The Trouble With Time (7 page)

She wasn’t in Islington any more. Ancient gravestones covered in moss and ivy leaned drunkenly towards each other, and tree saplings sprouted through ragged grass. Where was she? And how had she got here, and why was the light all wrong; grey when it should be amber? Perhaps she had been unconscious for hours. She shivered, her clothes offering no protection against the cold rain, and that was wrong too in July.

Nearby two men were fighting savagely, the man who’d brought her here and another who looked like a tramp. The man slammed the tramp into a headstone and reached under his jacket. The tramp punched him, kneed him in the stomach and knocked his arm away fast and hard, and whatever the man had hold of spun out of his hand. They crashed to the ground grappling, the man’s hand groping about for what he had dropped. It had to be a weapon. Floss leaped forward, saw something black nestling in the wet grass and grabbed just as his fingers touched it.

Though different from those she had seen in films and on television, this was unmistakably a gun, small and made to fit the contours of a hand, with silver knobs and sliders on one side. Floss had never held a gun before. It felt heavy for its size, and warm. She didn’t know what to do – should she call out, try to stop them fighting? Who were they, anyway?

The tramp seemed to be winning. His arm went round the other man’s neck, straining, and they both became still for several seconds. Then the tramp got to his feet and walked towards Floss, limping a little.

He was broad-shouldered and lean, and his clothes – vaguely piratical with fraying braid and a few surviving gold buttons – were worn and discoloured with grease and grime. Lank dark hair curled below his shoulders, and his beard came to his chest. His eyes were bright and impossible to read in a face dark with dirt. He looked her over, breathing hard.

Floss held out the gun in both hands like she’d seen in the movies, finger on the trigger, pointing at him. “Don’t come any closer!”

He took a step towards her.

“I’ll fire!”

“No, you won’t.” His voice was low, with a rough, husky edge to it, as if he hadn’t used it for a while.

“I will! Stop there!”

He took another pace forward. Floss aimed the gun at the sky and squeezed the trigger. Nothing happened. The man stepped up to her and took the gun out of her hands and put it in his pocket.

“You didn’t take the safety off. You’d better come back to the house.”

He turned to the other man, grabbed the back of his collar and began to drag him along the ground. Something about the way his head lolled seemed wrong.

“Is he . . . all right?”

He gave a curt laugh. “No. He stopped being all right when I broke his neck.”

Appalled, Floss watched him walk away, the body trailing after him, then got out her mobile, feeling sick again, shaking with shock and cold. No signal. She hastened off in the opposite direction from the one the man was taking, stumbling over the rough ground. Above the trees, their leaves just beginning to change colour, she could make out the tops of tall buildings. People there would help, take her in and let her use their phone.

Footsteps made her turn. He’d dropped the body to come after her. “Don’t wander off, you’ll get lost. There’s wolves out there. And the odd lion.”

Floss stared at him in disbelief. “
Wolves and lions?
Where is this?”

“London. Bunhill Fields. Near Silicon Roundabout.”

Relief flooded Floss. That was practically home ground. She recognized the old graveyard now, though the last time she’d been there two or three years ago it had been better maintained. They’d really let it go since then. All she had to do was escape from this homicidal maniac. Who now had a gun. Edging away, she attempted a polite smile. “Thank you. Now I know where I am I’ll be off.”

He shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He pointed to a small square brick building overgrown with ivy. “That’s where I live, over there, if you need me.”

He started to move away. Relieved but cautious, Floss managed another insincere smile and turned decisively to go.

“But you asked the wrong question,” the man said over his shoulder.

Pretending not to hear, Floss picked her way towards the safety of City Road. At the gates she paused. They were solid rust, with barely perceptible scraps of black and gold paint clinging here and there. And beyond the gates . . .

The surface of the road was broken up into great zigzag cracks, with grass and small trees growing through the tarmac, and in places an invading carpet of ivy. The only noise was the wind in the trees and the patter of rain. Buildings across the street looked normal at first glance. Look again, and you could see the broken window panes, the encroaching creepers, the damp spreading down the walls from sagging gutters full of weeds. Floss climbed up the gate, hanging on to the stone pilaster, and craned in both directions. The front wall of one house had collapsed into a heap of bricks, exposing the rooms like an opened dolls’ house. A lamppost lay at an angle across the road. Further away was a pile of fallen scaffolding, next to an area of water like a small lake. Everywhere was going back to nature; no lights, no traffic, no humans. The place smelled like the countryside, not like a city. In the distance skyscrapers appeared intact, until you noticed black specks spattered over their smooth façades, indicating missing panes of glass. A movement caught her eye – at the other side of the pond a wild boar trotted towards the water, surrounded by a troop of striped piglets.

Perhaps this was all just a very, very vivid dream, and she was actually lying in a hospital bed, badly injured and unconscious with morphine dripping into her veins. This struck her as a more inviting prospect than the alternative, that this was real. She shut her eyes tight for a few seconds, and opened them again fast when something ran over her hand.

Floss shook off the spider and started to climb the gate. She got to the top and stopped, remembering what the man had said about wolves and lions. It no longer seemed quite so improbable. Perhaps he had simply been telling the truth. His eyes had looked sane. Maybe she should go back and ask him what was going on. On the other hand, she’d just watched him kill a man. An idea came to her, an irrational idea she was unable to resist. Floss clambered down the far side of the gate and warily headed towards Old Street Roundabout.

She was going to go home.

Finding her route to Islington wasn’t too hard; the roads were still recognizable, even though their surfaces were breaking up and well on their way to becoming linear forests. Floss only got lost once, in an area with new unfamiliar buildings. She kept a wary eye out for carnivores, but didn’t see anything larger than a fox trotting along the pavement. Cats stared at her but wouldn’t come near. A small herd of deer had taken possession of Shoreditch Park, which had changed very little. Floss remembered reading that tree seedlings won’t grow where deer browse.

On the way, she climbed twenty flights of stairs in one of the more robust-looking skyscrapers, and from there she could see that the desolation spread to the misty horizon. No light, no fires, no movement, no aeroplanes. The view had a strange beauty, with trees flourishing in all the spaces between the buildings. There were more tall office blocks than she remembered. The city looked to have been abandoned for a long, long time. Something catastrophic had happened here, and Floss couldn’t work out what. Nothing seemed to add up.

It wasn’t until she got to her street, a Victorian terrace facing a main road and backing on to the railway, that she fully acknowledged the futility of her journey. Doggedly, she worked out which was number eleven, and stood gazing at the house where her tiny attic studio had been. Most of its stucco had fallen off, and buddleia stems thrust out of the windows. The remaining portion of roof sagged, and a sycamore grew through what had once been her flat. She stood, staring, heart pounding, more alone than she’d ever been in her life. The longer she looked, the more panicky she became.

Floss walked up the steps to the front door, part of her hoping a miracle would happen if she stood on the spot she’d been transported from. The door’s wood was warped and paintless, with only two panels in place. She pushed the edge, and what was left disintegrated and creaked wearily to the floor in a puff of dust. Inside was worse than outside. Fallen masonry, plaster and timber covered the floors, and furniture rotted where it stood, legs giving way, fabric frail and split with age, splotched with bird droppings. Books decayed on their shelves. In the rooms open to the sky, nettles flourished waist high, and birds, ants and spiders had moved in.

Floss wept.

The sky grew darker, and eventually hunger and cold drove her back the way she had come. There was nowhere else to go.

When Floss climbed back over Bunhill Fields’ gate and headed towards the man’s house it was 8.45 by her watch, and dark. The clouds had cleared and a huge moon shone above the trees. She’d been gone two and a half hours.

The yellow glow of candlelight glinted through the few non-boarded up panes. Floss approached cautiously, picking her way between stacked junk surrounding the building. A pipe sticking out from a galvanized water tank caught her shin painfully, tearing her jeans and drawing blood. She tiptoed to the window and peered in, grasping the tang of the knife she’d found in a ruined kitchen. Its handle had decayed to dust, the steel’s surface was brown and pitted, but she had spent half an hour whetting the edge on a wall to a ragged sharpness. Floss was not under the illusion that this would even the odds should the tramp attack her, but she was a believer in doing what you could.

The man was sitting at a table, eating by the light of an elaborate seven branch candelabra, reading a book. Like everywhere else she had seen, the room was derelict, but it had been swept clean, and flames flickered in a square stove whose pipe went vertically through the roof. Beside the stove, wood was stacked to the ceiling. The room’s bareness and lack of personal possessions gave the place a curiously medieval atmosphere like a monk’s cell, dedicated to contemplation. A plank supported on bricks held an orderly row of rusty tools, several knives all bigger than hers, some convex lenses, a row of church candles and a dead rabbit. Strings of onions hung from hooks. A narrow metal bedstead with a sagging mattress, yellowed duvet and grubby blankets stood in one corner, with a pile of books on the floor next to it. Drips plopped from the ceiling into a metal bucket.

The man looked up and saw her. She jumped backwards, feeling foolish. The door opened and he stood silhouetted on the threshold.

“Thought you’d be back. You look freezing. Come in.”

She followed him inside, cautiously, not sure what to expect. The air seemed warm compared to outside and smelled of damp plaster and wood smoke. He fetched a padded jacket from the bed and handed it to her. It was clean, nearly new. Only after she’d gratefully put the jacket on did she realize where it came from, and wondered what he had done with the corpse. On the table was a small pile of items, the contents of someone’s pockets; a penknife, a bunch of keys, a neat electronic gadget she couldn’t identify, a man’s metal cuff. She took off a sandal and rubbed her chilly toes, keeping a wary eye on the man who was doing something by the stove. He came back with a steaming dish in his hand which he pushed towards her.

Floss’s mouth watered. “What is it?”

“Rabbit stew.”

The stew wasn’t bad; a bit smoky and consisting mostly of rabbit meat and onions, but she spooned it up eagerly. He poured wine into a smeary glass for her. It was so smooth and delicious, she reached for the bottle to view its label: Château Mouton Rothschild 2011. Food and drink made her feel more able to cope with the situation, whatever it was. She smiled nervously at the man, raising her glass.

“Cheers. I ought to introduce myself. I’m Floss. Floss Dryden.” She nearly held out her hand, but thought better of it. His were no doubt filthy. And he was a killer. “Who are you?”

“Jace Carnady.”

She decided it would be best not to ask him straight away why he had killed her abductor. Or how he’d seemed to be waiting for him. Instead she asked the question that had been vaguely niggling her all the time she’d been exploring. “You know earlier, when you said I asked the wrong question? What did you mean?”

“You asked where this is. You should have asked when.”

“Why when?”

“This is the future. Not sure which year, Quinn didn’t tell me. Some time after 2170.”

A pause while Floss considered this information, sipping her wine and eyeing him uncertainly. He topped up her glass, waiting for her reaction, expression sardonic.

“That’s crazy,” she finally said, her tone less convinced than her words. “You’re asking me to believe I’ve time travelled to the future?”

“Nope.” He shrugged. “Your opinion is your own concern. I really don’t care what you believe.”

“But there’s no such thing as time travel!”

“Where do you think you are, then? Does it look like your own time? When was that, anyway?”

“2015.” An eerie howl in the distance made Floss glance towards the window. Other howls answered it. That was either a pack of wolves, or . . . something else that made a noise exactly like a pack of wolves.

Jace said, “Don’t worry, they can’t get over the railings. One reason I stayed here.”

“Okay. Assuming this is the future, how did I get here, and why?”

“Ansel Quinn – that man – brought you. Why, I don’t know. My guess is to get you out of the way.”

“Out of the way of what, exactly?”

“How should I know? But I can get you back home. Most likely.”

“Can you really?” In spite of her revulsion towards a murderer, Floss couldn’t suppress her relief and gratitude. “That would be awesome!” She pictured Chris sitting in the bar, wondering what had happened to her friend, who was usually so reliable; trying to reach her on her mobile; in the end giving up and leaving. This vignette was small and distant, as if she was looking through the wrong end of a telescope. The ruined room was much more real.