The colonel burst into raucous laughter, the kind that came up from the belly and took a while to die out.
‘What’s so funny?’ Josh asked.
The colonel wiped a tear from his eye and blew his nose on a large handkerchief.
‘Sorry. It’s been a while since I’ve had a good laugh.’
‘So?’
‘So you’re the first apprentice that has ever asked to be paid.’ He chuckled again.
‘Well, the others must all be mugs, then. Or loaded.’
‘Sorry. Yes, of course. It’s just I haven’t thought about money in such a long time. You forget what it means to not have it.’
Josh had never thought of the colonel as a rich man. In fact, he had always assumed the opposite. By the look of his clothes and the state of his house, it was reasonable to think that he didn’t have a penny.
‘Are you rich?’ asked Josh curiously, ‘like some eccentric millionaire?’
‘Not as such no . . . But let’s just say my “employers” make sure that I have everything I need.’ The colonel walked around the room picking random objects up off the floor and placing them back into their original positions. Josh was astonished to see that the old man knew exactly where they should go.
‘So they have a lot of money?’
‘Amongst other things.’
‘So I get paid then, yeah? Say, like, three hundred quid a day?’
‘Whoa! You don’t even know what the job is yet! Three hundred pounds may seem awfully low when you find out what it is we have to do.’
Josh shrugged. ‘Well, I need three Gs by tomorrow. So is it worth as much as that?’
‘Where we’re going, tomorrow will feel like a lifetime away.’ The colonel took out his watch and tapped one of the many dials, as if it were stuck. ‘This is not the place to have this conversation. Let’s take a walk back to my house and I’ll tell you all about it.’
Josh was about to leave when he remembered the diary and ran back into his bedroom to retrieve it. He took one last look around his room and waved it a mental goodbye — he had a feeling he was never going to see it again.
‘Got your own almanac, I see,’ the colonel said, pointing to the diary. ‘Useful things, books.’
‘There is just one other thing,’ Josh said as they walked out into the hall.
‘Ask away.’
‘What is it with your hair? Three days ago you looked totally different. Does travelling through time make your hair go weird?’
The colonel looked at himself in what was left of the hall mirror and patted his hair down.
‘Three days may have elapsed for you, but it’s been more like three months since I saw you last — I realise it may take some time to get used to all this.’
Outside the rain lashed the pavement. It had cleared the streets of all but a few of the hardiest of pedestrians. A gang of boys sat silently on their BMXs under the cover of a dripping walkway watching the colonel and Josh as they made their way out of the estate.
‘What’s Crash up to now?’ asked one of them.
‘No idea,’ said another, taking out his phone and typing:
CRASH HANGING OUT WITH CRAZY COLONEL. WAT 2 DO?
Lenin’s response was almost immediate.
FOLLOW.
18
The First Lesson
‘Before we embark on anything too adventurous, there are a few ground rules I need to go through with you,’ the colonel said as he pushed the overloaded shopping trolley of bric-a-brac along the pavement. There wasn’t a lot of room under his pink umbrella and Josh was beginning to question whether he should even be seen in public with the man; he smelt of booze and was acting strangely. Yet, certain things he’d said were starting to make sense — which wasn’t a great indication of Josh’s own mental state, but he ignored the alarm bells in his head — he needed the money.
The rain was beginning to tail off as they walked through the shopping arcade. They passed the last of the late-night shoppers who were slowly dragging themselves homeward — arms loaded with plastic bags. Josh watched the way they actively avoided the colonel and his trolley. It was a clever defence mechanism; no one made eye contact with a crazy man, especially one who was pushing a load of rubbish. A perfect way to make yourself unapproachable, if not invisible. Josh would’ve had exactly the same reaction as everyone else a couple of days ago.
‘First, and most importantly, you never go back into your own timeline,’ instructed the colonel, holding up his index finger as if to indicate there would be at least four more rules.
One of the wheels stuck on the trolley, and he spent a minute kicking it back into alignment.
‘Changing your own line causes all sorts of complications and paradoxes, and it’s not something you’ll even remember afterwards. Like drinking a bottle of tequila, you almost always end up dead or worse.’
‘What could be worse?’
‘Excised. Expunged. Redacted. Removed from history, disappeared, never having existed.’
Josh wasn’t sure that was really worse, since the dead didn’t tend to care if anyone remembered who they were, but he decided now was probably not the right time to push the issue.
‘The second point is about the future —’ the colonel began as they came to the corner of the high street and he proceeded to walk straight out in front of an oncoming bus. Josh instinctively reached out to grab him, but the old man was too quick. The bus driver had to slam on the brakes to avoid hitting him. Passengers on board went flying forward, and the driver blared his horn and swore at him through the glass.
Josh went after the trolley as it began to rattle down the road under its own steam. The colonel, meanwhile, was gesticulating at the driver.
He managed to control the trolley and drag the colonel to the other side of the road before the bus driver got out of his cab.
‘What is wrong with you?’
The colonel grabbed Josh’s hand and tapped a button on the side of his watch — time reversed around them — seconds later they were back on the other side of the road waiting for the bus to pass. This time, the colonel waved at the driver as he went by.
‘Nobody can travel into the future. As Shakespeare said: it’s the undiscovered country, too many unknowns, too many variables. There are no paths to follow.’
‘You’re fricking crazy,’ Josh said under his breath, watching the bus disappear round the corner.
‘An unfortunate side-effect of the job. Years of a non-linear existence can slightly disconnect you from reality, like jet lag. By the way, I don’t care for the attitude. It really doesn’t suit you.’
‘All right, Grandad. What century are you from anyway?’
‘Well, since you ask. I was born in 940 — in your terms, that’s the tenth. We tend to use a different system, though, one that has a longer perspective.’
They turned onto Churchill Avenue.
‘So you have travelled into the future,’ Josh stated smugly.
‘Yes. In the same way that most people do. One day at a time.’
Josh calculated the man’s age in his head, maths had been one of his only strong points at school. ‘That makes you over a thousand years old.’
‘If you take into account that I’ve spent more than three hundred and fifty years in the past, I’m actually nearer to fourteen hundred. Ageing doesn’t stand still when you go back, you know. You’re still subject to the same temporal laws of the universe, but they seem to affect us less.’
‘So how long do you live?’
‘Barring accidents and other terminal situations, fifteen-hundred years, but some of the High Council are allegedly nearer two millennia.’
‘So you’re, like, nearly immortal?’
‘Now you’re beginning to understand my predicament. A lot of memories to try to keep track of,’ the colonel said, tapping the side of his head, ‘and birthdays are not quite what they used to be.’
He left the trolley in the front garden and marched up
the front steps of No. 42 two at a time.
19
Cabinets of Curiosities
The first floor of the colonel’s house was like a museum, in stark contrast to the chaos of the hallway and stairs. The large Victorian rooms on this level were full of glass display cabinets, each containing meticulously labelled artefacts.
‘These are cabinets of curiosities — mementoes from previous missions,’ the colonel said proudly. ‘Each one represents a point in history that I’ve had to repair.’ He tapped on the glass of a case. ‘So which one shall we try for your first real test?’
Josh walked along the line of cabinets until he reached one with a vicious-looking cutlass lying on a bed of purple silk; it looked like something out of a pirate movie. The label read ‘Ocracoke Island, 22-11-11.718-Nexus 20’.
‘What was this for?’ Josh asked as he tapped on the glass.
‘That would be the cutlass of Edward Teach. Interesting chap.’
‘Who?’
‘Edward Teach, more commonly known as the pirate Blackbeard.’ The colonel opened the cabinet and carefully took out the sword. He examined the edge with his finger and then began to swing it around his body in a series of deadly scything arcs.
‘Nice weapon for close combat,’ he observed, stopping it millimetres from Josh’s chest. ‘Well balanced.’
Josh stared at the sword. ‘So you’re telling me you’ve met Blackbeard?’ He couldn’t quite hide the disbelief in his voice.
‘Yes, I’d been second mate on his flagship, Adventure, for nearly a year when Lieutenant Maynard finally caught up with him. Nearly didn’t happen. I had quite a job making sure she ran aground when she did — he almost made good on his escape.’
‘So why exactly did you have to stop him?’
‘See for yourself.’
The colonel offered him the sword, and as soon as Josh grasped the hilt he felt that tingling sensation. The same feeling he got from breaking into cars, but a hundred times more powerful. As the lines of history began to unravel from it, he caught fleeting glimpses of ships, and smelt the gunpowder of a battle. As he concentrated harder, the past expanded around him — suddenly he was looking at a young man standing on the deck of a ship in the middle of a wide blue ocean. He could smell the salt air and feel the wind rushing through his hair. It was a strange, dislocated feeling, like standing between two worlds — one foot in each.
‘Our predictions indicated that Blackbeard’s fleet would have intercepted this particular gentleman before he reached his destination.’
Josh didn’t recognise the tubby, bespectacled passenger dressed in knee breeches, waistcoat and white frilly shirt, but he didn’t look to be much older than himself.
‘Who is it?’
‘Have you heard of Benjamin Franklin?’
The name was familiar. He had a vague memory of his mother shouting it out in answer to a question on the TV. ‘Wasn’t he one of the American presidents?’
The colonel took the sword back and placed it carefully onto the silk. Josh felt slightly dizzy, as if he’d just been on a waltzer. It took a while for the room to come back into focus.
‘Not exactly. More like the founding father of the United States. He liked to dabble in meteorology and electricity, and was one mean chess player. When he was about your age, he ran away to London. In one version of events the ship he was travelling on was boarded and sunk by Blackbeard’s fleet. Franklin would have died without ever realising his potential, and the USA would have been a very different place entirely.’
‘So you took out Blackbeard?’ Josh said, trying not to sound too astonished.
The colonel shook his head. ‘No. We just selected one ending from a number of many possible outcomes. It is all planned very carefully to ensure we create the smallest number of side-effects. The sand bar at Ocracoke Island was calculated to be the least impactful event, even though it turned out to be one hell of a battle. I think it may be a little too hairy for your first planned excursion.’
Josh walked around the room. The cabinets were filled with the most random collection of historical objects: scissors, eyeglasses, a letter, some old brass keys, a ship’s compass, four coins fused together by fire, a shoe, an old flintlock pistol. Each item had a date and a location, although some of the ink on the labels had begun to fade.
‘So do you get to keep these after each mission?’ Josh asked, thinking about how valuable some of them might be.
The colonel chuckled. ‘It’s actually the other way round. We need the artefact to find the path.’
‘The path?’
‘To travel safely back through time you need a path, a map, if you like. We use the timelines of man-made objects like these.’ He waved his hand across the room. ‘They each have an inherent history, one that you can use to navigate back to certain events, like a kind of bookmark or waypoint. If the object was particularly personal, you could even use it to reach certain people.’
Josh’s eye was drawn to an old sepia-toned photograph of a beautiful young Victorian woman posing in a tight-waisted corset.
‘So what was her story?’ he asked, pointing at the picture.
The colonel walked over and produced a large ring of keys, which he fumbled through until he found the matching number and proceeded to unlock the cabinet door. He signalled to Josh to take the photo out, which Josh did tentatively, trying not to dislodge the other things that had been carefully arranged around it.
When Josh turned the photograph over, he saw the colonel’s now familiar copperplate handwriting.
‘Mary Somerville, 11.833,’ he read slowly, trying not to reveal his dyslexia.
‘Now Mary was a most interesting lady. She introduced Ada Lovelace to Charles Babbage.’
Josh stared at him blankly.
‘The father of the computer? She also inspired John Couch Adams to discover the planet Neptune. Something I have to take a little credit for.’ He performed a mock bow.
Josh turned the picture back over to study her image close up.
‘Now I think that she would make the perfect test,’ the colonel continued. ‘Would you like to meet her?’ He plucked the photograph out of Josh’s hand and began to talk to it as if she were at the other end of a Skype call.
‘What kind of test?’ asked Josh, who was more than happy to meet such a good-looking woman; he just didn’t like the sound of having to do any kind of exam.
The colonel stopped muttering and turned back to face Josh.
‘A test of your range, of course! Each of us has an inherent limit. We need to know how far you can go back. A hundred years makes you a Centurion, a thousand and you’re a Millennian. So far, we know you can travel back as far as 1944, which that means you’re at least a first-level Centurial, but I want to see if you can make it back to 11.833!’
The ribbons of light were arcing about the photo now. Josh could see symbols dancing around it as the colonel moved his fingers over them.
‘Can’t do this kind of thing with digital photography, electrons too bloody erratic. Ah, there we are — nice safe point to drop into.’ He reached out and brought Josh’s hand towards the photo. ‘Can you feel it, boy? The pulse of history running through your fingers?’
Josh put his fingers tentatively into the web of light and felt the tingling sensation like a cool burning over his skin. There were knots in the lines of light where the symbols were clustering. He moved one of his fingers and felt the knot slide underneath it. There was a feeling like remembering as he heard a voice, smelt the fragrance of a woman’s perfume, then it was gone again.
‘Did you feel it?’ the colonel asked again.
Josh nodded. ‘I think I heard her speak.’
The room twisted away, and the world dimmed for a second.
20
Fenians
[London, England. Date: 11.833-02-21]
As Josh’s eyes adjusted to his new surroundings, he realised that he was staring at the vaulted brick ceiling of a baseme
nt. The cold marble slab that pressed into his back made him shiver, and the sickly smell of chemicals did nothing to help the wave of nausea that swept over him. It was weaker than the last time and he managed not to throw up. He propped himself up on one elbow and saw that the colonel was busy rummaging through a wardrobe that was built into one wall.
It was then that Josh noticed the pale, lifeless bodies that were laid out on the three remaining marble-topped tables. From the look of the surgical instruments and glass jars that were arranged along the other walls, he guessed that they had landed in some kind of Victorian morgue.
‘Glad to see you’re feeling better,’ the colonel said as he came back with a set of clothes.
The jump had reduced both of them to their underwear; the ones the old man had insisted on wearing, describing it as a ‘Union suit’: basically a white cotton onesie, which would be good all the way back to the fourteenth century.
The colonel laid out the clothes on the slab. ‘Sorry about that. Perfectly natural reaction. I still find the sight of corpses hard to stomach. I probably should have mentioned this was a house of the dead.’ He had picked out a white shirt and a green three-piece suit for Josh.
‘This is one of our temporal safehouses — an outpost. They usually operate as a business to explain the comings and goings of strangers, one that doesn’t raise too much interest from the general public. Funeral director is particularly popular — no one tends to pry into the preparation of the deceased. You can always rely on these places for sanctuary, food and an abundance of clothing relevant to the era.’
The suit smelled of cologne and cigars, the shirt of carbolic. It obviously belonged to a dead man, but Josh was too cold to care and, besides, he figured the other guy didn’t need it any more.
As he got dressed, he could feel the quality of his clothing in the beautiful silk lining, the tailoring that was so fine that he couldn’t see the stitching. Regardless of the jacket being slightly too big for him, he felt like a gentleman.
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