“Are you sure?” I asked, but Silvan only made his way over to the recliner and settled back into it.
“Let’s do it.”
This time there were no straps, clips or buckles. Mr Wylie operated the mechanism that lowered the chair, and then gently hooked Silvan up to the machine using wireless probes that looked like globules of gel. As soon as one of the transparent pods had been placed on Silvan’s forehead, the computer screen behind him began to flash and beep.
I shifted forwards to stand a little closer to my inert friend, as Ballulah waved at the ceiling and the lights dimmed.
“I just need you to relax, Silvan,” Mr Wylie instructed, his voice low. “Close your eyes if you like. It helps to free you from other distractions.” Silvan grinned at me, and then shut his eyes as directed.
Mr Wylie fiddled with the keyboard of his computer and the screen began taking measurements of Silvan’s thoughts. The readings reminded me in part of Perdita Pugh’s electro-endoquaero, seemingly random and indecipherable unless you knew what you were looking for.
“Could you cast your mind back to the night you performed the ritual. You entered the bedroom at Whittle Inn and made your preparations…” The lights and squiggles on the screen altered, patterns emerging as Silvan remembered. “And then you located the forcefield.” The machine blipped and bleeped, orange and green lines shooting across the screen.
“Did you manage to make contact with Guillaume Gorde?” Mr Wylie asked.
Silvan scratched at the skin on his forehead, near the site of the pod. “I did. Ever so briefly. There was a tear in the fabric of the forcefield and I was able to put my hand through.”
“Good! Good!” Ballulah exclaimed. “Focus on that moment.”
“Yes, Silvan. If you could remember the moment when you reached through the rip in the forcefield…” Mr Wylie stared at the screen, as orange and blue and green lines zipped and zig-zagged. “And again,” said Mr Wylie, his voice still calm, almost soothing. The patterns repeated themselves over and over again until the machine gave one long high-pitched beep and a tiny printer began to spew out paper no bigger than a till receipt.
“Ah here we are,” Mr Wylie said, a little more excitement to his tone now. He ripped the first reading off, peered at it and nodded in satisfaction, before taking the next one that came out of the machine and passing it to Ballulah.
She pulled a pair of spectacles out of a pocket in her robes and examined the print in front of her. “Perfect,” she announced. “How do you all fancy a trip back to 1983?”
The tinny sound of a radio playing drifted across the early evening’s airwaves. Elton John’s I’m Still Standing had morphed into Paul Young’s Wherever I lay My Hat (That’s my Home) which seemed somehow appropriate given the current circumstances.
Silvan, Mr Wylie and I stood on the drive outside Whittle Inn gazing up at it. The weather was pleasant for late May 1983. This time my stomach had held it together and I’d made the jump through time without too much nausea.
I cocked my head, appraising the evidence in front of me, trying to remember the first time I’d set eyes on my wonky inn, attempting to measure the changes between 1983 and the present. The 1983 inn looked run down, the once white paint of the cladding had become grimy over the years, streaked with green, the windows filthy. At some stage in the intervening years since then the inn had been repainted. It hadn’t even looked this bad when I’d taken over, and I’d had it redone myself since then.
The grounds were untidy, but managed. To the left and to the rear of the inn, Speckled Wood stretched away into the distance. That much hadn’t changed. Mr Hoo, who had travelled with us of course, leapt from my wrist and flew off that way to take a look.
Mr Wylie led the way to the front steps of the inn and my apprehension grew. I couldn’t quite imagine seeing a younger version of my father here, or my paternal grandparents, either. Fortunately, if memory served me correctly, my father Erik Daemonne had been away at University, so there was little chance I’d meet him.
From the research that the chronometric wizards had undertaken, it seemed evident that the inn had been falling into disrepair for some time. Guests had been few and far between in the early to mid-eighties, and despite the clement weather there wasn’t a soul to be seen anywhere in the grounds.
We let ourselves in. The main bar was much as I’d originally found it. Partitioned walls in the place where the huge open fireplace now stood. Hardboard covered the rear of the bar, protecting the mirrors. Cheap wooden tables covered in mismatched veneer, and a revolting carpet that had probably been in situ since the mid-seventies completed the scene. The smell of spilt beer and cigarettes was everywhere, along with the oddly jarring undercurrents of boiled cabbage and furniture polish.
I burned with curiosity, desperate to explore the rest of the inn, but Ballulah had been firm on that score, insisting that we had a job to do and should not be side-tracked.
And so, one after another, we climbed single file up the main staircase to the first floor. The walls were scratched and stained, and only a few cheap flower prints decorated the space. The carpet was an odd shade of mustard with brown swirls, thick enough to muffle the sounds of our footsteps.
We paused several doors down from The Throne Room.
We’d discussed this at length before travelling back to this time. We wanted to get close enough to know that the person we needed was here, and then we intended to make the much shorter jump forward in time to the moment he or she broke through the forcefield. At that stage we’d surprise him and wrestle the Gimcrack away from him, perhaps apprehend him to either Ballulah or Wizard Shadowmender’s custody.
Silvan had been against this suggestion. Not surprising really, I suppose. There’s honour among thieves after all, and Silvan was the king of ne'er-do-wells. However, Ballulah had been adamant. A crime had been committed against the property of the Cosmic Order of Chronometric Wizards and she—rightly or wrongly—wanted to see justice.
She’d returned our wands to us, and we were under strict instructions to immobilise the culprit enough that Mr Wylie would be able to transport him to a place of security that would be agreed upon once he was in our custody.
I could sense Silvan’s displeasure at this whole set-up, and I understood his feelings on the matter. Guillaume had died of natural causes and so there was nobody to blame for his death. An opportunistic thief had made the most of a situation he had uncovered. As far as we knew, that was all there was to it.
Ballulah and the other wizards in the Cosmic Order of Chronometric Wizards obviously felt differently. Although I suspected there was more to the story than they were telling us, the facts as they stood, suggested that the only thing missing was Gorde’s Gimcrack, and there was no evidence that it had been put to nefarious purposes in the intervening years since 1983.
I would have liked to discuss this privately with Silvan, but he and I had enjoyed no time to confer as we hadn’t been left alone at any stage. For now, we had to go along with Ballulah’s plan. Mr Wylie for his part seemed intent on following it to the letter.
For the first time I became aware that someone else, presumably the person listening to the radio downstairs, was in residence. Footsteps were following us up the stairs. There was no time to lose. We had to make ourselves scarce. Holding my finger to my lips, I turned the handle of the door nearest us, praying that it hadn’t been locked and that the room beyond was vacant.
One after the other we slipped inside, I quickly closed the door as quietly as I could and pressed myself against it. Outside, the footsteps were muted by the carpet but I heard a woman humming to herself as she passed by. Each of us held our breath. We waited. She continued on her way and a few long moments later we heard the opening and closing of a door down the hall, possibly the office, it came from that direction.
I let out a nervous breath and smiled. “Now what?” I whispered, turning around to properly survey our location. This was a small room, with w
oodchip wallpaper painted in terracotta. Someone had come up with the bright idea of sticking a frieze—in lime green, terracotta and yellow—all around the room at the place where the walls met the ceiling. I imagined that the same person considered that the polycotton sheets on the bed, in a less than fetching shade of orange, would pull the overall colour scheme together.
Needless to say, it didn’t.
Silvan beckoned us over to the wall. “There’s someone next door,” he mouthed, and we each lay an ear against the wall and eavesdropped. I could clearly hear someone moving around next door, it sounded like they were knocking on wood.
“Which room are we in?” Silvan asked.
“In my time this would be Stillwater, my Dean R Koontz room, so yes, that’s The Throne Room right next door, the one where Guillaume stayed. He was interred in the space between that and the next room on.” Was still interred, I thought. We were back in 1983 after all.
Mr Wylie backed away from the wall and studied his Gimcrack. “Then this must be the person we’re after.” He held his palm-sized machine up, the blue light shining brightly. “Are we ready?”
“No time like the present,” Silvan smiled.
“Wands equipped,” Mr Wylie instructed, and I pulled mine from my robes.
Mr Wylie held his arms out. Silvan and I grabbed one apiece. Me on the left, Silvan to Mr Wylie’s right.
“Wait!” I remembered, “What about Mr Hoo?” But it was too late, and once more I found myself flung through the air like a ragdoll.
Given that the physical distance between where we were in Stillwater and where we needed to be in The Throne Room only amounted to a matter of metres, you’d imagine that our time-travel jump would have been over in the blink of an eye.
Not so.
In addition, we only needed to jump forwards in time by around fifty-three minutes—according to the readings taken from Silvan’s harvested memories in any case—and yet travelling through time took longer than you’d anticipate. Once more I became aware of the stars, and now that my body didn’t want to react so negatively to the forces spinning me about, I could spend a little time wondering at the infiniteness of time and space and what a small speck of dust I was in the grand scheme of things… before, pow!
We were in The Throne Room.
For a fraction of a moment we were all frozen in time, Mr Wylie, Silvan and I, wands pointing forwards towards a small youngish man. Aged about thirty, he wore casual clothes, a pair of brown corduroy trousers and a khaki coloured jumper with a red V-neck, covered by loose grey robes. Bizarrely, I recognised him, and although that awareness was only vague, it stopped me from acting quickly while my brain tried to process who he was, whether we were friends, or whether he posed any danger to me.
He had created a remarkably neat hole in the wall, square in shape, about a foot and a half high, and a foot off the floor. We caught him as he leaned into the hole. I could barely make out the colours of the forcefield, they weaved weakly in and out of each other—orange, green and blue—obviously damaged by this man. He reared back in shock as we unexpectedly appeared in front of him, a look of astonishment on his face. Faster to react than us, he lifted his wand.
I was slow to respond, and Silvan didn’t react at all. That left Mr Wylie, but he was hampered somewhat given that Silvan had for some reason maintained a firm hold of the cosmic wizard’s wand arm. As Mr Wylie endeavoured to take aim at the grey-clad wizard in front of us, his spell was knocked off course. It smashed into the wall to the side of the hole.
That was all the time our quick-witted thief needed. He raised his own wand and with a bright flash disappeared from the room.
Mr Wylie cried out and pulled himself away from Silvan and I, heading for the hole in the wall. I followed and glanced inside. I could clearly see Guillaume’s robes and his hands folded in his lap. He looked peaceful, much as he would do when we found him in the future.
Whomever it had been that we’d disturbed in the act, he had what he’d come for. The Gimcrack had gone.
“No!” Mr Wylie shrieked in frustration and I cast a quick glance Silvan’s way. His face remained impassive.
“I’m sorry.” I said, unsure what had gone wrong. I knew somewhere along the line both Silvan and I had failed. “Maybe we could try it again? Time travel to the same point?”
“We can’t come back to exactly the same moment of time ever again,” Mr Wylie said. “This isn’t Groundhog Day.”
“That’s one of my favourite movies!” I exclaimed. Silvan raised his eyebrows in disbelief. Now was probably not the time to be discussing our top-rated movies.
We were in a predicament. “What about landing a few seconds before instead?” I suggested.
“Can’t we find out where he’s gone?” Silvan asked, changing the subject, and made his way forwards to the hole in the wall, picking his way among the debris on the floor.
Wylie followed and waved his own Gimcrack around trying to record a trace of the wizard who’d disappeared. “There’s nothing here. No trace.”
Silvan frowned. “That’s a terrible shame. Back to the drawing board?” He sounded genuinely sorry, but I knew him too well. What was he up to?
“I need to get back,” Mr Wylie said. “The researchers will need to plot some new time co-ordinates and maybe I can have another go.” He pointed at the hole, “But we can’t leave Gorde exposed that way.”
“Leave it to me,” Silvan said, and without further ado, he leaned forward into the hole and with the tip of his wand began to repair the rift in the forcefield by waving it in tiny strokes across the width of the tear. Darning magick. I watched in amazement.
When he had finished, he stood back and admired his handywork. “It’s not perfect by any means, but it will hold for now.” He winked at me. “Until Alf’s builders find it again in a few decades.”
Mr Wylie flicked his own wand, and the plaster and wattle and daub that had been littered around the hole jumped back on to the wall and began patching itself up. Again, it wasn’t the neatest job, but to the casual observer it would just look like a wall in need of repainting.
“How about if we push this dressing table against the wall?” I suggested, and between the three of us, we shifted the furniture around.
From down the hall came the sound of the office door opening. “Time to go,” Mr Wylie said.
“But Mr Hoo!” I called urgently. To no avail. Once more as we gripped Mr Wylie’s arm, Whittle Inn disappeared from view and 1983 faded into the mists of time once more.
Silvan and I lay on our backs in the dirt of the clearing. Above us the stars twinkled down, the moonlight filtered through the branches of the trees that surrounded us. We were taking a moment to catch our breath.
“I couldn’t be doing all that leaping through time and space every five minutes,” I groaned. My stomach heaved once more. Fortunately, it had now been over twelve hours in real time since I’d eaten, and centuries in warped cosmic Time-Lord time-travelly kind of time.
“I don’t think the Cosmic Order of Chronometric Wizards will be in a rush to recruit either of us in the immediate future,” Silvan replied drolly.
I breathed deeply, filling my lungs with the fresh air I loved so much in my wood. “No, they won’t. That’s true.” I turned my head to look at him in profile. “What did we do?” I asked.
Silvan rolled over and grinned. “I think it’s called sabotage.”
Sabotage?
Why did we do that though? And instinctively? Without discussing it. Neither of us had taken the action that had been planned, and we’d let a thief go free. No doubt the Cosmic Order of Chronometric Wizards were going to be far from happy with us.
Mr Wylie already was.
I tossed and turned all night, scared to death that I would never clap eyes on Mr Hoo again. Was he really lost in 1983? Would Mr Wylie have the decency to return him to me? How was I even going to get in touch with the Chronometric Wizards? I would need to appeal to Wizard Shadowmen
der.
By five a.m. I couldn’t stay in bed anymore. There seemed to be no point. The alarm would be going off soon enough anyway. I had a shower and washed my hair, and then made my miserable way down to the kitchen where Florence was preparing breakfast pastries for our continental guests.
I snuck a couple of warm croissants from the side when she wasn’t looking, stole the honey from the pantry, and flung myself down on a bench at the big kitchen table. My eyes were grimy from lack of sleep, and while the shower had woken me up to a certain extent, I could tell it was going to be a long day.
Florence gave me the once over and poured a large mug of tea. “You look like you need it, Miss Alf.”
I sighed. “I do. I really do.”
“What’s happened?” my housekeeper asked with just the right amount of alarm.
I tore a chunk of croissant and stuffed it in my gob. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” My reply was almost inaudible, and Florence shook her head.
“I would. I’m over a hundred years old. Anything is possible.”
“I’ve left my owl in 1983,” I cried.
“1983?”
“Yes.”
Florence turned back to her pastries. “Really, Miss Alf, you do tell some right porky pies sometimes.”
Her disbelief made me grin for some reason. In my wonky world, anything was possible, until it wasn’t. Time travel for some reason was a step too far for Florence, but then, she was a ghost and infinity stretched out in front of her and not behind her.
Otherwise Guillaume Gorde might have been able to come back and help us out.
I paused over my breakfast, honey dripping down my fingers and onto the plate in front of me. Guillaume had obviously been happy to let go and travel to the next world. He hadn’t hung around. He hadn’t wanted to haunt the inn. He had entrusted my poor great-grandmother with the safekeeping of his worldly goods and physical remains. She had tried to keep her promise.
The Mysterious Mr Wylie: Wonky Inn Book 6 Page 13
