A Window into Time (Novella)

by Peter F. Hamilton

  “Behave,” Gran said in a sharp voice.

  “It’s all right, girl; they all know me in here. They should mind.” He turned to me, suddenly solemn. “I knew what it was like here before they built this town.”

  “Do you?”

  “Ooh, Jules,” Gran said, patting my hand. “You should listen to this. It’s right spooky.”

  “Soon as we came here,” Barney said, “I knew it. I knew the land, the hills, the shore. Didn’t I, girl?”

  “He did,” Gran agreed. “Very first time, when we drove in along the coast road, he said to me: Girl, he said, there’s some big rocks around the next corner. And do you know what?”

  “There were some big rocks around the corner?” I asked.

  “There were, Jules. No word of lie.”

  “I remember it from decades ago,” Barney said. “Turn of the century, like—last century; when this was just empty land. Banus built the marina back in the early seventies, and the rest of the developments sprouted out after that, until you reach what you got today. So I reckon I must have lived here in an earlier life. I picked up Spanish dead quick, too. Like it’s my second language.”

  I just stared at him in shock. “What else do you remember?”

  “The land. I remember the land. And the sea. It was hard times back then. I reckon I fought in the civil war.”

  “Which side?” Dad muttered.

  “You can laugh, son,” Barney said stiffly, “but it’s real, Jules. I swear it.”

  “Do you have a good memory, Barney?” I asked. It was amazing. I’d never thought anyone else in the family had a memory like mine, especially not Barney.

  “Best there is.” He twitched a grin. “Never forgot a debt back in the day, did I?” He nudged Gran.

  “He didn’t,” Gran agreed.

  “I still remember them now. All the amounts, down to the last penny.”

  “I remember everything, too,” I told him. “The last time you visited us in Yaxley, three years seven months ago, you were wearing Levi’s jeans and a green shirt, with black-and-yellow Reebok trainers.”

  “Blimey!” Barney grunted.

  “And, Gran, you were in an orange blouse and a black cardigan with silver ladybug buttons. Your handbag was leopardskin with a gold chain strap.”

  “I remember that handbag,” she exclaimed. “I’ve still got it somewhere. Years out of season now,” she confided to Rachel.

  “And you, lad, had red shorts and a T-shirt with them daft Minions on it,” Barney said smugly. “The ones off’ve the film.”

  “I did. Yes!”

  Barney gave Dad a sly glance. “Jules, I think the brains skipped a generation.”

  Rachel was looking at me with a very surprised expression. “Do you really remember everything?”

  I nodded. “Yes. I keep telling you I do.” Seventeen times in total, now.

  “What about you, Dave?” she asked Dad. “Can you do it?”

  “Not quite like that,” he said with an irritated grimace.

  “So did you have a past life?” I asked Barney.

  “No other way to explain it, lad.”

  “That makes him a Buddhist,” Dad said with a chuckle. “Imagine that.”

  “I’m not a bleeding Buddhist. They all come back as dogs or spiders or something.”

  “Only if you’ve been a bad boy,” Gran said knowingly. “So right now he should be a toad. A big fat one.”

  Barney gave me a cheerful smile. “Ignore them, lad. We know the truth, don’t we?”

  “Yes, we do.”

  —

  The Monday after we got back, I went to the office. Michael Finsen’s office. It was in a long concrete-and-glass building just off Canada Square. I hung around on the pavement on the other side of the road. There were a lot of companies with offices in the building; it was incredibly busy. Everybody went in and out through the main entrance.

  Watching it, I remembered how Michael hated the revolving door in the middle; he always used one of the ordinary doors on either side. There were people in dark suits standing outside, with the Secret Service earpieces—the ones with the coils of clear plastic tubing that vanished down into their collars. They smiled at the people going in, who were all dressed in expensive suits. The only difference among them was their ties, like they were all in competition to have the brightest one.

  I caught one of the security people glancing over at me a couple of times, but she didn’t start talking into her suit cuff like they do in the films. I felt a lot safer in Docklands than I did in Islington; it’s like a Kenan Abbot exclusion zone. His type simply didn’t belong here.

  Michael Finsen came out of the building (using a side door) at twelve thirty-seven. It was the face I’d recognized in the Facebook photos. He was really real! My legs went all tingly and weak, the same sensation you get with vertigo (I used to get it on fairground rides; when I was younger, Dad took me on the rides until I cried so much Mum stopped him).

  Michael was with a couple of colleagues. They set off across Jubilee Park, talking and laughing together. It must be nice to have friends like that, people you enjoy being with.

  Then Michael looked around, and he wasn’t smiling. I froze. I thought he’d realized who I was. But he just kept scanning all the people on the street.

  And I remembered why: Vladimir McCann. Mike’s memory made me shiver.

  Jyoti is already in bed when I come out of the bathroom. She is sitting up with her laptop on her knees, frowning at the screen. The light glints off the diamond in her engagement ring. She never takes it off, not even at night.

  I slip under the duvet and snuggle up beside her. Her frown only gets deeper, which isn’t good.

  “What’s up, babe?” I ask.

  She sighs and closes up the laptop. “Someone from before.”

  “Before?”

  I get the disgruntled look she always spikes me with when I’ve said something truly dumb.

  “Before you.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “He’s called Vladimir McCann. It wasn’t serious, not like you.” She gives me a small smile and squeezes my arm. “We went out for a few months, that’s all. He wasn’t…right.”

  I look at her laptop. “What happened to him?”

  “He’s not well. Mentally, I mean.”

  “What?”

  She reluctantly opens the laptop for me. It’s her Facebook page. I start to read what Vladimir has written in her Visitor Posts.

  She’s right. He is ill. It’s all nonsense—most of it incoherent, disconnected from reality. But in among the bizarre paragraphs about how the world is falling apart are disturbing passages. Personal ones. About how she knows what she’s done is wrong. About how she shouldn’t have left him. How that weekend they spent in Portsmouth will haunt him, and that is entirely her fault.

  “We never even went to Portsmouth,” she tells me sadly.

  The end of it is a long rant about how badly he is suffering now that he can see the truth. How that suffering wouldn’t end. How she will have to face up to what she’s done, and that will be dark for her. Very dark.

  “I’m going to the police,” I tell her.

  Chapter 12

  Time Line

  When I got home, I tried to go onto Jyoti’s Facebook page to check it, but she’d closed it down.

  I remembered the date Vladimir posted his tirade—three months and eight days ago. The post was actually quite scary. Even the stupids have a kind of logic to their behavior, which is easy for someone smarter, like me, to discern. Then there are criminals, who are actually clinical psychopaths, which doesn’t mean they go around hacking people apart the way films depict them (Mum and Dad wouldn’t let me see the ones with Sir Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter even though they’re classics, but I know the plot; there are literally thousands of spoiler reviews on the Internet). Their neurochemistry means they simply don’t empathize and conform with normal human social constraints (looking at you: Kenan
Abbot & Scrap Owen). That’s why they turn to crime; they don’t see anything wrong with stealing or threatening other people. Interestingly, the top 1 percent of them wind up running companies or banks or going into politics. People always misclassify them and call them ruthless; they’re not. They simply see an advantage for themselves and take it without any regard for the consequences. It’s their nature.

  Again, I can understand them.

  Vladimir McCann was not stupid or psychopathic. Michael Finsen was right; Vladimir was flat-out mad.

  I went on Vladimir’s Facebook page. His posts there were even worse than the one he wrote on Jyoti’s page. It was very hard for me to follow his writing. There was nothing rational there. But he did mention his medication. Mainly when he wasn’t taking it. Oops, forgot again, he was always saying. Or: These new tabs make everything dull, I can’t think proper. Or They space me out too much. A couple of times he talked about being sectioned. Logging on from inside my padded cell. Which couldn’t be right; I’m sure mental hospitals don’t allow patients Internet access.

  I couldn’t tell what was true or not. You can’t analyze something like that; there’s no reference point. I wouldn’t like it if he’d sent me anything like that. So no wonder Michael was worried and angry.

  And Michael and Jyoti were engaged now. That was something nice to come out of this, I supposed.

  “How good are the anti-stalking laws?” I asked Dad that night.

  He gave me a very surprised look and just said: “Why?”

  This time I’d worked out what to say in advance. It was no good me trying to explain what had been happening. Dad and Rachel don’t understand anything that happens outside their view of the world; their brains aren’t big enough. So I wasn’t lying to them, just explaining in a way they’d understand. “I saw this strange man today. He was in the Angel Center. I think he was following a woman. She didn’t know. He was hanging around outside the shops when she went in, and he sat by himself in Wagamama when she went in to meet some friends. It was kind of creepy.”

  “Did you tell her?” Rachel asked me.

  “No. I couldn’t be sure. It might have been coincidence.”

  “You didn’t think so, though, did you?” Dad said.

  I shook my head. “No. He was acting all weird. But that’s just what I thought. The police need solid evidence, don’t they?”

  “Okay, well, the next time you see something like that, tell the mall’s security people. They’ll know how to deal with it.”

  “Ha,” Rachel grunted. “This is what it’s like being a woman, Jules. You get some right creeps on the street these days. Harassment is getting worse all the time.”

  “But if she’d complained, would the stalking laws protect her?” I asked.

  “Not if he’s a complete loon,” Dad said. “But they’re good enough to warn most people off.”

  I went back to Docklands the next day. This time I disguised myself so the building security people wouldn’t recognize me. A red T-shirt now, and shorts (yesterday I had a green T-shirt and jeans); I never wear red on Tuesdays, so it was pretty radical. I couldn’t bring myself not to wear socks in my sneakers, but I did roll them all the way down so it looked like I wasn’t. I borrowed Rachel’s baseball cap, the one with her gym logo on the front. Then I finished it off with sunglasses.

  Dad was just going out to work when he saw me. “Where are you going?” he asked.

  “Out.”

  “Well, try and avoid those boys from school, okay?”

  “Sure.”

  His mouth opened, like he was going to say something more. But he just looked at my clothes again and shrugged. “See you tonight.”

  I stayed in the flat for a couple of hours, searching the Internet for any files on Vladimir McCann. But he was as bad as Michael when it came to filling in his Facebook details; all it said was that he lived in London. He wasn’t reliable enough for me to believe it. Not without a confirmed cross-reference.

  But there wasn’t anything on him. He must have been one of those people who lived off the grid.

  Thinking about it, I supposed I did, too. I’d never signed on to any social media site. I don’t have any friends to message or share photos with, so there’s no point.

  Now that I knew more about Michael, I thought about sending him a new message, but I decided against it. It’s logical: I could just walk up to him and say hello. This gave me the advantage. If he did know who I was, taking security precautions didn’t matter; if he didn’t know, then he would probably think I’m some kind of weirdo stalker like Vladimir, and he’d likely be all super-sensitive about that, so security was important. By security I mean not saying who I was or where I lived.

  There’s a special technique you can use for getting people to tell you stuff without them realizing what they’re doing. It’s simple enough. I’d go up to him looking all confident and say something like: “Hi, you’re Michael, aren’t you? My dad says you used to play football in his league.” That way he’d think he knows me and start talking.

  According to the Internet, it’s called soft-sideways interrogation. The most famous example ever is Neville Chamberlain, who was prime minister just before World War Two. He was in a lift in Harrods when a posh young girl and her nanny got in. The girl politely said hello to him and looked very familiar, but he couldn’t quite remember her name. So he asked her if her father was still in the same job, thinking she’d say what the job was so he could work out who she was. She replied: “Yes, he’s still king.” It was Princess Elizabeth.

  Maybe I won’t use that technique.

  Though, actually, Chamberlain did get to find out who she was.

  I arrived outside Michael’s office at twelve twenty-five. The same security people were on the entrance. The woman who had looked at me a couple of times yesterday didn’t pay any attention to me today. She wore different earrings—small purple ones with the circular peace symbol, which the Internet says was designed by the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. I thought it was odd that someone from security would wear those.

  Michael Finsen came out for lunch at twelve thirty-seven. I liked that. He clearly knew the importance of routine and how easy it makes life.

  I hadn’t even started following him when I began remembering his trip to the police station.

  It wasn’t Mike’s happiest memory.

  I go into the reception area, which is so much smaller than I’d expected, given the size of the station. It’s a long way in from the big glass doors, making it oddly dark. The desk is surrounded by thick security glass, and the door beside it has a keypad so you can’t get any farther into the building.

  There’s a community service officer in a high-viz jacket sitting at the back of the reception, using a computer. I know the cliché about police officers looking younger as you get older, but he can’t be more than twenty-two. It doesn’t inspire me with confidence.

  “What can I do for you, sir?” he asks.

  You can start by going and getting a real police officer out here for me to talk to, I think. “One of my fiancée’s old boyfriends is threatening her,” I tell him.

  “In what way?”

  Seriously? Do you not understand the word threat? “He posted this on her Facebook page.” I hold up my smartphone, which is showing the Visitor Post.

  He takes it from me and starts to read. It takes him a long time—longer than it should. The way his face is all creased up, I keep expecting his lips to move silently as he reads.

  When he finally finishes, he looks up and says: “There’s no threat there, sir.”

  “What?”

  “It’s odd, granted, but he doesn’t actually threaten her with anything.”

  “You’re kidding! He says she’s going to come to a dark end. It’s right there.”

  “But he doesn’t specifically say he’s going to harm her. It’s more like a prediction based on what happened in Portsmouth.”

  “They never went to Portsmouth.
”

  “I see.” He purses his lips. “Has there been anything else?”

  “Well, not yet, no. That’s why I’m here, so you can stop it getting out of hand.”

  “I’m sorry, but this isn’t a cause for any kind of police action.”

  “You mean you won’t even talk to him?”

  “We have no reason to.”

  “This is a joke! What are you here for, then? What’s the point of having police? You’re all useless.”

  He points to a big poster on the wall, one that says any abusive behavior toward police personnel will be dealt with severely, and may result in civil court action.

  “Oh for…” I take my phone back off him and turn to leave.

  “I can give you an incident number, sir,” he says.

  “What?”

  “An incident number for your complaint. That makes it all official, see. So if he bothers your fiancée again, it will be considered as showing a pattern of harassment. Then we may be able to take action.”

  Almost! I almost just walk out. But instead, I take a breath and say: “Fine. Give me the number, then.”

  Chapter 13

  Asteroid Impact Mission

  I was shocked—exactly the same as Michael had been, though perhaps with not quite so much anger thrown in.

  What use are the police? I didn’t expect them to send an armed tactical team around to Vladimir’s house straightaway, but this? A crime number? The tabloid sites are right: We are sliding into anarchy.

  Michael couldn’t even slam the door as he left. He tried, but it had dampening hinges.

  I sat in the flat by myself for the rest of the afternoon, thinking about what I remembered and what to do about it. Future-me was obviously revealing Michael’s life to now-me for a reason, but I simply couldn’t see what it was. Not yet. I still needed more data.

  One interesting thing, though. Whenever I saw Michael, I received more of his memory; he must be a visual trigger. And yesterday he’d been looking around for Vladimir. So there was still a stalker problem. Future-me must be wanting now-me to help. Somehow. I really needed more information to add to the file.