Future Tense

by Frank Almond

  Something small, complicated, and electronic was not only taped to my arm, but actually embedded in the flesh! It looked like a mechanical leech. My instinct was to pull it off me, but I was too terrified to touch it. I could see blood inside the “back” of the thing and wiring connected to diodes, like little antennae. A hypodermic probe protruded from it, going into my artery, like a drip, but there was also a long golden filament running through it. I knew this was no ordinary drip, because drips feed plasma or drugs or saline or nice things into the body to do something good and this thing was clearly pumping blood out, as well as fulfilling some other devious function I could not yet fathom. Which is not good. Notice I never said fiendish. Alliteration was never my strong point.

  I sat up and reached for my bedside candle to take a closer look. Sharp spasms of pain shot through the left side of my torso. Blood began dribbling from the nozzle in the end of the sachet. I placed the candlestick holder back on the bedside table and I lay back down. The pain stopped and the blood flow reduced to a drip. I sat up again—the pain came back and the blood spluttered out once more. I lay back down. Both stopped. I sat back up—they started again. I lay back down. They stopped. I was beginning to get it. I wrenched the thing off my arm and hurled it across the room. Alarming amounts of blood spurted from my puncture wound. I quickly wrapped the bandage back around it and pulled the knot tight with my right hand and teeth.

  There was no other explanation for it, my father was repressing a subconscious desire to kill me by transferring his loathing for me into imaginary bullets and projecting them from a duelling pistol, which he had placed in the hands of the stigmata of a love rival from a joke, who was holed up in a bell tower in Westphalia, because he saw himself as a failure. I know there are a few flaws in this theory, but I’m still working on the metaphors with my analyst.

  That was it for me. That moment was the end. The Duck and I were finished, as far as I was concerned. I was going to find Emma, get the book of twentieth century sporting achievements and records the Duck had promised me as a wedding present, find the Duck, make him take me to the 1920s, tell him to get lost and never have anything to do with him or time machines ever again. I couldn’t begin to think what was going on or what all the lies and treachery meant. I didn’t want to know—I just wanted out.

  I found a clean shirt and frock coat in the closet, put them on, and went to look for Emma. I decided not to tell anyone I knew about my phoney wound, because it would give me the element of surprise. But, then again, maybe I was just in denial.

  * * *

  I scoured that house. It was eerie—they were all gone, vanished into the night. Candles were burning in most of the halls and rooms, there was evidence on the dining table that several people had eaten a meal that evening, the doors were all locked, the windows all closed, there were no signs of a struggle—just stillness and silence, upstairs and downstairs and in my lady’s chamber. Well, I did find what I assumed to be Emma’s chamber, because I recognized some of the clothes she had worn hanging in one of the wardrobes. I must have searched Duckworth Hall high and low for the best part of an hour. It was such a vast place I didn’t get to every corner, every nook and cranny, but if there was anyone around, I never saw him. And, of course, I didn’t go up into the attic—I already knew what was up there. I sat down on the master staircase, eating a piece of cheese and a carrot, and drinking champagne from the bottle, racking my brains to think where else I could look. There just wasn’t anywhere left—except the—I threw down my carrot and descended the rest of the stairs two at a time, skidded on the black and white tiled hall floor, as I turned the right hander into the corridor, and sprinted up to the library door. It was locked. Why the hell didn’t I think of it before? I didn’t bother trying to force it, the thing was made of solid oak, so I dashed back along the passage to the hall, down the rear corridor, through the salon, and out through the back door to run round to the window.

  The library was in darkness. I looked about me on the ground for something heavy, found a loose cobblestone and broke in. I was soon on the top of that ladder, feeling about in the back of the shelf for some sort of lever to operate the turnstile mechanism. It didn’t take me long to find it. It felt like a trigger and when I pulled it the whole section of the shelving swung round and I was in the Duck’s secret garage. But there was no sign of the Duck or the white Ford Cortina. I switched on the electric lights and looked around for any clues to his whereabouts. There weren’t any, so I was naturally very disappointed and frustrated. And that is why I found a spray can and a hammer and trashed the place. I vandalized every single tool and surface in that workshop. I totalled it. Now, I know that was a bit juvenile of me, but it felt good—God, it felt good. And I thought I had just cause. And, anyway, it got my adrenalin pumped up—pumped enough to go and get a cutlass I’d seen hanging on a wall in the dining room and a set of master keys from the key cupboard in the cellar, and head for the attic.

  You see, during those mad ten minutes in my father’s garage, expressing my insecurities, it had occurred to me that if my dear schizophrenic father was lying to me through his teeth about everything else, why would he be telling me the truth about Jemmons and the squid? Ergo, that was the real Roger Jemmons up there!

  And, boy, I so did not want to go back up there. You know in those horror movies when the victim goes into the one place in the haunted house nobody in their right mind would go, and you wish he would just run out the front door like any normal human being, well, it felt a bit like that. I kept telling myself to run away, run away, but something just compelled me to keep going up those dark, winding stairs, with my candle flame fluttering with every puff of draught, step after step, up and up. Actually, I think I wanted to sever the tentacles of that squid because they represented the various influences and holds my father had over my life. I hadn’t yet learnt how to express my feelings for my father. I still needed to verbalize them.

  Anyway, I eventually unlocked the door, switched on the lights and there was no squid in the tank—just poor old Jemmons. And was he glad to see me! If that’s a replicant, I thought, I’d like to see how animated the real one could get. As soon as he’d blinked and got his eyes used to the light and saw me, he was rocking up and down, stamping his feet, opening and closing his eyes, nodding his head. I walked over to the glass—my spine squirming like an eel—and mouthed the words:

  “Roger? Is that you?”

  He nodded vigorously.

  “But how can I be sure?” I said.

  He twisted his wrist round and flicked two fingers in the shape of a “V” at me.

  “Yeah, all right, mate—there’s no need to be offensive, I am the rescuer here.”

  I looked for a way up to the top of the tank. It was just a pro-size aquarium filled with luminous green water. Like in one of those old freak shows, Jemmons was submerged and chained to the bars of a metal box, which he was sitting on. His ankles were shackled, too, and he was wearing a simple, but adapted, scuba mask, with two plastic pipes coming off the mouthpiece, trailing up to the top and out over the rear of the tank.

  Roll up, roll up—come and see The Tentacled Man, I smiled to myself.

  I walked round the back to see where they went and found them attached to an air pump—they looked like feed and return lines. But there was a third pipe coming off a large plastic drum, also with a pump fitted to it. I opened the lid and peered in. It was full of water with bits floating in it, but it smelt organic—some sort of foul-smelling soup, I guessed. I was just going to go back to the front of the tank, when I noticed the bowling alley stretching away into the unlit depths of the attic. So, the Duck hadn’t been lying about everything, I thought. I wandered onto the lanes and looked around for a light switch. I could see bowling balls lined up on the auto-returns and four sets of pins in the distance, at the end of each lane—and then I spotted the fridge against the far wall. I went over and helped myself to a cold beer and took it back to the front of the tan
k with me. Jemmons saw the bottle in my hand and pulled a face.

  “All right, I’m thinking,” I mouthed.

  The tank was about fifteen feet high and there was no obvious way up—no ladder or platform to climb, just the sheer four sides of the glass. I gave Jemmons a little wave and walked round it again, looking for an answer. It had me foxed. I took a swig of my beer. And then I had an idea. I sauntered back to Jemmons and tried to mime what I wanted him to do. I clamped my teeth together and pointed at him. He nodded but looked uncertain. Then I pointed at myself, put my bottle on the floor, and acted out me climbing up the side of the tank. He looked puzzled. I pointed at him and made a gesture to indicate his mask and how I wanted him to clamp it tightly in his teeth. He got the message. His eyes widened in alarm and he began shaking his head frantically. I waved my hands to calm him down.

  “Don’t worry,” I mouthed. “I’ll soon have you out of there.”

  I picked up my bottle and took a couple of gulps. Jemmons was still rocking on his box and shaking his head at me. I put my bottle down, took off my frock coat, and rolled up my sleeves, gazing up at the fifteen-foot glass wall and nodding to myself. No problem, I thought. Jemmons had somehow rocked himself closer to the glass and was kicking it. I waved. He shook his head and glared at me. I picked up my beer and pointed at it.

  “I bet you could use one of these,” I mouthed. I clamped my teeth at him. “Hold on tight,” I said.

  And then I strolled round to the back of the tank, spat on my hands, grabbed the breathing tubes, and tried to climb up the side of the glass. I got about four feet and fell back down on my ass. Just as I was about to get up and try again, both ends of the tubes wriggled over the top of the tank and fell on me, splashing me with water. I peered through the glass. Jemmons was sitting on his box with his back to me shaking his head and rocking about violently, a mega stream of bubbles flowing from his head.

  “Oh shit!”

  I looked around me—dashed onto the bowling lane, grabbed two balls and ran round to the front of the tank. Jemmons saw the bowling balls, realized what I was going to do, and tried to duck. I wound the first ball up and threw it with some force at the tank. It bounced off and hit me in the shin, skittling me over. I scrambled to my feet. Jemmons was swaying from side to side, his cheeks puffed out, trying to hold on to his last lungfuls of air. I ran at the tank and bashed it with the bowling ball. I wasn’t making any impression on it. It wasn’t even marked.

  “It’s toughened! They used toughened glass! What’s the matter with these people—don’t they know we may have to break these things in an emergency? Some people, they just go around making problems for the rest of us!”

  Jemmons was dying. I snapped out of the terminal rant I was in and redoubled my efforts. I used both hands this time and swung the bowling ball from above my head. The shock waves shuddered up my arms, but the dumb glass didn’t break. Jemmons was swaying more slowly and there were fewer bubbles coming from his mouth and his eyes were tightly shut. I was desperate. I started running a few more feet back each time and charging at the glass, banging on it with all my might with my bowling ball. I was shouting a lot. I think I was cursing the people who make aquaria again, but I might have moved on to glass blowers. I don’t remember. I had hit my fatal panic alert button. I was probably just making noises like those weird little Michael Jackson cries he puts in his songs, near the end.

  Suddenly, there was a sharp splitting sound. I stood back—my mouth wide open. A white tarantula of cracks had appeared in the glass right where I had been beating it. Jemmons’s eyes opened and we looked at each other in expectation. There was another, louder, splitting noise—I backed away—a long lightning bolt of a crack shot out from the small spidery one and stopped abruptly a few feet from the top right corner of the tank. There was a slight pause. I instinctively scampered over by the sidewall. And then the whole front of the tank just exploded and spewed the fifteen by fifteen sheet across the room in a shower of water and glass. I closed my eyes and heard two thuds against the wall. When I opened my eyes, two “daggers” of glass were sticking in the wall either side of my head. I felt like a knife-thrower’s assistant.

  “And for my next trick,” I mumbled.

  The water emptied in a matter of seconds and was washing around my knees, and splashing up the walls, but most of it just frothed and flowed straight out the door and ran down the stone staircase in a torrent.

  As soon as the water level began dropping, I waded across to the tank and lifted Jemmons’s head up. Water came out of his mouth and he gulped in air.

  “Are you okay, Rog?” I said.

  “Kill the Duck,” he gasped.

  “Kill the Duck—kill the Duck,” I sang, as I checked out the padlocks on his ankles and wrists. “I’ll have to saw these off. Wait here while I go and get a hacksaw. Kill the Duck.”

  “Come back,” he said. “Might come back.”

  “Who?” I said. “The Duck? He’s long gone, mate.”

  “No,” said Jemmons. “It.”

  “Oh, that,” I said. “Yeah, right. I’ll run. Kill the Duck.”

  I set off for the garage where I remembered seeing, and for some reason not destroying, a hacksaw. I was just on my way back up with it, when I noticed the bottle of Ruinart 1730 and the half-eaten carrot and cheese I’d left on the main staircase were gone.

  “Kill the Duck—kill the Duck,” I muttered to myself, and continued on up the stairs.

  There was a lot of water still washing around the far end of the upper corridor of the west wing. I splashed through it and was just turning to go up the steps when I ran into Bentley, carrying a silver tray with my champagne and leftover supper balanced on it.

  “Bentley!” I exclaimed. “You asshole!”

  “Good evening, sir,” he said. “We appear to have a leak, sir. There has been a seepage into the blue drawing room. I fear some paintings may have been damaged.”

  “You’ll be damaged and leaking in a minute—get up those stairs—I’ve got a job for you!”

  “Yes, sir,” he replied. “Will sir be dining in this evening? The rest of Sir Julian’s party have already eaten and—”

  “—Oh, shut up,” I said, giving him a shove up the steps.

  The old butler walked ahead of me at a sedate pace, nose in the air, his tray rock steady.

  “Look what I found creeping around!” I called to Jemmons, as we walked into the wrecked attic. “Good old Bentley!”

  “Good grief, sir!” exclaimed Bentley.

  “Hello, Bentley,” said Jemmons.

  “He’s a snake,” I said.

  “Yes, you are a snake, Bentley?” said Jemmons.

  “Mr Jemmons, sir—what in heaven’s name has happened?” said Bentley.

  “You should get an Oscar,” I said, giving the treacherous butler an elbow in the rib. “Here, take this and make yourself useful.”

  “Yes, of course, sir,” he said. He put down his tray and I handed him the hacksaw. He took it over to Jemmons, knelt down in a puddle, and began sawing at the ankle chain.

  “Bentley here knows more than he’s letting on,” I said.

  “Bentley,” said Jemmons. “Do you know more than you’re letting on?”

  “If you say so, sir,” said Bentley.

  “Yeah, and I’d be careful what you say with him around—he’s hand in glove with my father,” I said. I went over and got the champagne and took it back to Jemmons to hold it to his lips while he swigged. “Listen to this,” I winked to Jemmons. “Hey, Bentley,” I said, “where’s Miss Gummer?”

  “Miss Gummer, sir?” said Bentley.

  “You see,” I nodded. “He knows, but he’s not saying.”

  “She’s on her way to Bath to stay with the Mason-Wrights. I believe Miss Emily and her father are taking the waters, sir,” added Bentley.

  “He’s just saying that,” I said to Jemmons. And then to Bentley, “How would you know?”

  “Because I drove her t
o the local coaching house in the phaeton this morning, sir,” replied Bentley, continuing to saw through the chain.

  “You see,” I said to Jemmons, “he’s making it up.”

  Bentley’s arm jerked as the saw severed the last half millimetre of link.

  “I think you should be able to prise that open now, sir,” he said. He set to work on the wrist chain.

  Jemmons forced his ankles apart. I got down and grabbed the chain and pulled. The link bent open and Jemmons’s legs were free. Jemmons twirled his feet around.

  “Feel good?” I said.

  He nodded. “Good.”

  “Hurry up with his wrists, Bentley,” I said. “We’re wasting time here.”

  “I’m going as fast as I can, Mr Duckworth,” said the butler. “Are you taking Mr Jemmons somewhere, sir?”

  “Like I’d tell you,” I said. I smiled at Jemmons and shook my head. He grinned back.

  “Mr Duckworth, sir—might I have a word?” said Bentley, carrying on with his hacksawing.

  “What?” I said.

  “In your ear, sir,” said Bentley, looking at me over his shoulder and rolling his eyes towards Jemmons.

  I crouched down next to him, so that our heads were level. “What is it?”

  “You do know that this Mr Jemmons is a replicant, sir?” he whispered.

  I laughed. “Nice try, Bentley,” I said. “Oh, you’re good.”

  Bentley shrugged and went on with his work. I looked up at Jemmons, who was staring off into space. True, Roger Jemmons was not the smartest man who ever drove a time machine down the temporal vortex, but I was going to need his help, if I was ever to find Emma again and get even with the Duck.

  I stood up and walked around to Jemmons’s other side, to have a quiet word in his ear.

  “Don’t trust Bentley. Is your machine here?” I said.

  Roger kept looking straight ahead and nodded.