by Mark Morris
At once I remembered the voice that had called my name in the square, the patter of running footsteps behind me. Lyn’s presence here could only mean she’d been close enough to me when the Dark Man and I had ‘leaped’ to hitch a lift with us. Until now she must have been lying in the rubble somewhere behind me, dazed, perhaps even unconscious. But now she’d woken up.
And she was every bit as fucking furious as I was.
In her upraised hand she held not another version of the heart, but a half-brick. I discovered this when she hurled it at the Dark Man, still spitting vitriol. It flew straight and true, glancing off the side of his forehead and spinning away into the shadows. The Dark Man dropped without a sound, like a boxer felled by a knockout blow. Instantly the heart energy that he’d attacked me with evaporated like smoke in a strong wind. As the Dark Man’s body hit the ground, his fist opened and the heart rolled free. I saw Lyn scoop up a chunk of rock and run towards him as if she intended to smash his brains to pulp.
For me, the sudden dissolution of the Dark Man’s heart energy was like the unexpected snapping of a rope in a tug of war. I staggered back, exhausted and momentarily disorientated, almost tripping over a pile of rubble. In fact, if Lyn hadn’t been there I might well have succumbed to my weariness and fallen flat on my arse. But seeing her standing over the Dark Man’s prone body, raising the rock above her head, somehow gave me the impetus to shoot a leg out behind me and allow me to regain my balance, to stay upright.
‘Lyn,’ I shouted, putting as much urgency into my voice as I could, ‘don’t.’
She paused, but she didn’t lower the arm that was holding the rock. She turned her head towards me, and although I couldn’t see her features clearly, the harsh stripes of light and shadow on her face and the rubble-dust in her now wild and tangled hair made her look haggard, feral.
‘Why not?’ She spat out the words. ‘He deserves it.’
‘He does,’ I said, ‘but this isn’t the way. I’ve seen him die and this isn’t how it happens.’
‘You’ve seen…’ Her arm sagged. This was clearly all getting too much for her. When she next spoke her voice sounded almost plaintive.
‘What do you mean? What’s happening, Alex? I don’t understand any of this.’
Still holding the old heart in my right hand, I held up my left in a calming gesture and approached her cautiously. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know it’s hard. But you’ve seen what the heart can do. You know it can give us the ability to travel in time.’
She stared at me. She didn’t respond, but I thought – or hoped – she was listening.
‘I’ve seen him die,’ I said softly. ‘I’ve seen the heart destroy him. But if you kill him now, everything will change – and maybe not for the better. Do you understand?’
I was close enough now to make out her features. Despite the years of suffering she’d endured that had prematurely aged her, she looked almost child-like in her confusion. Looking down at the Dark Man she said, ‘He deserves to die. For what he did to me, to us, he deserves it.’
‘I know,’ I said (and part of me wondered what would happen if Lyn did kill him now; wondered whether, in fact, things might turn out better), ‘and he will die. Just not here. Not now. It isn’t worth it, Lyn. He isn’t worth it. Kill him and you’ll be a murderer forever. You don’t want that, do you? A taint like that… it never leaves you.’
Still looking down at the Dark Man’s crumpled body, she said, ‘How could it be murder? He’s not even human.’
‘We don’t know that,’ I said. ‘Throw away the rock, Lyn. Throw it away and pick up the heart. That’s what will really hurt him.’
I watched her hesitate, wondering what I would do if she rejected my advice, what would happen.
But then she sighed once more and reluctantly dropped the rock. Stepping forward, she bent to pick up the younger heart. I half-expected it to react to her touch, but it remained inert. She straightened and stepped away from the prone figure, turning towards me.
The Dark Man groaned, stirred – and then, in a sudden burst of movement, lunged and grabbed at Lyn, his hand encircling her ankle. Her forward momentum was abruptly curtailed, his grip so strong, despite his infirmity, that she was almost yanked off her feet. As she stumbled forward, trying to maintain her balance, her head came up and she looked at me, and then, like a rugby player passing the ball while being tackled by an opponent, she lobbed the heart in my direction.
It wasn’t the first time the heart had been thrown to me. Mayla, an African prostitute who’d been one of my ‘watchers’ in Victorian London, had once flung the heart to me up a flight of stairs, eager to be rid of it. Even though on this occasion it was dark and the heart was black, I knew, as I’d known then, that I’d catch it – and I did. I shot out my arm, opened my hand, and the next second the heart was smacking snugly into my palm. I closed my fingers around it with a sense of elation. The heart – my heart – was at last back in my possession.
My satisfaction lasted for only a second, though. Because as soon as I closed my hand around the ‘younger’ heart, both it and its older twin erupted into life. I’m not sure entirely why it happened. I can only guess that because my body was providing a physical link between two versions of the heart it created some sort of temporal short circuit. All I know for sure is that my body was suddenly engulfed in a blistering discharge of energy. It was as if the two versions of the heart were resuming hostilities using me as their battleground. My spine snapped into an arch and my head was thrown back. All at once I couldn’t see, couldn’t scream; my every nerve ending was on fire. I felt as if I was being torn apart – or as if each version of the heart wanted to return to its own particular time stream, taking me with it. I might have been the heart’s guardian, but what the heart didn’t seem to understand was that I couldn’t be in two places at once. Dimly, through the roaring in my head, I heard Lyn screaming at me to let go of the heart.
But I couldn’t. Each version of it was fused to my hands. The next thing I was aware of was that she was with me – she must have kicked herself free of the Dark Man’s grip – and was clawing at my right hand, the one that was holding the old heart, trying to prise my fingers apart. I wanted to help her, but I couldn’t; I was paralysed. I heard a crack, and then another, and although I felt no pain I knew she was breaking my fingers to get at the heart.
Then I felt what I can only describe as a sideways whoosh, and suddenly the energy was draining out of me – or rather, shooting out of me, as if I was a water pipe that had sprung a leak. As the power flowed from me, my senses came back – and to my horror the first thing I saw was Lyn flying backwards through the air, like someone caught in a bomb blast.
It was so dark that I didn’t see her land – but I heard her. She came down with a horrible dead-weight thud and a clattering of bricks and rubble that made me flinch and cry out. I knew in that moment that if she’d saved my life by sacrificing her own I’d never forgive myself. I’d use the heart to go back and change things, and fuck the consequences.
The heart. I looked down at my left hand and saw that the younger heart – my heart – was still tightly clutched in it. My right hand, though, two fingers now swelling and going blue and (now that I came to think of it) hurting like fuckery, was empty, with the old heart nowhere in sight.
That wasn’t my concern right now, though. All I cared about was Lyn. Goading my wobbly legs into life, and trying to ignore the sickening waves of pain that were throbbing up from my broken fingers and through my arm, I lurched and stumbled over the uneven ground towards the place where I’d heard her land. All the way I was muttering, ‘Please be all right, please be all right.’ It was unbearable to think that only a short distance away, while all this was happening, our younger selves were meeting for the first time.
When I finally found her, she was so still that I thought at first she was just part of a pile of weeds and rubble. I almost walked straight past her until I noticed the paleness of her outs
tretched hand. She looked crumpled, one leg twisted beneath her, one arm outflung, her chin tucked into her chest.
‘Lyn,’ I said, dropping to my knees beside her, even though the right one was still aching from when I’d whacked it earlier. She was covered in dust and there was an ominous-looking dark patch on the right side of her clothing that stretched from beneath her ribs to her hip. Unable to use my right hand (I was holding it against my body like an injured pet), I slipped the heart into my jacket pocket and reached out with my left hand, tentatively touching the dark patch with my fingers. The patch was wet and sticky. Oil, I told myself stubbornly, or mud. I raised my wet fingers to my face and smelled the unmistakeable coppery tang of blood. Fuck. There was such a lot of it. And the dark patch on the right side of her body wasn’t all of it, by any means. There were more dark smears on her face, and yet more clotting her hair and on the rocks beneath her head.
Touching her cheek, I spoke her name again. ‘Lyn. Can you hear me?’
Leaning forward, I put my ear to her chest, but before I could tell whether or not her heart was beating I heard a gritty shifting of rubble behind me.
Still on my knees, I twisted around, my hand reaching for my jacket pocket with the same speed and instinct that a gunslinger might reach for his gun.
The sound was the Dark Man. But he wasn’t sneaking up on me. He was down on his hands and knees, scrabbling for something on the ground.
I realised it must have been the ‘old’ heart only when his hunched silhouette smeared and disappeared. Clearly he’d decided that with the younger heart back in my possession he was no longer a match for me, and so had gone away to lick his wounds. I had no doubt I’d see him again, though right at that moment such a prospect seemed less than inconsequential.
My head starting to swim from the pain in my right hand, I drew the heart from my pocket with my left, then hunched forward and slid that same arm carefully beneath Lyn’s shoulders. I had to push through the blood-sticky rubble beneath her, but eventually I had her in an awkward but fairly secure grip. Holding her as close to me as I dared, I rested my forehead against hers and instructed the heart to take us home. As our surroundings bled away and the world went momentarily black, I prayed it wasn’t already too late.
SEVENTEEN
THE CROSSROADS
‘Penny for them?’
I was so deep in my own thoughts that I didn’t hear Clover come in. I looked up from my chair, feeling dazed.
‘Just the usual boring stuff that any time-travelling killer thinks about,’ I said.
She frowned and crossed the room to sit in the seat beside me.
‘You’re not a killer.’ She put a hand on my arm. ‘Well, not a bad one anyway.’
I snorted a laugh.
‘How are the fingers?’
I held up my right hand. It had been five days now since, thanks to Lyn, I had got the younger heart back. My forefinger and the one next to it were still buddy-taped together, but there was virtually no pain from them now.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Good old nanites doing their work. The doctors are baffled by my amazing powers of recovery.’
She smiled, waited a couple of beats, and then said, ‘So? Do you want to share?’
‘My fingers?’
‘Your thoughts, dumbo.’
I sighed. ‘I’m just… taking stock. Trying to work out what my next move should be. Trying to apply logic to the situation.’ I tapped the side of my head. ‘It’s hard to be logical, though, when you’re on the inside looking out, when you can’t see the bigger picture.’
She nodded. ‘Go on.’
‘It’s just… time travel creates so many ripples… so many consequences and conundrums and inconsistencies. By doing what I’m doing… going through the War with Frank, making notes in my little book to remind myself of things I need to do in the future… it just feels like my life’s become a constant process of patching up, of making sure everything continues as it should… or as I think it should… of, I don’t know, retro-fitting the past so it correlates with the present, and hopefully the future.’
‘It’s a big responsibility,’ she said.
‘It’s not just that, though, is it?’
‘Isn’t it?’
I’d looked away from her to stare down at my hands, but now I slid another glance in her direction.
‘What if we’re wrong, Clover? What if I’m wrong? What if time travel isn’t an exact science? What if none of this is set in stone? What if time is constantly in flux, and whenever I use the heart, thinking I’m keeping things on the straight and narrow, or putting them back to where I’ve been led to believe they should be, I change things? Maybe not big things, but… what if, by establishing or restoring the timeline, I’m making things happen slightly differently each time, creating ripples?’
‘That’s a lot of what ifs,’ she said.
‘My life’s become a whole series of what ifs. And here’s another: what if I just decide not to do it any more?’
She was looking at me steadily, and although her expression was thoughtful rather than disapproving I couldn’t help feeling a bit like a child that has stamped a petulant foot.
‘You’ve said this before,’ she said.
I threw up my hands in exasperation. ‘Yeah, I know. It’s just that now I’ve got Kate back my whole mindset’s changed. Before, I had a purpose. I was searching for my daughter, and I wasn’t prepared to stop until I’d found her. Now, though…’
‘You’ve still got a purpose,’ Clover said. ‘You’ve got to keep things on the right track for Kate’s sake. Who knows what might happen if you don’t?’
‘But that’s my point, don’t you see? Who knows? Maybe things will be better without my interference. Maybe, if I hadn’t got involved in the first place, Lyn wouldn’t have ended up the way she did.’
Clover was silent for a moment. Then she glanced across at the recumbent figure in the hospital bed.
‘Lyn’s fine,’ she said firmly. ‘She’s going to be fine.’
I looked across at Lyn too. We were back at Oak Hill, the private hospital in which I’d recuperated after returning from the Victorian era with Clover and Hope. Lyn, who was now a patient here, was in an induced coma, having fractured her skull. With the top half of her shaven head swathed in bandages she looked incredibly vulnerable, child-like. She had also broken three ribs and her right arm, and she had a nasty gash on her right hip. But aside from that her injuries were superficial – cuts and bruises, most of which were already healing.
‘I’m not talking about her physical injuries,’ I said. ‘I’m talking about the five years she spent raving and terrified out of her wits because of that… that bastard.’
‘The heart seems to be helping her with that.’
I had placed the heart in Lyn’s limp hand, and despite being unconscious she was now cupping it gently between her palms.
‘It calms her,’ I said. ‘Whenever she’s held it before, she’s said she can feel it healing her.’
There was silence between us for a moment. Then Clover said, ‘Do you really think you can keep Kate safe by doing nothing?’
‘By protecting her, you mean?’
‘Don’t split hairs, Alex.’ Clover’s voice was mild, though, not irritable. ‘You know what I’m talking about.’
I felt weary. Weary of the way my thoughts constantly batted to and fro. Weary of everything I might prospectively still have to do to maintain the status quo. Weary of the uncertainty of it all. I slumped back in my seat.
‘Truthfully?’ I said. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. I mean, how do you keep someone safe? How do you guarantee their safety?’
Clover considered the question. ‘You eliminate all threats to them, I suppose.’
‘And what’s the biggest threat to Kate?’
Clover shrugged. ‘The Dark Man?’
‘The Dark Man,’ I confirmed. ‘So you’d think, wouldn’t you, that what I really need to do is find o
ut, once and for all, who the Dark Man is and nullify him in some way? But is that possible? Is it even wise? Because we’ve already seen the Dark Man die. We know how it ends for him. We know that he becomes an ancient, crippled creature who’s eventually destroyed by the power of the thing he most covets. So the question is, can I change that version of our past by dispatching the Dark Man sooner? More to the point, should I change it? Dare I? And what’ll happen to us, to our past, to our memories, if I do?’
‘It’s a tricky one,’ Clover admitted.
‘That’s putting it mildly.’ I hesitated, then said, ‘Thing is, I have been thinking pretty seriously about going to a point in time where I know the Dark Man’s going to be and… well, stopping him from doing what I know he’s going to do.’
‘What point in time is that?’
‘The moment when Lyn first met the Dark Man. The moment when he first… poisoned her mind.’
‘Do you know when that is?’
I nodded. ‘With Lyn’s help I’ve worked it out. This could be the pivotal point for both of us – the point when both our lives began to go off the rails…’
‘I sense a “but”.’
I grimaced. ‘But what if I’m wrong? What if I do manage to stop the Dark Man? The change to both of our lives would be… monumental. Lyn and I would live happily together with Kate, as a family, and maybe none of this’ – I waved my hand around vaguely – ‘would ever happen. Or maybe it would happen so differently that I’d never get to this point, and so would never be in the position to go back and change things. Classic time anomaly.’
‘Or maybe only some things would change,’ Clover suggested. ‘I mean, maybe your older daughter’s boyfriend would still get in trouble with that drug dealer, and maybe you’d still contact Benny, who’d still put you on to me, and I’d still tell you about the heart…’
‘But Kate would be with Lyn, and so Adam and Paula would never need to look after her, which means they’d never abduct her, which means I wouldn’t have to steal the heart, which means I’d never kill McCallum…’ I put a hand to my head, as though to contain my thoughts. ‘Unless…’
