CHAPTER TWENTY–NINE – TINTAGEL
Now Tom turned to Edward and asked him, “Can you still sense the Professor and Redfeld?”
“Yes, I can – although it’s dim. He has some sort of barrier blocking me. But he is still in the present day, although some little distance away: Wales perhaps? No ... south of that; Exeter. No, wait a moment ... ah, I have it now. Gosh, I wonder why there. It’s Tintagel. He is at Tintagel. Well, Tintagel Island to be precise, towards the southern end.”
There was a long moment’s silence as the others stared at him in admiration.
“Now’s that’s impressive!” Septimus said at last.
“Tintagel? Where is that place I have no knowledge of it?” Mary asked.
Tom answered her. “I went there on holiday once. It’s in Cornwall: a ruined castle on a headland, with more ruins on an island beyond, reached by a bridge. It has some story about it, but I can’t quite recall ...” he hesitated.
“Camelot!” Septimus interrupted. “Or at least one of the locations that claim to be Camelot,” he added.
“What, King Arthur and all that?” Charlie asked.
“Indeed ? all that,” Septimus confirmed.
“I think it’s where he was supposed to have been born, before Merlin took him away and raised him. All nonsense, of course,” Edward said.
Tom thought idly about Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. He recalled many stirring tales of ancient battles between knights and monsters; quests to be completed; evil to be fought and good made victorious. But they were just stories. Fables – as his English teacher had put it – mainly invented in the Middle Ages by a Welsh monk, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and later embellished by the Victorians, but having little or no basis in fact or, at least, so she had said.
“So then, I wonder why there,” mused Tom.
“It’s possible that it is where he first came through from his reality,” Septimus answered. “Indeed, it kind of makes sense. Various locations around the world have almost mystic significance as if touched by some other worldly power or influence. In ancient times the Welsh, who first told stories about Arthur, believed in these points and places where spirits could pass from one reality to another. Perhaps there is more to those stories than they first realised. Maybe there really are locations where the barriers between the worlds are thinner than elsewhere.”
“Like Stonehenge and Glastonbury?” Tom said.
“Exactly like that.”
Tom had a thought. “Hang on a minute, what did Redfeld say he wanted me for, I mean back when he ambushed us in Trafalgar Square?”
Septimus screwed up his face to cast his mind back, and Tom was struck just for a moment by how much he looked liked his father when Dad was doing a Suduko puzzle. A twist of sadness caught in his throat.
“It was ... aha! I have it now,” Septimus said, “it was that you would give him time.”
Tom shook his head. “No something else. It was that, yes, but also that he needed someone who would give him the key to open certain doors and give him access to the present, the past and the future. Then there is that entire obsession he has with these ‘portals’ between his reality and ours. Mind you, he can open them himself because he has done so already. We all saw him do it.”
“So why did he want you to help him if he can bring his men across?” Edward asked.
Tom was about to shake his head, but suddenly some words from a dream in the Office came back to him: Redfeld discussing with the Custodian what to do about the troublesome boy, Thomas Oakley.
“...We must make alternative plans. I will get the job done but you must grant me and my guards presence in Die Andere Weld to achieve it. We must be able to interact.”
He repeated Redfeld’s words out loud.
“Presence – he means being able to touch things. Septimus, I think that before, when he was coming across to our world, he was just projecting himself and he was not even here. Charlie and Edward: you said he mentioned projection. That is why he was wearing a coat on a hot summer’s day once. He could talk to us, create his illusions and alternative histories, but not touch us. He wasn’t really here!” Tom concluded, his voice rising in excitement.
“Hang on a minute, Thomas, you must be wrong there. He certainly could touch us in Trafalgar Square. He shot Septimus for a start. Then his guards beat me and Charlie up and dragged us away,” Edward pointed out.
“Yes, but only after he had seen the Custodian. He made a deal of some sort with the Custodian. He must have promised to kill my parents if he and his men were allowed to travel to our world and have physical form and not just be projections or illusions. Teuber was wrong. Redfeld could not create portals but just project himself. The Custodian granted him the ability that allowed him and his men to come here and interact with us because the Custodian wanted to obliterate me! Teuber did say that it was only in the last day or so that he had heard Redfeld had started taking his men across to our world. Redfeld just took it all further than his promise to the Custodian and tried to capture us all. Indeed, in my case, it was all about trying to force me to help him. It suits his purposes that in fact I somehow continue to exist. He might almost have engineered it, killing my parents at a time when he knew I was in an alternative reality.” Tom was talking fast sure he was on the right track. The others stared at him, hanging on his words.
Tom recalled the convoy on the road past Newbury, heading for Exeter. And all those trains that Phil, the resistance fighter, had said were heading that way too. Suddenly, over the last two days a large part of the German army in the alternative Britain was heading, seemingly against all logic, to Exeter. But Exeter was in Devon, just a relatively short distance from ....
“Yes, but that isn’t good enough for Redfeld,” Tom burst out, speaking his thoughts aloud. “He needs to be able to open portals at will and not just bring a few men, but many. To open a door – that is what he said he needed me for! He meant to open a permanent door to his world. Just imagine if they could do that. Not just a dozen soldiers but a thousand; tens of thousands; along with tanks and guns and maybe even planes.”
“Planes?” Edward and Mary chorused.
“Flying machines,” Charlie explained, “er ... like huge metal birds that can drop bombs, Mary.”
Everyone looked grim as all the implications sunk in.
“Hang on a moment, though, Tom. He can bring a dozen men across already, why not more?” Charlie asked.
“Like I said, only after the Custodian had allowed him to. And he was only permitted a few men. The Custodian would not give him more. I know this: I was the Custodian in my dream and I have seen his mind. He does not want the realities thrown out of balance. He would certainly not permit an army to cross. Unless Redfeld can open this portal his army will be mere illusions and projections, not flesh and blood.”
“Master – forgive me, I mean, Tom – I think that Redfeld’s portals don’t last,” Mary said quietly, a look of concentration on her face as she tried to absorb and express concepts well beyond her time.
“Eh?” said Charlie.
“I was in contact with Redfeld’s magic door ... er, this portal,” said Mary. “It did not last long. From what I felt, I believe it would be limited to lasting for only a certain length of time and also, I think it would collapse after a certain number of men had passed through it.”
“Just like what happened to us in the projection room?” Tom asked and Mary nodded.
“So Redfeld’s portals don’t last long. The Custodian was not too generous with his powers,” Septimus mused.
“Maybe he suspected Redfeld planned to double cross him so was limiting the damage he could do?” Edward suggested.
“That’s possible,” Tom agreed.
“But you can Walk many of us across, Tom,” Mary said. “He has seen you walk a group of us at ease. If you can drag us with you then who knows what limits you have, how many you could bring?”
Tom shrugged. He did not know, but he suspected t
hat the answer was a great many.
“So, if he wanted to solve his transportation problem, then taking someone like you with your talents to a thin point between the realities, like Tintagel, could be the way to do it,” Septimus concluded.
“Fine then, so that was his plan: to use Tom to bring his army here. Is that what we all think?” Edward asked.
Everyone nodded. Tom was sure of it: Redfeld needed help to complete his plans. He shivered as it occurred to him that he could have been the means to his world being conquered. Had he been tempted by Redfeld after all and done what was asked of him, he truly could have changed the world. It did not bear thinking about.
Edward stared at Tom, his face taut with anxiety, “If Redfeld had succeeded, he could have brought across a whole army. Why, in that case he could swarm across England in days. Conquer this country and then, the world!” Edward said, alarm rising in his voice.
“From what Tom is suggesting it could be worse even than that. He could look to invade the past. Imagine ten thousand enemy troops appearing in London in 1940!” Charlie suggested.
“Or in 1879,” put in Edward, then looking at Mary he added, “or 1666.”
“But Tom, he doesn’t have you, does he? So does that not mean all is well and there is no danger?” Mary suggested.
Tom thought for a moment then shook his head. “He wanted me, but now he has the Professor. The Professor founded the Hourglass Institute. I think he probably knows as much about Walking as the rest of us put together – and the rest. He knows a lot about The Event and the Twisted Reality. I think Redfeld doesn’t need me anymore. If the Professor has betrayed us, then I think the Professor and he have just gone off to open Redfeld’s doors!”
There was a stunned silence.
Tom became aware of the acorn clenched tightly in his palm. Or maybe, he thought, the Professor was up to something else – but what? He looked around at the others. “I’m going to Tintagel. I must stop him. I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I have to try.
“Shouldn’t that be ‘we’?” Charlie retorted.
Edward and Mary both nodded.
Septimus said, “Definitely ‘we’, boyo!”
“Look, it is even more dangerous than I imagined; I am prepared to take the risk, but I am not sure that you all should. This is your last chance to change your mind everyone.”
They all remained stubbornly silent.
“Ok then; you’re all daft,” Tom grinned. “So what are we waiting for? Let’s go.”
They gathered around him and reached out to touch him on the shoulder. In his mind Tom saw the map and he moved it until he could see England. Then he browsed across it: first West and then South West, across Hampshire and Dorset, Somerset, Devon and finally into Cornwall. Then he zoomed in until he could see individual towns and villages, focusing even closer in, to that corner of England and its rugged, sea–tossed coastline until he could see the modern town of Tintagel. For a moment he was distracted as the image and the taste of Cornish pasties and ‘knickerbocker glories’ came to his mind and hung in his mouth. Tom felt his stomach growling. He moved quickly on, west out of the town and then down the path to the coast.
There was the castle on its rocky island, almost separated from the mainland. Up the cliff face he went until, at last, he was focused on a spot within the ruins inside a slight enclosure, which he could remember from his family’s visit. Holding the place in his mind, he Walked to it.
It was dark and very quiet, aside from the endless swell of the ocean. The hustle and bustle of the hundreds of tourists who daily visited the ancient and evocative site had gone and the doors and gates leading to the crossing were secured. The moon was up tonight and casting its silvery glow on the short, dry grass, as well as on the aged and cracked stones that had seen eight hundred summers and whose glory lay long in the past. Tom and his companions stepped back and looked about them. For a while no one spoke and all they could hear was the crashing of the sea against the cliffs and the occasional boom as a surge of water blasted into caves at the water’s edge. Then, Charlie whispered.
“Well, what do we do now?”
Tom shrugged and hissed back. “They’re not just here, so let’s try up on top.”
The path wound its way upwards in stages past more ruins and terraces filled with what was left of stone houses or larger structures. Still there was no sign of Redfeld or Neoptolemas, and still the only sounds were the distant noise of the waves far below them and the gentle whistle of the warm wind coming in over the island from the sea. Eventually, the path levelled off on the highest plateau.
There at last they found Redfeld.
Tomorrow's Guardian Page 30
