The Wraiths of War (24 page)

‘I’m fine, Alex. Really. It’s just… well, I’m freaked out by this.’ She wafted an arm to indicate our surroundings. ‘But no more than anyone else would be in my situation.’

I smiled and said, ‘I’m sorry. This is my fault. I should have prepared you for this. I meant to, but everything was a bit… frantic.’

She nodded distractedly and tugged at my arm again. ‘Just look at this and tell me I’m not delusional.’

‘What?’

‘There, look. Over on that table near the door to the Ladies. Tell me what you see.’

She was deliberately keeping her face averted from whatever she wanted me to look at, as though afraid the sight might send her over the edge. I swept my gaze across the chattering throng of people. Using the door to the Ladies as a marker, I glanced down…

A tingle went through me.

I’d seen older versions of myself several times now, and although I couldn’t exactly say I’d got used to it – or ever would – it was an experience I was at least half-familiar with. But this was different. This gave the notion of time travel a whole other perspective. Not because it was the past, but because it was
this
particular night in
this
particular place. I knew exactly where we were now – and when.

It was Thursday 19th June 2003, and we were in the Punch and Judy pub in Covent Garden. Sitting on the other side of the crowded room, completely wrapped up in one another even though they’d only just met, were younger versions of Lyn and me. I was twenty-six and she was four weeks away from her twenty-third birthday. I was two months out of prison and feeling giddily happy. Lyn was… well, she was beautiful. So radiant, so full of life, that I felt emotion welling in me, tears prickling in my eyes.

I became aware that Lyn – the Lyn of today – was staring into my face, and that there were tears in her eyes too.

‘I’m right, aren’t I?’ she murmured. ‘It is…’

Her voice tailed off. I nodded. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘you
are
right.’

She leaned into me, and I put my arm around her. Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘I’d forgotten how… I’d forgotten what I was like.’

Her voice at that moment was the saddest thing I’d ever heard. There was so much regret, so much longing, in her words. I hugged her tight, enfolded her in my arms. Around us people chatted and drank and laughed, oblivious.

‘Everything will be okay,’ I told her. ‘I’ll make it right.’

Maybe it was wrong of me to make such a promise, but I couldn’t not respond to her anguish. Looking at the young couple across the room who had eyes only for each other, I wondered why the heart had brought us here. I’d told Lyn to find the Dark Man, but had the heart simply latched on to her happiest memory and made a beeline for that instead? Was the heart now too damaged to take me where I wanted to go? In which case, would I have trouble getting back to
my
present day? To Kate? And what about all the other things I needed to do?

I tried to stay calm for Lyn’s sake, but I felt my anxiety escalating. Perhaps we ought to get out of here now, give the heart another chance to find the Dark Man.

But then, diverting my eyes from my and Lyn’s younger selves for a moment and sweeping my gaze once more around the pub, I realised I wasn’t the only one watching the couple. Leaning on the far side of the bar, only visible now and again because of the ebb and flow of the crowd, was a figure whose attention seemed also to be fixed on the two lovebirds. It was hard to tell for certain because he was wearing dark glasses – though, in fact, it was these and the rest of his clothes that had caused me to notice him in the first place. As befitting a warm June day, most of the pub’s customers were wearing light summer clothes, but this man was dressed in a black baseball cap, shades, and a black leather jacket, whose upturned collar concealed all but his nose and mouth. Although it was difficult to tell, I also got the impression there was something wrong with his face. Had he been scarred or burned?

Lyn must have felt me tense, because she asked, ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Look over there,’ I said. ‘No, not at us. Over to the left. At the figure in black at the far end of the bar.’

She had broken our embrace and twisted around to see where I was looking, but now she stepped back so smartly that she almost cracked the back of her skull on my chin. I put my hands on her arms to steady her, and felt her body trembling.

‘Oh my God!’ she said. ‘That’s him!’

‘Who?’ I asked, then realised. ‘The Dark Man?’

She shrank back against me, head nodding rapidly, jerkily.

I don’t know what it was – sixth sense? Foreknowledge of our presence? Or perhaps he had simply been peripherally alerted by Lyn’s evident fear of him? – but all at once the black-clad man’s head snapped round. I couldn’t see his eyes through his shades, but I felt certain he was scrutinising us coldly, intently.

I stared back, wondering what he would do, whether he was about to launch an attack in a crowded pub – but if he did wouldn’t the younger me have remembered it? Then he turned and began to make his way towards one of the pub’s several exits, his shiny black form slipping through the crowd like an eel through water.

‘Stay here,’ I said to Lyn.

Before she could respond, I set off in pursuit.

It was tough pushing my way through the crowd around the bar, but despite my urgency I tried to do it without spilling a drink or nudging anyone aside. I was paranoid about making a scene and drawing the attention of my younger self. What if he clocked me and realised who I was. Would history change? Would the timeline as I knew it fall apart? It really wasn’t something I wanted to find out.

It seemed an age before I managed to wriggle my way through to the spot where the Dark Man had been standing, though in truth it was probably no more than thirty seconds or so. The exit he’d used led into an equally crowded sunken courtyard that was five or six metres below ground level, from where a set of stone steps over to my left ascended to the complex of swanky retail outlets that occupied the elegant, neo-classical structure that had once housed London’s main fruit and veg market.

I knew that if I lost track of the Dark Man here I’d have little chance of finding him again. There were so many exits out of the vast building of which the Punch and Judy was only a small part, and indeed out of the central square itself in which the building stood, that it would be the easiest thing in the world for him to perform a vanishing act in the surrounding maze of streets. It helped him too that the June sky was now darkening rapidly, which put the time at somewhere between 9 and 10 p.m.

A few streets away was the building which in the late 1800s had been occupied by Mr Hayles, the ill-fated proprietor of the junk shop Tempting Treats, in which the heart had fetched up before it had found its way into my hands. The area was far more salubrious now, but the layout of the streets was no less dense and convoluted than it had been just over a century ago. Plus there were many escape options available to the Dark Man these days. To evade my clutches, he could jump on a bus or dive into a cab or lose himself in the labyrinth of the Underground. As I manoeuvred my way slowly through the milling crowd of drinkers in the courtyard, I wondered if my task was already a hopeless one.

But no. As I came to the top of the steps, leaping up them two at a time, I saw his black-clad form ahead of me. He was at the far end of the walkway that stretched up the left-hand side of the piazza, rows of now mostly closed shops on his left and Ponti’s bustling, open-air restaurant on his right.

I was heartened not only by the fact that the Dark Man was still in sight, but also that, despite moving fairly rapidly, he was hobbling. I guessed this meant that although he was a younger version of the creature I’d encountered in Victorian London, he was already afflicted with whatever illness or disability would reduce him to the twisted, emaciated wreck he’d ultimately become – which could only be good news for me.

As I broke into a run, I attracted the attention of various onlookers, and a pair of Japanese tourists even scuttled out of my way in alarm, as if they thought I was going to attack them. Aside from the crowded pub, though, and the various eating places in the vicinity, the rest of Covent Garden was sparsely populated, for which I was thankful. I couldn’t let him escape.

I had gained on him by maybe ten or fifteen metres when he glanced over his shoulder, and saw me.

He put on a spurt of speed, limping out through the wide, colonnaded exit at the far end of the building and into the square itself. Although I was already going full pelt, I tried to speed up too. Who knew which way he’d turn now that he was temporarily out of my sight? He might even use the heart to transport himself elsewhere.

Even as this thought occurred to me I felt a tingling, like a warm electrical current, on the right side of my stomach, just above my hip. Still running, I slipped my hand into my jacket pocket. Sure enough, the heart had come alive; I could feel energy rippling through it. But why? What had activated it? Could it be in its death throes? Might it be expending whatever energy remained in it before it died altogether?

Alarm spiking inside me, I burst out from under the roof of the main building and looked wildly around the square. A few couples were strolling about, but there was only one person on his own – a dark-clad figure, about twenty metres to my right, who was hunched over as if in pain. He was holding something in his hand – I couldn’t see it, but I knew it must be the heart – and he appeared to be blurring and jittering, as if he was shifting in and out of phase. It hurt my eyes to look at him.

My right hand was still stuffed in my jacket pocket, still wrapped around the tingling heart. Not entirely sure what I was doing I drew the heart from my pocket and held it up, as if it was a grenade I was about to throw.

‘No!’ I shouted, and was peripherally aware of a few passers-by casting startled glances in my direction. I shouted again and began to run towards the jittering, flickering shape of the Dark Man.

As I drew closer to him, so the heart in my hand began to tingle more strongly. Electrical ripples coursed down my arm and through my body. My vision blurred, my surroundings not only moving in and out of focus, but altering too, the buildings around the square constantly brightening and going dull, as if hundreds, perhaps even thousands of days were passing in the blink of an eye.

The buildings themselves were also changing – new details appearing and then disappearing just as quickly, the frontispieces altering shape and structure and colour, as if a vast series of photographs taken through time from exactly the same angle were being laid rapidly over one another, like the images in a flicker book. Here was the row of buildings blackened by soot; here were the same buildings with bomb damage; here they were encased in scaffolding; here they were with repositioned windows.

There were more peripheral things too that appeared and disappeared: greenery, people in various styles of historical dress, carts pulled by horses, street lamps, market stalls.

I felt dizzy and sick as the array of images flashed before me – more than that, I felt buffeted, hurled about, as if I was desperately trying to hold a tiger by its tail.

And so I was in a way. Perhaps it was because the two hearts were linked – or rather, because the older heart was linked to its younger self – but I knew without a shadow of a doubt that the Dark Man was using
my
heart, the younger heart he had stolen from me, to flit haphazardly through time, to jump from one day, one year, one century to another in an effort to escape.

But clearly he was finding it impossible. Though whether that was because the hearts, when active and in such close proximity to one another, were inseparable or because the heart in my possession was latching on to my desire, my need, my desperation even, to stick with him, I had no idea. All I knew for certain was that, try as he might, he couldn’t shake me off. If there
was
a way of detaching me, of breaking the link, then he was not strong enough, or perhaps simply not canny enough, to make it happen.

As though not only the hearts but our thoughts were linked, I sensed him deciding to abandon that tack, to try something different. I knew what he was going to do before he did it. I knew that rather than jumping from one
time
to another, he was instead going to try to escape by jumping from one
place
to another.

What happened first, though, was that we returned to the present day – or rather, to the point at which we’d started our tussle: 19th June 2003. Our surroundings settled, became sharper and more
fixed
; the sense of being buffeted about slowed and then ceased altogether.

The Dark Man’s body stopped jittering and phasing for a moment. It became solid, entrenched wholly in the here and now. I knew, though, that this was only a temporary thing; knew that he was, in effect, briefly taking stock, getting his bearings, before launching himself elsewhere. I knew too that if I wanted to stop him, trap him, then this might be my only chance. But I was also reeling. I, too, needed a moment to orientate myself, get my breath back. Even so, I tried to imagine using the heart to throw a lasso of energy around him, ensnare him.

Just then, however, someone shouted my name, breaking my concentration. The voice was harsh, urgent, and very close. I heard running footsteps.

And then the Dark Man
leaped
.

That was what it felt like. I know because I leaped with him. There was a sense of propulsion, of hurtling through space, of my surroundings flashing by in a smear. I had the notion both that I’d been dragged after him and also that I was giving chase, determined not to lose him. For a long moment I had no inkling where or when I was. I was rushing through darkness, the heart’s energy rippling through me. I was screaming – or someone was.

And then I arrived.

I hit hard ground. I stumbled and fell, gasping at the flash of bone-jarring pain as my knee impacted with something sharp. I heard the clattering of stones or bricks; more distantly I heard traffic. I felt a brief but warm summer breeze on my skin. As my vision cleared I became aware of shapes around me, some blurred by darkness, others sketchily defined by a grainy, yellowish light that leaked in from… somewhere.