by Scott Baker
‘Hello?’ he repeated with even less certainty. The line was full of static.
‘Is this Shaun Strickland?’ came a voice. American accent.
‘Who wants to know?’
‘Where are you?’ asked the voice. Shaun hung up. How could he be so stupid? In his daze he had almost forgotten that people were trying to kill him, and he had just given them a signal. The phone rang again.
Shaun stared at it, his thumb moving towards the green ‘answer’ button. If he answered they might be able to trace him. His brother, Tim, once told him they only needed six seconds to trace a landline, but how long for a cell? But what if it wasn’t the bad guys? He thought about throwing the phone or smashing it, but then reasoned that he might need it.
Instead, he flipped the vibrating phone over, his cold fingers searching to find the battery-eject catch. As soon as he popped the battery the ringing stopped dead. He breathed. He had to get out of the area immediately.
He gathered up the diary and tucked it deep inside his inner jacket pocket. He looked straight down the canal. It ran perpendicular to the several roads that crossed it, but it was all exposed ground, and the rain was starting to come down hard. He could not afford to get the diary wet, so he took off his coat, wrapped it tightly, the diary in the middle, and carried it under his arm like a rugby ball.
Shaun ran straight and hard, away from the bridge and the distant blare of police sirens. He didn’t trust the police in this town. Maybe at the next overpass he would try to hail a cab. If he could just get away some place, he would have time to think and read.
‘Where to?’ the taxi driver asked as Shaun, drenched and desperate, bundled into the front seat.
‘Hey, man! Shit, this ain’t my cab, man!’ he protested as Shaun’s pockets spilled water onto the upholstery.
‘Sorry,’ he said, thankful to be sitting down. He had run down the canal for around an hour in the driving rain. Each overpass came and went with his brain giving the same advice: just one more, not far enough yet.
‘Where to?’ the cabbie asked again. He was a gruff-looking man of about forty, with tufts of white hair spilling out from under his cap. Shaun checked his driver ID mounted on the dashboard: Vern.
‘I don’t care, just go. Just get away,’ Shaun said, trying to catch his breath.
‘Don’t know that street,’ Vern said with a straight face.
‘Anywhere!’ Shaun said. ‘Head for DC. I’ve got money.’
‘What? Are you shittin’ me?’ Vern’s brusque reply came.
But Shaun, dazed and weary, and for the moment feeling safe, was already asleep. The cabbie crunched the car into gear and set off north for the interstate, wondering how far he could get before his lucrative fare woke up.
Shaun dreamed he was standing on a stage in front of an auditorium full of people who were looking expectantly up at him. He could not make out the details on the faces, not even the ones in the front row. He was there to deliver his speech. He stood at his pulpit about to preach the good news to his congregation. His theories on the nature of time, and its connection to and dependence on the physical world, were fantastic stuff, he knew.
He had theorised a plausible way to tag a particle and send it back in time. It all had to do with gravity. He was going to blow them away. He looked over the crowd, and they looked back at him. He had come all the way to England for this, and now was his time to shine.
He opened his mouth. A long rasp of air escaped his throat. He tried to speak again, but he didn’t know what to say. He knew he was talking about time. He started with the word: ‘Time …’ But nothing followed. He did not know how to explain it; could not find the words. The crowd started to giggle. A ripple of murmurs passed through the auditorium from front to back. Soon they became jeers.
He didn’t know what to say. They all wanted him to explain it. What could he say? He could not remember anything. He was an expert on this; why could he not remember anything? He looked into the crowd. The shimmering faces were laughing out loud now, at him, at his incompetence. Then he saw another face. A face that wasn’t laughing. This face was looking right at him. Then she smiled. Lauren.
Their eyes met, and although she was way up the back of the room, he spoke only to her.
‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said, his eyes filling with tears. ‘I don’t know what to say. I’m lost. I’m lost without you. I don’t know what to do.’
Lauren smiled again.
‘I don’t know how to explain it,’ he pleaded.
Her eyes softened, then she spoke. Her voice was kind and understanding.
‘You have to read.’
‘Buddy! I said, is that your phone?’ It was the abrupt voice of the taxi driver.
Shaun’s eyes tried to focus. He rolled more than turned his head round to face the direction the voice had come from.
‘What?’ he asked, his tongue feeling furry.
‘That, down there. I think your phone just fell out and smashed or somethin’.’
He looked down at his feet. Indeed, while he was asleep his flip-phone and battery had fallen out of his pocket, popping apart. He reached forward and squinted at the dull grey plastic covering. Its screen had a crack in it. He sighed, unsure what to do. He was fairly sure he was safe just so long as he didn’t answer any calls, so he decided to put it back together just to make sure it worked then turn it off again.
‘You know,’ Vern started as he watched Shaun bring the small device back to life, ‘I got a kid with one o’ those. She’s fourteen now and I fink the fing’s practically stuck to ’er ear. I can’t get it off ’er. She answers calls in the middle of dinner. You know? In the middle of dinner! Now, I’m not saying I’m always around or nothin’—’
‘They left a message,’ Shaun stated matter-of-factly.
‘Huh? You got a message? You know, it was like an extra fifteen bucks a month for my Sally to get message-bank, but she’s gotta have it. They always gotta have it. Then it’s the added text features this, and ring-tone that. I tells ya …’
What kind of killer leaves you a message? his brain asked, as Shaun stared at the envelope symbol on the scratched screen.
Vern continued to talk, oblivious to Shaun’s lack of response. Shaun was good at colouring sound. His mother had called it ‘selective hearing’, although she was usually referring to her ignored requests for him to wash the dishes after dinner.
Shaun heard nothing now but the sound of his own thoughts as he debated whether to connect to the network and retrieve the message, or if it was more dangerous to let the information go unheard. He flipped the phone shut.
‘… eight or nine times a day! I mean, I know that boys and girls are getting older when they’re younger these days, if you know what I mean, but when I was her age I wasn’t even allowed to take a girl to the movies on my own. You’d fink I coulda gone to the movies! Not that it stopped me, though …’
Shaun flipped open the phone. Death might not be such a bad option, relatively speaking. Taking a deep breath, he held down the number 1 on his keypad to speed-dial his voicemail service. Silence followed. Then there was a beep. Finally it rang once, and then switched to the familiar female automated voice recording.
Shaun circumvented the process by skipping ahead, hitting the 1 button twice quickly. BEEP. BEEP. Then he heard it. The voice was male.
‘Mr Strickland – I believe your life may be in danger—’ static. ‘This is not a hoax. I need to meet with you.’ The voice then recited several short phrases, as if reading from a script:
‘We actually move about in time every day.’ Pause.
‘The space craft would not be able to travel faster than light.’ Pause.
‘Impossible to hold these worm holes open.’ Pause … shuffling noise.
‘Power requirements beyond what we are capable of.’ Pause.
‘Bethany would be older by a day.’ Long pause.
‘I may know something about what’s going on.’
Shaun sat back. Who was that? What the hell was it about? His life may be in danger? No shit. But then, the other part of the message that had caught his attention: ‘I may know something about what’s going on.’
The past twelve hours had been the strangest of his life, the worst of his life, and he had to find a way to figure out why it was happening. He knew, with growing certainty, that the book he carried was important to some very dangerous people. That made it valuable.
And someone out there knew something about what was going on, and was reaching out to Shaun. He tried to recall what he had read last night.
‘I had to find and record a video interview with Joshua of Galilee. I was to interview the man they called Jesus.’
Oh, man. He stopped for a moment and thought about it. If, hypothetically, it were possible to travel back in time, with the means to record an interview with a historical figure, who in the whole of history would be the person chosen? Which single person had been the cause of more debate, who had affected the modern world more than this man Jesus?
Shaun was not religious. In fact, he rejected the superstitious nonsense that had been attributed to this man, if indeed there had been such a person. But he knew that enough people in the world believed; that if there was an interview with Jesus, it would surely be valuable. Maybe even something worth killing for.
He sank back. His mind reeled. Could it really be all about that? Could it really be about this story in the damp bundle of jacket in his lap? If it were real, it blew everything out of the water. Not only did it talk about a modern-day man on a mission to interview the most influential figure in history, but for that to be true, it meant that somehow, someone had learned how to travel back in time.
As fanciful as that notion was to most people, suggesting it to Shaun was an entirely different prospect. Shaun Strickland was an expert in that field, and he had proved that it was impossible to send anything back in time. He knew the facts so well that he had even documented them in his paper on—
Shaun inhaled sharply. His paper.
That was where he had recognised the words from. He could not believe it. He flipped open his phone and hit the speed-dial key again, skipping through the process so he could replay the message:
‘We actually move about in time every day.’ Pause.
‘The space craft would not be able to travel faster than light.’ Pause.
‘Impossible to hold these worm holes open.’ Pause … shuffling noise.
‘Power requirements beyond what we are capable of.’ Pause.
‘Bethany would be older by a day.’ Long pause.
‘I may know something about what’s going on.’
He replayed the message one last time, listening carefully to a particular line:
‘Impossible to hold these worm holes open.’ Pause … shuffling noise.
That was it. The sound of paper being shuffled. Whoever was speaking was turning pages. They were reading the lines from physical pages. Pages of his paper. The words the man was saying were Shaun’s.
‘… You know, now I’m not saying I didn’t touch the girl or nothing, know what I’m sayin’?’ Vern recounted. ‘But when you—’
‘Take me to the internet,’ Shaun said in a hurry.
‘… told me she was … What?’
‘Take me to the internet!’ he repeated, suddenly burning with purpose.
‘I been driving cabs for a lotta years now, buddy, but I ain’t never heard anyone ask for that address. That’s a first, for sure.’
‘Would you shut up!’ Shaun said, suddenly irritated.
Vern stopped short, a little startled. ‘I’d take you straight there, buddy, ’cept to be honest, well we’ve been drivin’ north for a while now and we’re somewhere on the interstate about to hit Virginia. I’m not exactly sure where the internet is round here.’
Shaun looked out the window, noticing his surroundings for the first time. Vern was right. They were out on a highway somewhere.
He glanced down and saw the meter tick over to five hundred and seventy-eight dollars. He smiled. It was liberating in a perverse way not to care about money. His whole world had just been ripped apart, and he seemingly had come into the possession of the most important book in history. Five hundred and seventy-eight dollars wouldn’t make the slightest difference to anything. A day ago he would have been concerned, but everything was relative.
Relative. He sighed. That’s how his obsession had started. He was thirteen when his dad gave him a book instead of a basketball for Christmas. He had been upset at the time, but that book, Einstein and His General Theory of Relativity: The Illustrated Edition had changed Shaun irrevocably. His dad had told him that an Englishman had struck-up a conversation with him in a bookstore and recommended the book for Shaun, saying that it had changed his own life when he was a boy, and he was certain it would do the same for Shaun. The man had been right; it had sent Shaun down a whole new path.
He saw a sign pass by in a blur. Eighty miles to the next town, where surely there would be some kind of internet cafe. He had written that paper more than six years ago, and barely remembered it, but he always backed up his papers on a secure online server, and he knew he needed to print out that paper. He needed to find the page numbers, then he needed to dial them into a phone. It was the only meaning he could grapple from the seemingly random collection of sentences garbled at him through the message.
He looked down at his lap and saw the insulated bundle. Slowly he unwrapped it and looked over the pages with new eyes.
CHAPTER 23
‘There are many types of gladiators,’ Malbool told me as we walked through the training yard of the ludus, ‘and it is common practice for gladiators of one type to fight gladiators of another type. He is a “secutor”,’ he said, pointing to a short, stocky man with plating down one arm who was practising with a long, curved shield. ‘He will commonly fight a “retiarius”,’ Malbool finished, gesturing across the yard to where another group of men practised with nets and long, three-pronged spears.
‘This is how you fought me,’ I said with interest, watching as a tall man showed two others the technique for how to throw a net, swinging it, then twisting his wrist just before letting it go, causing the net to fan out, its weighted edges spreading wide.
‘It is,’ Malbool replied, pausing alongside me to watch the exercises. ‘The net, my friend. The net equals all men. But not you.’ He clapped a hand on my shoulder. ‘Come, there is more to see.’
He continued to walk, explaining further.
‘It is all about the spectacle. If two men came out with no armour, you would have one of two conclusions: they would either massacre one another in an unskilled bloodbath far too quickly, or fight so tentatively as to make the engagement boring. It is for this reason that the men wear armour, but it is measured. A helmet, one arm, perhaps a shield. All this creates the conditions needed for dynamic and skilled combat. When the time comes for you to choose your style of fighting, do so with great care. It could mean the continuation or the end of your life.’
He went on to tell me of many of the other groups of fighters I might encounter, and as I watched groups of men practise with swords, shields and fists, I knew that to gain my freedom, to fulfil my mission, I would have to be part of this rehearsed bloodshed.
‘The “eques” and the “provocatuer” usually fight others of the same type, but most disciplines will fight gladiators of other styles. A “murmillo” will usually fight and defeat a “hoplomachus” but if he were to fight a skilled “retiarius” or “Gaul” he would most likely be cut down.’
‘Rock, paper, scissors.’ I muttered under my breath.
‘Still,’ finished Malbool, ‘it is the skill of the individual that makes the contest most exciting. There are no hard and fast rules for who will win any given battle.’ His eyes looked straight into mine.
‘You are a man most rare,
’ he began uneasily. ‘You speak in the Roman tongue, yet I have heard you speak in your sleep in many strange tongues I do not understand. You look near enough to a Roman but are more refined, so you could be from any number of lands …’ Malbool left it hanging. I gave no reply, simply returned his gaze. He turned away.
‘I was a leader among my people. I had two sons and a daughter. I lost everything when the Romans took me. They killed my wife and my daughter. What fate befell my sons I do not know, and I cannot bear to think about it. I know you are from somewhere far away, but understand this: I too have lost. I do not tell you of the games because I boast of my knowledge, but because I have learned to accept my new life and take from it what I can. My master treated me as well as a master can treat a slave – that is, like a dog, but a dog that he feeds. Not a day went by that I did not dream of slicing his throat in his sleep, though I knew that it would make my situation worse.’
Malbool put his face close to mine then, as if imparting a great secret. ‘I took what I could from him. I took the knowledge I needed to improve my station. He had promised me freedom at the end of the year. Then his enemies destroyed him and took his property. I was part of that property. I know you are eager to get away, stranger. I see it in your eyes, but you must learn that the life you had is gone. If you want to stay alive, you must fight for it.’ He turned and left me standing in the courtyard, surrounded by the civil practice of an uncivilised sport.
It had been more than two weeks since I fought in the pit, and I was still coming to terms with my situation. When I had known no different, I desired my freedom, but there had been no urgency for it. It was only now that I realised with horror that I was running to a timeframe.
I was miles from my objective, and I was a prisoner. Armed with the knowledge of what I was supposed to do, the gravity of how far I was from achieving that goal became clear. I did not have any real reference to the date as I had known it in my previous life; I could only hope that a man across the sea had not yet been nailed to a cross.
