by Nina Allan
Aside from one burnt-out car at the side of the road I saw no overt signs of violence but in spite of this I found the atmosphere oppressive. The forest seemed unending, and its green stillness unnerved me; I felt as if something was lying in wait, just out of sight.
We passed through a set of traffic lights, then came to a standstill beside the two fluted granite columns that marked the entrance to the hospital. The main building was mostly hidden behind a high stone wall topped with metal spikes and coils of barbed wire. Armed sentries stood on guard beside a swing barrier. The soldiers on the bus all rose to their feet, jostling each other impatiently as they crowded towards the front. Once outside they formed a straggling line, waiting to be admitted. I saw one of them rummaging in his knapsack, presumably for his entrance pass or some other necessary document.
I pressed my face to the window, watching the soldiers go through their ID check. As the bus pulled away I caught a glimpse of narrow windows and blotchy grey walls. Now that the soldiers were gone the bus was almost empty. Towards the rear sat two men in business suits and a stout, middle-aged woman with a wicker basket on her knees. The basket contained three live chickens. On the seat across from me sat a teenage girl. Her pale face and wispy fair hair reminded me a little of Miranda. She glanced past me at the soldiers in the road.
“That’s the loony bin,” she said to me suddenly. “They guard it to stop the loonies getting out. Some of them have killed people.”
I stared at her in silence for a moment, unsure of what I should say. When I looked back towards the road the hospital and the soldiers were already some distance behind us. I had vague memories of the place from my childhood, when Oxleas Wood had been unrestricted and carjackings less prevalent. The hospital was derelict then, a forgotten eyesore. We used to pretend it was haunted, or believed perhaps that it really was, I was no longer sure. In either case, the gates were always secured against intruders, and the high wall that ringed the perimeter meant that the grounds were impenetrable, even to the most resourceful and daring among our company. Its gloomy edifice had always been a source of vague dread to me. It was not ghosts I feared so much as the building itself. I hated its barred windows, the frowning façade that always made me think of dungeons and prisons. I could never escape the idea that terrible things had happened there.
I was unsurprised to find that the intervening years had done little to moderate my dislike of the place.
“Do you know why the soldiers are here?” I said to the girl. I had taken her for about thirteen, but now that I looked at her closely I saw she was older, eighteen or nineteen perhaps. She did not really resemble Miranda, other than in the colour of her hair. The girl pressed her lips tightly together and shook her head vehemently from side to side. She seemed startled, even frightened that I had spoken to her, even though it was she who had begun the conversation. It crossed my mind that she might have learning difficulties, though when she finally replied to my question there was no doubt she had understood what I was asking.
“I’ve been inside,” she said. She glanced at me from beneath her colourless lashes, as if checking to see that I was still listening. I felt certain that she was lying. I turned away from her and back towards the window. We were coming into the village. Shooter’s Hill had never been much of a place, and the encroachment of the forest made it seem even less significant. I saw a general store and a post office, a church and beside that a recreation hall or perhaps a schoolhouse. One side of the dusty main road was flanked by houses, a mixture of small flint cottages and slightly larger Victorian terraces. On the other side of the street the forest began, stretching in an unbroken swathe as far as the Carshalton Reservoir and beyond that the Sussex Weald.
The bus juddered to a halt beside the Bull Inn. As I rose to my feet the fair-haired girl scampered past me, darting along the pavement and then disappearing down an alleyway between two of the houses. The bus coughed once and then lurched forward, bearing the chicken woman and the suited businessmen on towards the dockyard at Woolwich. The silence closed itself around me, so complete it seemed material, green in colour and with the texture of house dust. I looked back the way I had come. Somewhere to the north of me lay the boulevards and tramlines and bombsites of central London. I hesitated for a moment in front of the pub then headed off down the road. On my left was the water tower, a renovated Victorian structure that I guessed would serve all the houses in the village and probably the hospital too. It soared above the rooftops, its brick-built crenellations weathered to the colour of clay. Owen Andrews’s house was on Dover Road, one of a terrace of eight Victorian villas and directly in the shadow of the water tower. The houses were shielded from the road by a thin line of trees. Fifty years ago and as a main route into London the road would have been seething with traffic. The universal tax on private vehicles had changed everything and so had the closure of the woodlands. Dover Road was now a forest byway frequented mainly by logging trucks and army vehicles. Weeds spilled through the cracks in its tarmac. For the first time since setting out that morning I asked myself what I thought I could possibly achieve by coming here.
Andrews’s house was approached by a short pathway, a couple of paving slabs laid end to end across a yellowed patch of pockmarked turf. I stepped quickly up to the door and pressed the bell. I heard it ring in the hallway beyond. I stood there waiting for what seemed an age. I had no doubt I was being watched. Whether my visit would have repercussions was something I would only discover later. I bent down and peered in through the letterbox. I caught a glimpse of cream walls and wooden floorboards and then the door was opened so suddenly I almost went flying.
“Can I help you?” said Owen Andrews. “Are you lost?”
“No,” I said, staring down at him. “At least I don’t think so. It was you that I came to see.”
“You’d better come in then,” said Andrews. “I don’t get many visitors these days.” He retreated inside, moving with a slow rolling gait that was almost a waddle. He seemed unsurprised to see me. I followed him into the house. Things were happening so fast they felt unreal.
He took me through to a room at the back. The room was steeped in books, so many of them that the ochre-coloured wallpaper that lined the room showed though only in oddly spaced random patches. Glazed double doors overlooked a narrow strip of garden. A set of library steps on castors stood close to one wall. Andrews heaved himself up on to a battered chaise longue, which from the multitude of books and papers stacked at one end I guessed was his accustomed reading place.
“Sit down,” he said, waving at the seat opposite, an upright armchair upholstered in faded green velvet. “Tell me why you’re here.”
I lowered myself into the chair. “I’m sorry to turn up uninvited like this,” I said. “But I bought a clock of yours recently and I wanted to ask you about it. I wanted to talk to you as soon as possible. I hope you don’t mind.”
“A clock of mine? How fascinating. Which one?”
He leaned forward in his seat, clearly interested. He was very short in stature, with foreshortened limbs and a head that seemed too big for his body, but his torso was powerful and upright and he seemed to take so little account of his disability that it is true to say that within five minutes of meeting him I had stopped thinking of him as different – he was simply Owen Andrews. His force of personality was tangible. I thought he was probably the most extraordinary man I had ever met. I described the clock to him, telling him also how I had come by it.
“I know the one,” he said at once. “The case was made from melted-down bell metal.”
He grabbed a sheet of paper from the pile at his feet and began to draw on it, sketching in rapid strokes with a blue biro. He gazed at his work appraisingly, tapping the blunt end of the pen against his teeth then handed me the paper. His drawing captured the likeness of my clock in every detail.
“That’s it,” I said. “That’s amazing.”
Andrews smiled. “I find them hard to let go of,”
he said. “It’s a weakness of mine. But you didn’t come all the way out here to ask me about an old clock. A simple telephone call would have dealt with that. Why don’t you tell me what you came for really?”
I could feel myself beginning to blush. The man’s forthrightness startled me, and now that I was about to put it into words the thing I had come to ask seemed as ridiculous as the article I had read in Purple Cloud. But I had come too far to turn back. And the fact was that I trusted him. I believed that Owen Andrews would tell me the truth, no matter how difficult or unpleasant that truth might be.
“My wife died,” I said at last. “Her name was Miranda. She was killed in a car accident. Her father drove his car off a cliff into the sea and drowned them both.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” said Andrews. “That’s a terrible story.” His eyes were clouded with concern, and I was surprised to see that he really was sorry, not just interested as most people were when they first discovered what had happened to Miranda. I didn’t blame anyone for being interested. The story was shocking and dramatic, a breakdown in normality that had never become entirely real even to me, even after the wreck was salvaged and the bodies recovered. Who would not be interested? It is all but impossible for one man to climb inside another man’s sorrow. But I could see from his face that Owen Andrews was at least trying. I guessed he was more practised than most in enduring heartache.
“I read about you,” I said. “About the work you did for the army. I read about the Silver Wind.”
His dark eyes flashed, his expression changing so suddenly it was almost as if my words had thrown a switch inside him.
“You’re asking me to bring back your wife? That is what you’re saying?”
I nodded and looked down at the ground. I felt smaller than an insect.
“Do you have any background in physics?” he said.
“Not in the least.”
“Well, if you did you would know that what you are asking is impossible. For one thing, the time sciences are in their infancy. We have about as much control over the time stream as a Neanderthal over a steam train. But mainly it is just not possible. A layman such as yourself tends to think of time as a single thread, an unbroken continuum linking all past events together like the beads on a necklace. We are discovering that time isn’t like that. It’s an amorphous mass, a ragbag if you like, a ragbag of history. The Time Stasis might grant you access to what you think of as the past, but it wouldn’t be the past that you remember. You wouldn’t be the same and nor would your wife. There’s a good chance you wouldn’t even recognise each other, and even if you did it’s unlikely that you would have any sense of a shared history together. It would be like that feeling you get when you meet someone at a party and can’t remember their name. You know you know them from somewhere, but you can’t for the life of you think where. It would be an alternative scenario, not a straight rewind. And Miranda would still probably end up dying in that car crash. We’ve found that the pivotal events in history still recur, even if the cause and effect are subtly different. It’s as if the basic template, the temporal pattern if you like, is to some extent indelible.”
He folded his arms across his chest, as if to indicate that this was his last word on the matter. I felt once again the power of his personality, the force of his intellect, and it was as if we were fighting a duel, his knowledge against my despair. I knew the battle was lost, but I could not deny myself one final, miserable onslaught.
“But I would see her again? She would be alive?”
“No. It might be possible to transfer to a version of reality where a version of Miranda did not die in that car accident. But that is all.”
“Then that is what I want. I have money.”
“No you don’t,” said Andrews. “And this has nothing to do with money.” He fell silent, looking down at his hands, the fingers short and neat, pink as a baby’s. I sensed that he was troubled, that such brutal candour was not something he enjoyed dispensing.
“I’m sorry,” I said in the end. “I’ve been very stupid.”
“Not at all,” said Andrews quickly. “And at least what you asked for is harmless, beautiful even, the kind of wish one might almost be tempted to grant if it were possible. I’ve had far worse propositions, believe me. Fortunately they’ve been equally impossible.”
“You’re talking about your work with the army? The Billings government?”
Andrews nodded. “I must warn you that this room might be bugged. I’ve given up bothering about it. They know my views and I have nothing to hide. But I wouldn’t want to cause any unpleasantness for my friends.” He paused, as if giving me the option to leave, but I stayed where I was and waited for him to continue. I realised two things: firstly that my pilgrimage to Shooter’s Hill had always been about Andrews’s story rather than mine, and secondly that I felt properly alive for the first time since Miranda had died.
There was also the fact that Owen Andrews had called me his friend. I took this as a mark of trust and a gracious compliment but strangely it also felt true. For a brief instant something flickered at the back of my mind, a sense that there were some facts missing, like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. Then the curtain of logic descended and the feeling was gone. I liked Andrews, and felt a certain kinship with him. That was all.
“What’s the matter?” Andrews said. His anger seemed vanished, and an amused smile tweaked the corners of his mouth. I wondered what secrets my face had given away.
“Nothing,” I said. “Go on.”
He shifted his position on the chaise longue, sitting upright and hugging his knees. He was wearing green velvet slippers and grey schoolboy socks. The combination was both amusing and moving, and I was reminded of images I had seen in books, paintings by Velázquez and Goya of the court dwarfs of Spain. They had been the playthings of the nobility but in some cases they had actually been the secret power behind the throne. “Do you know about the hospital?” he said.
“I’ve heard the rumours,” I replied. “What about it?”
I was surprised to hear him speak of the place, I suppose simply because it was the source of so much ignorant tittle-tattle. I thought of the strange girl I had met on the bus, and my heart sank. If Owen Andrews went spinning off in some similar tale of murderous lunatics it would make me start to doubt everything he had told me.
I was wrong, of course. The girl had not been completely deluded either, although I did not think of her again until much later.
“It’s always been a military hospital,” Andrews said. “It was designed and built by Florence Nightingale’s nephew as a centre for the study and treatment of shell shock. It was the first hospital in the country of its kind.”
“I’ve heard it’s being used to test chemical weapons,” I said. “Is that true?”
Andrews shook his head, seeming to dismiss the idea out of hand. “You said you read about the Silver Wind,” he said. “What did you read, exactly?”
I hesitated, unwilling to reveal that the only hard information I had on Andrews’s research had been gleaned from a UFO magazine. “Something about time-bridges,” I said in the end. “The article I read said that the army were trying to change the outcome of the Saudi war by stealing technology from the future. It all sounded rather improbable. I wasn’t sure what to believe.”
Andrews nodded. “Do you know what a tourbillon regulator is?”
“I have no idea.”
“It was invented by a watchmaker named Louis Breguet, in the eighteenth century. He became famous for making watches for Napoleon and Marie Antoinette. His grasp of mechanics was extraordinary and at least a century ahead of his time. He discovered a way of making time stand still. Please excuse me, just for one moment. It’s better if I show you.”
Andrews slid from the chaise longue and shuffled out of the room. A minute later he returned, bringing with him a small wooden box.
“Here’s one I made earlier,” he said with a smile. He flipped open the lid, an
d I saw there was a watch inside. Andrews lifted it out, laying the box carefully to one side on the floor. The watch was quite large, a facsimile of a gentleman’s pocket watch from the nineteenth or early twentieth century. I was familiar with such articles, having bought and sold them on several occasions. This one had a silver case, and a pattern of roses engraved on the dial. Even to my untutored eye it was a thing of quite exceptional beauty.
“I studied Breguet’s diaries for many years,” said Andrews. “He died an old man. Many people thought he was losing his faculties in his final years, suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or some other form of dementia. It is true that he did lose some clarity of expression at the end, but that may well have been due to the complexity of the ideas he was struggling with. A lot of it was brand new science.” He thumbed a catch, opening the back of the watch. I caught a glimpse of wires and levers, a mass of mechanical circuitry that glimmered as it rotated. Andrews cradled the watch in his left hand, using his right to point to first one of the gleaming internal wheels and then another. I quickly lost track of them all. Fortunately his words were somewhat easier to follow.
“The tourbillon is like a cage,” he said. “It rotates the whole mechanism about its own axis. Breguet discovered this as a way of preventing gravity from dragging on the mechanism and making the watch run slow. In effect he made the mechanism weightless. The Time Stasis is simply an advancement of this idea. It reduces time to a null state within its area of operation. The stasis creates a kind of temporal anteroom. Think of it as the lobby of a large hotel, with doors and lifts and corridors opening off it. Once you get through the entrance and into the lobby you can go anywhere you like within the building. It’s the Time Stasis that reveals the entrance. Do you see?”
“Some of it.” I paused. “It’s what the article I read referred to as the time-bridge.”
“Yes. But I’ve never liked the term ‘time-bridge.’ Once again it’s too linear. The lobby image is better, and useful, too. You know how easy it is to get lost in one of those big corporate hotels. All the corridors look the same after a while.”
