Future Tense

by Frank Almond

  I held it up.

  “Where were you when you drew this?” I asked him.

  He took it from me and looked at it for a moment or two. “That’s looking east,” he said. “I was recovering from frostbite—that’s the view from the infirmary window.”

  I sat down next to him and pointed. “What are these outlines, here and this flat-topped one here?”

  “Islands,” he said.

  “I was hoping you were going to say that,” I smiled.

  “Why—how does that help us?” he said.

  I fetched the diary from the shelf and took the biro out of my jacket pocket and showed him. “Because it means we can do this,” I said. I drew a crude aerial idea of the Castle, set on an ice sheet, with a wavy line for the coast and the two islands in their relative positions. “It’s rough, I know, but we can get it much better by really studying these two drawings, and any more I may have missed. We can make a map.”

  Emma and Emily brought the coffees in.

  Tree shook his head. “I still don’t see how a bad map is going to help us to find the Castle,” he said.

  Emily gave her father his coffee and sat down next to him. Emma put mine on the coffee table and then sat down on the coffee table next to it, picked up my scribble, quickly discarded it, and began turning over Tree’s drawings, one by one.

  “We are agreed the Castle is somewhere in the British Isles?” I said.

  Tree nodded, wearily.

  “But we don’t know where and we don’t know when?” I said.

  Tree nodded and rubbed his eye. I could see that the memories were almost too painful for him to even think about. I turned my attention to Emily.

  “Emily, do you remember you once told me your father believed the Castle to be in our distant past—in an Ice Age?” I said.

  “Yes, Stephen, I do.” She looked to her father. “That’s what you said, isn’t it, Daddy?”

  Tree nodded and sighed. “It is in the past,” he said.

  “You mean the Castle is in the past?” I said.

  “Yes,” sighed Tree.

  “How do you know?” I said.

  “Steve, stop pressing,” said Emma. “Can’t you see Tree’s upset?”

  “No, it’s all right, Emma,” said Tree. “Stephen’s right—we must try to find that evil place and get poor Roger out.”

  “And Jools,” said Emily.

  “The Duck is quite capable of taking care of himself,” said Tree. “It’s Roger Jemmons I’m worried about. He has been a good friend.”

  “There’s been no sign of the Duck,” I said. “I think we can assume the worst, Tree. I’m afraid I haven’t told you everything.”

  Everybody’s attention immediately focussed on me. I told them the whole story, more or less, though leaving out the bit about my, uh, brief emotional attachment to Miss Parker or the Princess Mormagleea, or whatever her name was.

  “Are you sure that wasn’t the real Jemmons in that attic?” said Tree. “The way you tell it, it sounds to me as if he could have been attacking Bentley not you. He might have known Bentley was a traitor.”

  “Oh, he meant me all right,” I said. “Damn near had my head off.”

  “Do you believe all this stuff about a princess? It sounds far-fetched to me,” said Emma, to the others.

  “And why would she dress up in a nurse’s uniform and nurse you? It sounds a bit kinky to me,” said Emily, pulling a face. “Did she wear thigh boots?”

  “Emily!” said Tree.

  “Look, what am I—an unreliable witness? I’m only telling you what I saw and heard,” I said.

  “Travis is in danger,” said Emma, thinking aloud. “We have to find this place.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell everybody—it’s the key to this whole mess. Something is going down and the Duck’s at the bottom of it as usual,” I said.

  “Well, I think Julian and Travis have been very brave,” said Emma. “You’re the one who’s been completely useless in all this.”

  “What? Well, you would say that, wouldn’t you—if loverboy’s involved it can’t be dodgy, can it?”

  “Travis has more honour in his little finger than you’ll ever have,” said Emma.

  “Weren’t you listening to a thing I said? They set me up—they’re as thick as thieves!”

  “They probably just wanted you out of the way, while they rescued this princess, because they knew you’d be absolutely useless!” she said.

  “Emma-Stephen-please,” said Tree. “We must not allow personal rivalries to cloud our judgement. It’s plain what must be done. We must go to the Castle and—and rescue whoever needs rescuing, if anyone does need rescuing—I mean, if we can find the place, which I very much doubt. Stephen and I will purchase some more suitable clothing and leave as soon as we work out where it is we’re going.”

  “Hang about!” said Emma. “You’re not leaving me here—I’m going with you.”

  “And me,” said Emily, taking Emma’s hand, in an act of sisterhood.

  “Don’t be daft,” I said. “You’re both pregnant!”

  “Oh shut up!” said Emma. “We’re only a few months gone—we’re not invalids!”

  “Yeah!” said Emily.

  Tree and I looked at each other in dismay.

  “Well,” said Tree. “It’s probably all academic anyway—it’s highly unlikely we’ll ever find the place. It’ll be like looking for a needle in every haystack in England.”

  “Then let’s get started,” said Emma.

  I folded my arms, leaned back, and smiled at her. “Go on then—what’s your plan?” I said.

  Emma turned to Tree. “Tree, you said the Castle is in the Ice Age—do you have any idea which one?”

  “Which one?” said Tree. “Well, I don’t know.”

  “Then what made you think it was in an Ice Age?” she asked.

  “There were woolly mammoths—”

  “Mammoths?” I said.

  “Big hairy elephants, dear,” said Emma. She turned her attention back to Tree. “That does sound like the last Ice Age. The woolly mammoth is believed to have died out some eight thousand years ago, though the last Arctic incursion had receded by about twenty thousand years ago and lasted around ten thousand years. So that means the Castle is almost certainly situated in a time window somewhere between 30,000 and 20,000 years ago. The Late Pleistocene.”

  “How do you know all this?” I said.

  “Saw a Discovery Channel programme about it,” said Emma. She turned back to Tree. “Do you think, with your artistic training, that you and Emily could look at the drawings Stephen picked out—and this one I found of what looks like another view of the ice sheet—and visualize a map?”

  “Let me see that,” I said.

  Emma ignored me and passed the sheet to Emily.

  “We can try, can’t we, Daddy?” said Emily, taking the drawing from Emma. “I know how to transcribe perspective drawings into plans—Mr Wren showed me.”

  “Sir Christopher Wren?” I said.

  “Who else, silly?” said Emily.

  * * *

  Emma had taken charge and I knew from that moment on I would be taking a backseat. It was my own fault. I’d been trying to be sarcastic when I asked her if she had a plan, not relinquish any control I might have had! She had us all organised within minutes. She quickly sussed that Emily had more idea about technical drawing than her father and got her to work alone on the rough map. Meanwhile, she had Tree drawing her a plan from memory of the Castle, on which she herself worked intensively and sensitively with him. I was detailed to make coffee, but once I’d done that, I was just standing around with my hands in my pockets. I watched Emma as she talked to Tree or checked on Emily’s progress, encouraging them with a word of praise here, a smile there.

  It started off innocently—I was admiring her—but it developed into something a bit more voyeuristic, when I fixated on the way her calf muscle curved into the neat scroll of her heel,
or the way her sweater tautened each time she twisted round to speak to Emily, or the way her hair fell across her face and she let it stay there for a few moments before lazily pushing it aside with her hand, which, to me, was, uh, very attractive. And then, of course, there was her mouth—I loved Emma’s mouth—and her eyes, but especially her mouth. She had perfect, smooth, full lips—in fact, she had actually modelled an entire range of lipsticks, from red through to blue—I still had the magazines with the adverts hidden behind my wardrobe—believe me, I have spent hours poring over those close-ups. I find it extremely erotic the way her lower lip pouts, while the upper lip sort of juts up proudly and you just get this glimpse of her teeth through the very suggestive gap between her—

  “—Sloane!”

  “What? Oh—Em.”

  “Stop leching,” she said. “Can’t you find something useful to do?”

  “I wasn’t leching. Leching.”

  “Why don’t you go and clean the time machine or something?” she suggested.

  “Clean the time machine?” I said. “It’s not a car—no one sees it, it’s in another dimension.”

  “I know—” she said, suddenly having another idea, “why don’t you go and buy up as many Ordinance Survey maps as you can find?”

  “We just need the coasts, Emma,” said Tree.

  “Only the ones with coastlines,” added Emma.

  “Uh, and what do I use for money?” I said.

  “Here, take my credit card.” She dug in her jacket pocket and passed it to me. “Give me your hand.” I gave her my hand and she wrote her PIN number on my palm. “This is the number. Oh, and get some more cigarettes—you know my brand. Anyone else need anything?”

  “I’d like some pistachio ice cream please,” said Emily.

  “Tree?” prompted Emma.

  “We need tobacco and papers, Stephen,” he said.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “There aren’t any cash machines yet—this is 1960. You haven’t got a bank account!”

  “Oh. Well, can’t you use the time machine?”

  “You want me to use the time machine to go shopping?”

  “Is that a problem?”

  “Of course it’s a problem,” I said. “I can’t just jump in and—”

  “Oh, please don’t make a fuss, darling,” she sighed.

  The word “darling” shut me up instantly. I smiled sweetly at her.

  “All right, I’ll go.” I stooped down and kissed her cheek. “I’m doing this for you, darling,” I said.

  She inclined her head towards me and we exchanged one of those intimate looks only those who have had something going would understand.

  “We have got to have a long chat,” I mouthed.

  “Not now,” she mouthed back, and turned away.

  Chapter 10

  It wasn’t such a big deal using the time machine to go forward to the third millennium to use Emma’s cash card. I deliberately arrived at night with Jemmons’s machine in default mode and found myself floating on the river aboard an old sloop. She was called La Belle and she was Jemmons’s pride and joy.

  * * *

  I had to wait around till morning for the shops to open, but I used some of the time up by walking into the city centre and withdrawing two hundred pounds from Emma’s bank account. I was walking on air. I had that nice warm feeling inside me again. Things were looking up. All because—well, I don’t want to talk about it… Then I found an early morning café and had a full, greasy, English breakfast. I started wondering how much Ordinance Survey maps cost and how many I’d need, and decided I might need more than the amount I’d taken out, so I went back to the cashpoint and withdrew another hundred. I was just walking up the High Street, to see if there were any stationery or bookshops opening early, when a police car screeched out of a side street and skidded up to the kerb, quite close to me. As I was looking round to see who they were after, I saw a second police car coming up the other way, and suddenly twigged—they were after me! It was the damn credit card—I’d forgotten the police were still looking for me in the third millennium—they wanted to question me about Emma’s disappearance. Now, here I was using her plastic. No way was I going to stick around and try to explain the truth to them—they’d put me in an asylum!

  I legged it past the first police car and made it to the corner—I could hear them reversing at high speed behind me. I kept running, desperately looking for somewhere to run to—and then I spotted a big department store just opening its doors across the street. It was my only chance. If I could get inside I might just be able to hide or lose them. I didn’t hesitate. I put everything into reaching the entrance—pumping my arms and legs like pistons. And then I was pushing open the heavy glass door and running on carpet past hundreds of hanging handbags and glass counters full of cosmetics, past the elevators, rails of shirts and sweaters, socks and ties—someone shouted at me—I just kept running—and then I saw double glass doors. I had run straight through the ground floor of the store and was exiting it. It wasn’t my original idea, but I never stopped to look around or think about what I was doing. And then I was in another street and running across that into a pedestrian walkway. On and on I ran, until I was in the next street over. I still didn’t stop or look round. I was straight across the road and looking for another cut-through to the next street. I found the first one and darted down it.

  Then I saw a multi-storey car park and the back of a restaurant with three wheelie-bins outside and an alleyway leading off somewhere else. I got behind the bins and threw my back against one. My chest was heaving and wheezing. My breath sounded like one of those old steam engines—thumping out a powerful panting noise. The sweat was pouring off me. I knew that I only had to get back down to the river and I’d be safe, so I didn’t think my situation was hopeless. I just thought that for a twenty-six year old I was really out of condition. I vowed never to eat another breakfast like that again. It was bran and juice for me in future.

  * * *

  I realized the police had been just waiting for someone to use Emma’s credit card, and when I took that money out in the middle of the night I must have alerted them. And when I used it again later that morning, they probably couldn’t believe their luck. They simply got a mugshot of me from the ATM and the rest was down to the CCTV cameras Big Brother has in every city centre up and down the land. Well, I didn’t take any chances after that scare, I worked my way back down to the quays using backstreets only and took the sloop back a few days, then I returned to the city centre to do my shopping. But I couldn’t resist going up to a police car I saw parked in the high street and asking the driver if he knew where I could buy an Ordinance Survey map. He directed me to W H Smith’s.

  * * *

  For the return trip I was careful to switch the holographic matrix over to the clock again, and also made sure I didn’t arrive too soon and meet myself. Meeting yourself is dangerous—it’s like standing between two mirrors and seeing infinite images of yourself, only the images are real and multiply, and some can even evolve into clones like that one of Jemmons in the attic—so I set the time control for the middle of the afternoon. We had stored the machine in an empty forward cabin, so the co-ordinates were already locked in. I arrived back on board precisely where I had departed from and headed excitedly along the central passageway to the living quarters, in the stern of the barge.

  I had all the maps covering the coastlines of England, Scotland, and Wales—and I had also bought detailed maps of Ireland, just in case. And, of course, I hadn’t forgotten everybody’s goodies, so I was feeling pretty pleased with myself as I burst through the door.

  “I’m back!” I shouted. “Emma? What’s wrong with her?”

  Emma was lying on the cushioned bench seat in the lounge half naked and Tree and Emily were holding her down. I threw down the shopping bags and rushed to her side, skidding along the floor on my knees to bring my face in line with hers.

  “Emma? What’s the matter? What the hell�
�s happened?”

  “Steve—there’s something in my back,” she sobbed.

  “Where? What?” I knelt up straight and looked down her body. “Where?”

  “It’s on her other side,” said Tree.

  I leaned over and saw to my horror a pulsing green light about the size of a shirt button, under her skin. There was no visible scar—but it had actually got inside her somehow.

  “Emily noticed it when I was in the shower,” said Emma.

  “Stay calm, Em,” I said.

  “Can’t you take it out?”

  “How? No, we have to leave it there—I think I know what it is.”

  “What?” said Emma.

  “I don’t think it’s anything to worry about.”

  “That’s easy for you to say! How did it get in there?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then how do you know what the damn thing is?” said Emma. “Tree, take me to a hospital—I want it removed right now!”

  “We can’t go to a hospital, Em, they’ll just ask a lot of awkward questions and call the police or, even worse, the military,” I said. “Remember I told you about that gadget on my arm? Well, I think this is something similar.”

  “It’s nothing like that thing you described!” cried Emma. “Yours was just a bloody catheter! This is inside my body!”

  “Em, I left something out,” I sighed. I looked at Tree and Emily and then back at Emma. “I was also drugged. They slipped me something in that private clinic—I lost about three days and—and I thought I was in love with Miss Parker.”

  “So you screwed the nurse—what’s that got to do with this?” said Emma.

  I could see she was becoming highly stressed. And kept my voice calm.

  “I didn’t screw the nurse. What I said was I became infatuated with her—just like you have become obsessed with Travis De Quipp—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake!” exclaimed Emma. “Not that again—you’re the one who’s obsessed! Tree, Emily, please call me an ambulance.”

  “You’re an ambulance,” blurted Emily, and quickly covered her mouth with her hand. “Sorry—it just slipped out.”