by Silk, Avril
Jo jumped to her feet and looked about her in alarm, then realisation dawned.
Matthew! Thank goodness! Where are you hiding?
‘I’m right here,’ beamed a youthful Matthew, as he stepped out from behind a tree.
‘How did you know? When did you realise?’ The questions tumbled over themselves as Jo ran to hug her dear friend, still recognisable despite being decades younger.
‘Well, I could sense something unusual at the very beginning of the tour, then I became aware that someone was doing some rather effective shielding. That intrigued me so I really concentrated but somehow you were always on the edge of my perception. Well done, by the way!’
Jo basked in the compliment. ‘I had some excellent teachers,’ she conceded.
‘Then just now you fell asleep, dropped your guard, and I was able to locate you.’
‘But I saw you get on the bus!’
‘Indeed you did. To the casual observer I still am on the bus, quietly dozing.’
Jo thought for a while. ‘So are we both dreaming? Or are we both here in 1957? Or am I dreaming and you’re time travelling? Or…’ she stopped at the dizzying array of possibilities that unfolded before her.
‘It’s complicated. I think you are dreaming you are here, which is why it is so hard to perceive you. Or maybe I am also dreaming I am here, because I know we connect in the future.’
‘So you are a Time Traveller?’
‘I’m a Dream Traveller. If you sleep now, I should be able to enter your dream and guide you home. Shall we try?’
A very relieved Jo was just about to agree, when the ground seemed to shake and a terrible noise filled the air. They both ran out of the trees. Strange cloud formations rolled across the sky, and in the distance they saw a massive plume of smoke and steam.
There was a blinding flash as they ran through teeming rain and a hail of falling debris. Jo saw as clear as day the chaotic scene on the bus as it screeched to a halt, panic and alarm spreading like wildfire. The passengers were falling over themselves and each other in a scramble to get out of the bus to a more robust shelter. Zachary and Rosemary Lake moved calmly and quickly, each leading a daughter by the hand. Confusingly for Jo, there was a moment when Matthew was right next to her and on the bus as well, rudely awoken from his nap. When the moment had passed, she was alone again.
Jo watched in horror as another belch of steam and flying rubble sent people falling like ninepins. Titus scrambled shakily to his feet and ran for dear life towards The Nursery, now almost hidden by smoke and flames. She had a glimpse of Matthew, his face stricken; gathering Rosie and their boys, limp as rag dolls, into his arms. Before she had time to take in the measure of his loss, she realised that a piece of jagged metal piping was headed directly for her mother. She cried out a futile warning, but no-one could hear.
As time slowed to a crawl and her heart pounded like a hammer, Jo finally remembered what happened in 1957.
Zachary Lake moved like lightning and shielded Ali with his body. The wreckage hit him squarely in the chest and the metal pipe penetrated his rib cage. As blood oozed from the wound he fell to the ground.
Then a piece of rubble from the next explosion caught Jo full in the chest and sent her sprawling. The last thing she heard before she blacked out was Lethe screaming at Ali. ‘He’s dead! Daddy’s dead! Because of you! It’s all your fault!’
Wearily, Jo began to blink. Her head hurt and dull red shapes pressed against her mind. As she grew accustomed to her surroundings, a sliver of fear pierced her heart.
The room was an all-too familiar hellish vision. Dark red quartz studded the walls like blood rubies amidst golden and scarlet fire. Jo was lying in a sunken bath of blood-red tiles. Tiny diamonds of gold glittered and twinkled around her. She lay, twisted and broken, powerless to move as the fear grew and grew. Suddenly, her hands felt warm. She peered down at her contorted body to see a rich, sticky ooze pooling around her.
With horror she realised that she was bleeding, badly.
She tried to rise but a pressing weight upon her chest pinned her down. She tensed her hands and feet, trying to raise them. The pain was unbearable. Even worse was the bitter realisation that she could only move her head, desperately jerking it from side to side as the blood reached the edges of the bath and began to fill it. Casting her gaze frantically from one direction to another, Jo glimpsed a leering face in the shadows. Her blood turned to ice.
A banshee howl and the shade of Everard Burnley swooped toward her. All the while, as the blood slowly, steadily rose around her, covering her neck and throat, filling her ears and mouth, choking her and cutting off the air, the gruesome visage of the twisted writer hovered over her like a hooded vulture, staring blankly yet deeply into her eyes. A cracked whisper of a voice as old as time reverberated throughout Jo’s mind.
Welcome to immortality. Your soul is now mine for eternity.
Unable to look away from those huge, translucent eyes, Jo silently screamed as the bloodbath engulfed her completely.
Chapter Seven - The Return
Jo woke with a start. She had fallen asleep, fully clothed, in her chair. Her text-book lay on the floor. The room was dark and chilly. That’s strange, she thought. It’s usually really warm here. I wonder what time it is?
She looked for the clock by the bedside, but there were no luminous numerals softly glowing in the darkness. Maybe there’s been a power cut.
Jo looked out of the window and saw it was still dark outside. All the street-lights seemed to be off. The floods must have knocked out the electricity supply. She was really cold by now, and very tired, so she just slipped off her shoes and climbed under the covers.
The bed didn’t seem as comfortable as usual, but Jo barely registered that. She fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.
When she woke up a grey light was edging past the heavy curtains, lending everything a murky, grainy quality. Jo felt terrible. She had a dreadful, pounding headache. She sat up, shivering in the chilly dawn, and went to the wardrobe to find the warm, soft, fluffy bathrobe Titus had bought for her. Still half asleep, she opened the wardrobe door, then blinked with surprise and growing alarm.
I’ve been robbed! she thought. The wardrobe was empty apart from some dingy underwear, some nondescript tops and a steel grey boiler suit. Jo rubbed her eyes, still reluctant to believe what she was seeing. Or am I dreaming?
As she tried to make sense of what was happening, Jo was goaded to distraction by an outbreak of terrible itching. Driven into a frenzy, she scratched savagely, horrified to see red lumps erupting across her arms and legs as fleas feasted on her blood. Repulsed and angry, she tore off her clothes, wildly shaking them to get rid of the blood-sucking parasites.
She rifled through the wardrobe for a change of clothing, reluctantly dragging on a coarse, scratchy T-shirt and the hideous, utilitarian boiler suit. As the itching continued unabated, she was almost at her wits’ end, but she remembered something Matthew had said when he was telling her that some bodily fluids could be used to write secret messages or leave a faintly luminous trail. It was just an aside – Oh, and saliva is antiseptic, of course – hence the expression ‘to lick our wounds’.
With an expression of distaste Jo did just that, and managed to take the edge off the itching, so it was just about bearable.
Jo scratched her head, turned and looked around the room. The pretty, welcoming guest room had been transformed into something closer to a monastic cell – bare walls, cheap sticks of furniture and a complete absence of colour and comfort. Mildew and grime coated everything.
The only familiar object was Jo’s text book. It was still open at the page about the Cuban Missile Crisis, but something had changed. The chapter heading was different. Jo gasped as she read Castro and Khrushchev Triumphant. Imperialist Aggressors Humiliated. Bewildered, she read how the American blockade had failed, the Cold War had escalated and the world had been plunged into the first full-scale nuclear war, with an unimaginable loss of life.
After the American military blockade fiasco, nuclear missiles were successfully transported to Cuba. The Cuban-Russian alliance, known as the Mariposa-Camomile Pact, after the national flowers, flourished under a benevolent Communist regime beloved by the people. However, American capitalist warmongers, threatened by paranoiac fears of the so-called Red Peril, unleashed a series of missile strikes. The first nuclear war – NW1 - began in February, 1963.
Jo read how firestorms had raged all across the world through cities flattened by nuclear explosions, releasing sooty smoke into the stratosphere and blocking out the light of the sun permanently.
Nuclear winter had followed, bringing crop failure, famine and disease. Riots and revolutions were viciously suppressed as, in countries across the world, the iron grip of totalitarian rule tightened, bringing all aspects of society under the control of the state.
Turning to the chapter on Europe, Jo read with horror as the text-book praised the efficiency of the work camps that had replaced schooling for all but a small elite; applauded the effectiveness of a legal system that favoured regular public hangings and lifelong incarceration; and justified the crushing of creativity and independent thought in the name of military might and the imposition of a bleak, brutal political ideology.
The final chapter of the book, written twenty years after the war, promised that when populations co-operated with their rulers, austerity, hardship and conflict would give way to a new dawn of peace and prosperity.
Jo closed the book, thinking furiously. The course of history had been changed; that much was clear. Although the room was so altered, it was still the room where she had fallen asleep before dream-travelling with Sebastian. She wondered if she had returned to the same point in time, and what she would find when she ventured outside. The book had told of the lawlessness and corruption that had swept through the major cities of the world, especially London, as capitalism collapsed and the Stock Market crashed.
Jo pulled back the curtains, and looked out onto empty, rain-sodden streets, instead of the immaculately laid out grounds of Glory Heights. Terraces of squalid hovels stretched as far as the eye could see, interspersed with factory chimneys belching out filthy smoke, and littered with bomb-sites. A thick, greasy smog coated everything, obscuring the sky above.
There was a burst of crackling from above the bed. Jo noticed the metal grille of a speaker, and a cold, clipped voice rang out.
MARCH FIFTEENTH. YEAR TWENTY-ONE ANW1.
SIX O’CLOCK. BAYNE SECTOR.
ALL OPERATIVES WILL RISE AND PREPARE FOR WORK.
Jo glanced out of the window and saw that, with almost military precision, the curtains at the upstairs windows of all the houses were being pulled back. She did a swift calculation. Realising that NW1 stood for the first nuclear war of 1963, she knew she had arrived in her near future. 1984. This was a very different world to the one she thought of as home. ‘What happened to change everything?’ she said out loud. ‘Is this some sort of parallel universe?’ Still half disbelieving, she looked again at her History text-book. As her headache intensified and the words danced before her eyes a terrible idea began to form in her mind.
You did this. You went back in time and you altered reality. You tried to stop Aunt Lethe giving your Dad that book, so he wouldn’t fall for her, and now everything is ruined. It’s all your fault.
As Jo reeled at the terrible thought, a deafening siren blared out and a steely voice issued clear orders.
OPERATIVES WILL MAKE THEIR WAY
TO THEIR PLACE OF WORK.
Front doors opened, and people poured out onto the street – men, women, children and babes-in-arms. All wore the same steel grey clothing; a few had patched and tattered great-coats over their work suits but others just shivered in the biting wind. They were all filthy and malnourished.
Jo had been thinking hard. I have to find Matthew, or Sebastian, so I can dream my way back to 1957 and give back the book and make this right. And I need to go now – the crowd will give me cover.
So saying she grabbed the heavy, dusty coat hanging on the back of the door, and swiftly made her way along a deserted corridor towards the street. A grey knitted hat in the pocket covered her auburn curls, rendering her reasonably anonymous.
Although nothing like the state-of-the-art Glory Heights, the abandoned building she was in had obviously once been a basic medical centre. She passed a small operating theatre and laboratory, all equipment and furniture long gone, leaving only fly-blown posters on the walls and old, rusty blood stains on the floor. Poky side rooms might once have been wards. The lift wasn’t working, and with no electricity the building was cold, dark and eerie. Most of the windows were smashed, and there were gaping holes in the brickwork, with rubble and broken glass blocking her way in places. Any hope Jo had of finding some headache pills evaporated.
There was nothing to indicate that the finest hospital in the world had been, or ever would be, built on this site. The entrance had been boarded over with notices saying:
BUILDING CONDEMNED
SITE CONTAMINATED
NO ENTRY
The wood had been recently splintered as if someone had tried to force their way in. As Jo squeezed out she saw bullet holes in the door frame and fresh blood stains spattered on the ground and on the jagged timbers. An icy wind whipped at her clothes, instantly stripping any warmth from her coat.
The blood led to a pile of rags – a pile of rags that twitched convulsively. To Jo’s horror, a bony hand caught at her ankle.
‘Help me.’ The voice was barely audible. Jo struggled with her terror, and bent closer. Afraid of what she might see, she moved the rags away from the anguished face of a young priest. Unable to stop herself, Jo cried out as she saw the burns and cuts that screamed their testimony to torture. The words FAITH FREAK had been gouged across his forehead.
As the crowds of grey-clad workers passed them by, averting their eyes to studiously avoid Jo and the priest, she drew the dying young man to her, and gently stroked his mutilated face. For the briefest of merciful moments the healing lotus danced at her fingertips, pearly and iridescent, and the priest’s pain and distress visibly lessened. He looked searchingly at Jo’s face, then managed a shadow of a smile as he decided to trust her.
‘Tell… Reg. They… found me. I told them… nothing.’ Again that sweet smile, then his eyes widened with pain as the lotus vanished. There was a terrible rattling sound and all was still.
The crowd was moving quickly now, and Jo knew instinctively she could not risk being alone on the street. She had to get moving. She quietly closed the young man’s eyes. There was nothing more she could do. She stood up and joined the people making their way towards the ominously looming factory chimneys.
As she looked around, hoping to see a landmark she could recognise, she realised that the lamp posts, rusted and mostly lacking their lanterns, were nevertheless bristling with brand-new loud hailers and security cameras swivelling through 360 degrees. Had she been seen trying to help the priest?
Uniformed thugs, dressed in the VMN colours, armed with truncheons, suddenly swooped round a corner, beating the legs of anyone they thought was dawdling. Some of the children started to cry. A klaxon started up, harsh and ominous, and from the loud hailers came the message:
SIX MINUTES TO CLOCK-IN
The klaxon continued eerily. Jo urgently wanted to get off the street. She tried to remember the lie of the land, but so much devastation, the slum buildings and the all-pervading fog made it hard to recognise. She was struggling to resist the rising panic that made it difficult for her to breathe, when she saw a strange shimmering ahead of her, and at the centre a distinctive circular building. The Roundhouse at Camden! Above its domed roof, the blue forget-me-not ensign of VergissMeinNicht lent the only splash of colour in the drab landscape.
In another reality, the old engine shed, with its railway turntable, had been famous as an outstanding music venue. For a brief and notorious time, however, V
MN had created an arena there where street children fought to the death to entertain the dissolute and depraved. Jo could not afford to remember her time in the arena, when Lucy had almost killed her. She needed to think about her present predicament, and work out her location.
A sudden glimpse of a canal told her she wasn’t far from Camden Lock. Although the busy, colourful market she remembered was reduced to rubble, Jo’s memories of coming here with her mother, and staying with Ali’s friend Quinn, came flooding back. He had been so kind and funny, and the Vermin had murdered him.
Jo tried to blot out the memory of his lifeless body being hauled from the canal.
She was walking faster now. Somewhere nearby there was a pillbox leading to the Underground station where, when Jo was twelve, fugitives from VergissMeinNicht, including the Ferals and Crazy Em, had hidden in fear of being exterminated. That was before Titus grew a conscience, dedicated his life to God, and created the Glory Foundation, a philanthropic organisation created in part as penance for his sins.
It was obvious to Jo that the reality she found herself in had more in common with the days of the VMN than those of the Glory Foundation, and she was certain that reason and dissent would once more have been driven underground. If she wanted to find Reg the best place to look would be the Deep Level Shelter, the last place she ever wanted to go again.
FIVE MINUTES TO CLOCK-IN
As Jo watched out for the pillbox she found herself hoping against hope that when the priest had spoken of Reg, he meant her Reg; leader of the Righteous; honourable, reliable and always on the side of the underdog. Some things can’t ever change, she thought. Reg and his rag-bag army would always be needed as long as greedy, powerful tyrants and their followers tried to ride rough-shod over the poor and vulnerable.
Even thinking about Reg helped Jo feel more optimistic. Even so, the crowd of workers had reduced considerably and soon she would be dangerously isolated and visible.
