The Wraiths of War (27 page)

This room was the nursery in our little flat in Shepherd’s Bush, and the smell of fresh paint and fresh fabric, coupled with the lack of curtains, placed the timeframe at mid 2007. In fact, I could be even more accurate than that, because I knew without a shadow of a doubt that the heart had brought me to the date I’d had bobbing in my head for the past week or so.

Thursday May 10th 2007. As closely as Lyn and I had been able to ascertain between us, this was the day when she had first encountered the Dark Man.

He had come in the evening, she’d told me, when I was out teaching. Aside from that she had little recollection of the incident. She said she could remember it now only as an awful dream – or as less than that; as the
flavour
of an awful dream. It was a memory which even now her mind veered away from, or erected barriers against, whenever she tried to focus upon it.

All she remembered with any certainty was waking up at around 9 p.m. that night, and thereafter of having a little wriggling
something
in her mind. Something which made her think of a worm burrowing into an apple, and which, little by little, blackened and poisoned her thoughts.

‘It’s like… like he’d made my mind into a dark and terrifying place. Like a house of nightmares that I couldn’t escape from. At first, sometimes I’d be there, trapped in this horrible place, and sometimes I wouldn’t. But when I was there I couldn’t make myself understood, and when I wasn’t there I’d forget about it – or almost forget, enough at least that I couldn’t explain what I was going through. And then, more and more, I’d find myself trapped in the nightmare house until finally I couldn’t get out at all. And all the time I was looking for you, Alex, but I couldn’t find you. And I was so scared that I lost the ability to function on my own. I couldn’t speak… couldn’t think…’

Even telling me this much had made her tremble. And although I’d wanted to know everything about her first encounter with the Dark Man I hadn’t pushed it. Looking around now, at the half-finished nursery, at the chair that Lyn would never sit in, I felt sad and angry. We’d been so happy together, and so looking forward to the birth of our first child. And it wasn’t as if we’d been asking for much. We’d just wanted a simple, straightforward life. Thinking of how the Dark Man had casually and spitefully destroyed all of that made the anger boil up into something vicious and murderous inside me. The Dark Man was nothing but a cancer, and if I got the opportunity I would eradicate him, cut him out.

I could tell by the sky through the curtainless window that it was already evening. But what time in the evening? It was May and edging towards dusk, so I guess that would make it… 7:30? 8 p.m.? Lyn couldn’t remember exactly what time the Dark Man had showed up, but what she
did
remember was waking up on our bed, fully clothed, at around 9 p.m. I used to leave the flat for my class at 6:30, and be back around 9:45, so was it possible the Dark Man’s visit had already happened? That I was already too late? No, surely not. The heart wouldn’t be so cruel – would it? Feeling a little panicky, I crossed the room to the door, opened it a crack and listened.

Faintly I could hear music. One of the female vocalists that Lyn used to like: Norah Jones, Tori Amos, someone like that. Along with the clatter-clink-bump of pots and pans and crockery, and cupboards opening and closing, which I knew was the sound of Lyn clearing up after dinner, the music was coming from the kitchen, which was the last door on the left at the end of the corridor. And now that I had the door open I could hear Lyn half-singing, half-humming along with the music. It was a distracted and fairly tuneless sound, to be honest, and yet the sweetness of her voice, the innocence of it, was like a knife to my heart.

But there was no time for sentiment. I was here for a reason – but what reason? How
exactly
was I going to stop the Dark Man? By making myself known to Lyn, announcing my presence, acting (unbeknownst to her) as her protector? But wouldn’t that lead to some awkward questions? Like why had I come back? Why wasn’t I teaching? Why was I wearing a T-shirt and boxers, and looking all rumpled and tousle-haired, as if I’d been asleep? And, perhaps most pertinently, why did I look the best part of a decade older than I had an hour or so earlier?

Suddenly I had a horrible thought. What if
I
was the Dark Man? Or rather, what if it had been
my
presence here now – an older, more care-worn version of the man she knew and loved – that had sent her over the edge? Was that possible? But she had identified the Dark Man in the Punch and Judy, hadn’t she? And I had had run-ins with him; he wasn’t a figment of our imagination.

Even so, I dithered, wondering how best to do what I had presumably been brought here to do.

I was still dithering when Lyn screamed. But I was running barefoot along the corridor as the scream became words, as her voice, shrill and raw with fear, demanded, ‘
Who are you? Get out! Get out of my flat!
’

I was a metre or two from the kitchen door when I heard
his
voice – the Dark Man’s. It was a clotted rasp, and it sounded not malicious, as I’d expected, but wheedling, even regretful.

‘Don’t be scared. I’ve been looking for you. It’s taken me so long to get here. I just… just want you to remember me.’

I hit the partly open door with my shoulder and burst into the kitchen. I saw Lyn pressed back against the kitchen sink, her hands soapy, terror on her face. The Dark Man, looking similar to how I’d seen him in Covent Garden, was looming over her as she leaned back, his gnarled hand reaching out. Before I could do anything to stop him, I saw him touch her cheek lightly with the tips of his fingers, saw (or thought I saw; it happened in a split second) a black spark, like a shot of poison, spasm from the withered obsidian heart in the Dark Man’s other hand, pass in an instant through his body and into the fingers of the hand that was touching Lyn. Then the blackness passed through his fingers and into Lyn’s skin, forming a bruise-like blemish on her cheek. I saw Lyn’s eyes widen in utter horror – and then her body dropped as if her bones had been removed, her legs folding beneath her.

‘
No!
’ I screamed as I ran at the Dark Man.

But he was no longer there. Suddenly I was alone with Lyn, who was lying in a crumpled heap at my feet. I dropped to my knees beside her, saw that the dark blemish on her cheek was already fading, being absorbed through her pores and into her body. Frantically I pressed the heart against her now-pale cheek, hoping I wasn’t already too late, that I could use it to draw the poison out of her before it became embedded, wormed its way into her mind.

It didn’t work. The heart remained inert in my hand, nothing but a cold black stone.

‘Come on,’ I muttered. ‘Come on, you fucker. Why did you bring me here, if not for this?’

I kept the heart pressed against her cheek for several minutes, willing it to come to life,
ordering
it to undo what the Dark Man had done – but to no avail. The heart refused to play ball. In the end, snarling, I drew back my arm to hurl it across the room. But I arrested the action before I could carry it through, forced myself to calm down.

‘Useless bastard,’ I spat, holding the heart in front of my face, before, due to my lack of pockets, tucking it under my arm. With both hands free I picked Lyn up, carried her through the flat and into our bedroom. I laid her on top of the bed, and after putting the heart down on the bedside table, placed a hand gently on her swollen stomach. I felt nothing at first, and then there was a squirm of movement, followed by a little thump, which, despite the situation, made me smile.

‘Hang in there, Kate,’ I whispered. ‘I’ll see you soon. I love you.’

I sat on the edge of the bed and stroked Lyn’s hair, and then her cheek where the Dark Man had touched her, wondering what else I could do. Remembering how Lyn had gained comfort from simply holding the heart, how she had said that she could feel it healing her, I grabbed it from the bedside table and pressed it between her hands. Then I simply held it there, my hands over hers, for a long time, looking at her face.

She looked peaceful, but then she had looked peaceful from the moment she’d passed out. I thought again of how the Dark Man had said that he had been looking for her, that he wanted her to remember him.

The words themselves could have constituted a threat, but the way he had said them hadn’t seemed threatening. Was it possible that what he had done to her, therefore, had been an accident? In which case, could he be
persuaded
not to touch her? Maybe if I’d just been a bit quicker off the mark, if I hadn’t stood dithering in the nursery…

Perhaps it wasn’t too late. I had the heart, after all; I could try again. Gently I extricated the heart from Lyn’s hands, then leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead.

‘See you earlier,’ I whispered and closed my eyes. I willed the heart to take me back to the nursery, to the exact moment I’d arrived this evening.

I opened my eyes, and felt a moment of disorientation. I wasn’t where I’d expected to be. I was so thrown that it took me a moment to recognise my surroundings – and then it struck me.

I was in my bedroom, in my house in Kensington. My bed sheets were rumpled, as if I’d just crawled out of them, and there on my bedside table was my phone and the John le Carré book I’d been reading the previous evening.

So the heart had transported me not to the nursery, but back to where I’d started from this morning. And from the quality of the light pressing against the closed curtains it looked as though I hadn’t been gone long either – possibly only minutes.

I paused just long enough for the post time-travel nausea to peak and then ebb as the nanites kicked in, and then I tried again. I wondered whether the misunderstanding had been mine or the heart’s. Or was the heart sulking because I’d got cross with it? The thought would have been funny if it hadn’t made me uneasy.

There was a slight sense of shifting, and then my bedroom simply solidified around me again. What was going on? Was I losing my touch? I waited for the sickness to come and go, then tried again.

And again I didn’t move.

I tried three more times, thinking that nothing was happening at all, until I realised that, subconsciously, I had heard the same faint bird call outside my window more than once. I tried again – and yes, there it was again. The exact same cawing screech of a distant crow.

So I
was
moving each time I used the heart, but only in time, and only backwards by the same few minutes. Was I stuck in a loop? Had the heart become defective in some way?

In truth, I think I knew the answer. I just didn’t want to face up to it.

I’d had my chance, and I’d blown it. Or perhaps this was the heart’s way of letting me know there were some things I
couldn’t
change, no matter how much I wanted to. Perhaps when it came to events in my past, events that I
knew
had been established in my own timeline, then – even taking into account interference from my future selves, which was
also
part of my established timeline – there was no changing them further.

In some ways this was reassuring (it was as if the heart had a built-in safety cut-out switch that came into effect whenever I tried to do something with potentially cataclysmic consequences), but shittily it also meant there was seemingly no leeway to rectify the wrongs and regrets of the past.

Or was there? Perhaps I was accepting defeat too easily. Perhaps there was another way round it.

I pondered on the problem for a while. Wondered whether the solution might be not to try and overlap an event I’d already lived through, and failed to influence, but to go even further back in time – or even forward.

Yes, maybe that was it. Maybe the easiest and best thing to do was simply to go forward, into my own future, and seek advice from my older self. Would my older self be prepared to help me when I got there? I had no way of knowing. But what I
did
know was that if my older self was simply a future version of me, then when he was my age he would have had this thought too.

In which case, he would be expecting me.

Moving forward was easy.

I’d decided to go forward five years –
exactly
five years – from the day I left, which was Friday November 2nd 2012. It was mind-boggling to think that in what I considered
my
timeline, the one I’d lived in before acquiring the heart, and the one I felt most anchored to, only a few weeks had passed since I’d first got in touch with Benny and met Clover at Incognito. I’d lived for considerably more than a few weeks during that time, of course, having spent three months in Victorian London and another eighteen or so from the late summer of 1914 to early 1916. Soon I’d have to head back there again and live out the rest of the War. Which meant that by the time Candice, my eldest daughter, next saw me I’d have lived through something like five years in what for her would be roughly the same number of weeks.

I’d been thinking a lot about that since finding Kate. About what it really meant. It was something of a headfuck living on a different timescale to everybody else. I hadn’t got used to it, nor probably ever would. A few weeks ago the prospect of going months, even years, without seeing my daughters would have seemed inconceivable. I wondered whether Candice would be shocked at my appearance when she saw me again. Or would she, in that oblivious way all teenagers seemed to have, not even notice how much I’d aged? Or maybe the nanites inside me would slow the effects of ageing right down, and I actually
wouldn’t
look all that different to how I’d looked before I’d gone off to war?

This, of course, was assuming that everything went as intended, and I returned from the Front unscathed.

Once the usual time-travel nausea had subsided, the first thing I did when my bedroom, after shimmering slightly, reappeared around me, albeit subtly altered (the bed stripped, a few things replaced or moved around), was head for the office, which as I think I’ve said before was white, spotless and full of snazzy gadgets. I logged on to the main computer, a flash, flat-screen model, and checked the date, smiling as it showed me I’d arrived when I’d intended: November 2nd 2017.