“What kind of incident?” he asked, feigning genuine interest.
“She did shoot the Master,” Porter said. Without thinking, he had somehow managed to make it sound like a normal event. Still, he reasoned, this was Prudence he was referring to.
Hopkins nodded. “Ah, the employer of the witc... of the girl you suspect?” He creased his eyes. “Indeed, indeed. And why did she do this..?”
“He raised a ’lock to me as I took the girl from her duties,” Porter said. He spoke fluidly, yet his mind was elsewhere. It was pondering exactly what he might do to Hopkins if the despicable young showman fired the words ‘indeed, indeed’ quite so disinterestedly at him just one more time. He mused that it might just involve getting a farm-hand to violently insert the young man’s head somewhere deep into the back end of his still-sweating horse.
Hopkins now looked decidedly pensive. Deliberately so, as though he were perhaps acting it - as a town player might - rather than actually feeling it. “So he saw fit to shoot you, and she saved your life?” He thought some more. “And what of the Master? Is he still with us?”
“Barely,” Porter replied ruefully. “The night will tell us more.”
Hopkins smiled gently, as though perhaps some small prayer had been answered in his mind and all was becoming well in the world once more. “Then there is no real harm done,” he said confidently. “As yet. She acted in defence of your life and even then she has merely wounded the poor man. I suspect the Magistrates will look quite favourably upon her actions. Of course, if the Master were to live and if she were to aid me in the uncovering of devilry within his very own household, then it is likely she would not even need to be called before the Magistrates at all. Wouldn’t you say...?”
“I do not think that would be appropr...” Porter began, but Hopkins cut him off with a swiftly-raised hand.
“I do know the statutes of this land fair well, Mr. Porter, and young Prudence is guilty of no real crime. Not yet. No...” he said, thinking, “…she commissioned my services. She shall assist me as planned.”
Porter gritted his teeth against the many things he wanted to say, all battling for voice behind his tongue like squabbling children. Of course Matthew Hopkins knew the law; it was how he managed to skirt his coin-operated horse around it so effortlessly when it reared its head in his path. Yet... he had a point and, whilst Porter himself might not like to admit to such a thing, it might actually aid the course of events if Prudence Hart were indeed to attend the pricking...
“So...” Hopkins added, as though what followed was to be the most natural request in the world, “...you will take me to her right away?” He too raised an eyebrow, dipped his head slightly and curled a sinister, knowing smile of finality within his neatly trimmed jet-black beard. “Will you not?”
THIRTY-FOUR
Friday, November 25, 1644.
Alison returned from changing her clothes, her usually pristine hair slightly askew and the loose fitting red jump-suit and pensive expressive carved across her face giving her the appearance of a guilty suspect entering the dock for the final time, ready to be sentenced. In many ways I guess she was.
Life: a new one with little or no possibility of parole.
I would have offered her my seat had I thought for one second that she would have been able to sit down. She had things about her person I did not want to even consider and it made me wince a little at the thought.
As ever, I was resplendent in my trademark jeans, sneakers and T-shirt - sans white coat should it make me look too much like a scientist.
For a moment I just leaned back in my chair and admired her, a gentle smile creeping across my face. I admired hHer beauty of course, of which I had long been a fan, but more importantly - on this day - her spirit, her courage and her resolve. I have absolutely no idea if I had done that at the time, of course, but as memories went it seemed to be the kind of thing I really should have done, so I built it in.
“I still don’t know why you’re doing this,” I said.
Looking through the glass to the sphere resting in its cradle in the recently repaired laboratory, she sighed gently It was more about readying herself than fear, I suspected. The runner in the blocks. It was as though she was staring to a distant finish line and seeing all it would bring to her life if she could only get there first.
“I have my reasons,” she said softly.
“But you can’t come back,” I offered. That was the bit I had always struggled to get my head around. The finality of it all.
“It’s not just about me though, is it?” she asked, turning to face me. She looked serious. OK, this was Alison, she looked more serious. “There is someone who needs my help.”
“Who?” I asked.
She smiled warmly; her own memory of someone special now filling her mind. “Someone I owe my life to.”
“And so what about these…tables?” I asked. “The idea is you… what?.. find them and put them back in the loop? Give Klein what he wants?” I knew very little, only that these ‘tables’ were the main purpose of Alison being allowed to return, but I what I did know, only too well, was Klein. Giving that man anything he wanted really, really badly could never strike anyone as being as a particularly good idea.
She smiled again, though this time it seemed a little mischievous; knowing. She looked right at me. “No,” she said. “I get want I want. Klein only gets what he needs.”
“And then what?” I asked. “What happens to you when it’s all done?” Alison was heading back to 2009 and , like she herself had I suspect, I had done the maths. She could not be in two places at the same time, and she must have known that already.
She took a deep breath and thought for a moment, perhaps even deeper. Pondering her options, her ‘outs’ if they even existed. Eventually, she spoke… almost in riddles. “They say that, if one were to actually decode the tables and uncover the information they hold, one might actually have the answers. The answers to life, to the universe… to everything.”
“42..?”
She threw me a look. “They say that one might even be able to control the world around us, to understand and control the laws of physics to such a degree that one could break them at will. Just imagine what the world would be like if mankind, or even just one man, could quite literally move mountains.”
“I don’t follow,” I said.
She sighed, resigned. “Well, you see… I can’t move mountains,” she said. “And I never will. Which means that I’ll just have to climb that particular one when I get to it. Doesn’t it?”
She looked sad.
“And yet you’re still going?”
Suddenly she looked stoic again; firm in her reasoning as though bracing herself whether she wanted to or not. “And still I have to,” she said. She pointed to the sphere, still sitting idle. “There is someone at the other side of that gateway right now who is, quite literally, depending on me to come through for them.”
I think I understood. I didn’t, back then, I just thought I did.
“Nervous?” I asked, my feet now resting on the console. I had hoped my by me appearing relaxed it might seem to relax her too. I should have known better. Alison was not one for relaxing.
“Shitting bricks,” she said. She looked like she meant it and I guess, once she got back, that would be more a literal statement than either one of us really wanted to consider.
“Not surprised.” I said. “I can’t actually believe you’re actually doing this.”
“Me either.”
“So I suppose any chance of a date’s out of the window then?”
“It was anyway.” She threw me a wry look. “How is Rachael, by the way?”
And that’s when it dawned. And, as it did, it began to tear at my insides piece by piece. Of course this was a memory, a flashback, call it what you will… but it was also a particular memory. A memory of the day Alison had returned, sure, but more importantly a memory of the day on which Rachael hadn’t. This was the
day on which I learned that Rachael was gone.
And I wasn’t enjoying the memory any more.
* * * * *
The first time this had all happened, when Charlie the mouse had been sent on a permanent vacation to somewhere around 1776, both Alison and I had been blown clean off our chair in the midst of the blinding white light. I might be alone this time around, but I was determined that it was not going to happen again. So, after I had wished her luck, and she had wished me it too, I not only pressed ‘Orange-Two’ with my right hand but also gripped my chair with my left. The moment the button was pressed and the flash commenced I moved my right hand to the chair also and gripped for all I was worth.
It worked. When the melee around me subsided and the light returned to normal I was indeed still seated in my chair. Result.
It just so happened that, the more I looked, the more I realised that that same chair was now flat on its back with me still in it and I was staring at the ceiling. Partial result.
Gathering myself together I took a moment to look to the empty chamber and ponder. Alison starting a new life and, hopefully, me starting mine. I removed the ring from my pocket, the ring with which I would ask Rachael to become my wife, and carefully placed the ring over the manicured nail of my left ring finger. I smiled gently. One more week and, one way or another, my life was going to change forever.
Just one more week.
I then removed my Peace Dollar from my trouser pocket and placed it across my right thumb. All I needed was for the coin to give me some kind of sign; to tell me that my odds were currently just a little better than 50-50.
Under my breath, I said: “Heads she says ‘yes’. Tails she says...”
And I daren’t even say what came next. So I flipped instead.
Suddenly the door flew open and I found myself instinctively spinning around to find Burgess standing breathless in the doorway.
“We’ve got a problem,” the guard said, wheezing.
“What kind of problem?”
“Cardou,” he said sharply. His face was deathly serious and his toned matched it perfectly. “There’s been an explosion. A big explosion.”
I was frozen to the chair and, for just a moment, it seemed as though time, this same supposedly rigid entity that Alison had seen fit to dance through not a few minutes ago, had stood still. Slowly, like awakening from an anaesthetic, realisation crept through me and then thawed that same shock into something that felt so much worse. It tore something inside.
Only one word found an exit. “Rachael…”
And now time really did stand still. Burgess was suddenly frozen in the doorway as though turning, but he was not. He was rigid. And so, when I looked, was the second hand on the clock.
Like my heart, everything around me had just… stopped.
I felt as though I was sitting in a vacuum, my senses numbed and my body felt heavy.
I stood, slowly, my mouth open wide at the vista of a frozen room which surrounded me. Burgess was not moving at all, not one inch. Instead, he was simply caught in a fleeting fragment of time, as though he had been paused just after delivering the killer line at the end of an episode. I half expected titles to roll through the still air between us at any moment.
Again, I looked to the clock, still nothing. The hands were frozen solid. I turned and looked at the console, same deal. Flashing lights no longer flashed. Indeed, those that had been ‘on’ in that instant were still on and those that had been ‘off’ were, well, off. Looking through into the lab I could see that a final weary spark had been trapped and had been - until a moment ago - ready to die in there; a death-throe inmate. It too had been frozen now and it remained shining blue halfway between the sphere and the arm.
The world had stopped and yet, for some reason I could not understand, I hadn’t.
From the corner of my eye, floating in the air just above me, I saw the coin; fixed in space and time. I turned to examine it, its crisp edge just a few centimetres from my face. It too was frozen; effortlessly defying gravity as it hovered like a preying eagle in the still air which filled the space above a decision it had yet to make.
I touched it and it moved ever so slightly, as though caught by a gentle wave or a slight draught. As I looked I could see that absolutely nothing, seemingly, was holding it aloft. Just… time. Or a lack of it. Carefully, I crouched slightly and looked underneath. I knew that whatever side might face the floor now would not necessarily be the side which faced the floor when it had done it’s thing, but it annoyed me that heads was facing down.
“So, I guess you need to make a decision now. Don’t you, Mr. Smarty Pants..?”
Victoria. That same drawl and the same vacancy embedded within her words she always seemed to carry, as though she was talking to me, to herself and to no-one all at exactly the same time. I turned to find her sitting in a chair against the far wall, next to the door to the room Alison had used to change into the jumpsuit. A chair I did not even know was there. It was like a coach seat draped in a really bad burgundy material with a sickly pattern running all across it. She looked relaxed and was not even looking at me as she spoke.
“Sorry?” I said.
She looked up, seemingly surprised. “Ah, it lives,” she said with a smile. “I thought you were sleeping.”
“Where am I?” I said, still looking around at the frozen room surrounding me.
She looked down again, pensive. “You, Mr. Strauss, are in ‘Decision Town’, Illinois. The rough part I’m guessing.” She pulled a face. “Don’t know why I said Illinois. Never been, but it seemed appropriate. Anyways, that’s where you’re at and it looks like you forgot to bring a map. You’re lost, Mr. Strauss. It’s to be expected. I know that feeling. It eats you when the wasps are asleep.”
“So what do I do?” I asked.
“You make a decision,” she said firmly, “and you get out. Find a new town.”
“I don’t know how,” I said. I looked. Burgess was still blocking the door, his face frozen in the remains of his previous words and his eyes wide. His body was twisted slightly. He had been turning to leave when the clock had stopped.
“Well, you could leave it to fate,” Victoria said, “or you could accept that fate holds no place in this world. You could accept that everything that needs to happen will happen. But to do that you have accept that it does this because we make it happen. Because we have to.”
I looked to the coin again, still floating in the space just above me and wavering slightly. It still hadn’t fully settled from me touching it, as though the laws of friction had been abandoned and those of perpetual motion were desperately trying to take their place.
“Heads she says yes,” I said, under my breath.
Heads she says yes. And yet here I was leaving one of the most important decisions of my life to the simple, almost-faceless flick of a coin. Whether I could or I couldn’t, I wasn’t even trying to influence it. I was letting the world control me instead of controlling the world. I too might never move mountains, but I would never know for sure unless I at least tried.
I flicked down on the edge of the coin and it began to spin on an invisible axis as it floated in space. It took a while but ultimately came close to a stop. Not enough kinetic energy within it for another half turn. Heads was still down and it still annoyed me, so carefully, using my index finger, I gently turned it around until heads was facing up. I hoped that, in some small way, I’d had just upped my odds. Taken control.
“I have to go,” I said.
“Go where?” Victoria asked, looking up at me again.
“To where Rachael is,” I said. I sounded defiant.
Opening my eyes I saw the azure-blue screen directly in front of me, the desperately bland safety instructions plastered across its high resolution face in a font that made them seem even more dull than they had ever hoped to achieve on their own. I smelled the strange, repackaged air that surrounded me and felt the claustrophobic heat of over a hundred sweating bodi
es. I saw the fake smiles of the stewardess as she moved along the aisle offered drinks and the annoying blonde-haired butter-wouldn’t-melt child that seemingly must be carried on all flight by law as he tried to clamber over the seat in front of his own.
Turning, I saw Victoria, still sitting in the sickly-patterned burgundy coach seat as we ourselves hovered many miles above the deep blue of the Atlantic Ocean.
Four days after I had first been informed that Rachael had ‘died’ and I had still been struggling for answers. Even when I was being offered even the slightest chance of being able to help her, I had still been completely unsure of what to do. And it hurt. It hurt because the answers had been there all along. Alison had given them to me the day she had left; the very day that I had first found out about Rachael’s accident. It was almost as if she had been trying to prepare me in some way, though she could not possibly have known. I, for my part, had been way too wrapped up in my own grief and troubles to even bother listening.
“There is someone at the other side of that gateway right now who is, quite literally, depending on me to come through for them.”
She could do it. So must I.
And then, at the turning point of my mid-air dream, at the point in which the world around me had stopped and news of Rachael had thrown my life firmly into limbo, along had come Victoria; her own special brand of wisdom carried firmly with her. Seated by my side on the plane, she will probably have had no idea that I was actually still half-asleep; still dreaming. She just spoke to me and I, in my half-conscious state, spoke back.
“Fate holds no place in this world.”
“Everything that needs to happen will happen.”
“Because we make it happen.”
But I was awake now, in every sense. I looked her straight in the eye and repeated the words. I don’t think I had ever sounded more serious in my life.
“I have to go.”
THIRTY-FIVE
Friday, February 10, 1645.
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