What Time Devours

by A. J. Hartley

  But then there was a snap and the stone circle suddenly flickered with the candleglow of Dagenhart’s cigarette lighter, and by the time Thomas had started to move and shout, it was too late. There was another light—this time momentary and brilliant. It came from the edge of the circle and was followed by an explosive crack like a tree riven by lightning. It was loud and flat and short, so that it was gone before he had a chance to respond to it, and Thomas was still wincing away from the sound of the gunshot when he realized that Dagenhart was crumpling to the earth.

  The lighter flame died before he hit the ground. As Elsbeth Church spun toward the stones where the shot had been fired, Thomas turned and stooped to Dagenhart. It was dark now, too dark to see much of anything with the trees shading out the moon and none of that urban glow in the sky that he was used to on the darkest nights in Evanston. So it was with his hands and his ears that Thomas discovered that Dagenhart had been shot through the chest and was quite dead.

  CHAPTER 91

  “The next person to make so much as a movement toward that play will go the same way as Dagenhart,” said the man with the gun in his hands. “And Miss Church, put the pickax down.”

  Thomas heard her do so.

  The gunman’s voice was even and just unfamiliar enough in its composure that Thomas wondered if he had been wrong after all, but he knew he only thought that because he wanted it to be true.

  “Put the gun down, Taylor,” said Thomas. There was a momentary silence.

  “You expected me?” said Taylor Bradley.

  “Yes.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “Because of David Escolme,” said Thomas. He was stalling. “He said he gave some names to Daniella Blackstone. People who could help her authenticate the play quietly. I was one of them because I had been his high school teacher. Dagenhart was another, but he was the last person Daniella wanted to involve in her plans for the play. I couldn’t think who else David would have known, but then I remembered that David would have been in Dagenhart’s lecture class, a class that always had graduate student teaching assistants . . .”

  “Okay,” said Taylor. “Yes, very clever. I was Escolme’s TA and he came to me because Daniella had told him not to go to Dagenhart.”

  “Come on, Taylor,” said Thomas. “Put the gun down. More killings will only make it worse.”

  “Really?” said Taylor Bradley. “What’s that Macbeth line? ‘I am in blood stepped in so far, that should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.’ I’ve racked up quite the tally, Thomas, and without being caught. I spared you in Evanston for old times’ sake. But you’ve made things difficult. I have nothing to gain by sparing you this time, and a good deal to lose.”

  “You know how else I knew it was you?” said Thomas. “You never asked why I was here. I told you about Kumi, remember? We were in the Dirty Duck and I told you about . . . all of it, and you knew her. You knew us as a couple. But you never said, ‘Hey, Tom, why don’t you go be with her?’ It struck me as weird even then. ‘Maybe he doesn’t want to pry,’ I thought, ‘But still . . . Why doesn’t he tell me to go to Japan or have me take her back to the States?’ But you wanted me here. Back in Chicago, you were prepared to kill me because you thought I already had the play, but once you realized it was still hidden you wanted me pottering around, seeing if I could turn it up. Then you would kill me, but not before. So you never suggested I should go be with my wife while they cut her open to take out her cancer.”

  He had started speaking just to keep him talking, a conventional ruse borrowed from just about every murder mystery he had ever read, but as he framed the words something had happened. The realization he had carried in his head had settled in his bones and made him angry.

  Bradley didn’t seem to hear it. He moved to the center of the barrow and stooped to the play, shaking off drops of gasoline as he picked it up.

  “Why do you want it so badly?” said Thomas.

  “Oh come on now, Thomas,” said Bradley. “We’re not going to play that Agatha Christie crap. You know why I want it. I’m a badly paid assistant professor at a tiny school with barely literate students, with a four-four teaching load, and a third-year review that says that if I don’t generate a ‘significant scholarly achievement’ in the next two years, I won’t get tenure. Can you believe that? A significant scholarly achievement! They mean, of course, a book. There’s no one on the staff who could understand the damned book if I did write it, and my students are too busy texting each other and plagiarizing their papers from the Internet to know we even have a library, let alone consult its books. But a book is what they want, and my theater work is not considered ‘reviewable academic product.’ ”

  “Discovering a lost play saves you from having to write a book?” said Thomas. “That’s why all those people died?”

  “It will keep me in the classroom and in the theater, which is where the real work of Shakespearean academia is done. They want treatises on obscure Renaissance fishing manuals and deconstructive essays that we only read so we can footnote them in our own pointless essays. It’s insane. They call it research, like it’s going to save lives or build fuel-efficient cars, or something, but it’s really just the profession’s secret handshake. It has no connection to real education, and it has nothing to do with what these plays originally were. Yes, I’ll publish the play, which will get me tenure, and probably move me to a better school where the kids give a rat’s ass, but I’ll also get to stage it, show it to the world as it was meant to be seen, as a piece of performed art, not the raw material used by scholars to further their own careers by parading their cleverness.”

  “You are going to stage it?”

  It was Elsbeth Church’s voice, and underneath the blankness was something else, something dark and wrathful.

  “Of course, I’m going to stage it,” said Bradley. “It’s a play. It’s supposed to be seen in the theater, not read in some study armchair . . .”

  Church flew at him, fingers splayed. The speed and wildness of the attack caught him off guard, and she was almost upon him when the first shot rang out.

  CHAPTER 92

  Thomas ducked as he heard the bullet careen off the standing stone to his right, dropping almost to the ground. His knuckles brushed the haft of the mattock Church and Dagenhart had used to unearth the lost play, and he grabbed it as another shot tore the night apart.

  It was followed by a keening wail.

  Elsbeth Church had been hit. There was a silence, and then Thomas could hear her fighting for breath where she lay.

  Taylor Bradley had been knocked onto his back, the night vision goggles wrenched from his face by Elsbeth’s ravenous nails, but he still had the gun, and he was already scrambling to his feet.

  Instinctively, Thomas rolled right, moving fast and low past one stone, then another.

  Bradley, sensing the movement, fired twice, behind him.

  Thomas, now at the mouth of the barrow’s burial chamber itself, threw himself to the ground and lay quite still. For a moment there was nothing, and then he heard Bradley’s voice.

  “Come out, Thomas,” he said. “Let’s not make this any more difficult than it has to be. We were friends, once.”

  The strangeness of the remark struck Thomas. There had, after all, been no falling out between them. They had been friends until the moment Bradley tried to kill him.

  But there was something else in the voice. Something deliberately casual that sounded fake.

  Thomas focused his thoughts, and they came to rest on the night vision goggles. Even if they had survived the fall, Bradley wouldn’t dare try to put them on now. It would take too much attention, and with Thomas only a few feet away, he wouldn’t dare let down his guard.

  And if he had been wearing them for several minutes at the very least, his eyes would have grown accustomed to them. Now he was in a very different kind of darkness, and his eyes were still getting used to it.

  Thomas inched around the
cave mouth, scuttling as quietly as he could across the gap to the next stone. He could hear Church’s ragged breathing in the center of the clearing. He moved again, and this time he thought he heard Bradley react, turning for signs of movement.

  But there was no shot. Bradley didn’t know where he was.

  Instead, he spoke softly.

  “You of all people should know why this play has to be brought out where people can see it,” said Bradley. “You can’t let people like Dagenhart dictate the nature of art. Come out, and we’ll introduce Love’s Labour’s Won to the world. Together. A celebration of love and life. It would be tribute to everything you value, Thomas. Think of it as a memorial to Kumi.”

  The last words pinned Thomas against the rock, rooted his feet to the earth. His mouth fell open and locked in a silent cry, eyes clenched. But only for a moment. Then a terrible anger welled up in him.

  Thoughtlessly he sprang from his hiding place and burst into the circle.

  Bradley wheeled and fired at him, but Thomas kept going, not knowing—not caring—if he had been hit. Four more yards, and then he swung the mattock in a broad, lethal arc, its bit catching a sliver of moonlight so that it flashed like a spark as it hit Bradley’s outstretched hand.

  Bradley gave a shout of rage and pain and the gun clattered away into the darkness and was lost.

  The two men fell on top of each other, rolling and scrambling, the mattock gripped by its handle between them as they each tried to press it against the other’s windpipe. Thomas used the breadth of his shoulders, but his right side was still weak, and he could not push the wooden haft down. Taylor Bradley’s eyes—only inches from Thomas’s—flashed with triumph, and he grinned as he pressed back, twisting the mattock till Thomas was rolling back and under him, his shoulder burning.

  He brought his knee up hard, and Bradley’s grip faltered. Thomas released the mattock handle and punched with his left. Once. Twice. Then they were up, the mattock abandoned, the two men gripping each other like exhausted prize-fighters, flailing and butting desperately.

  Bradley kicked, a neat, hooking stab with his foot, that whipped Thomas’s right leg out from under him, and then they were down again, scrambling, and Thomas knew he was going to lose. He took a blow beneath his left eye, and the sky went white for a moment. Then another. And another, and he could feel himself sliding toward unconsciousness.

  He reached for a weapon but could find nothing. His strength, already taxed to the limit, was failing. The blows kept coming, and Bradley’s face—merciless now—swam in Thomas’s vision.

  Then there was something else. A sudden moist coldness and an acrid stench so sharp it acted on his senses like smelling salts. He flinched away from it, and he saw Bradley hesitate, his face moving from confusion to terror in a heartbeat.

  Gasoline!

  Then the mattock head swung into view above them. It was a weak blow, carried more by the weight of the weapon itself than any great force from the wielder, but it caught Bradley behind his left ear and he rolled sideways, half stunned, half furious.

  Thomas squirmed out from under him, and there was light, first a speck, yellow and uncertain, then sudden blossoming above them. As Thomas fought to make sense of what was happening, he saw by the light in her hand, Elsbeth Church, wild as Margaret of Anjou or the weird sisters of Macbeth, blood streaked, her face crusted with dirt, her hair blown into a tangled fury, holding the burning play aloft.

  “No!” screamed Bradley, staring at her.

  “Yes,” she muttered.

  Then she threw it to him, its flaming pages still just held together, and as he snatched it, the gasoline with which she had doused him exploded into flame.

  CHAPTER 93

  Thomas stumbled out of the stone circle and onto the path back to the Ridgeway with Elsbeth Church slung over his left shoulder. She had not spoken since collapsing back to the ground as Bradley became a screaming, flaming torch, and he was not absolutely sure she was still alive. The bullet had hit her low in the belly, and she had lost a lot of blood. He had no idea what kind of damage had been done inside, or how much his lugging her back to the car might yet do, but he knew she would die if he left her there, and no one else was around. He had taken off his shirt, torn it, and bound the wounds as tightly as he could. He doubted it would be enough.

  Bradley had not survived the fire. The burning was bad—so bad that Thomas was glad of the night so he wouldn’t have to see it all—but he suspected his old friend had died of shock or heart failure.

  The play, of course, had been incinerated utterly.

  Dagenhart was dead too, though Thomas suspected that his last thoughts—if he had had time to realize he was dying—were probably of relief.

  He reached the Ridgeway but knew with certainty that if Church was still alive, he could not get her the mile or so back to the car by himself without taking more time than she had. He couldn’t see more than a few yards ahead of him and wished he had brought Taylor’s night vision goggles. Still, he blundered on, sightless and determined, though he walked as if wrapped in failure. He trailed a chain of corpses, and the one thing he had sought to save had been lost to the fire. He had achieved nothing.

  He pressed on between the hedgerows to a place where fields stretched out on his left-hand side and dense young pines rose up on his right. And then, as his legs began to wobble under the weight of his burden, as he weaved from one side of the path to the other, he saw two men approaching at a run. They were big men. Out here in the moonlight he could see them quite clearly as they got close. One was bald and wore an earring.

  Thomas slowed to a halt and gradually lowered Elsbeth Church to the grass under the hedgerow. He thought her eyelids fluttered as he set her down, but he could not hear her breathing.

  The two men had spread out a little as they approached. They still crammed their square bulk into coats and suits as they had when they had chased him through the ruins of Kenilworth Castle, and they had that watchful caution, as if they were penning a wild animal.

  But Thomas felt anything but wild. He was exhausted. His legs trembled and he doubted he could have carried Elsbeth any farther even without their appearance. He had no energy to fight or fly, and he felt only desolation and despair. He bent down and found himself laughing, at the futility of his predicament, at his failed mission, at himself.

  CHAPTER 94

  “What’s so funny?” said the bald man.

  The other nodded, his eyes still on Thomas. He had a tiny goatee.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Forgive me for saying so, Mister Knight, but you don’t seem to be in what you might call a comic situation.”

  Thomas laughed all the more at that.

  “Neither, for that matter, is the lady,” he added. “Take a look at her, will you, Mr. Wattling?”

  Thomas stopped laughing at that. He hoped the name was an alias. If they were calling each other by their real names, they didn’t expect him to be able to pass the information along.

  “I don’t have it,” he said. “The play. I don’t have it.”

  “Didn’t think you would have,” said the man with the goatee. “No offense.”

  “None taken,” said Thomas, feeling the urge to laugh again. “It got burned. In Wayland’s Smithy. Doused with gasoline and burned to nothing.”

  “Well, that is a shame,” said the big man, his eyes still on Thomas. “Gasoline. That’s petrol, right? Funny, isn’t it, how we come up with different names for the same stuff.”

  Thomas considered him. The whole encounter was feeling increasingly surreal.

  “How is she, Mr. Wattling?”

  “Not good,” said the bald man, straightening up. “Alive, but only just. Gunshot wound to her stomach.”

  “Where were you going to take her?” said the man with the goatee.

  “To my car,” said Thomas, bewildered.

  “That won’t do at all,” said Mr. Wattling. “She needs to get to a hospital.”

  “I don’t
have a cell phone,” said Thomas.

  “You hear that, Mr. Barnabus?” said Mr. Wattling. “He don’t have a mobile.”

  “Mr. Barnabus” pulled one from his pocket.

  “Oh dear, oh dear,” he said, dialing. “Living in the twenty-first century with no mobile? And you an American! Got to live in the present, Mr. Knight. Time marches on, isn’t that right, Mr. Wattling?”

  “Right and correct, Mr. Barnabus,” said Mr. Wattling. “Time’s wingèd chariot . . .”

  “Waits for no man,” concluded Mr. Barnabus.

  He turned sharply and spoke into the phone.

  “Yes, we need an ambulance, please,” he said. “We’re on the Ridgeway between White Horse Hill and Wayland’s Smithy.”

  As he gave what details he could and promised to try to move Church to the nearest road, Thomas stared from one to the other. The bald one with the earring—Mr. Wattling—gave him a nod.

  “Apologies about last time, Mr. Knight,” he said. “We rather got off on the wrong foot.”

  “You tried to kill me.”

  “Not at all,” he said, waving the remark away as if nothing could be further from the truth. “You’re a big man. I had to take the initiative, as it were. Just wanted to scare you a little into telling us what you knew. Or, failing that, just scare you. Our employer thought that would put you off the scent a bit.”

  “It didn’t,” said Thomas.

  “Evidently,” said Mr. Wattling, with a rueful look down the Ridgeway.

  “Who is your employer?”

  “Now that would be telling, wouldn’t it?” said the bald man with a boyish smile.

  “I think you owe me that much,” said Thomas.

  “It’s not like we were really trying to kill you,” said Mr. Wattling.

  “Felt real enough to me.”

  “Well now, that was the idea, wasn’t it? But you know we weren’t actually trying to kill you because, well—you know—if we had, you’d be dead, like, wouldn’t ya?”