The Wraiths of War (26 page)

Leaning forward, I put my ear to her chest, but before I could tell whether or not her heart was beating I heard a gritty shifting of rubble behind me.

Still on my knees, I twisted around, my hand reaching for my jacket pocket with the same speed and instinct that a gunslinger might reach for his gun.

The sound was the Dark Man. But he wasn’t sneaking up on me. He was down on his hands and knees, scrabbling for something on the ground.

I realised it must have been the ‘old’ heart only when his hunched silhouette smeared and disappeared. Clearly he’d decided that with the younger heart back in my possession he was no longer a match for me, and so had gone away to lick his wounds. I had no doubt I’d see him again, though right at that moment such a prospect seemed less than inconsequential.

My head starting to swim from the pain in my right hand, I drew the heart from my pocket with my left, then hunched forward and slid that same arm carefully beneath Lyn’s shoulders. I had to push through the blood-sticky rubble beneath her, but eventually I had her in an awkward but fairly secure grip. Holding her as close to me as I dared, I rested my forehead against hers and instructed the heart to take us home. As our surroundings bled away and the world went momentarily black, I prayed it wasn’t already too late.

‘Penny for them?’

I was so deep in my own thoughts that I didn’t hear Clover come in. I looked up from my chair, feeling dazed.

‘Just the usual boring stuff that any time-travelling killer thinks about,’ I said.

She frowned and crossed the room to sit in the seat beside me.

‘You’re not a killer.’ She put a hand on my arm. ‘Well, not a
bad
one anyway.’

I snorted a laugh.

‘How are the fingers?’

I held up my right hand. It had been five days now since, thanks to Lyn, I had got the younger heart back. My forefinger and the one next to it were still buddy-taped together, but there was virtually no pain from them now.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Good old nanites doing their work. The doctors are baffled by my amazing powers of recovery.’

She smiled, waited a couple of beats, and then said, ‘So? Do you want to share?’

‘My fingers?’

‘Your thoughts, dumbo.’

I sighed. ‘I’m just… taking stock. Trying to work out what my next move should be. Trying to apply logic to the situation.’ I tapped the side of my head. ‘It’s hard to be logical, though, when you’re on the inside looking out, when you can’t see the bigger picture.’

She nodded. ‘Go on.’

‘It’s just… time travel creates so many ripples… so many consequences and conundrums and inconsistencies. By doing what I’m doing… going through the War with Frank, making notes in my little book to remind myself of things I need to do in the future… it just feels like my life’s become a constant process of patching up, of making sure everything continues as it should… or as I
think
it should… of, I don’t know, retro-fitting the past so it correlates with the present, and hopefully the future.’

‘It’s a big responsibility,’ she said.

‘It’s not
just
that, though, is it?’

‘Isn’t it?’

I’d looked away from her to stare down at my hands, but now I slid another glance in her direction.

‘What if we’re wrong, Clover? What if
I’m
wrong? What if time travel isn’t an exact science? What if none of this is set in stone? What if time is constantly in flux, and whenever I use the heart, thinking I’m keeping things on the straight and narrow, or putting them back to where
I’ve
been led to believe they should be, I change things? Maybe not big things, but… what if, by establishing or restoring the timeline, I’m making things happen slightly differently each time, creating ripples?’

‘That’s a lot of what ifs,’ she said.

‘My life’s become a whole series of what ifs. And here’s another: what if I just decide not to do it any more?’

She was looking at me steadily, and although her expression was thoughtful rather than disapproving I couldn’t help feeling a bit like a child that has stamped a petulant foot.

‘You’ve said this before,’ she said.

I threw up my hands in exasperation. ‘Yeah, I know. It’s just that now I’ve got Kate back my whole mindset’s changed. Before, I had a purpose. I was searching for my daughter, and I wasn’t prepared to stop until I’d found her. Now, though…’

‘You’ve still got a purpose,’ Clover said. ‘You’ve got to keep things on the right track for Kate’s sake. Who knows what might happen if you don’t?’

‘But that’s my point, don’t you see?
Who knows?
Maybe things will be better without my interference. Maybe, if I hadn’t got involved in the first place, Lyn wouldn’t have ended up the way she did.’

Clover was silent for a moment. Then she glanced across at the recumbent figure in the hospital bed.

‘Lyn’s fine,’ she said firmly. ‘She’s going to be fine.’

I looked across at Lyn too. We were back at Oak Hill, the private hospital in which I’d recuperated after returning from the Victorian era with Clover and Hope. Lyn, who was now a patient here, was in an induced coma, having fractured her skull. With the top half of her shaven head swathed in bandages she looked incredibly vulnerable, child-like. She had also broken three ribs and her right arm, and she had a nasty gash on her right hip. But aside from that her injuries were superficial – cuts and bruises, most of which were already healing.

‘I’m not talking about her physical injuries,’ I said. ‘I’m talking about the five years she spent raving and terrified out of her wits because of that… that bastard.’

‘The heart seems to be helping her with that.’

I had placed the heart in Lyn’s limp hand, and despite being unconscious she was now cupping it gently between her palms.

‘It calms her,’ I said. ‘Whenever she’s held it before, she’s said she can feel it healing her.’

There was silence between us for a moment. Then Clover said, ‘Do you really think you can keep Kate safe by doing nothing?’

‘By protecting her, you mean?’

‘Don’t split hairs, Alex.’ Clover’s voice was mild, though, not irritable. ‘You know what I’m talking about.’

I felt weary. Weary of the way my thoughts constantly batted to and fro. Weary of everything I might prospectively still have to do to maintain the status quo. Weary of the uncertainty of it all. I slumped back in my seat.

‘Truthfully?’ I said. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. I mean, how do you keep someone safe? How do you
guarantee
their safety?’

Clover considered the question. ‘You eliminate all threats to them, I suppose.’

‘And what’s the biggest threat to Kate?’

Clover shrugged. ‘The Dark Man?’

‘The Dark Man,’ I confirmed. ‘So you’d think, wouldn’t you, that what I
really
need to do is find out, once and for all, who the Dark Man is and nullify him in some way? But is that possible? Is it even
wise
? Because we’ve already seen the Dark Man die. We know how it ends for him. We know that he becomes an ancient, crippled creature who’s eventually destroyed by the power of the thing he most covets. So the question is, can I change that version of our past by dispatching the Dark Man sooner? More to the point,
should
I change it?
Dare
I? And what’ll happen to us, to our past, to our memories, if I do?’

‘It’s a tricky one,’ Clover admitted.

‘That’s putting it mildly.’ I hesitated, then said, ‘Thing is, I have been thinking pretty seriously about going to a point in time where I
know
the Dark Man’s going to be and… well, stopping him from doing what I know he’s going to do.’

‘What point in time is that?’

‘The moment when Lyn first met the Dark Man. The moment when he first… poisoned her mind.’

‘Do you know when that is?’

I nodded. ‘With Lyn’s help I’ve worked it out. This could be the pivotal point for both of us – the point when both our lives began to go off the rails…’

‘I sense a “but”.’

I grimaced. ‘But what if I’m wrong? What if I do manage to stop the Dark Man? The change to both of our lives would be… monumental. Lyn and I would live happily together with Kate, as a family, and maybe none of this’ – I waved my hand around vaguely – ‘would ever happen. Or maybe it would happen so differently that I’d never get to this point, and so would never be in the position to go back and change things. Classic time anomaly.’

‘Or maybe only
some
things would change,’ Clover suggested. ‘I mean, maybe your older daughter’s boyfriend would still get in trouble with that drug dealer, and maybe you’d still contact Benny, who’d still put you on to me, and I’d still tell you about the heart…’

‘But Kate would be with Lyn, and so Adam and Paula would never need to look after her, which means they’d never abduct her, which means I wouldn’t have to steal the heart, which means I’d never kill McCallum…’ I put a hand to my head, as though to contain my thoughts. ‘Unless…’

‘Unless?’

‘Unless something worse happened. What if, in this new scenario, it’s the Dark Man who abducts Kate, after all? What if he hurts Lyn, or worse, and abducts Kate?’

‘Why would he do that?’ asked Clover.

‘I don’t know. But that’s the point, don’t you see? I don’t know anything! And that’s what’s tearing me up. If I nip things in the bud, and stop the Dark Man from doing what he did to Lyn, I might make things so much better. On the other hand, I might make things so much worse. I mean, what about Hope for one thing? If I change things, I might never go back to Victorian times, might never rescue her. She’d die a horrible, lingering death in one of Tallarian’s cages…’

‘Nothing is without consequences,’ said Clover softly. ‘And at the end of the day all you can do is what you think is right.’

I looked across at Lyn on the bed. She looked nothing like the bright and bubbly girl I’d fallen in love with. Her skin was waxen, her face sunken and care-worn.

‘But I don’t know what that is,’ I said. My guts felt clenched; my head ached. ‘That’s the problem, Clover. I don’t know what that is.’

My hands are buried deep in the sand, but I push them deeper still. I feel the sun scorching my back, the hot sand burning my knees, but it doesn’t matter. I am connected to the earth; I am connected to creation. I reach and I reach, and eventually I grasp the soul of the planet.

It is an unknowable force, but in that moment I know it, and it knows me. It is the stuff of all things; I am its Creation, but also its Creator. I am both Frankenstein and his monster. We are indivisible, a loop that continually circles, and never meets its beginning, nor its end.

I close my eyes and reach out, both with my hands and my mind. I draw the soul of the planet towards me, even as it lures me in. Then the essence I am searching for implodes, compacting and compacting until it becomes both compliant and pliable, a substance to be manipulated.

When I draw it from the sand it is black and dripping, and squirming with energy, with life – the
first
life. Then it gathers the sun and the air to it, or rather the knowledge of what and where it is, of what its limits are within this environment. And it adapts accordingly, becoming clay and stone and root matter. And I use my hands, and the energy we share, to shape it, knowing it will find its way…

When I opened my eyes I was immediately overwhelmed by the sense that I had returned from a monumental journey, and that in the split second it had taken me to slip from sleep into consciousness I had crossed impossibly vast distances of time and space. As I lay in my warm bed, staring into a swirl of shadows and pre-dawn light, I fancied I could hear the unending hum of the universe, which had accompanied me forward through time. More than that, I fancied I was a part of it; that not only my flesh and bones but also my thoughts, my ideas, my perceptions, my
soul
were composed of stardust, which still crackled with the faint white static of the beginning of everything.

Mad thoughts.
Cosmic
thoughts. Old Dennis Jasper, wherever he was, would have been proud of me.

I smiled, but couldn’t shake the notion that when I breathed it was the universe breathing, and that when I shifted in bed I could hear that white static underlying every tiny rustle of movement.

Movement. I saw it out of the corner of my eye, flickering and dark. Slowly I turned my head on the pillow. The universe crackled.

‘Oh, my…’

The heart was blooming with life. Perched on the bedside table between my phone and a John le Carré paperback I’d started last night in the hope it would dilute my racing thoughts, it was extruding a mass of long black tendrils, which were writhing and waving gently, as though tasting the air. Still partly swaddled in the freewheeling and seemingly limitless nature of my dream-thoughts, I wondered if this was an omen, or perhaps even an answer of sorts to the many questions constantly orbiting inside my head. Trying to clear my mind of clutter to facilitate the link between the heart and my own subconscious, I reached out a hand and pushed my fingers deep into the tendrils, caressing them, as if they were the silky strands of a lover’s hair. The tendrils responded, wrapping themselves around my fingers and wrist. Immediately I felt the heart-energy swirling through me, becoming part of me, like ink injected into water. I gave myself up to it, trusting it would take me where I
needed
to go…

Maybe it was because I hadn’t imposed my will on the heart – or not consciously anyway – but this time the transition was both effortless and instantaneous. This time I didn’t even get a sense that my surroundings were shifting around me. All at once I was simply no longer lying in bed, but standing in a room that I recognised instantly. The walls were a soft butter-yellow, and there was a mobile of little felt clouds and a smiling sun hanging over a wooden cot containing a padded mattress. Stood against the opposite wall was a chest of drawers with a changing mat on top of it, and in the corner, next to a window which was still waiting for curtains, was a well-padded armchair, still wrapped in plastic, which Lyn and I had bought under the assumption that Lyn would need somewhere comfortable to sit when she got up to feed our new baby in the middle of the night.