The Timepiece and the Girl Who Went Astray: A thrilling new time travel adventure

by O. R. Simmonds

  Will began unfolding the papers and it soon became apparent that they were in fact banknotes. He made a quick count of the twelve notes, each in £20 denominations. He turned to Frenz and said, ‘This’ll do it, all right!’

  Frenz nodded quietly in response.

  Will looked at the notes, his smile quickly turning into a look of confusion. He locked eyes with Frenz. ‘Where did you get these? These are legal tender. How could you possibly have these in 1940?’

  ‘All that matters is that we keep moving. We’re far too exposed to eavesdroppers for a conversation as sensitive as this. It’s probably advisable to limit talk altogether until it’s safe to do so.’

  Will knew now not to object once Frenz had set his mind to something, and before long they boarded the number 228 bus from Norland Square travelling east towards London Euston station. Next, they caught an overground train northwest. On Frenz’s insistence, they sat apart throughout their journey. Apparently, a black man and a white man travelling together would be too memorable an occurrence should their fellow passengers ever face questioning from their pursuers. The burning questions racing through Will’s mind would have to wait, keeping sleep at bay, despite his exhaustion. They changed trains at Birmingham and then at Chester before arriving at the port in Holyhead, North Wales.

  The two men were ravenous by this point, and Frenz reluctantly agreed to stop at a quaint sea-front café opposite the ferry terminal. They took a table out front. Will had a full fried breakfast, still not sure why he received such disgusted looks whenever he asked if he could have pancakes and maple syrup with it, and Frenz had porridge with fresh fruit and a pot of tea. They ate outside in the sun, both too exhausted for conversation. When they’d finished, Will rose from the table and went inside to settle the bill. The atmosphere inside the café was stuffy and loud. Two or three families were crammed into the small space, along with their dogs. The only toilet was out of order and the children were screaming about needing to pee, the dogs were barking and the parents were screaming at both for making so much noise. Will had dreamed of one day having children, but now he wasn’t so sure.

  A TV was mounted high on the wall at the back of the café. Above the din, Will was just able to hear the presenter on the afternoon news: ‘…police are still investigating the reported prison break in the early hours of this morning. Details are scarce at this time; however, it has been confirmed by an independent source that a manhunt is underway by the Metropolitan Police force, who are working closely with forces nationwide. The fugitive, who was being held in connection with a shooting in north London, is thought to be an American male, and investigators are due to address the media in a press conference scheduled at the end of this programme. In other news…’

  Will’s blood turned cold. Thick beads of sweat materialised across his forehead. His hands shook as he unfolded a neat £5 note and laid it on the countertop. He forced a smile at the overworked waitress, said, ‘Thanks, keep the change,’ in his best attempt at an English accent, then walked briskly out of the café. He didn’t break stride as he passed Frenz outside. ‘Frenz, we need to go. Now.’

  Frenz scrambled out of his chair, spilling some tea on his hand. ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’m on the news. There’s a press conference soon and my face is going to be all over it for a murder I didn’t commit.’ Will still didn’t know how to tell Frenz that it was his murder that he was wanted for.

  ‘I’d hoped we would get here before news of your escape had spread. The police move far more quickly in 1984 than they did in my day.’

  ‘What are we going to do? If they’re doing a press conference in the next five minutes, then there’s no way they don’t have my picture.’

  ‘Wait here,’ Frenz said.

  Frenz entered the ticketing office of the main ferry terminal. There was a palpable military presence both inside and out, which Frenz hadn’t expected to see. He waited patiently in line behind a dozen or so people, scanning the area behind the ticketing desk. There was a cork notice board affixed to the far wall. On it Frenz could see various health and safety notices, what looked like a staff rota and a clipboard. A piece of string with a pencil dangling from the other end was attached to the clipboard. Along the left side of the board were a series of mug shots with police force emblems at the top of them. As Frenz moved closer and closer to the front of the queue, the more certain he became that none of them pictured Will. He let out a long sigh of relief.

  Once it was his time to be served, he asked for two return tickets to Dublin and paid with cash. While his tickets were being processed, he could hear a machine whirring loudly in a small side office. A rotund man in a brown suit and a stained beige shirt stood from his desk and walked over to the source of the noise. When the sound stopped, the man reached down and tore a single piece of paper free from the reel. He studied it for a moment before walking out of the office towards the notice board. The woman serving Frenz handed him his tickets and wished him a pleasant trip, but Frenz didn’t hear her. He was staring far too intently at the board behind her. The large man’s greasy head of hair was obscuring the latest addition he’d just pinned up. He seemed to take an age to move away from the board, and an impatient customer behind Frenz began to get riled when Frenz didn’t immediately move to let him through. Just as he thought it might come to blows, the large man stepped away and there, just as he feared, was a picture of William Wells smiling back at him with the word WANTED printed above.

  Frenz left the ticketing office and returned to Will with the news.

  ‘Well, that’s it,’ Will said. ‘We can’t go to Ireland. We need to find another way.’

  ‘No, we must go. It’s the only way. We’re scrambling around in the dark. We need to know what’s going on and what we’re up against. This is the only person I know whom we can trust.’

  ‘What are we going to do then?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’m thinking.’

  ‘Could we sneak on the ferry?’

  ‘We don’t have time to plan something like that.’

  ‘Technically we have all the time in the world, right?’ Will said, rolling his sleeve back and tapping the face of the Timepiece.

  ‘No. Absolutely not. It’s too dangerous. There are also a number of military personnel stationed here for some reason.’

  ‘That’ll be because of The Troubles.’

  ‘The Troubles? What’s that?’ Frenz asked.

  ‘Nothing good. But the soldiers won’t be interested in the likes of us.’

  ‘It’s still too dangerous.’

  ‘Wait a sec, hear me out. How long did you say it would take for the Timekeepers to find us once it’s activated?’

  ‘It depends on a number of factors.’

  ‘Give me a ballpark,’ Will said.

  ‘A what?’

  ‘An approximation. A guess.’

  ‘Given our current distance from London, I would say they’d have our location within thirty minutes or so,’ Frenz said. ‘But even without that, we don’t have time to research this location to make sure it’s safe to travel.’

  ‘How long ago did they put up my picture?’

  ‘Not long, five minutes perhaps.’

  ‘Then we travel back twenty minutes. We’ve got our tickets. All we have to do is avoid ourselves, right?’

  Frenz raised an eyebrow at Will and began scratching the hair on his chin. ‘It’s a huge risk.’

  ‘Any more of a risk than doing nothing and getting shot?’

  ‘How are we going to be sure we can travel to a location unseen and that isn’t occupied?’

  ‘I know a place,’ Will said.

  Will marched purposefully away from the ticketing office and back towards the small café, with Frenz following closely behind. Inside he pressed his way through the cramped interior, which had now emptied itself of the noisy families. The lone waitress was busy tidying up the carnage they’d left behind. ‘Be with you in a minute,’ she said without loo
king up.

  Frenz had caught up with Will as he approached the disused toilet and spoke in a low voice to avoid being overheard, ‘William, that door is locked. I tried the door when we first arrived.’

  Will turned to Frenz and with a crazed look in his eyes, said, ‘If what you’ve told me about how the Timepiece is true, then we’ll have already gone back to the past and unlocked the door from the inside.’

  ‘But…’ before Frenz could offer further objections, Will silently jimmied open the door of the disused toilet, raising his eyebrows excitedly at Frenz as he did. They squeezed inside together and closed the door behind them.

  The room was no larger than a wardrobe. A rank smell hung in the air and something unmentionable floated in the blocked toilet. There was barely room for the two men to stand up without touching the walls or any of the porcelain. They stood face to face, pressed against each other. ‘And to think I was uncomfortable holding hands…’

  Frenz ignored him. ‘Are you sure about this?’

  ‘Not really,’ Will said before twisting his body slightly and activating the Timepiece.

  May 15th, 1984, 16:08

  Using the Timepiece to travel across such a short period was a peculiar experience. At first, neither man was sure that it had worked since the toilet’s cramped interior appeared not to have changed, but then it wouldn’t have. The only evidence that it had changed wasn’t what they saw or what they smelled, but what they could hear: the racket from the feasting families was back. Will manoeuvred awkwardly so that he could unlock the door from the inside, engaging the snib to ensure the door could now be opened by him in the future. He then bumped the door firmly with his shoulder while turning the handle with his free hand. The door inched open and he peeked outside. Thankfully, the café was as chaotic as he expected.

  First Will and then Frenz edged out of the restroom. The waitress took no notice of them as she struggled to wrangle the over-stressed parents, screaming children and barking dogs. As they headed towards the back door of the café, Will couldn’t help but glance out through the front window. There he saw a sight that made his stomach turn in the most inexplicable way: he and Frenz sitting at the table outside, eating their breakfast. Something that had happened barely half an hour earlier but somehow felt like an age ago. As he gazed at the scene outside, he felt a firm hand on his shoulder. ‘We shouldn’t linger,’ Frenz said and they continued to sneak unseen out through the rear of the café.

  They both hurried towards the boarding gate and through the ticketing office. Frenz scanned the notice board to make sure Will’s image wasn’t there. They joined the front of the queue so that they would be the first to board. Their tickets were checked by a thoroughly dislikeable security officer. As he studied the tickets, he scrutinised a clipboard with various mug shots attached to it before allowing them through. Once aboard, they hurried towards their private cabin, locked the door and deactivated the Timepiece.

  May 15th, 1984, 16:46

  Inside the cabin the two men looked at each other and even Frenz couldn’t suppress a toothy grin. It was a big risk, but it had worked perfectly.

  ‘How long was that?’ Will asked.

  ‘Just over twelve minutes.’

  ‘Are we good?’

  Frenz opened the cabin door and studied the hallway. ‘I think so.’

  At just under one hundred and thirty metres in length, the Stena Caledonia ferry was capable of carrying one thousand passengers as well as almost three hundred cars. The size of the vessel and the calm weather promised a smooth journey. Unfortunately for Will, neither prevented him from feeling nauseous during the crossing. He positioned himself in the stern, slouched on a bench with his head between his knees. Frenz, meanwhile, spent the majority of the three-hour voyage sitting in an empty corner of the bar, sipping a glass of rum and quietly absorbed in a book.

  As they approached Dublin, Will extracted himself from his seat on the deck and walked unsteadily back into the bar. He took a seat opposite Frenz, who looked up at him. The discomfort was written across his pale green, clammy face. ‘You know what?’ Will said. ‘This is the first time I’ve ever been on a boat. Apparently, I suffer from severe seasickness.’

  ‘I must say, you are looking rather peaky,’ Frenz said, then refocused on his book.

  ‘Please tell me we’re almost there.’

  ‘Yes, not far now.’

  ‘So, now that we’re alone can you share with me a little more about this friend of yours?’

  Frenz grudgingly closed his book, moving his glasses from his nose to the top of his head. ‘I suppose so. Her name is Avy Stammers and she joined the agency around the same time as me. She was born in Austria but raised in Germany. She spent her formative years working on her father’s sugar beet farm in northern Germany, where she discovered a natural talent for mechanical engineering. She spent most of her free time fixing and maintaining her father’s farming equipment, anything from tractor engines to combine harvesters.’

  Impressed yet frustrated with Frenz’s almost encyclopaedic knowledge of his friend’s past, Will nodded but remained silent. Now that he had Frenz talking, he didn’t want him to stop.

  ‘When she outgrew the family nest, she joined the Deutsches Heer, as the German Army was once called. She was the first female engineer in the German military at the time. And she was just seventeen – she lied about her age, of course, but that was common at that time. However, the rise of the Nazi Party in the late 1930s meant that she and her family fled to England only a year later. When the war broke out, her talents became obvious to the British government. Being a defector from Germany, she became particularly valuable to the Allied efforts. At some point she caught the attention of the agency, and when the war ended, she was recruited.’

  ‘Wow, she sounds amazing.’

  ‘I assure you; she is. She’s a remarkable woman.’ Frenz beamed as he thought of his old friend. Will’s mood momentarily improved and with a smirk he said, ‘Do I detect romantic feelings for this friend, by any chance?’

  ‘No, no. While I confess that I do love her, she is far more like a big sister. My dear friend Nestor and her, on the other hand, well, they loved each other in a more traditional way. The three of us were very good friends for a long time. Thick as thieves, I believe is the saying. When Nestor disappeared, it hit Avy the hardest.’

  Frenz pulled his reading glasses back down and resumed reading. Will glanced over the table at the book in Frenz’s lap. ‘Hey, what are you reading?’

  Without looking up from his book and seemingly without stopping reading, he said, ‘The Man in the High Castle. It’s a book about parallel worlds and alternative histories. It’s riveting. I started reading it before all this and would rather not have to wait the best part of two decades to find out how the story ends.’

  ‘Where did you get it?’ Will asked.

  ‘The book shop next to the ticketing office. Please, Will, we’ll be docking soon and I’m almost finished.’

  Will took the hint and settled back into his seat.

  When the boat had docked, Frenz helped an unsteady Will to shore. There was a substantially larger military presence here than there had been at Holyhead. Frenz had scouted ahead and fortunately the port security, police or military had yet to receive Will’s mug shot.

  Will was happy for a delay to their onward journey due to a cancelled bus service and after a two-hour wait had sufficiently recovered before they boarded the first of three buses. The first took them southwest to Limerick. From there they boarded a bus bound for Tralee, changing one final time ahead of their arrival in the town of Dingle.

  A little over twenty-two hours had passed since Will and Frenz left Norland Square garden earlier that morning, and it was approaching dawn by the time they disembarked at the bus stop overlooking the small fishing harbour. The harbour itself was situated in a large bay with flat, calm waters. The town of Dingle was at Will’s back, to the north. To the south, east and west were roll
ing hills covered in lush green. They looked agricultural, divided up into neat squares. The bay opened out to the sea just under two miles to the southeast, where the hills tapered off to sea level. There was a light breeze sweeping in from the south, causing the water surface to ripple and lap gently against the shore. As the sun rose in the east, it broke through the clouds in fine shafts and sparkled on the waves. The whole scene was so exquisitely picturesque that it didn’t quite seem real. The fresh scent of sea air shook some of the weariness from Will’s head after the long journey. Even the incessant song from the throng of seagulls overhead seemed to lift his spirits.

  Man, Abigayle would love this place. I’ll bring her here once this is all over.

  Eventually the two of them proceeded away from the water, heading inland along Bridge Street, turning right onto Dykegate Street before reaching Main Street. The town was wonderful and beautiful in an entirely different way to the natural beauty of the harbour. It seemed as though the buildings running along Main Street were either public houses or fish-and-chip shops. The pubs seemed to outnumber the chip shops five to one, however. Each establishment was painted a different combination of vibrant colours. The pub on the right was bright yellow with green detailing. The pub opposite had opted for predominantly lime green with red window frames. Farther up the street were buildings painted in lavender and burgundy, red and black, cream and blue. Farther on still were oranges, purples, teal and pink. As they walked along the street, Will was sure that no colour in the spectrum had been overlooked.