Timekeepers

by Dave Weaver

  ‘Something only we ‘biologically imperfect creatures’ get; it makes us stronger because we can learn to accept it, even embrace it. But you can’t do that, you’re not inoculated from it, you’re defenceless. It’ll eat up your memory, burn out your logic systems and destroy your functions byte by byte. It’s acid for your brain, Chrono! We call it ‘guilt’.’

  ‘NO… GET IT OUT OF ME… GET OUT IT OUT…!’

  There was a sudden furious pain in Jack’s neck. Under the scar he felt the implant burn his flesh as it began to corrode. He instinctively reached a hand up to it and felt his arm respond, as if the muscles were trying to remember.

  Jack looked for the countdown figures again. Fourteen seconds left. He shuffled across the Capsule floor and reached a shaky hand to the intercom.

  His throat was dry, still half-paralysed. “Abort the jump!”

  Lucas’ voice snapped back immediately. “What’s the matter?”

  “Stop the jump, Lucas!”

  “We can’t Jack; it’s gone past critical mass. The counter-reaction would blow the Centre to pieces.”

  “It’s okay then. I was just panicking.”

  “Jack!” It was Portia. “Jack, what is it, what’s wrong?”

  “Goodbye Por…” But they were gone. And it was time to finally catch that train.

  Chapter 29

  Whether it was the oily burning smell that first entered his senses, the metallic clack of wheel on rail, or the sight of the machine itself looming out of the Jump’s white flash that swiftly brought Jack to his senses, one thing he was completely sure of was imminent death. He closed his eyes and waited for it to embrace him, then realised that what he most wanted to see in the last few seconds was his home world again.

  What Jack did actually see was a heavy figure dashing towards him around the side of the slowing train; a boy in a school uniform clutching a long metal scaffolding pole. Bruce’s flushed face gave him a quick glance then he darted across the tracks almost disappearing beneath the oncoming machine. He ran puffing before it then tilted the pole’s end towards the ground like a demented pole-vaulter. It clanged into the V of rails that held Jack’s foot. He swung on it, twisting the pole across Jack’s face, and heaved down hard. As he did so Jack felt the pressure on his trapped foot ease as the two rails were levered apart. A hand grabbed his collar and tugged him over as the pole slid away. The points snapped back into place and the train clattered past. There was a microsecond image of the driver’s whitened face peering down, then the two boys were tumbling in the sand and dirt of the railway cutting. Bruce flattened him then rolled away as they both came to a rest on their backs. The carriage clanked on by, then came to a stop. A man’s footsteps marched towards them. Both looked up at the angry face of the driver glaring down.

  “Right, names, both of you! I’m going to report you to the Police!”

  “We weren’t mucking about mate!” Bruce was the first to react, sitting up. Jack did likewise but remained bewildered. What had just happened? He was finding it hard to process it.

  “You’re on British Rail property!” The driver continued. He looked both angry and relieved; Jack realised that he was still in shock.

  “He had his foot trapped in your bloody points!” Bruce told him.

  “What was he doing down here in the first place?” Not an unreasonable question, Jack felt.

  “I threw his cap on the line, didn’t I? I didn’t think the silly sod would go and get it.”

  “Is that what happened?” The driver addressed Jack for the first time.

  “It was my fault.” Jack replied, trying to regain some semblance of rational thinking.

  “He says it was him, you say it was you…” The driver gave a loud oath of frustration followed by a deep intake of breath. When he spoke again, it was in the voice of a man who was just grateful that he hadn’t killed a couple of kids. “Get off to school, the pair of you. Bloody kids…”

  He walked back up the line and climbed into the train’s cabin. A few moments later the train moved off, gathering speed until it disappeared around the bend.

  Bruce looked at him. “Well, that was fun.”

  “You just saved my life.” Jack told him in an incredulous voice.

  “You noticed.”

  His saviour stood up, then reached down a hand. Jack grasped it.

  “Thanks… I mean thank you for…”

  “Saving your bloody life.” Bruce prompted.

  Jack nodded.

  “That’s all right. What the hell were you trying to prove anyway?”

  Jack forced his mind back to those last few moments with Bruce before the Jump. “I wasn’t trying to prove anything; I was running from you. You were about to beat me up.”

  “I wasn’t going to beat you up; don’t be so dramatic. Get a couple of kicks in at the most. And anyway, you started it. You hit me!”

  He did hit Bruce, smack, in the mouth. He’d thought it an accident at the time but maybe not, maybe he’d meant to do it because… because of what he’d said about Honour and him, what he’d thought Bruce had said. But that scorning voice sounded now, in retrospect, like Chrono’s. And, like everything from that damn programme, only inside Jack’s own head.

  He remembered Bruce’s expression of total surprise, even shock, when he hit him. Chrono had made Jack hear what it had wanted him to. Hopefully, the Timekeepers would reprogramme it into something less psychotic. Then again, all that was another time-brane away now.

  And he was back in this one.

  Jack looked around the cutting. He looked down-line to the sidings and station, up-line to the distant hills and woods then across at the office blocks, department stores and church steeples of Fulchester peeking above the embankment.

  He was back indeed, as if he’d never left the place. And most importantly, he was alive.

  “Thanks mate.” He told the big lad, “I apologise for the punch.”

  “Lucky punch.” Bruce corrected him. “And for Christ’s sake don’t ever pull such a stupid stunt again. We’d better get off to those stupid mocks. I presume you’re going to get every bloody question correct yet again?”

  But Jack wasn’t really listening. He couldn’t seem to stop grinning. “Bruce Willis, my hero!”

  Bruce stared at him for a long moment then shook his head and returned a sheepish grin of his own. “Sod off, Johnson.” He turned away and started trudging slowly back up the embankment.

  After one further glance around his home, just to make sure, Jack followed.

  Chapter 30

  Fulchester Museum’s opening time on a Saturday morning was ten o’clock. Jack had decided the night before that he’d be there the moment they unlocked the doors but in fact he was late getting into town then, put off the visit for another half an hour, wandering randomly around the shops and electronic games stores. He bought a local newspaper but didn’t bother to read it.

  After nights of troubled sleep and unfocussed dreams of hover-car chases and girls in thigh-high boots, time machines and coin-portals, all to the soundtrack of by a booming machine voice he’d awoken every morning with a hellish headache. They’d gradually lessened as the days passed. This morning’s had hardly registered, or perhaps he was just getting used to them. What precisely had happened to him at a quarter-to-nine in the morning four days ago? He wasn’t entirely sure what he believed anymore, about anything. The surrounding world had been shaken apart and rebuilt around him. Or was the truth of it actually something less prosaic: something that had more to do with his own personal situation.

  Was any of it true?

  Let’s look at the facts: he’d stupidly trapped himself on a railway line fleeing a fight; unlucky, but then his aggressor had become his saviour. For a brief moment in the middle of it all he’d been transported to somewhere not of this time and, ultimately, not of this Earth. Not the Earth he recognised anyway. Was this just a twisted version of the old ‘life flashing before your eyes’ moment before you die o
r could it have actually happened?

  Although obviously grateful to still be alive, the early morning incident had been distracting enough for him to get a couple of the questions wrong in the mocks. He’d almost told Bruce as they filed out of the hall, before realising how patronising that would be to the guy who’d just risked his life so that Jack could take the damn tests. In the end he’d given him a nod and received a gloomy eye-roll in return, causing raised eyebrows from Butt and Wilson. Jack had smiled inwardly when Bruce mouthed a dismissive ‘piss-off’ at both of them.

  So here he was now, outside the doors of Fulchester Museum.

  He took a deep breath and went inside, showed his local resident pass to the woman in the gift shop and distractedly took a clutch of leaflets. Then he climbed the central staircase to the Roman section like a prisoner heading into the courtroom for the jury’s final verdict. He could pretend to himself that he didn’t know what he was looking for but knew that to be a lie. There was one very specific item which he thought it was possible, unlikely maybe, but possible to find in the glass-topped display cases of artefacts from the original fifties archaeological dig.

  He trained his eyes on the cases, trying to remember which one, then looked up suddenly as a long shadow fell across them. In the corner of the white-walled room a large armoured figure loomed, silhouetted in bright morning sunlight. For a few shaky seconds Jack was back in the park with the Roman soldier staring at him. He caught hold of himself; this was just the model that Bruce had clumsily bumped into. Ridiculous to get so spooked, even the short-sword brandished so menacingly was merely a fibreglass replica.

  At the model’s feet, with ‘Don’t Walk Here’ signs all around it, was the tessellated picture that Bruce had dropped the spear onto. Now Jack could make it out more clearly: the young man in dark blue clothing and winged cap, surrounded by the Gods; Jupiter, and the rest of the immortals. It certainly looked a good deal more like Mercury than it did him. And the unlikely garment the Messenger of the Gods was wearing didn’t resemble a Fulchester High school uniform in the slightest.

  Jack looked up at something glinting at him from the farthest display case along the opposite wall. It was roughly where ‘Honour’ had stood just a few days previously. Or was it a few weeks? No, don’t go there now. Today’s visit, he finally acknowledged to himself, was for getting his head right.

  Nevertheless… Hesitantly, Jack walked over to the case.

  The Roman coins inside were laid out in neat rows, each dated and labelled with the name of the Emperor whose partially obscured head adorned them. Jack focussed on them individually and saw that one was different, despite the whole collection’s mildewed appearance. It was far too dull to have given off any blink of light. Even so, it was the only coin in the collection without a famous head, image of a horse or whatever. At first it looked blank but then a thin circular line could be discerned running near the edge. There appeared to be something else faintly embossed onto its surface, touching the circle.

  It looked like the letter ‘T’.

  So had Borg’s portal remained behind with him in this reality and not the one where the Roman Empire still ruled after two thousand years? Was this portal dug up in the famous fifties dig, then placed in the museum with the rest of the great historical find?

  If Jack’s experience was true, those archaeologists never realised what they really had.

  And if it wasn’t, what then was the explanation for such an object?

  So it had all really happened: the escape from the train, the coin-portal thing, the other Roman Empire. Portia.

  A man’s voice came to him from somewhere very distant; at least the memory of it.

  ‘Let it all go Jack…’

  As he walked down the stairs he thought he heard a crackle of static behind him. But there was no flash of white light this time and he wasn’t going back.

  Not yet.

  Elsewhen Press

  an independent publisher specialising in Speculative Fiction

  Visit the Elsewhen Press website at elsewhen.co.uk for the latest information on our titles, authors and events; to read our blog; find out where to buy our books and ebooks; or to place an order.

  Sign up for the Elsewhen Press InFlight Newsletter at

  elsewhen.co.uk/newsletter

  The Black Hole Bar

  Dave Weaver

  Simon, a traveller with time to kill, enters an inn on the outskirts of London. Inside he meets a motley crew competing to tell tales for their own amusement. So starts Dave Weaver’s new novel, The Black Hole Bar, which has already been compared to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio’s Decameron.

  Simon is an industrial journalist, on his way to yet another off-world assignment, this time a three month trip to Saturn’s moon Titan to write a promotional piece about the harvesting of the Methane lakes on that forbidding world. But Simon is a troubled man. He’s sure his wife is having an affair during his prolonged absences; he’s bored with his job; and unsure where his life is going.

  Simon has stumbled into what was supposed to be a closed session for the Black Hole Bar Writers’ Group, who meet once a month to take part in a short story competition. Simon writes stories too and begrudgingly they let him participate. The stories begin, and Simon starts taking the competition far more seriously than he intended.

  Each of the bar’s denizens tells two stories, variously strange, amusing and occasionally downright scary. The writers’ own histories, lives crossed by tragedy and drama, come tumbling out one by one into the cramped little room and as they do so, we learn more about the background of this future world. A world which is at the same time recognisable as our possible future but also chilling in its recent past.

  ebook, paperback (256pp)

  visit bit.ly/BlackHoleBar

  Japanese Daisy Chain

  Dave Weaver

  In Japanese Daisy Chain, Dave Weaver takes us on a very individualistic journey around contemporary Japan through the eyes of the participants in a series of apparently unrelated incidents. Events that, to an outsider may seem a little strange or hard to explain, but to which we are given an exclusive insight – enabling us to see the consequence of contact with the paranormal, fantastic or downright weird. As each episode unfurls and our journey progresses, we alone can see the invisible thread that connects these events, albeit tenuously. A participant on each occasion, a minor character if you will, becomes the main protagonist in the next, creating a human daisy-chain. Just like a daisy-chain, what goes around comes around. The chain is completed and we finally understand karma...

  ebook, paperback (248pp)

  visit bit.ly/JapaneseDaisyChain

  Jacey’s Kingdom

  Dave Weaver

  Jacey’s Kingdom is an enthralling tale that revolves around a startlingly desperate reality: Jacey Jackson, a talented student destined for Cambridge, collapses with a brain tumour while sitting her final history exam at school. In her mind she struggles through a quasi-historical sixth century dreamscape whilst the surgeons fight to save her life.

  Jacey is helped by a stranger called George, who finds himself trapped in her nightmare after a terrible car accident. There are quests, battles, and a love story ahead of them, before we find out if Jacey will awake from her coma or perish on the operating table. And who, or what, is George? In this book, Dave Weaver questions our perception of reality and the redemptive power of dreams; are our experiences of fear, conflict, friendship and love any less real or meaningful when they take place in the mind rather than the ‘real’ physical world?

  ebook, paperback (272pp)

  visit bit.ly/JaceysKingdom

  The Unseen

  Dave Weaver

  Ex-advertising man John Mason is driving to the small town of Hambleford to view a cottage that is for sale, when he is caught in a sudden hailstorm. It brings back memories of the crash a year before in which he lost his wife Judith; a crash caused by a woman in white standing in the middle of t
he road – a woman who was nowhere to be found after the accident. As the hailstorm lashes his car he has a vision of her, with empty eyes and a silent screaming mouth. John has been having regular dreams about her ever since the crash, but lately they have been replaced by dreams of an idyllic cottage on a hillside like the one in which Judith had wanted them to live. John is special – he sees things that others can’t. Since childhood he’s had strange experiences but has tried to shut them out; now he thinks Judith is trying to contact him, that she’s been sending his mind images of the house where her spirit will join him again, and that Pine Cottage in Hambleford is literally the cottage of his dreams.

  But things aren’t all as they appear and John quickly becomes convinced that a spirit other than Judith is trying to manipulate him.

  The Unseen is a darkly erotic tale of guilt and obsession. Both hallucinatory and horrifying, its finale will shock you.

  ebook, paperback (248pp)

  visit bit.ly/Unseen-Weaver

  About the author

  Dave Weaver, a graphic designer, was born in darkest Surrey but now lives near the ruins of the Roman town of Verulamium with his family and a cat called Trillian. He took quite a long time to begin writing, but eventually joined the local Verulam Writers’ Circle and had a number of short stories published in various anthologies and webzines. Much of his writing hovers on the shifting borders between fantasy and reality, but he also indulges a love of science fiction. His first novel, Jacey’s Kingdom, explored the uncertain times of Britain’s Dark Ages. His latest novel, Timekeepers, explores Romano Britain, but not just in the past; it is his fifth novel to be published by Elsewhen Press.