The Wraiths of War (3 page)

Ginger looked from one man to another, his anger turning to petulance and then to uncertainty. He looked to his knot of cronies, who had initially egged him on with their sneering laughter, but they’d lapsed into silence and were now looking at their shoes or huddling into their jackets, keen to disassociate themselves from their thuggish companion.

Ginger looked first at me and then at Frank. ‘You haven’t heard the last of this,’ he said, and stabbed his finger in our direction, ‘neither of you. I’ll have you yet, you mark my words.’

‘Yeah, you and the Kaiser’s army,’ retorted Frank, and everyone laughed.

Ginger’s face went as red as his hair. He clenched his fists, gave us one more murderous look, then stalked away.

A few of the men catcalled after him, but the general mood was one of great good humour. The incident seemed to have stirred the collective blood, to have brought us all together, reminding us – on this unseasonably cold and wind-swept day – that we were here to unite against a common enemy. Conversation swelled and bubbled in the wake of the bully’s departure; hands were shaken; strangers introduced themselves to strangers.

I stepped towards Frank, hand outstretched. ‘Mate of yours, was he?’ I asked, nodding towards Ginger’s retreating back.

‘Bosom pal,’ Frank said. ‘Wasn’t that obvious?’

His hand met mine, and it was warm, his grip strong. He was so full of life I felt like weeping.

‘I’m Alex,’ I said. ‘Alex Locke.’

‘Frank Martin,’ said Frank.

I nodded at a pub called The Crown, which was across the road, opposite the recruiting station. ‘Fancy a pint once we’ve joined up?’

Frank’s grin widened. ‘Why not?’

I mulled it over for a long time before deciding to go ahead. In the back of my mind, though, I always knew that now I had the means at my disposal – i.e. the ability to use the heart without it half-killing me – I’d have to give it a try. If I didn’t, and everything went tits up at some later date, I knew I’d only end up wondering what might have happened if I had. And more to the point, whether, by avoiding what seemed like an obvious solution, I’d made things unnecessarily difficult for myself.

I reasoned too that if it wasn’t meant to be then it wouldn’t work out. And that if it
was
meant to be, then it would. In short, I’d be putting myself into the hands of Fate, just as I had when I’d gone along to the recruiting station in Lewisham. I’d left the timing of that up to destiny, and things had worked out just fine. I’d met Frank as I was supposed to, we’d joined up together, and now, despite the disparity in our ages, we were great pals.

In fact, it was Frank who I talked the whole thing over with, in a roundabout way, one night in The Globe over a few pints. The Globe was a poky little boozer in Lambeth, not far from the Bethlehem Royal Hospital – or Bedlam, as it was more popularly known.

It had been a couple of weeks since that blustery day when we’d first put paid to Ginger and joined up together. Since then we’d been kicking our heels, waiting for our call-up papers. Such was the enthusiasm among the men of Britain when war had been declared that many recruiting stations had had to temporarily close down in order to deal with the backlog of paperwork that needed processing before the thousands of eager volunteers could become bona fide members of the armed forces.

When Frank and I had reached the front of the recruitment office queue two weeks earlier, the flustered-looking officer on duty had simply taken our names and addresses and told us we’d be contacted ‘in due course’. Frank had learned from a bloke at his work, whose cousin was in the Royal Fusiliers, that we could be waiting a couple of months before we heard anything further. According to Frank’s work mate’s cousin, it was a logistical nightmare trying to fix up quarters and find suitable training facilities for the huge influx of new recruits. Added to which there was a shortage of uniforms, weapons and food. The Great War might only be a few weeks old, but already it was taking a massive toll on the country’s infrastructure and resources.

It was odd how a new century and a new monarch, or more especially the death of one who had epitomised the era that was named after her, could alter the mood and ethos of a country. Although the current year was only a couple of decades on from my three-month sabbatical in Victorian London, it felt like a different age entirely. The London of the 1890s had been a city of horse-drawn carriages, thick fog, gas-lit streets and elaborate, cumbersome clothing. More pertinently it had been a city of extremes – of astounding technological and commercial progress on the one hand and chronic poverty on the other.

Now, though, things seemed to have… the only phrase that sprang to mind was ‘settled down’. Although ongoing social reform under the Liberal government, which had come to power in 1906, had to be a good thing, to me London seemed to have lost much of its colour and vitality, to have acquired a drabness, like a set of once fresh and fashionable clothes that had now faded and sagged out of shape.

Perhaps it was simply the dark cloud of war, which hung over everything; perhaps it was my own misconception of the world around me; or maybe it was even that I didn’t have Clover here to keep me company, as I had in the 1890s. Whatever the reason, I couldn’t help thinking that the London of 1914 needed a bloody good shot in the arm. The clothes that people wore were simpler, more sombre and less individual than they’d been twenty years earlier, and even the way people talked had changed. The mannered, formal, often colourful verbosity of the Victorians had, in a very short time, given way to a simpler, more homogenised way of speaking – one that seemed closer to how my parents and grandparents had spoken in the ’60s and ’70s, even though that era was still another half-century down the line.

The Globe, where I’d taken to meeting up with Frank most evenings (I had no idea whether, in this day and age, Frank was underage, and I didn’t ask – if he wasn’t, it would have seemed a bloody weird question), was poky and low-ceilinged, the furniture, floors and bar hewn of dark, dusty wood, the air grainy with pipe smoke. The local brew was strong – though it was also tepid and sometimes tasted a bit funky, on which evenings I favoured whisky to avoid the squits (not wine, though, which was my usual tipple at home; wine was for the ‘toffs’). The clientele was one hundred per cent male, aside from the landlord’s wife, who had a lazy eye and a permanent sneer. A fire roared in the grate to the right of the main bar, whatever the weather, and tarnished horse brasses adorned the walls.

By modern standards The Globe was a quiet pub, though sometimes, later in the evening, a sing-song would break out, occasionally accompanied by an enthusiastic plonk on the piano. For the most part, though, the only sounds to punctuate the smoky, somnolent atmosphere were the click of dominoes, the crackle of logs burning in the grate and the low rumble of conversation.

It hadn’t been difficult cultivating a friendship with Frank, a fact that helped alleviate the guilt I felt at the sense that I was manipulating events, and therefore him, simply to keep Destiny, or Fate, or whatever, on the right path. He was a lively, bright lad, and he seemed mature for his age – though that might have been because the young people of this time were expected to shuck off the indulgences of childhood as soon as they left school and become adults almost overnight, usually marrying in their early twenties.

It was the last day of August, a Monday, which was significant to me only insofar as a couple of weeks earlier I’d promised myself I’d come to a decision by the end of the month as to whether I’d do what I’d been thinking of doing ever since (more or less) waking up in my new nanite-enhanced body. Halfway across the world the First Battle of Garua was taking place in Nigeria between British and German forces, a skirmish that would result in a German victory. But here in Lambeth, even though talk in the country was of little else, the War still seemed not only impossibly distant, but not entirely real.

Frank and I were on our third pint of the evening, or maybe our fourth. He may have been only seventeen, and have weighed ten stone soaking wet, but I’ll say this for him – he couldn’t half put it away. In fact, sometimes I had a job keeping up – and so it was proving this evening. He still looked bright as a button, whereas I was feeling woozy and dull-headed, despite the nanites in my system. I’m not sure whether I’d been consciously planning to discuss my dilemma with Frank, or whether it was simply that I felt if I didn’t share it with someone soon I’d burst. At any rate, all at once, my inhibitions loosened by alcohol, I heard myself asking, ‘Listen, Frank, have you ever read
The Time Machine
by H.G. Wells?’

Frank looked momentarily surprised by the left-field nature of the question, then pushed out his bottom lip in lieu of a shrug. ‘Can’t say as I have. He’s the coward, isn’t he? Always going on about war being wrong and all that?’

‘I don’t think he’s a coward,’ I said. ‘A pacifist maybe.’

‘Same thing, ain’t it?’

‘Not really. But anyway – you know of it?
The Time Machine
? You know the story?’

Frank screwed his face up, as if trying to recall the name of a distant cousin. ‘Is that the one about the bloke who can go into the future?’ He snorted. ‘A bit daft, if you ask me. Kids’ stuff.’

Resisting the urge to discuss the merits and demerits of Wells’s far-reaching vision, I said, ‘Yes, but what if it was true? What if you
could
go into the future? Or the past for that matter?’

Frank looked at me as though I was simple. ‘You can’t, though, can you?’

‘Just bear with me,’ I said, trying not to become frustrated at his lack of imagination.

‘Bear with what?’ he said, a note of irritation in his voice. ‘What’s the point of this, Alex? Whatever I might look like to you, I’m not a bloody kid any more.’

‘I know that,’ I said, ‘and I’m not making fun of you. Think of this as… a hypothesis?’

His eyes narrowed. ‘You mean as something that’s daft, but that we pretend is true? That we take seriously even though we
know
it’s barmy?’

‘Exactly!’

‘Why?’

‘Just because… well, because sometimes it’s good to think outside the box.’

‘What box?’

I waved a hand. ‘I’m not talking about a real box. What I mean is… think of the world as having boundaries. Within those boundaries is everything we know about, everything we accept.’

‘Everything that’s true and real?’

‘Everything we
accept
as being true and real. The sum of all human knowledge.’

‘All right,’ he said slowly.

‘Now imagine there are things we
don’t
know about. Things we haven’t learned yet. And they exist outside these boundaries – not because they’re not real, or because they’re daft or childish, but simply because we don’t know about them yet.’

‘Like finding a way of travelling into the future?’

‘Or the past, yes.’

He sighed indulgently. ‘All right. But I still don’t see what you’re getting at.’ Abruptly he laughed. ‘Sometimes, I think you’re half-cracked.’ I grinned, was about to agree with him, and then had a sudden thought. I put my hand in my jacket pocket, aware that my heart was beating hard. ‘I want to show you something,’ I said. ‘To illustrate my point.’

He looked at me uncomprehendingly, but shrugged as if to say:
Go ahead
.

I glanced around me, ever wary, and withdrew the obsidian heart. Frank took a nonchalant sip of his pint, but to me it felt like a charged moment. Keeping the heart below the level of the edge of the table, out of sight of prying eyes, I extended my arm towards him and opened my palm.

‘Here,’ I said, ‘take it.’

He glanced down, his expression dubious. In the gloom of the pub it must have looked as if I was offering him a lump of coal.

‘What is it?’

‘Take it,’ I repeated. ‘Have a look.’

He gave a little shake of his head, but then sighed and took the heart from my hand. I tensed as he lifted it in front of his face so he could peer at it more closely, and subtly tried to adjust my position so that I was shielding it from sight.

If I expected anything to happen, for the heart to respond to Frank in some significant way, or for him to respond to it, I was disappointed. He simply stared at it in bafflement, moving it from side to side. ‘What is it?’

‘What does it look like?’

He glanced at me, as if uncertain whether I was trying to catch him out. ‘It’s a heart, ain’t it? Carved out of ebony or something.’ He hefted it in his hand. ‘It’s a nice piece.’

My own heart was thumping harder now. I was half-surprised the vibrations weren’t causing pint glasses to rattle on tables, curious eyes to turn in our direction. My mouth felt dry and I licked my lips. I said, ‘Imagine that’s
your
time machine, Frank. Imagine that with that you could go anywhere, backwards or forwards. That you just had to think yourself there and there you’d be. Where would you go?’

He looked at the heart and scowled. ‘Well, I don’t know, do I?’

‘Isn’t there anywhere you want to go? Anything you want to see?’

‘I’ve never really thought about it.’

‘Think about it now.’

‘Why?’

I sat back, smiled, tried to take the intensity out of the situation, to make it into more of a game. ‘Call it… an intellectual exercise.’

‘The only exercise I want to do is lift me arm with a pint glass in it.’

I sighed, on the point of giving up. Then I had a brainwave. ‘What about the War?’

‘What about it?’

‘Well, wouldn’t you want to end it if you could? Stop it before it had even started?’

For a moment I thought he was going to say no. He looked almost sulky, like a schoolboy who’d been asked whether he wanted to cancel his birthday party. Then he said, ‘Suppose so.’

‘So what if, using the heart, you could travel back in time and… I don’t know… stop Gavrilo Princip from shooting Franz Ferdinand? Would you do it?’

‘Dunno,’ he said, and then grudgingly, ‘Maybe.’

‘But what if, by stopping Princip, there was the possibility you’d be opening the door to something worse?’