TIME QUAKE (29 page)

For a long time Kate crouched on her heels, too bewildered to think, too horror-struck to do anything save rock backwards and forwards. Was this strange place where parallel worlds met? Time passed. The stars still shone down. From time to time she would glance over at Gideon, spreadeagled in the water; at Peter, fully submerged, his dark hair floating about his white face; at the Tar Man who still looked as if he would tear his younger brother apart given the chance. She tried again to look at her own future but could not push her way past a solid wall of darkness. And so, cradled in the Tar Man’s little boat, Kate drifted, lost in time, unhooked from all certainties.

‘Can you hear me?’ asked the voice inside her head. ‘I can hear you sometimes. Kate? It
is
you, isn’t it? I’ve sensed you for a while. I can talk to my parallel self in your world but I don’t know for sure that you even exist in mine . . . But that’s not important. It’s
your
world that is the important one.
Your
world can make things right again. Mine can’t.’

Kate groaned in her sleep and her forehead wrinkled.

‘I can sense how lost you feel, how brave you’ve had to be. I am going to ask you to suspend your disbelief. You
must
talk to me for all our sakes. You see, Time is beginning to splinter. The number of parallel worlds has increased exponentially. We don’t believe that the universe can contain them all. Massive disturbances are being triggered in the time mantle. We’re calling them time quakes but we’ve no idea how destructive they are. We need your help, Kate. If you can hear me, try to talk to me. Reach out with your mind . . .’

Kate opened her eyes and blinked, unsure whether or not she had been dreaming. She scanned the darkness looking for signs of another Kate Dyer. There had been a voice, a woman’s voice, with an American accent. She had wanted to speak with her. All at once Kate remembered the amazing celebration at the farmhouse after she and Peter had both managed to make it home. Everyone was there: Peter and his family, Inspector Wheeler, the Marquis de Montfaron, Megan, her brothers and sisters . . . and
Dr Pirretti
. It was her last memory of home. The celebration was short-lived – within a few hours the Tar Man had abducted them and brought them back to 1763. But she had a vivid memory of Dr Pirretti going into a kind of trance during the dinner. Suddenly Dr Pirretti had started to speak in a voice which was her own and yet not her own at the same time. That
alternative
Dr Pirretti had spoken of the parallel worlds formed as a consequence of time travel. Her father had seemed highly sceptical. But if the existence of parallel selves in parallel worlds seemed far-fetched, Kate herself had just seen proof of it with her own eyes . . . And, no, she hadn’t dreamed that voice – a Dr Pirretti from another world really had just spoken to her! Kate sat up abruptly, now wide awake. She
must
remember everything that she had said. Dr Pirretti had talked of the splintering of time. She had talked about needing
her
help! But what could she, Kate Dyer, possibly do for anyone? I can’t help Peter, she thought, I can’t even help myself.

‘What can I do?’ she cried into the night. ‘Is anybody else out there?’

But all she could hear was a deafening silence.

Kate sat looking out over the city, and after a while she felt a surge of anger rise up inside her, anger at the injustice of her dilemma, anger at her father and Dr Pirretti and Tim Williamson for their part in the accidental discovery of time travel, anger at the
whole string of events that had led to a situation that was now spiralling out of control. Suddenly she rounded on the Tar Man.

‘This is
your
fault!’ she shouted in his face. ‘You walked off with the anti-gravity machine in the first place. And then you couldn’t resist stealing it back again. But Lord Luxon ran off with it, didn’t he? And who knows what he’s been doing with it . . . Don’t you realise what you’ve done? It sounds like the universe is about to explode because of your greed! What makes people like you think they’ve got a right to spoil everything for the rest of us? You’re a grown-up! My baby sister has got more sense. How can you have lived so long and still be so stupid? Do you hear what I’m saying, Tar Man? I
hate
you!’

As the word
hate
fell from her lips she drew back her hand and struck his scarred cheek with a stinging slap. But at the instant Kate’s flesh came into contact with the Tar Man, a tremendous jolt flung her backwards and electricity crackled all about them. The two of them were bound together at the eye of a sudden and violent storm that crashed through the dead calm of her world like a witch’s spell. A strange wind sprang up and swirled around them in powerful eddies, catching at her dress and causing strands of hair to whip wildly in front of her so that she could see nothing. Kate tugged her hair away from her face and looked up at the Tar Man. His eyelids snapped wide open and his eyeballs swivelled in their sockets so that he was looking directly at her. The rest of him remained statue-still. The effect on Kate could not have been more shocking if she had seen a dead man walk. Kate was petrified. She leaped to the far end of the boat and, without thinking of the consequences, launched herself off the stern hoping to reach dry land. Her cries were lost in the roar of the wind. But even the powerful rush of adrenaline which put renewed strength into her limbs did not provide sufficient momentum to reach the quayside. Kate fell through the air, stomach
lurching, the skin on her hands and arms grazed by the coarse stone of the supporting wall, then landed on the surface of the water.

She braced herself for the icy immersion but felt – nothing at all! When Kate looked down, she realised that she was
sitting
on the Thames. She shifted to one side and the water yielded a little but still she did not penetrate its surface. Now she threw a wary glance over in the direction of the Tar Man’s back; he had not moved, or at least as far as she could tell. She relaxed a little and, once her heart stopped fluttering in her chest, the novelty of her new-found skill brought a smile to her face. And so she bounced up and down, gently at first, and then with more confidence. It was as if she were sitting on a hard mattress. She patted the ripples of water with the flat of her hands and marvelled at their cool softness. There was nothing in her old world that she could compare it to and she delighted in the unique texture that soothed the palms of her hands.

She looked over again at the Tar Man. He was as motionless as ever. What had happened when she touched him? It reminded her of an experiment the Marquis de Montfaron had described, in which he had passed an electric current into the thigh muscle of a dead frog. The resulting twitch had caused his assistant to run, screaming from the room. But what force had
she
transmitted into the Tar Man? Was she a conductor of some unknown force – did it merely flow through her? Or was she the source of it? She sighed. She suspected that even her father and Dr Pirretti wouldn’t know the answer to those questions. At least it was only the Tar Man’s eyeballs that had moved. How awful if she had brought the whole of him to life, a cross between Frankenstein’s monster and Man Friday to share her desert island. Except, of course, it wasn’t exclusively hers, not any more – Kate’s gaze swept the riverside anxiously, looking for any further sign of movement.

Thankfully the unearthly wind had eased, the ferocious gusts
having reduced to a gentle breeze. Slowly and cautiously she got to her feet, arms outstretched for balance. Kate walked on water. It was slippery, and she kept falling over, landing painlessly on the cushioned surface. As she pushed herself up once more she noticed, a little way away, the small blob of white just below the surface that she knew to be Peter’s face.

‘Peter!’ she exclaimed. It suddenly dawned on her that she could now reach him. Kate started to shuffle over the slippery ripples towards her friend but soon decided that it would be easier to crawl on all fours. A feeling of dread came over her. What if she were too late? But something flickered in the far reaches of her mind: Peter’s future. She could sense it. He was not dead. He had a long life in front of him. She crawled on.

Covered by perhaps a finger’s width of water, Kate observed his face. Peter’s eyes were wide open and a stream of air bubbles that escaped from his mouth confirmed that he was alive. Kate let her forehead sink with relief onto the soothing surface of the river. She stretched out her hand towards him. All she had to do was touch him and it would be over. But just as she was about to touch the tip of his index finger, the only part of him that which not submerged, she stopped herself. The Thames was a fast-flowing river and she could not be sure that Peter was capable of swimming.

Crawling back to the quayside as fast as she could, Kate jumped up to catch hold of a metal mooring ring and hauled herself up, pushing with her feet against the roughly hewn stones until she had heaved herself onto street level. She ran off into the darkness.

Presently the river echoed to her footsteps once more and she appeared, out of breath and clutching a pile of soiled strips of petticoat that she had used to bind her sore feet, along with a shirt she had found drying in the Tar Man’s scullery. Kate dropped onto the spongy surface of the Thames, checked the Tar Man’s face for
further signs of movement and, satisfied that he was not suddenly going to come to life like a zombie in a horror film, made herself comfortable on the water, crossing her legs and pulling out her skirts around her like a picnic blanket. More cheerful than she had felt in an age, she sorted through the pieces of cotton and struggled to tear the shirt into strips. Then she started to knot them together. The pieces of petticoat had already lost much of their pliability. This was doubtless, she deduced, on account of the law of temporal osmosis – oh, how she longed to tell her father about this – but she still managed to work the material without too much difficulty. The shirt was a different matter. However, once she had finished, Kate clambered back on board the boat and, being extremely careful not to touch him, tied one end of the rag rope around the Tar Man’s wrist, using a triple knot. Then she walked back over to Peter and sat down next to him. She formed a loop, large enough for her and for Peter, which she dropped over her head and under her arms. Then she looked around at the silent, dark, no-man’s land of a world and shouted, ‘Goodbye, Limbo Land!’

Kate sat poised to touch the tip of Peter’s finger with hers, knowing that all hell would break loose the moment she did so. For a moment she clung to the peace and silence of this static world.

‘Dr Pirretti, I don’t know if you can hear me—’

‘Kate!’ Dr Pirretti’s urgent voice came straight back at her.

Kate gasped at the clarity of it. She could have been wearing headphones.

‘Dr Pirretti! How are you doing this?’

‘That’s not important. The important thing is that you can hear me.’

‘I’m with Peter again – I’d lost him for a while. Can you tell everyone we’re okay?’

‘Yes, of course, but listen to me, Kate, listen while you can. I
need to tell you the code for the duplicate anti-gravity machine. It’s a six-digit code and it’s the same as your birthdate . . . Did you hear me?’

Kate’s face broke into a grin. ‘I heard you!’

One hand clutching the loop around her chest, Kate’s finger hovered over Peter’s. She looked down at the pale moon of his face, and at the life escaping from his lungs, trapped under this layer of water. She wondered if he were still conscious. Her finger was now so close to his it was pulsing in anticipation and felt almost hot. It was like balancing on the edge of a diving board, confronted with the heart-stopping leap into the void. She wanted to do it, she
had
to do it, but now it came to it her nerve failed her. ‘Now!’ she ordered. But she faltered again. What if she got swept away? What if she couldn’t save him? ‘Do it!’ she shouted, channelling all her fear into her cry. ‘
Now!
’

Two fingers touched, two worlds united, two bodies thrashed around in swirling currents. Spitting out the foul water, her head burst through the surface of the water like a rebirth. Coughing and spluttering she passed the loop over Peter’s shoulders. Kate Dyer was back in the real world.

C
HAPTER
E
IGHTEEN

Time Quake

In which many centuries collide, two brothers
make a pact and Kate tells Peter her secret

Peter shook the hair from his face and coughed up the water that was making him choke. He felt himself being dragged through the strong current. What was happening to him? Out of the darkness he saw the Tar Man in his boat looming towards him. The water was choppy and the boat bobbed up and down. The Tar Man appeared to be leaning backwards, legs set wide apart for balance, and he was digging his heels into the floor of the boat. He was pulling on something, too. In fact, it occurred to Peter that the Tar Man looked exactly as if he were taking part in a tug o’ war contest. Peter glanced down at the taut rag rope in front of him and felt it cut into his back as he surged through the water. The Tar Man, he realised all at once, was hauling him in like a big fish! But why, having tossed him into the river in the first place, had he now decided to rescue him?

Within the space of half a second Peter noticed several things. Firstly – and inexplicably – he became aware of Kate right next to him, clutching at the rope and gasping for air. Then he grasped
what the Tar Man was trying to do – he was struggling to free his hand from the rope that was tied so tightly around his wrist. Next he spotted Gideon, shirt clinging to his chest, clambering back into the boat from which he had been pushed by the Tar Man’s oar only a moment before Peter himself had been tossed overboard.