by Nina Allan
I was struggling to make sense of it all. “But what use could this be to the army?” I said. “You’ve already told me it’s not possible to travel in time in the way we imagine it, so where’s the point?”
“There isn’t any. But the government refuse to believe that. They’ve set up a stasis field around the hospital and they are conducting experiments there, forcing people through into other realities and trying to control the future before it happens. And I’m not just talking about weapons. My guess is that they have glimpsed something in the future they don’t like, somewhere in one of the alternative realities, and are trying to eradicate it as a possibility for this one. Think about what Hitler might have done if he had seen what would happen when he invaded Russia, or if Reagan had changed his mind over North Korea. It’s insane, of course, like trying to do brain surgery with a pickaxe. They believe that with the right inducements I might still be persuaded to refine the calculations for them, and that is the only reason they leave me alone.”
“But if their experiments can’t succeed, what harm can they do?”
“The harm they’re doing to individuals, for a start. They snatch people after curfew and then blame it on the carjackers. They snatch carjackers, too. They send them through the Time Stasis, hoping that with enough practice they’ll learn to control the direction and duration of travel. They believe that individuals are expendable. Some of the people they send through never come back. Some never seem to leave, but their contact with the stasis seems to alter their substance. They’re incomplete somehow, flickering in and out of existence, like ghosts. I have come to think that they are ghosts, or rather that the manifestations people think of as ghosts are not the spirits of the dead at all, but the living products of unsuccessful experiments with a Time Stasis, conducted from a time stream lying parallel to ours. Then there are the mutants, those unfortunate individuals that experience the stasis as an allergy, a chemical reaction that distorts their bodies, leaving them with all manner of deformities. There’s nothing that can be done for them. The soldiers simply release them into the forest. They don’t mind if someone catches a glimpse of one of these poor creatures once in a while because they’re better than any amount of barbed wire and electric fencing for discouraging intruders. I’ve no doubt that this is how the chemical weapons stories started. And if the mutants start causing trouble then the army simply go out and use them for target practice.”
“But that’s terrible.”
“No more terrible than most of what is happening these days.” He looked at me hard, as if holding me personally accountable for the transports and for the Saudi wars, for what had happened to Kwella Cousens aboard the Anubis. “No doubt there have been the usual speeches about omelettes and breaking eggs. What none of them seem to realise is the harm they are doing, not just with these local atrocities but on a wider scale. The Time Stasis is a weak point, a lesion in time that could undermine the stability of our own reality. The breach should be closed, at least until we understand its implications. There are people that have an idea of what is happening and are determined to stop it, but they have a tendency to disappear.”
“A resistance, you mean?”
“I don’t talk about that. I do still have some shreds of a private life, and I intend to hang on to them. I suppose it is true, that everyone has his price.”
A clear image came to me of the young woman in the photograph on the mantelpiece in the other room. Andrews folded the watch in his hand, pressing it shut.
“How long did it take you to make that?” I said.
“A long time,” Andrews said. He smiled to himself, as if at some private joke. “Can I offer you something to eat?”
I stayed, and we talked. I told him about Miranda, and he told me about his childhood in Devon, his first encounter with a Breguet watch at the town museum in Exeter, his friendship with the master horologist who had brought him to London as his apprentice. Some details of his stories seemed disconcertingly familiar, and several times I experienced that same feeling I had had earlier, that there was a wider sense to everything, just out of reach.
It was only when Andrews got up to light a lamp that I realised how late it was.
“I should be going,” I said. “It will be dark soon.”
I had not thought to check what time the last bus departed for Greenwich. In the light of what Andrews had told me about the hospital, the idea of breaking curfew was doubly unthinkable.
“You’re welcome to stay,” said Andrews. “There’s a spare bed upstairs.”
“No, thank you,” I said. The idea of spending the night marooned in the Hanging Wood was deeply unnerving.
“Then at least say you’ll come and visit me again. It’s been just like the old days, having you here.”
I laughed to show I knew he was joking, but his face remained serious. Suddenly I was anxious to leave.
“I will, I’ll come soon,” I said.
“See that you do. Mind how you go.”
He waved to me from the doorway. I wondered if he ever got lonely. Dover Road stood silent, a ghost place. With the darkness approaching, the scene appeared to me as a mirage, a stage set for some elaborate deception.
The dusk was gathering. The forest loomed before me, its greens leached to lavender by the approaching twilight. In the Bull Inn the lamps were already lit, and further along the road towards the village there were lights showing in the windows of most of the houses. It was not long till curfew, but I reasoned that as long as I could get myself on to a bus within the next half hour there would be nothing to worry about. I set off in the direction of the High Street, walking briskly in what I hoped was a business-like fashion. I had just come in sight of the bus stop when I saw something terrible: a roadblock had been erected outside the post office. There were four soldiers manning it, all of them armed with carbines. I stopped in my tracks, ducking sideways into an alleyway lined with dustbins. My heart was racing. There was no question of approaching the barrier. Even though I had not breached the curfew and it was still my legal right to pass along the street I knew beyond any doubt that in practice this would count for nothing, that the soldiers would find some pretext to arrest me. What might happen after that was something I did not care to think about.
The safest move was to go back the way I had come, to return to Owen Andrews’s house and take him up on his offer of spending the night there. I hesitated, knowing this was the logical course of action but still reluctant to take it. I trusted Andrews completely, the place I did not trust at all. As the dusk came stealthily onwards, seeming to curl out from beneath the trees like tendrils of smoke, I realised that my horror of the place had not diminished, that the thought of spending the night here in Shooter’s Hill was almost as impossible for me as the idea of confronting the soldiers at the barricade.
I cowered in the alleyway, staring at the trees opposite and knowing I had to make a decision in the next few minutes or risk breaking the curfew. It was then that it came to me there was a third option: I could bypass the checkpoint by cutting through the forest. The idea seemed simple enough. I was actually within sight of the checkpoint, and less than half a mile from the village boundary. I could walk that in less than fifteen minutes. I would not need to go far into the woods, just enough to keep me out of earshot of the soldiers. I should emerge on the Shooter’s Hill Road somewhere between the hospital and Blackheath.
I ran quickly across the road, hoping that one of the soldiers down by the barrier would not choose that moment to turn his gaze in my direction. I slipped in between the trees, my feet crunching through leaf litter. The slope down from the road was steeper than I had imagined. I tripped against an exposed root and almost fell. In what seemed a very few moments I had completely lost sight of the road.
I had imagined there would be a pathway, some kind of track to follow, but there was none, or at least none that I could find, and in the oncoming darkness it was difficult to see clearly for more than a couple of
yards. I kept going, fighting my way through the underbrush in what I hoped was a westerly direction. There were no landmarks to guide me, no sounds other than the scuffling of my feet in the leaves and my own rapid breathing. I stopped moving, straining my ears for the rumble of a logging truck or even for the voices of the soldiers at the barricade, but again, there was nothing. I could not have been more than a mile from the lighted windows of the Bull Inn, yet it was as if I had unwittingly strayed into another universe. I could smell the trees all around me, the pungent odour of tree bark and rising chlorophyll. I remembered something from my schooldays, that it was during the hours of darkness that plants released their pent-up stores of oxygen, and it seemed to me that I could feel their exhalations all around me, the collective green-tinged sigh of a thousand trees. The dark was rising, spreading across the forest floor like marsh gas. From somewhere further off came the echoing melancholy hooting of a night owl.
I walked for what seemed like hours. I could no longer see where I was going, and had no idea of whether I was even vaguely headed in the right direction. I was very afraid, but the state of high nervous tension that had taken me over when I first realized I was lost had worn itself out, blunting my terror to a dull background hum, a mental white noise that drove me incessantly forward whilst slowing the actions and reactions of my brain.
Finally I came to a standstill. The woods seemed to close in around me, shuffling forward to block my escape like some vast black beast that knows its prey is out of running. I slid to the ground where I stood, the dampness settling at once into my clothes. Until that moment I had not realised how cold it was. I began to shiver. I knew that if I was to spend the night in the open I had to get under cover somehow, but I was too exhausted by my flight through the woods to make any decisions. I closed my eyes, thinking confusedly that this might make the darkness less awful. When I opened them again some minutes later it was to the sight of a yellowish glow, moving slowly towards me from between the trees. I could hear something also, the soft shushing sound of someone or something doing their best to move quietly across a ground that was ankle-deep in twigs and dry leaves.
I moved from a sitting to a lying position, stomach down in the dirt, never taking my eyes from the pale light that though still some distance off appeared to be coming closer with every second. I was torn by indecision. I did not wish to fall into the hands of soldiers or carjackers, but on the other hand I was desperate to be out of the forest. At that moment, any human company seemed better than none. As the light came closer I was able to discern amidst the surrounding darkness of trees the deeper, blacker bulk of a human figure. A woman, I thought, a woman carrying a torch, and coming my way.
In the end the simple need to hear a human voice outweighed my misgivings. I scrambled to my feet, extending my arms towards the figure with the lamp like a blind man trying to feel his way across a crowded room.
“Hello!” I cried. “Hello there. Wait for me!”
I moved forward, my attempt to run reduced by the darkness to an unsteady lurch. I crashed through the treacherous underbrush, stray twigs clawing at my hands and face. The figure stopped dead in its tracks, the torch beam wavering gently up and down. Its light was weak but my eyes had grown used to the darkness and were temporarily blinded. The figure took a step backwards, crackling the leaves underfoot. I sensed she was as much afraid of me as I was of her.
“I’m lost,” I said. “Do you know the way out of here?”
I could hear her breathing, slow and heavy, as if she was about to expire. There was a rank odour, a smell like burning fat tinged with underarm sweat. I was by now convinced that the woman was a fugitive, a political detainee or an immigrant without a work permit, someone on the run from the police. None of that mattered to me. All I cared about was getting out of the woods.
“I’m not going to report you,” I said. “I just want to find the road.” I grabbed at her sleeve, anxious in case she tried to bolt away from me. She was wearing padded mittens, and a padded anorak made from some shiny nylon-coated fabric that was difficult to get a grip on. My fingers tightened involuntarily about her wrist. The woman moaned, a low, inhuman sound that made me go cold all over. I released her abruptly, pushing her backwards. As she flailed her arms to retain balance the torch beam darted upwards, lighting her face. Until that moment she had been shrouded in darkness, her features concealed by the large, loose hood of the nylon anorak. Now I saw she was disfigured, quite literally de-formed, squeezed apart and then rammed back together again in a careless and hideous arrangement that bore as little resemblance to an ordinary human face as the face of a corpse in an advanced stage of decomposition. Her skin was thickly corrugated, set into runnels as if burned by acid. Her mouth, a lipless slit, was slanted heavily to one side, dividing the lower portion of her face in two with a raw diagonal slash. One of her eyes was sealed shut, smeared in its socket like a clay eye inadvertently damaged by its sculptor’s careless thumb. The other eye shone brightly in the torchlight, gazing at me in what I instinctively knew was sorrow as much as fear. The eye was fringed with long lashes, and quite perfect.
I screamed, I could not help it, though it was more from shock than from fear. I knew that I was seeing one of the mutants Owen Andrews had spoken of, one of the victims of the army’s clumsy experiments with the Time Stasis. Andrews had called the mutants unfortunate, but his words had barely scratched the surface of the reality. In my traumatised state I could not grasp how this person could survive, how she did not just stop. Her face was an apocalypse in flesh. It was impossible to know what further ravages had been unleashed upon the rest of her body and internal organs.
Her mental torment I could not bear to imagine.
My scream made her flinch, and she stumbled, dropping the torch. She fell to her knees, sweeping her hands back and forth through the leaves in an effort to retrieve it. But either the padded mittens hampered her efforts or she no longer had proper control of her hands because it kept skidding out of her grasp. I saw my chance and made a lunge for it. Suddenly the torch was in my hand. The woman howled, flinging herself at me as if she meant to topple me into the dirt.
I began to run. The woman picked herself up off the ground and began to follow. She was no longer crying, but I could hear her breathing, the raw panting gasp of it, and I felt sick with revulsion. The thought of having to fight her off, of having her ruined face pressed in close to mine as she battled me for the torch did a good deal to keep me moving. I knew the very fact of possessing the torch made me easy to follow, but there was nothing I could do about that. I pointed it ahead of me, panning the ground at my feet and lighting the way in front the best that I could. The beam was weak, a feeble yellow, barely enough to see by. I kept expecting to bash into a tree, or worse still, to catch a foot in some pothole or crevice and twist my ankle.
I have no doubt that one of these two things would have happened eventually but in the event I was saved by the soldiers. I climbed a shallow rise, tearing my hands painfully on brambles in the process, and then I was in the open. I could sense rather than see that there were no more trees around me, and I guessed I had reached the edge of a woodland meadow. I shone the torch frantically about me, trying to work out which was the best direction to follow. Suddenly there were more lights, broad and penetrating beams of white radiance, strafing the ground and dazzling my eyes. They were approaching from the side at a full-on run.
“Halt!” someone screamed. “Get down.”
I threw myself to the ground, covering my head instinctively with my arms. A stampede seemed to pass over and around me. Then there was more shouting, a single wild cry that I knew was the woman, and then a burst of gunfire. I covered my ears, cowering against the ground, and the next minute I was being dragged upright, pulled back down the rise and into the trees.
My mind froze and went blank. I felt certain that I would die within the next few seconds. Someone shoved me from behind and I almost fell. The criss-crossing beams of powerfu
l torches showed me half a dozen men with blackened faces and wearing combat fatigues. The woman’s body lay face down on the ground, a dark irregular stain spreading across the back of the padded anorak. One of the soldiers kicked her, flipping her on to her side with the toe of his boot. The anorak shifted slightly, revealing a portion of the clothing beneath, a tattered woollen smock over filthy jeans.
With her face turned away from me she was just a dead woman, an unarmed civilian, gunned down in cold blood. Fury coursed through me like an electrical current. I wanted to be sick, but I was terrified to vomit in case these men shot me for it.
“Frigging disgusting,” said one of the men. I had the confused impression that he was referring to my weak stomach, then realised he was talking about the woman they had killed. “What do you think would happen if they started breeding?”
“Shut up, Weegie,” said another. The tone of authority in his voice left me no doubt that he was in charge. Then he turned to me. “What the fuck are you doing out here?”
My throat gave a dry click, and I felt once more the gagging reflex, but finally I was able to stammer out an answer.
“I came off the road,” I said. “I’m lost.”
“ID?”
For a second I panicked, wondering what would happen if I had lost my wallet, or left it behind at Andrews’s place, but miraculously when I reached into my jacket pocket it was there. I handed it over in silence. The officer flicked through it briefly, letting his eyes rest for a moment upon my photograph and national insurance number, then handed it back.
“Bloody civvies,” he said. “Do you want to get mistaken for one of these?” He nodded down at the woman’s lifeless body. I shook my head, not trusting myself to speak.
