Red-Handed (Pax Britannia: Time's Arrow 01)

by Jonathan Green

  The eldritch energies unleashed by the Sphere were steadily shaking the weakened stronghold apart. It was only a matter of time before the rest of Schloss Adlerhorst came crashing down on top them, burying them all – the good and the bad.

  Ulysses groggily got to his feet. Surveying the sepulchral cavern, it was clear that there was only one way out now.

  His left hand clamped over the bullet wound in his shoulder, Ulysses hurried between the last looming pillars still holding up the roof, his eye on the figure atop the steel dais.

  He had been shot, he was losing blood, and he was still cruelly visually impaired, but suddenly the universe had turned, and life had given him a second chance.

  The warped freak that had once been Daniel Dashwood was occupied, pulling on a single, oversized glove. And he was utterly ignorant of Ulysses’ presence.

  A second chance...

  “...THREE,” THE ENIGMA engine intoned.

  His shoulder’s scream of pain silencing him, Ulysses let go of the generator ring and landed, sprawled in the cradle. He felt another gloved hand grab hold of his and hang on.

  Ulysses stared through the rippling heat-haze distortion of the temporal field and into Daniel Dashwood’s grim death’s-head leer.

  The glove’s wrist-mounted controls thumped against one of the support rings of the Sphere; Ulysses heard the keys rattling.

  “Course change confirmed.”

  “One.”

  “Launch.”

  The body blow Dashwood had dealt him was as nothing compared to the forces that assailed Ulysses as he was blasted into the black oblivion of null-space...

  ...ULYSSES BLINKED, HIS vision swimming.

  The whirling Sphere had gone, to be replaced by a molten ball of liquid silver light that spun and swirled like mercury on water.

  Ulysses winced in pain. His nemesis’s hand was still gripped tight about his. The esoteric mechanisms of the control gauntlet crackled and hummed. Everything below the elbow lay outside the sphere of whirling, silvered light.

  Dashwood hung in the void, the howling winds of the temporal vortex taking their toll on his flesh, devouring his body with the raw hunger of the void.

  As Ulysses watched, his own face slack with horror, Dashwood’s flesh withered, his skin falling away in a whirl of grey flakes. The muscle beneath atrophied and blackened until that too was nothing more than dust, cascading like sand through an egg-timer into the void.

  The madman’s staring eyeballs collapsed inwards, melting like wax inside their orbits. In a moment there was nothing left of them but dark stains in the sockets of Dashwood’s age-bleached skull.

  His mouth open in a silent scream, the traitor’s tongue shrivelled. The layers of flesh peeled away and the man’s blood evaporated in a fine red mist.

  Just as Ulysses was beginning to wonder whether his terrifying journey through time would ever end, the eternal darkness exploded in a nanosecond burst of light as brilliant as a supernova.

  Part One

  Red-Handed

  “Time is a brisk wind, for each hour

  it brings something new...

  but who can understand and measure its

  sharp breath, its mystery and its design?”

  – Paracelsus

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Scene of the Crime

  ULYSSES LANDED HARD, flat on his face, on what felt like rough floorboards. Fresh waves of nausea pulsed through him with the pain from his shoulder and he blinked as the supernova brilliance faded to a murky grey twilight.

  Something hit the floor beside him with a hollow clatter.

  He felt uncomfortably hot and his skin was clammy. There was the coppery tang of blood on his tongue.

  The unpleasantly familiar stink of scorched human hair – his own, he assumed – merged with the charcoal smell of roasted timbers.

  His whole body shaking, he pushed himself up onto his hands and knees. Leaning back onto his heels, he pulled off his smouldering jacket, wincing again as his right arm came free.

  He was kneeling at the centre of a perfect circle of blackened floorboards. The burn-marks ended abruptly; the bare boards beyond remained completely untouched.

  The next shocking sight to greet him was Daniel Dashwood’s skeleton. Steam was rising gently from the bones lying to Ulysses’ left, half-in and half-out of the circle.

  Ulysses started. He dropped Dashwood’s hand – still encased within the control glove – and put out an arm to stop himself falling backwards.

  His hand came down in something warm and sticky.

  He pulled it back in surprise, his fingers brushing against something cold and hard that shifted at his touch. His hand had closed around the object and he raised it to his face for a closer look. As he did so, he turned to see the handprint he had left in the pool of dark blood creeping out from under the body.

  He could not stifle his gasp of surprise. The body was face-down on the floor, but just from the sheer amount of blood oozing away between the floorboards, and the waxy pallor of what little flesh he could see, Ulysses was certain that the poor wretch was dead – whoever he might have been in life.

  He looked from the corpse to the room.

  There was more ceiling than walls, the sloping sides meeting at the apex of the roof above him, and it was sparsely furnished. The body was lying beside a filthy, unmade bed that looked old enough to have been an antique.

  There was a draught blowing in under the door of the mouldering attic room. Opposite it, a cracked mirror had been hung on the only wall tall enough to accommodate one. Beneath the mirror, on a rickety table, sat a cracked porcelain bowl bearing a crazed-glaze painting of flowers. A mismatched earthenware jug with a chipped rim sat within it.

  The only other piece of furniture in the room was a small writing desk, positioned beneath a shuttered dormer window. The fallen chair before it had once been painted cream, but was now worn and chipped.

  Ulysses gave in to the waves of exhaustion threatening to overwhelm him, allowing his body to sag. He took a deep breath.

  Where had the Sphere brought him to? Was he back in his own time?

  Slowly, Ulysses turned his stupefied gaze to the object gripped tightly in his right hand.

  It was a knife, its hilt and blade slick with blood, as was the palm of his hand.

  He swore, letting the knife fall from his fingers.

  A thunderous banging from what sounded like several storeys below had him leaping to his feet, despite the pulsing pain of the gunshot wound.

  The furious knocking subsided and a gruff voice shouted, “C’est les gendarmes! Ouvrir la porte!”

  “Oh, boy,” he said with a heartfelt sigh. “Not again.”

  “Ouvrir la porte!” the angry voice came again from downstairs.

  Ulysses was either in France or in a place where French was the native tongue. Happily, he had an ear for the language. After all, he was - as many a young debutante could testify - a cunning linguist.

  He did not know the intricacies of the Sphere’s operation, but he suspected Daniel Dashwood had not intended on taking a vacation to France. But if the course alteration had only been a minor one, and if he had actually been intending to flee to Germany or even back to England, it seemed perfectly plausible that the Sphere could have sent him to France instead. He wouldn’t know for sure until he had been able to get his bearings properly, or had the chance to speak to someone. Someone with fewer anger issues than whoever it was hammering on the door downstairs.

  But right now what Ulysses was even less sure about was when in time he was. That would take some investigating, too.

  The thunderous hammering came again, the voice growing more impatient and irate.

  “This is your last chance! This is the police! Open the door or I’ll have it broken down!” There was a tremendous crash from somewhere at street level. The owner of the voice was making good on his promise.

  Staggering to his feet, Ulysses scoured the room for anything
that might enable him to escape.

  There were only two ways out of the garret room – through the door, or through the window.

  For the briefest moment Ulysses wondered whether he should simply open the door and wait for the gendarmes to find him, and then worry about trying to explain to them how he came to be there, alongside a dead body.

  But then what was he thinking? Who was going to believe that he had travelled through space and time to end up here? And what would they make of the scorch-marks on the floorboards, let alone the corpse lying in a pool of its own congealing blood?

  He took a step backwards and caught his reflection in the cracked glass above the wash bowl.

  He was in a worse state than the room. He was still wearing the scruffy suit he had purloined from Castle Frankenstein. His right hand was wet with blood, as were the knees of his trousers. The eye-patch and a few days growth of stubble didn’t help either.

  He no longer looked like the bachelor once voted ‘Best Dressed Man of the Decade’ by The Strand magazine. If he had been a French policeman and had walked into the attic and found a stranger looking like that – with a dead man’s blood on his hands and the victim lying next to him – he would have pronounced him guilty as soon as the next man.

  Worst case? The gendarmes would shoot first and ask questions later.

  He looked at the door, noticing the key in the lock for the first time. Stumbling over, he tried the handle.

  The door was locked.

  Had he been set up? But surely that wasn’t possible. His arrival at this time and place had been pure fluke, hadn’t it?

  No, Ulysses decided, the best he could hope for was that he would be arrested and interrogated by the police. Normally, he would have thought he could talk himself out of pretty much anything, but he doubted that even his undisputed charm and silver tongue could help him this time.

  Never mind the fact that he was inside a locked room with two dead bodies; how was he supposed to explain away the presence of the steaming skeleton? Frankly any explanation he gave would make him sound like nothing less than a certifiable nutcase – or, at worst, a total psychopath. The best he could hope for, then, was to be checked into a room for one at the local sanatorium; the one with the special rubber wallpaper and the jacket that buckled up at the back.

  There was no way he was going to be able to talk his way out of this one, and he wasn’t going to be able to fight his way out either. Certainly not in his current condition, and with the full weight of the French police on his case.

  Ulysses hastily dropped the incriminating knife, as if it was suddenly too hot to handle, and wiped the sticky blood from his hand onto his already ruined trousers. After being caught up in a crash-landing, and a cave-in, and hurled through time, a little blood wasn’t going to make a lot of difference to the state of his apparel.

  The man could not have been dead more than a matter of minutes. His true killer could not be far away.

  In the stillness of the room something banged behind him.

  Ulysses froze.

  The killer surely couldn’t still be in the room, could he?

  Ulysses looked anxiously around the room, but there was – as he had at first thought – no one else there. He relaxed and breathed again.

  A second loud bang drew his attention to the dormer window, which appeared to be open and swinging in the breeze. Whoever had killed the poor unfortunate lying on the floor of the garret room had apparently left this way.

  Ulysses’ head suddenly swam, and he took a stumbling step back, putting his hand to the exposed laths of a wall to keep upright.

  The gunshot wound had not been as bad as it might have been, but it was beginning to take its toll on him nonetheless, not helped by the fact that his mind was still reeling from the impossible journey he had taken only a matter of minutes before.

  There came another splintering crash from downstairs, accompanied by a shout of, “We’re coming in!”

  The crash was the impetus Ulysses needed to marshal his thoughts and push aside all feelings of doubt and physical incapability. He moved to the door again, his hand on the key in the lock, but then stopped.

  He was weak. The police were coming up the stairs. If he left through the door what were the chances that he would be able to avoid them and get away? Not knowing the layout of the building, he decided that the odds weren’t good enough.

  Stumbling away from the door again, Ulysses circumnavigated the patch of burnt boards and pooling blood. His foot caught the prone skeleton as he crossed the draughty attic space to the writing desk. The bones they fell apart with a clatter at his touch. Leaning across the desk, he pushed the window fully open with the heel of his hand. The putty of the sill of the garret room window had been deformed by a number of gouged ridges.

  His eye fell on the sprawl of papers covering the desk, which fluttered and shifted in the breeze, making a noise like nesting birds in a dovecot.

  A piece of manuscript paper protruded from the pile of newspapers and ink-stained blotters. A bottle of ink had tipped over, spilling its blue-black contents across the desk and much of the paper covering it.

  Intrigued, he gave the corner of thick, yellow parchment a tug, pulling it free. A few bars of musical notation had been written upon it before being crossed out so vigorously that the nib of the pen had torn through the paper in several places. And at the top of the piece of sheet music, written in a hurried scrawl, was what he took to be a title:

  Black Swan

  The crisp morning sunlight painted bright bars of light across the desk, drawing his attention to the curled copy of Le Monde lying there.

  Roughly folding the musical manuscript paper in half, he stuffed it into a jacket pocket, concentrating on the revelation the broadsheet held for him.

  Ignoring the headline – something about a new production by the Paris Opera – Ulysses focused instead on the date.

  Jeudi 7 Mai 1998

  It looked like it could well be several days old, but the newspaper hadn’t begun to yellow in the sun yet. So, Ulysses concluded, it couldn’t be that old. It was some time after the seventh of May.

  Ulysses hesitated as he set the chair on its feet again in front of the desk.

  The seventh of May 1998.

  Could it be as much as a month after the seventh of May?

  He studied the paper again and came to the conclusion that it was most unlikely. But even if it was as late as June, then the implications were still the same.

  Hard as it was to reconcile, it seemed that Ulysses had arrived back in 1998, some weeks before he had originally left for the Moon in pursuit of his ne’er-do-well brother Barty.

  Ulysses’ mind reeled. For some reason, that truth seemed even more incredible and harder to accept than the idea of travelling back to the Second Great European War, although meeting his father – who, at that time, was younger than Ulysses – had been a tough one to come to terms with. To think that there was another Ulysses Quicksilver, living his life in London, making plans to travel to the Moon, with no idea of the horrors that awaited him there and beyond...

  Ulysses absent-mindedly put a quivering hand to the scars under his eye-patch, where his right eye should have been...

  “Poor bastard has no idea what he’s got coming,” Ulysses said, staring at his reflection in the mirror once more.

  It was still hard to believe that the dishevelled wretch he was looking at was actually him. He still thought of himself as looking as he had done before his second trip to the Moon – at about this time, in May 1998, as it happened.

  Staring into the grizzled face, with its lean, unshaven chops and sinister eye-patch, he then stared through it, seeing the younger, handsome man he had once been.

  And seeing that other, happier and more youthful man in his mind’s eye, he also saw a woman standing at his side, her arm through his, a smile on her lips and love in her contented gaze.

  Emilia Oddfellow – the woman he loved and the woman
to whom he had once been engaged years before. The woman he had been forced to leave behind on the Moon when he leapt into the whirling time tunnel created by her father’s teleportation device.

  The pounding of heavy boots on the bare boards of the stairs shook him into action again.

  “How could you have been so stupid?” he chided himself as he climbed up onto the desk and out through the window, a manic smile finding its way onto his face.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Déjà Vu

  ULYSSES CLUNG ONTO the window frame with both hands, steadying himself on the sloped roof outside the garret room. A chill breeze gusted into his face. The sunlight was sharp and bright in his one good eye. He winced and blinked against its sudden intensity, tightening his grip on the splintered frame as a wave of dizziness threatened to pitch him off the edge of the roof.

  He closed his eye, letting the sounds of the metropolis wash over him as he concentrated on regaining mastery of his reeling senses. He could hear the distant sound of car horns and costermongers announcing their wares in Parisian French.

  From the room beneath him, he could hear pounding footfalls, underscored by breathless grunting and grumbling voices. From the sounds of them they would like as not give short shrift to anyone they found waiting for them there.

  Ulysses opened his eye again, his swimming gaze ranging over the vista of rooftops bristling with aerials, as the latest wave of vertigo mercifully passed.

  It wasn’t only vertigo; it was exhaustion too. After all that he had been through, it was hardly surprising that fatigue was finally catching up with him.

  To the left, some streets away, he caught sight of what looked like the sails of a windmill. They were crimson in the stark sunlight. He cautiously turned his head to the right, not wanting to make any too hasty movements and bring on another bout of nausea. He gasped.