late. “Ignorance is not bliss, though. It’s deadly.” I half-hurled myself down the stairs after his swift, retreating figure.

He paused at the top of our stairs, his eyes like dark sapphires. “Sometimes things aren’t what they seem. And the illusion is more pleasing, it can lead you to your strength better than the naked truth.”

“What do you mean?”

He disappeared down the stairs. I followed, clutching at the wall to keep my balance. “What are you trying to tell me? Who are you really? What are you?”

His voice echoed from somewhere down below. “I’ve known you for a while. As I said, yours is an attractive magic . . . I really couldn’t help but love you.”

“What are you, Mellon?”

The silence was painful. By now I’d come to the huge brass stairs, and I had to slow down so I wouldn’t fall. Without Jonathan to hold on to, I had to slide down and, knowing we came to hunt, I had the presence of mind to bring a flashlight instead of a romantic but relatively weak candle or lantern. For the first time, I could see the deep scratches and slashes clawed into the metal.

“Oh my God,” I whispered, half to myself.

I reached the bottom of the stairs, and Jonathan waited for me, eyes wide. “Daytime up above is night down here. And at night . . . the creatures of night claim their share of the world.”

A low growl rose from beyond the garden’s walls.

“Part of what they seek to claim is you. But I won’t have it.”

He came to me, seared my lips with a final kiss. “What am I, Mireya?” He held me as the growls got closer. I passed him the flashlight, but the darkness engulfed us, thicker than velvet.

He shook his head and laughed. “It doesn’t matter any more, what I am. My father fell in love with my mother, a woman from the dark places. The walled garden is mother’s domain. The creature that attacked you is likely my mother’s creature.

“But all that matters is you, Mireya. I first saw you at the bottom of a ditch in Riverside Park, and you were fighting for your life. I didn’t let him get you then, and I won’t let him have you now.

“Listen to me, Mireya,” Jonathan continued, as the growls rose to a horrible shriek. “I’m going to take care of the monster that attacked you. Very few pure mortals have a magic like yours. It’s a rare and beautiful light, my love – but it attracts the darkness, too. Go back up the stairs, quickly.”

“But, Jonathan, sweetheart . . .”

“Don’t argue. Go. When it’s safe, I’ll come for you.” The shriek grew into a guttural scream. “Go!”

I had never run away from a fight, not in my entire life. But I knew better than to argue with him – after all, I had met that evil beast before, and had barely survived my first encounter. Now, too late, I understood that Mellon alone had stopped it from snuffing me out. The only way to thank him was to try to survive this second time.

I ran back up the stairs as best I could, half blinded by tears and by the loss of the flashlight, and it wasn’t until I stopped for air in the middle of the Quad that I realized it . . .

I still had the map, wadded up in my back pocket.

I finished the rest of the school year in a haze, doing what I knew I had to do in a world that had become a faint dream. I picked up my old nemesis, the telephone, and called Colleen for help; my old friend forgave me for my neglect of our friendship without saying a word. She kept my body and soul together somehow, much as she had the first time I had been attacked. But I think she knew I hadn’t really made it back this time, and that I wasn’t going to stick around for long.

It was the end of school for the year. I packed up my two boxes of earthly possessions and mailed them to my darling grandmother in New Hampshire. My move thus completed, I bequeathed my drooping spider plant to Ali, the ancient security guard, and he smiled and nodded in silent thanks.

My last night, I sat alone on my bare bed, where I had once made love to a creature of starlight and shadows, and I looked out the window, smelled the wild apple-scented fragrance of the night, and knew I was alone, wild and free. Jonathan’s gift to me.

The door trembled under the gentlest of knocks.

I turned, and rose. Scooped up my map, walked slowly to the door. And without hesitation, I answered it.

The door opened to a walled garden. And Jonathan.

Madeline Baker

Prologue

The great white stallion sniffed the freshening breeze. The Apache called him a spirit horse; the Cheyenne called him a ghost horse because of his colour. But Relámpago was both, and neither. For hundreds of years, he had wandered the path between the past and the present, saving countless lives, bringing lost souls together.

Ears pricked forwards, he heard a faint call for help carried on the wings of the wind. With a toss of his head, Relámpago descended from his home high in the Chiricahua Mountains.

One

It was 11 a.m. on a rainy Saturday morning in January when Macie Jenkins decided her life was no longer worth living. Her parents and younger sister had died in an automobile accident six months ago. Her best friend in the whole world had married a computer programmer and moved to Japan. Her boyfriend had left her for his secretary. Last month, the collie she’d had ever since she was a little girl had got lost in a thunderstorm and never returned. Last week, she had lost her job due to the ongoing recession. And this morning, she had found her two-year-old goldfish belly up in the tank. It had been the last straw.

With a shake of her head, Macie turned away from the living-room window. Now that the decision was made, she felt a curious sense of peace. How to do it, that was the question? A knife was too messy. She didn’t own a gun. Sitting in the garage with the engine running seemed too creepy. Sleeping pills, of course, that was the best way. And how fortuitous that she’d had her prescription refilled yesterday. Tomorrow, she thought, she would do it tomorrow. But today, ah, today she would indulge in all the things she had been avoiding. She would have a big bowl of warm chocolate pudding for breakfast, a Big Mac, fries and a chocolate malt for lunch, pasta and garlic bread for dinner, and a pint of chocolate fudge ice cream for dessert.