The Wraiths of War

by Mark Morris

  And yet. And yet. There was a deep and abiding melancholy about him that hadn’t been there before. I kept wanting to apologise for what I’d done to him; I kept feeling guilty about it. After I’d told him my story, and what (as far as I’d already experienced) his part in it was, I felt compelled to say, ‘But look, mate, you don’t have to do this. This is your choice, your life. You’re not a puppet to be manipulated – not by me or anyone else.’

  Having said that to him, though, I honestly don’t know what I would have done if he’d said no. I like to think I’d have respected his decision, but in truth I would probably have reminded him once again of the visions I’d had – particularly the one in which his failure to show up at Benny’s house had resulted in Clover’s death.

  Luckily, though, with no hesitation, and no apparent sense of resentment or obligation, he said, ‘Course I’ll help you out, Alex. We’re mates, ain’t we? It’s what mates do.’

  At last, when I’d briefed him as fully as I was able, and he was as ready as I felt he could be, I kitted him out with the overlarge demob suit, shirt, tie and brogues he’d been wearing when I’d first seen him (all bought from a vintage store down Camden Lock – so much for authenticity!). Then I used the heart to take us to Benny’s house on the night he’d forced us to flee. I knew it had been around 5 a.m. on Thursday 4th October, so I got us there at 4:30. We arrived at the end of Benny’s back garden, standing among the trees, swathed in shadow. There was nothing but blackness ahead of us, but after we’d been there about ten minutes or so, a light came on in the conservatory. It was the dim red glow of the lamp with the tasselled shade. From where we were standing the conservatory looked small and distant, though I could make out two figures – Clover and me – moving about in it through the glass.

  ‘There I am, right on schedule,’ I whispered to Frank. ‘How are you feeling?’

  ‘Fine,’ he said, deadpan.

  ‘So you know what you’ve got to do?’

  ‘Yeah, you told me.’

  ‘And you’re happy with everything? You haven’t forgotten that next time you meet me, after you’ve rescued me from Queens Road Cemetery, it’ll be him, not me, and he won’t know who you are, and you’ll have to tell him what I told you? And remember, when he asks about Kate, you’re to say that you know I’m looking for her, but you’re not to tell him—’

  He sighed, loud enough to cut in on my babble. I didn’t know if his heart still beat in his chest or if the blood still pumped through his veins, but he was certainly still capable of sighing. ‘I haven’t forgotten,’ he said. ‘I won’t let you down, Alex.’

  ‘I know you won’t,’ I said. ‘I know it’ll happen exactly as I remember it, because… well, because that’s how I remember it.’

  ‘So stop worrying,’ he said. ‘I’ll do exactly what you told me. Now bugger off so I can turn on the fireworks and give you all a lovely display.’

  I grinned nervously, and although I itched to offer more advice, I decided it was time to go, and leave the rest of it up to Fate.

  ‘Well, good luck,’ I said, and I hovered a moment, not sure whether to say anything more, or whether to throw my arms around him. We’d been through such a lot, Frank and me, and I owed him… well, potentially I owed him everything.

  As if anticipating my half-intention to embrace him, and eager to deflect it (man-hugs just weren’t the done thing in Frank’s day), he thrust out his hand.

  ‘Cheerio, guv’nor. See you soon.’

  I took his hand. It was icy-cold, as always.

  ‘See you, Frank. And thanks.’

  He gave a single brief nod.

  I went back. Not to the flat, which was Frank’s to use whenever he needed it, but to my house in Ranskill Gardens. I wasn’t quite ready yet for my post-war reunion with Clover, though, so I arrived on the afternoon of Thursday November 2nd 2017. This was one of the days I’d jumped to when I’d wanted to talk to my future self, and had found the house empty. I took advantage of that now, using my time alone to rest and recuperate. I had a long bath, went out for a meal, slept in my own bed. The next day I took out my little black book and knuckled down to a bit more ‘housekeeping’.

  I started small by jumping back to the day after Kate’s abduction, finding an internet café and sending the email to Clover at Incognito, the one purporting to be from Kate’s kidnapper. I felt bad having to type the threat to kill my own daughter, though I reasoned that it was better coming from me than from a real kidnapper, and that at least the only person I was truly hurting was my own past self.

  Previously I’d have been worried that I might not remember the exact wording of the message, but I’d found that these things have a way of sorting themselves out. You find not that you’re remembering the words as you type them, but that they’re coming to you naturally, and that they feel right, as if they’re being written for the first time – which, of course, in a way they are. It was exactly the same thing with Frank’s suit. I’d been worried I might not be able to find a suit that matched the one I remembered him wearing the first time I’d seen him, but of course not only did I find a similar suit in Camden Lock, I found the exact one – which, again, is why he’d been wearing it when my past self had encountered him.

  Time. It was neat in some ways, messy and convoluted in others. If you went with it, and tried simply to implement what in your experience had already taken place, all the pieces fell nicely into their allotted slots. But when you deliberately tried to change things… that was when the trouble started.

  After I’d sent the email, wiped the account and offered a silent apology to my past self for the anguish I knew I was about to put him (me) through, I went back in time again. I went back to the summer of 1893, to a place in London I’d never been to before. It was a leap of faith, a leap into the dark, but I knew I’d arrived in the right place when I smelled the appalling stench of decay and unwashed flesh and human excrement, and when I felt things scuttling over my shoes that I knew were rats and cockroaches. I stood swaying for a moment, the nausea, both from the stench and from the effects of time travel coiling in my gut, threatening to overwhelm me. When I was finally able to focus I saw a tall, scraggly-bearded man in filthy rags staring at me in open-mouthed wonder, his eyes flickering from my face to the heart in my hand.

  I swallowed and said, ‘You must come with me, Abel. It’s time.’ Then I stepped forward and took his hand. And even as the nanites inside me were still doing their job, we were travelling again, though on this occasion we weren’t moving through time, but simply slipping across London in the blink of an eye – from Newgate Prison to Ranskill Gardens.

  That was where I stayed for the next twelve days. I stayed there with the man I’d called Abel, and who I renamed Hawkins to conceal his identity. He was broken when I found him. He was grieving for his murdered family, and he had resigned himself to the death he’d been facing for killing one of the men who had attacked the camp of travelling performers in which he, his wife Marta and their four children had lived.

  But he was a proud, intelligent man with a strong spirit, and as the days passed, and he grew to trust me, we became friends. I told him my story – or as much of it as he needed to know – and by the time I left him, having given him his instructions and a letter to give to my past self in two years’ time, not only was he on the road to recovery, but I knew I could trust him implicitly.

  It was an honour spending time with him again. But it was heart-breaking too. It was the first time I’d gone back in time to see a dead friend, and although I’d been apprehensive about how it might make me feel, I’d had no real concept of what the true strength and depth of my feelings would be.

  ‘Bittersweet’ is the word that springs most readily to mind, but that doesn’t even begin to cut it. Even though I’d seen Hawkins die, I’d always known that I had unfinished business with him. The reality, though, of actually seeing him and talking to him when I knew of his ultimate fate was both giddyingly glorious a
nd gut-churningly harrowing.

  I had to keep reminding myself that at this point in time he was alive, as alive as any of us were who were occupying the span of time between our beginning and our end. That wasn’t the hardest thing, though. The hardest thing was dealing with my compulsion to keep trying to convince myself that what I had done for him – rescuing him the day before his execution, and giving him another couple of years’ life he wouldn’t otherwise have had – was a precious gift, and not simply a pragmatic, even callous, tactic on my part, designed simply to further my own cause.

  Could I help it if I was bound by circumstance? Could I help it if there were certain things I had to do to maintain what I believed was a possibly fragile equilibrium? Whatever I did, I did with the best intentions. At no point did I set out to harm anyone or prolong anyone’s pain. Sometimes stuff happened. Sometimes bad things happened to people because of my involvement with them – but was that my fault? Or just part of the randomness and complexity of life.

  After leaving Hawkins, I jumped forward to the day after I’d received the letter from McCallum inviting me to his house. It was because of that letter that I’d been arrested and taken to the police station, and had ultimately ended up as Tallarian’s prisoner in Victorian London, after trying to stop the shape-shifter, in the guise of DI Jensen, from stealing the heart.

  My ‘appointment’ with McCallum (though I hadn’t known it had been McCallum who’d contacted me until I arrived there) had been scheduled for noon that day, and that was the time I arrived back in town. Not at McCallum’s house, though. My intention wasn’t to warn myself, or to interfere in any way with what I knew had happened to me. No, I went back to see Clover.

  Although I wasn’t yet ready for a reunion with the Clover I’d left behind to continue my journey through the First World War, I was happy enough to meet up with Clover’s past self in order to tick off another ‘housekeeping’ job in my little black book. I arrived as my past self was tentatively approaching McCallum’s house at 56 Bellwater Drive. While he was occupied there, I turned up, once again, in the bedroom of my house in Ranskill Gardens. I arrived probably half an hour or so after my past self had left the house.

  I went downstairs to find Clover in the kitchen making a sandwich.

  ‘Hi,’ I said.

  She turned, bread knife in hand, eyebrows rising in surprise. ‘Hi. What are you doing back so soon? Has something gone—’ Then her eyes narrowed as she peered harder at me. ‘Wait a minute. You’re not “you” you, are you? You’re not the you who left here. You’re from a different time.’

  I nodded. ‘I’m from the future.’

  ‘How far?’ She wrinkled her nose. ‘Three or four years? But you look thin.’

  ‘I’ve been through the wars.’

  ‘Literally?’ Then she waved the bread knife vaguely in my direction. ‘No, it’s okay, you don’t have to answer. And don’t give me one of those enigmatic smiles of yours, because frankly you’re not very good at them. You just look constipated.’

  ‘What enigmatic smiles?’ I asked.

  She shrugged. ‘That’s probably the future you. You haven’t perfected them yet – not that you ever will.’

  I frowned. ‘You’re more au fait with the idea of time travel than you’ve been letting on, aren’t you? This is just a few days after Frank rescued you from that basement in the Isle of Dogs, right?’

  She nodded.

  ‘And yet back then, when I mentioned time travel, after waking up having been unconscious for three days, you sounded surprised – like it was a whole new thing for you.’

  She raised her hands in surrender, though the fact that she was still holding the bread knife kind of spoiled the effect. ‘It’s a fair cop. You’ve got me bang to rights.’

  I frowned. ‘So why did you lie?’

  ‘Work it out, dumbo. Because you told me to.’

  ‘Me?’

  She pulled a face to let me know I was being really slow. ‘You woke up here, didn’t you? Who do you think brought you here?’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Correct. And do you remember who I said the house belonged to?’

  The penny dropped. ‘A friend. Of course. That was the future me, wasn’t it? So I appeared, told you who I was, and about this place, and you brought the unconscious me here?’

  ‘Correct. That night in the Isle of Dogs I heard a commotion somewhere outside the room I’d been locked in, and started yelling, and next thing I knew the door was opening and there was Frank. He was surprised to see me at first, because he thought you and him had already rescued me, and that the two of us had legged it while he’d been holding off the shape-shifter. As soon as we realised what had happened – i.e. that you’d gone off with another bit of the shape-shifter disguised as me – we raced up top to try to warn you, but you were nowhere to be seen. I would have called you, but my mobile was back in the hotel room I’d been kidnapped from. Frank and I were just wondering what to do when a cab pulled up next to us and the bloke in the back told us to get in. Guess who that bloke was.’

  ‘I’ll take a stab in the dark and say me.’

  ‘Correct. It was you as you look now, in fact – same clothes and everything. In the taxi you told us who you were and that you were from the future, and that we were on our way to pick up the past version of you – by which I mean his past, not my past.

  ‘Anyway, the cab took us to some God-forsaken little street in the East End, and next second there you were. You just seemed to appear out of nowhere, lying in the street, clutching the heart and looking as though you’d had seven bells knocked out of you. We dragged you into the taxi and brought you here, and the future you told us to look after his past self, and said that this was his house, but not to let on to his past self yet – when asked, I was to say it belonged to a friend. And… well, that pretty much brings us up to date. Why are you looking so glum?’

  I sighed. ‘You said the future version of me that arrived in the cab was wearing what I’m wearing now?’

  She nodded. ‘So?’ Then her face cleared. ‘Oh! I suppose that means it was you! The “now” you, I mean?’

  I nodded wearily and took out the heart. ‘Why does one job always lead to another? Can you remember the name of the street the cab took us to?’

  She frowned. ‘Not off-hand.’

  ‘Try. It’s only if you tell me that I’ll know where to go.’

  She screwed up her face. ‘It was something to do with birds. The name of a bird.’ She closed her eyes and massaged her forehead with her thumb and forefinger, as if she could coax the memory out. It seemed to work, because her head suddenly jerked up, her eyes opening wide. ‘Kingfisher something. Kingfisher Walk! That was it.’

  ‘Great,’ I said. ‘Make me a sandwich. I’ll be back in five minutes.’

  I did what needed to be done. I went back a few days, hailed a cab, picked up Clover and Frank from the Isle of Dogs, and explained who I was and what was happening en route to Kingfisher Walk in the East End. Once there, we waited around until my past self appeared – this was the version of me that had been battered by Hulse and his cronies, and Jesus, was I in a bad way! – and then took the cab round to Ranskill Gardens. Once Frank and Clover had been briefed, I used the heart to take me forward, arriving back in the kitchen at Ranskill Gardens to find Clover sitting at the kitchen table, sandwich in hand, chewing.

  ‘Turkey, salad and cranberry,’ she said, her voice muffled by food. She nodded at the place she’d set for me at the opposite side of the table. ‘Tuck in.’

  I put a hand on my belly, lurched across and sank into the empty chair. ‘Give me a minute.’

  She regarded me steadily as I took deep breaths in and out, waiting for the nanites to kick in. ‘Travel sickness?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  After a few minutes my guts settled enough for me to eat my sandwich. Once we were done and the plates had been cleared away, Clover said, ‘So? You must be here for a reason.
What can I do for you?’

  ‘Have you ever fancied visiting the Victorian era?’ I asked, and I watched her face light up.

  You know the rest. Or, if not, I’m sure you can work it out. I took Clover back to August 1895, introduced her to Hawkins and the staff he’d employed during the two years since I’d rescued him from Newgate Prison, gave her some money to kit herself out in Victorian garb, told her as much as she needed to know and then left her to get acclimatised and to await the arrival both of Hope and my smoke-damaged past self – who Hawkins, having been briefed by me (I was getting pretty good at this by now), would rescue from Tallarian’s lair in the early hours of September 3rd.

  I still had things to do to establish myself in Victorian London – I needed to make some astute financial investments in order to accrue my fortune, set myself up with various business interests that would operate efficiently and profitably with minimal involvement from me, and buy the house in Ranskill Gardens – but by now I was reaching critical mass. I’d been desperate to see Kate since coming back from the War, but now I was so far beyond desperate that I’m not even sure there’s a word to describe it. Added to which, the nuts and bolts of setting myself up as a Victorian gentlemen were so boring and long-winded, and seemed to require such a lot of thought and consideration that I simply didn’t have the patience for, that I decided it could wait for another time.

  I felt pretty much the same about the other big job that was currently nagging at me, which was the one concerning the Sherwoods. At some point I’d have to put three months aside, maybe more, to recruit them to my cause and then transform them, both practically and psychologically, from naive, strait-laced Victorians into a couple of tech-savvy whizz kids, capable of coping with the onslaught of the twenty-first century. But Rome wasn’t built in a day, and the thought of undertaking that gargantuan task now, when I had already delayed my reunion with Kate beyond endurance, was too depressing for words. I’d tackle it at some point in the future. When Kate was ten maybe. Or fifteen.