Dispel Illusion (Impossible Times)

by Mark Lawrence

  ‘You’re not worried that the elevator will break or run out of juice while you’re down here for decades?’ I asked.

  ‘There are several of them, all very well concealed, and powered by generators with ample fuel,’ Guilder told us. ‘And the way we came in would be buried after I began my journey.’

  ‘Entombed like an ancient pharaoh,’ Mia said. ‘With all you need for the afterlife.’

  ‘Precisely,’ Guilder said. ‘Getting out is not the problem.’ He pushed a smaller button on his control. ‘This is.’

  Floodlights burst into life on all sides. I covered my eyes, letting go of the wheelchair and cursing. For a few moments all I could do was press my knuckles to my eyes; then, hearing Mia’s exclamation, I started trying to peek between my fingers. It seemed as though we weren’t alone. I could make out figures ahead of us. Lots of them.

  ‘What the . . .’ With a tear running down my cheek and blinking away more, I lowered my hands.

  ‘Why are they naked?’ Mia asked.

  It wasn’t the first question I would have asked, but it was on my list. Scores of naked people stood in front of us in an ordered queue like they were lining up for check-in at the airport. And they weren’t the nice kind of naked you can see in top-shelf magazines. This was real people naked, young and old, fat and skinny, droopy and pert.

  ‘What on earth have you been doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Me?’ Guilder managed a hollow laugh. ‘Nothing. They were here when we breached the chamber. All one hundred and seven of them. Like a fucking terracotta army.’

  CHAPTER 5

  NINETEEN YEARS LATER

  2011

  I always held out hope that we had jumped the tracks somehow, that somewhere along the line our lives had diverged from the script witnessed by Demus. Nobody likes to believe that everything they ever think or do, no matter how spontaneous it seems, has already happened and was bound to follow its path. Twenty-five years had given me plenty of surprises, plenty of times to stare into the mirror, even as Demus had slowly written himself into my reflection, and to say to him that surely I was the first and only one to have experienced the moment that had just passed. Could the man who came back to visit me when I was just a child, sick and terrified of dying, could he have already lived every second of my life? Had he already made love to Mia, cried with her when she miscarried their child, accepted the Fields Medal for mathematics, sailed the South China Sea, stared in wonder at dawn breaking over the shoulder of Kilimanjaro? Was it true that everywhere I went, he had been there first?

  I hoped that we were free of Demus and his lies, that we could live our own lives and make our own destinies. But until we were done with the year 2011 we would never be sure. This was the year Demus said he had come back from; this was the year his Mia was supposed to have her accident. If we passed through it safely, we would know that we had escaped him. We would know that somewhere in the intervening quarter of a century of free choices and random events, our paths had strayed and our lives had become our own rather than something held in trust, a torch to be passed over when we had run our leg of our own particular human race.

  I’d grown to hate Demus with a passion. He could have saved Mia both from the accident itself and from the lifetime spent knowing that it was headed her way. He could have done it with a few words. He just had to tell me to do something that he hadn’t done. Anything. If I knew he had never sung in public I would have done so, thereby ensuring that I wasn’t him, and that my Mia wasn’t his Mia. Instead he chose not to. He chose to sit back and let it all happen, and for that I couldn’t forgive him. What made his Mia more valuable than mine? What made his love for her deeper than mine? Because whatever he might think on that score, he was wrong. Mia and I may have left the melodramatic rapture of teenage love behind us, but what remained had wrapped itself around our bones. We had something deep and rarely spoken, the shared scars of early trauma, the ache of children that never came, an enduring delight in each other’s company. And, of course, I still wanted to take her to bed whenever the opportunity arose.

  ‘Nick?’ A hand shook me. ‘Nick! Did you hear anything I said?’

  I looked up. Neil Watkins, assistant director at the National Institute for Temporal Studies, had hold of my shoulder. ‘They’ve been trying to reach you. Mia’s been in an accident. You need to get to the hospital.’

  CHAPTER 6

  1992

  ‘How could they just be here already?’ I blinked and tried to keep my eyes from returning to the naked people. The line of mainly pale flesh exerted a strange pull, like a road accident. ‘Halligan and Creed only did their experiment yesterday!’

  ‘They were all here when the chamber was first entered last November,’ Guilder said.

  ‘And you’re sure there’s no other way in?’ Mia asked.

  ‘We’ve found another way since. There are extensive tunnels. One leads to a well-hidden crack in a small cliff face in some old-growth woodland a quarter-mile west of here. It’s just about large enough for a man to squeeze through, but the moss all around showed no signs of disturbance.’

  My gaze had returned to the figures while we waited through Guilder’s laboured explanation. Mia had actually gone up to the first of them, a middle-aged man, and was feeling his arm. ‘He feels like Professor Halligan did. But how far in the future are they trying to go, and why here? How did they even get the equipment in?’

  ‘And who did it?’ I asked. ‘Have they been spying on our work?’

  I went to join Mia. The cave wasn’t as silent as I had first thought. From further back came the slow dripping of water. It was cold after the sunshine above and goose bumps had risen across my bare arms. An icy drop of water hit the back of my T-shirt and suddenly I had great sympathy for the naked crowd before me, standing here in the dark year after year, come what may.

  ‘I’ve had the faces of these people photographed and circulated discreetly in the hope of finding their identities,’ Guilder said.

  ‘And?’ I asked.

  ‘If you and Miss Jones would go and study the two figures at the far end of the line, you should be able to tell why it has proved so difficult to discover who these people are . . .’ Guilder said. ‘I would come with you, but my wheels weren’t made for such explorations.’

  ‘You could just tell us,’ Mia said.

  ‘Humour me?’ Guilder managed a smile. ‘Would any of this have been as much fun had I just told you about it in Cambridge?’

  I had to admit it was an impressive and fascinating thing. I was glad I’d come.

  I tilted my head at Mia. ‘Coming?’

  And we set off around the edge of the cavern.

  None of them were children, and most were older rather than young, though none were really elderly. Two of the women were young and gorgeous. The whole thing made very little sense to me. The queue led back towards the far end of the chamber, beyond the area illuminated by the floodlights. The end of the line stood in shadows. We closed in on the last pair, numbers 106 and 107. A man and a woman, neither of them young nor old.

  ‘Fuck me!’ I stopped in my tracks.

  ‘What?’ Mia nearly walked into me.

  Words escaped me.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ Mia pulled up short beside me. ‘Is that . . . ?’

  ‘It’s Demus, yes.’ I hadn’t seen him in six years, but now he stood before me, with a full head of hair and all his worldly goods on show, there was no mistaking him.

  ‘So who’s behind him?’ She leaned to look past, eyes widening.

  ‘Wow.’ I stepped forward and stared, wishing the light was better.

  ‘At least I kept my figure,’ Mia said.

  ‘Yes, you did!’

  Guilder waited patiently for us to return. We came back with furrowed brows, lost in thought. Mia had questions, of course, and so did I, but I cautioned her to wait. Guilder probably had the place bugged and I didn’t want to give the man any more cards than he already held.

&nb
sp; ‘So, you see,’ he said. ‘They’re not going into the future. They’re from the future and they’re heading into the past.’

  ‘Well, technically they could also be from the future and be heading back into it after a visit to some earlier year,’ I said.

  Guilder shook his head. ‘You go back, you start a new timeline; they wouldn’t still be in our timeline for the return journey. I shouldn’t have to remind you of your own discoveries, Dr Hayes.’

  I said nothing. Guilder didn’t have to know about the peculiar arrangement of our own timeline, which allowed me, and seemingly anyone else who tried, to come back to it and not start a new timeline as long as they didn’t do anything to contradict what had happened in their past.

  ‘The real question is, why are Miss Jones and yourself the last two travellers?’

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘If you wait long enough, you’ll find out.’ I regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth.

  Guilder didn’t seem to take offence, though. He twisted his mouth in a rare smile. ‘I don’t think I have that option. My doctors have given me a few months. Six, at most.’

  ‘That begs a different question then. Why did you wait until now to show me this? Has Professor Halligan seen it, or Dr Creed?’

  Guilder watched me for a moment with those stony eyes of his. ‘Knowledge is power, and I like power. Unfortunately, in this particular game almost all the knowledge is locked up in that extraordinary brain of yours. So, forgive me if I hang on to my secrets a little long. But I doubt the reality of this cave has any bearing on your mathematics. I brought you here to remind you that there is an end product and to prove to you that you achieve it. This seems to be a fact that is now set in stone, or at least in a stone cave.’ He managed a dry chuckle. ‘So my push for results clearly gets us somewhere.’ He took a moment to recover his breath before trying to turn his chair. ‘Take me back to the lift, if you would.’

  As I pushed him back along the path, he explained the reason for the visit. ‘I’m going to bring Halligan and Creed here, of course, but you’re going to have to be the one to arm them with the techniques they need to understand what’s going on here. Knowing when these people have come from and where they are going might be the beginning of giving us a why. I’ve identified at least twelve of them. All extremely wealthy individuals. At best estimate they are all around twenty years older in the cave than they are now.’

  Guilder allowed us to go up first. By the time he rattled back into view the sun had almost managed to erase the subterranean chill from my bones, and Mia had realised that two old men she knew were going to be seeing her naked on a regular basis.

  We ate in the beer garden of a roadside pub not far from the caves. Possibly we were still on land Guilder owned. It felt odd to sit there with a half of lager and a ploughman’s lunch across the table from Rust and Guilder. I imagined them as the snake and the spider: Rust driven by a cold hunger, remorseless and ready to strike at any moment; Guilder more inscrutable, his motivations hidden, possibly alien. Like a spider, he would sit still when you watched him, making no move but full of a menace that was hard to explain. But that wasn’t the real threat. The true fear was what would happen if you looked away. The sudden scurry. And when you looked back, he would be somewhere new, the distance between you devoured. Perhaps even on you. Metaphorically speaking, of course.

  Neither Guilder nor Rust made any conversation. When healthy, Guilder had been full of the energetic can-do charm that businessmen exude, but with him the steel was always there under the velvet, and the face he showed to the world was not his own. For Rust, words were just another weapon, to be brought out when required but serving no other purpose. He had saved me once, after my might-have-been daughter manipulated his past, putting him in my debt according to his own bizarre life rules. But that debt had been paid, and we were never anything even distantly approximating friends.

  ‘What if the press get hold of it?’ Mia was saying as we got back into the car. ‘We’ll both be nude on the Nine O’Clock News. They’ll do tours round the cave for sightseers. We’ll be like the waxworks at Madam Tussauds.’

  None of that really concerned me, though. All the long drive back to Cambridge I sat deep in my thoughts, mumbling the barest of responses to the occasional half-heard comment from Mia. Demus has said that he arrived in January 1986 in the small hours of the morning, naked and just outside the Watkins Road police station. Had he been lying? Why would he? Was this a second trip? But he wouldn’t have made any other trips ever again after that visit. He died. So was this a visit to the past made before he came to see us? And again, why?

  How could he just have appeared at the police station if the solution to time travel that he invented was the one we saw in the cave? It would mean that from the moment he appeared outside the police station until the moment in the future that he left from, there would be a naked Demus standing in the street. And if that were the case I think I might have heard about it by now . . .

  So . . . what the hell was going on?

  We got back to Cambridge by late afternoon and Guilder’s chauffeur dropped us in the street where he had picked us up that morning.

  ‘You’ve been very quiet,’ Mia said, climbing up the steps behind me.

  ‘There’s a lot to think about.’ I watched the Rolls Royce pull away.

  Mia opened the main door and led the way upstairs. ‘What does it mean? What we saw in the cave? We’re there, Nick. I come back with Demus? That means it works, right? The whole thing about storing my memories. I get better after the accident.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ I really didn’t. ‘Just because they’re in a line doesn’t prove that’s the order they left in. And we don’t know when the Demus we saw there actually left the future. And even if the me and you we saw there really did leave after the accident . . . well, just being able to stand up doesn’t prove your mind is restored.’

  Mia reached my floor and turned, rolling her eyes. ‘How about a little optimism?’

  ‘The optimist sets themself up for disappointment. I’m just aiming for a little realism. We have a hundred and seven naked people travelling backward through time in a cave, and two of them are us. That’s about all we know for sure.’ I moved past her, wanting a cup of tea and a comfy chair before continuing the conversation.

  ‘Well, I—’ The door to the flat stood ajar and, seeing it, Mia fell silent.

  We went inside to find everything on the floor. Papers, books, clothes, the contents of cupboards, the furniture turned over with its linings slit, the carpets rolled back, floorboards lifted.

  ‘John?’ Mia called, but it wasn’t the kind of flat you could get lost in. ‘John!’

  ‘They’ve taken him,’ I said, anger rising.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Guilder’s people, of course.’

  ‘Guilder did this? Why? What’s he done with John?’

  I nodded. ‘He’s always kept a close eye on my work. You know he has me followed. He’s in my computers, too. His hackers are quite clever, but I have them boxed out of areas they don’t even know exist—’

  ‘John!’ Mia shouted. ‘What about John?’

  I frowned. ‘This is obviously a message. He has my flat broken into quite often. Usually it’s hard to even notice they were here. This is about ownership. Like a dog pissing on a tree. Maybe John will . . .’ I heard footsteps on the stairs.

  ‘Jesus! What happened?’ John stood at the still-open door looking astonished.

  ‘John!’ Mia rushed over to hug him. He looked even more surprised, but didn’t object. ‘Hey! Hey! Everyone’s OK, aren’t they?’

  ‘Where were you?’ Mia asked.

  ‘Well . . .’ John coloured. ‘There was a girl from downstairs who wanted to borrow some sugar. And . . . well, we got talking and she took me out for a coffee, then we went to see Batman Returns. I just said goodbye to her at her door. Jenny. You must have seen her, Nick. Hot blonde! She lives just below you.’ />
  ‘A forty-year-old accountant named Kevin lives in the flat below mine,’ I said. ‘I think he’s gay.’

  ‘But. She said . . .’ John looked around at the chaos. ‘Oh . . .’

  We all set to tidying, trying to get things back in order. At least they hadn’t broken anything, but even so it made me angry. Angry that after all these years I still hadn’t found a way out from under Guilder’s boot. This whole journey of mine had been punctuated by people who thought they could impose their will on me, from Michael Devis and his schoolyard bully mentality, through first one Rust brother then the other, to Guilder who, despite never lifting a finger against me, was the biggest bully of them all.

  ‘You and Mia naked in a cave?’ John stopped midway through restocking my kitchen cupboards with the assorted tins that had been pulled from them. Mainly mushroom soup, with a few tins of baked beans for visitors. Nothing but haute cuisine chez Hayes. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Seriously.’ I was stuffing reams of old bills and bank statements back into the right drawers.

  ‘How does that even work?’ John asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I’d been thinking the very same thing myself. I’d spent forever wrestling with the mathematics of the thing without ever giving serious thought to what it would look like. I thought I knew. I thought Demus had told me about his solution. And then there had been my almost-daughter Eva’s more sophisticated form of time travel. I guess I had invented the bicycle and she had invented the biplane.

  ‘But . . . if you can see people travelling back in time . . . I mean, how does that work?’

  ‘You understand that asking the same question twice doesn’t mean I will change my mind about not knowing the answer?’ I forced the over-stuffed drawer shut, making a mental promise to have a cleanout. One day.

  ‘But . . .’ said John, who was seriously beginning to test my patience. ‘If you came back from a hundred years in the future that would mean that there would be a “you” standing there in that one spot for a hundred years—’