Anachronist

by Andrew Hastie

  ‘The Führer’s private art collection, appropriated from museums all over Europe,’ whispered the colonel.

  Josh heard music once more, and looked up to see a tinny metal speaker. A shiver went through him as he realised that this was definitely the same place as before.

  The colonel stopped at a door further along the corridor. The gothic script on it read Oberkommando der Wehrmacht. He knocked once and waited for an answer from within. A very long minute went by before he tested the door handle and went inside.

  The interior of the office was the opposite of what Josh was expecting. It was a plush, carpeted, executive room with panelled walls and beautifully carved furniture.

  The colonel closed the door quietly and locked it. He took off his hat and sat behind the massive gold-inlaid mahogany desk. Behind him stood a sculpture of a giant eagle, its wings spread wide while grasping a swastika with its claws, the Nazi flag was draped behind it.

  ‘Welcome to the office of the Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces,’ the colonel said opening his notebook. ‘I’m glad to see you managed to keep your mouth shut out there.’

  ‘Languages aren’t my strong point. What did you tell them?’

  The colonel paused to study something on one of the pages. ‘That we’d been sent to investigate a potential conspiracy. The great thing about a well-drilled unit of elite soldiers is that they are trained to accept orders without question — as long as you know whose name to put at the bottom of the document.’ He waved a piece of paper at Josh.

  Josh examined the order; it was in German so meant nothing, the name at the bottom of the signature read Heinrich Himmler.

  ‘The head of the Gestapo, Minister of the Interior,’ the colonel said, as if anticipating Josh’s next question. ‘Now we only have ten minutes before your appearance so I suggest you tell me exactly what happened and where. I believe the washroom is through here --’ He opened another door, and Josh immediately recognised the green tiles and white basins with their golden taps.

  ‘Where exactly do you appear?’ the colonel asked.

  Josh showed him.

  ‘And the general comes out of here?’ He pointed towards the end cubicle.

  Josh nodded.

  ‘OK. Good.’ Looking at his watch again. ‘Now we have to make ourselves scarce for a few minutes.’

  They went back into the main office and through a connecting door into the next room. This second office was smaller and nowhere near as ornately furnished. ‘Secretary’s out having a sneaky smoke,’ the colonel said with a wink. ‘We just have to wait for a couple of minutes.’

  Josh’s pulse was racing. His brain was still having trouble accepting the fact that he was standing in the Führer’s bunker in 1944. The colonel, however, was taking everything in his stride, as if he did this everyday. Josh was trying desperately not to look weak or frightened in front of him, but he was having serious difficulty holding his nerve.

  The door to the executive office opened, and they could hear Stauffenberg enter and walk through into the washroom. The colonel opened the connecting door slightly to see if the coast were clear and then went through, signalling to Josh to stay where he was.

  Josh moved so that he could watch the colonel, who was checking something in his notebook and counting time with his finger.

  Suddenly there was a loud crash from the washroom. Stauffenberg had dropped his suitcase. Josh held his breath, he could picture the scene vividly: the man’s gloved hand scrabbling to push everything back in, the explosives scattered over the floor, the second charge rolling too far away.

  ‘Herr General,’ barked the colonel. He was standing at the door to the washroom knocking on the glass. ‘Herr General? Der Führer erwünscht Ihre sofortige Anwesenheit!’

  There was a noise from inside, and Stauffenberg opened the door. He looked back once before leaving; Josh knew the look well, and then Stauffenberg cooly nodded to the colonel and walked straight out of the room into the corridor.

  The colonel went into the washroom and reappeared a moment later tucking something inside his jacket.

  ‘Right, we’d better leave now!’ His eyes were burning with an intensity that Josh had never seen before.

  He placed his hand on Josh’s shoulder and took out his watch.

  The room twisted away.

  By the time Josh had got changed back into his own clothes, the colonel had made a large pot of tea and a plate of small round pancakes. The kitchen was something he would have expected from Mrs B instead of a crazy old man who lived alone. In contrast to the rest of the house, it was spotlessly clean and had the delicate looking china cups and plates displayed in on ornate Welsh dresser. The table was covered with a white linen cloth, and the silver cutlery looked antique and expensive.

  There was no sign of the colonel and Josh was famished. He sat down and stuffed the first pancake into his mouth without a second thought. Then he picked up the tea cup and drained it in one go.

  When the colonel came in from the garden a few minutes later, Josh got the impression that he had been away for significantly longer than it would take to pick the vegetables he was carrying. He looked different: his hair was slightly longer, but nothing like as straggly and overgrown as before, and his beard had begun to grow back.

  He was carrying a basket full of carrots, leeks, and potatoes, which from the state of his hands, had just been picked. A small black cat followed him into the house, winding itself around his legs as he set about cleaning the vegetables.

  ‘I see you found the oatcakes. You’ll need to replenish your energy levels. I find strawberry jam helps the blood sugar along quite nicely.’

  Josh took a heavy handled knife and smothered the next oatcake with jam and then proceeded to devour it. The colonel dried his hands and removed his coat. He was wearing a mustard-coloured chequered waistcoat and moleskin breeches, like a head gamekeeper from some country estate. He sat down opposite Josh and poured out another round of tea.

  After a few minutes, Josh began to feel more like himself.

  ‘So,’ said the colonel, pouring a little of his tea delicately into a saucer. The cat jumped up onto the table and began to lap at it. ‘I assume you have a few questions?’

  Josh’s head was full of them, so many that it was hard to choose where to start. He finally opted for an obvious one.

  ‘Did we really just go back in time?’

  The colonel nodded. ‘Technically not so much go as displace, but, yes, you could say we did that.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Ah now, quantised spacetime, that could take quite a while to explain, and I’m not sure I’m the right man to do it — you need a rather large blackboard for a start. To put it in simple terms, we followed the timeline of the medal. It’s a rare skill — there are very few with the ability.’

  The colonel took the medal from his pocket and placed it on the table. Josh could see there were still lines of energy emanating from it. The cat hissed at it and jumped down.

  When Josh reached to take another oatcake, the colonel noticed the burn patterns on his hand.

  ‘I see that you’re no stranger to the weaving,’ he remarked as he grabbed Josh’s hand and pulled up his shirt sleeve. ‘Very recent activity too. Don’t worry — it fades in a few days.’

  ‘Weaving?’

  ‘That’s what we call it. When we’re trying to locate the appropriate nodal event in the timeline — like rewinding a map.’ The colonel moved his hand over the medal and the lines shifted subtly.

  Josh pulled back his arm and put his hand under the table. ‘I don’t remember how I got it,’ he admitted with a hint of embarrassment. He didn’t want to mention that he was drunk when it had happened. ‘What are you?’ he asked, trying to change the subject.

  ‘An Anachronist, a man of the Watch,’ the colonel said proudly, ‘part of the Oblivion Order — an ancient society of chronologically ambiguous individuals from a rather elite evolutionary branch known as Homo Temporalis
.’

  Josh wasn’t quite sure about the ‘Homo’, but he liked the thought of being part of an elite group, as long as they weren’t all as deranged as the colonel.

  ‘And this time thing.’ Josh pointed at the medal. ‘You can all do that?’

  ‘There are a wide variety of abilities within the Order, but, yes, basically everyone can do that.’

  ‘That’s messed up. How come no one knows about this?’

  The cat came back and began sniffing around the remnants of Josh’s breakfast.

  ‘Do you honestly think that anyone would believe you? You hardly believe it yourself. Our work is based on the premise that the human race is blissfully ignorant of what we can do. Time is not something to be trifled with — there are rules.’

  Every answer seemed to create more questions, and Josh’s brain was having difficulty prioritising them.

  ‘Why me?’ was all he could think to say.

  The colonel began to clear away the cups and plates. ‘Who knows? It’s random, doesn’t follow any kind of perceivable pattern — that’s the universe all over.’

  Josh grabbed the last oatcake before the cat could get too close.

  ‘Any of your relations show a penchant for history?’ asked the colonel.

  ‘No, not that I know of.’

  ‘And your mother and father didn’t have unexplained collections of things?’

  Josh shook his head. He didn’t want to go into the whole family history. There were too many gaps in it, ones his mother was unwilling to fill in.

  ‘How old are you exactly?’

  ‘Seventeen,’ he said in between mouthfuls.

  ‘I would have put you in your twenties. You’re mature for your age — had a hard life, have you?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘One thing you will learn about us is that it is pointless to lie about your past. Our own timelines are complex things, but they are there to be read just like the medal — if one has the talent to do it.’

  Josh was not about to discuss his life story with a complete stranger, even if the crazy old man had just taken him on a round trip to Hitler’s bunker.

  ‘Back then, in the Wolf’s Lair, what did you say to make Stauffenberg come out of the toilets?’

  The colonel shrugged. ‘Simple. I told him he was required by the Führer. Most officers know better than to keep their C.O. waiting.’

  ‘So you were the one on the other side of the door? Before, when I was . . .’ Josh felt the colour rise in his cheeks.

  ‘Stark naked? Yes, that was me. It was a minor repair. In other versions of that scenario your appearance caused a lot more problems than a failed assassination attempt on Hitler — what we have now is one of the best statistical outcomes.’

  ‘A repair?’ Josh was confused.

  ‘A temporal adjustment to ensure that the version of events stay within a pre-determined set of positive outcomes.’

  ‘Determined by who?’

  ‘By a whole department of brilliant boffins who spend a very long time assessing the alternatives before they decide on the best course of action.’

  ‘I don’t get it. How can we have gone back and —’

  ‘Changed the past? That’s the paradox of it all: it’s already happened, and the world still seems to be turning. Now, where did I put the biscuits?’ The colonel began hunting through the kitchen cupboards.

  Josh shook his head as if attempting to realign his misfiring brain cells.

  ‘What you need in situations like this is a custard cream, or maybe even a Garibaldi. At the very least a chocolate digestive . . . Ah, here we are.’

  The biscuit tin was Victorian — the hand-painted enamelling of a family Christmas scene around the dining room table looked like something off of the Antiques Roadshow — but when the colonel opened it the smell of freshly baked biscuits was overwhelming.

  ‘Another perk of the job,’ the colonel said, grinning like a six-year-old. ‘Shopping is a rather more eclectic experience. By God, those Victorians really know how to bake!’ He picked out a fig roll and popped the whole thing straight into his mouth.

  Josh took one of the plainer ones and bit into it. The taste was so different from the usual budget stuff he was used to; it was as though the thing was melting on his tongue, butter, cinnamon and sugar crumbled apart in his mouth. He helped himself to two more.

  ‘So what happened? Did Hitler survive?’ he mumbled through half a biscuit.

  ‘Yes. It took the Allies another year to end the war. Terrible bloody business.’

  ‘Why not just go back and kill Hitler before? Or his dad? Or his grandad?’

  The colonel paused for a moment as if weighing up how much to tell him.

  ‘That’s not how it works. Some things were always meant to happen; for good or evil, you cannot change the past too dramatically without disastrous consequences. You have to be more subtle.’

  ‘Like telling someone they are needed urgently by their Führer?’ Josh said flippantly.

  ‘At the right moment, yes. One word can change the course of history. Never forget that.’ He held up his finger to emphasise the point.

  ‘But that wasn’t how it should have been! Who are you to decide on who lives and who dies?’ said Josh raising his voice. The image of all the names on the Churchill Park memorial ran through his mind.

  The colonel’s face grew serious. ‘There are bigger things at stake here. We’re trying to stop the human race from destroying itself. Sometimes that requires sacrifice — these decisions are not taking lightly.’

  ‘So you’re telling me that the hundreds of thousands who died because a bomb didn’t go off were sacrificed for a good cause? You really are mental!’ Josh stood up.

  ‘Don’t blame yourself. Greater minds than ours have been debating this event for hundreds of years. The Copernicans predicted a seventy-four-point-four per cent chance that a united Germany would have initiated another world war within seventy years, probably during the economic decline in 12.008-15, after the UK left the European Union.’

  Josh took a moment to process the dates. ‘No! I was there — it didn’t happen! Your geniuses got it wrong!’

  The colonel shrugged. ‘That’s statistics for you. No one said it was an exact science,’ and began washing up the cups and plates in the sink.

  ‘So is that it? Am I supposed to carry on as though nothing has changed?’ Josh was shouting now. ‘This makes no frigging sense!’ and, with that, he turned and stormed out of the house.

  The colonel sighed to himself. ‘I think he’ll find that everything about his life is about to change a great deal. Won’t he, puss?’

  The cat ignored him, realising that the opportunity for food had ended, and wandered out through the back door.

  16

  About My Dad

  It took three long, frustrating days to complete his community-service order. They didn’t go back to Churchill Park, which was a relief as Josh didn’t want to bump into the colonel. He needed time to think it all through.

  Nothing seemed to make sense any more. He tried to ignore the changes, but something had been awakened in him — adding an extra dimension to the world around him. Everything had become more real, more vivid. Every object he touched seemed to pulse with history; every smell, sound or colour registered as if for the first time. He felt like he had superpowers, which perhaps he did. Josh ached to tell someone — to show them what he could do — but he knew he shouldn’t. He didn’t want to screw this up. This was the chance he had been waiting for, to be something really special, and he kept it close, kept it secret.

  They had told him his mother was likely to be in the hospital for weeks and so, with his flat being a total train wreck, he had gone to stay with Mrs B. She was taking great delight in spoiling him. It was like being a ten-year-old again: tonight was chilli and chips, with Angel Delight for dessert.

  Today was his final day of community service and as he packed up the tools into the minib
us, he watched the other members of the crew goofing around: they had someone’s phone and were throwing it to each other and pretending to drop it, while the kid who owned it flailed around, trying to intercept it. Everyone was laughing apart from the boy. It was juvenile and harmless. No one was going to get hurt — not yet, anyway. Josh knew that in a few years half this group would be doing time or dead. It was just a fact of life around here. Crime was a whole lot easier than working on a zero-hour contract and the pay was better, especially when drugs were involved.

  Josh had never really been that into drugs — his mum took enough for both of them — but, when he did, it usually ended badly. Junkies were uncontrollable and random, ready to do just about anything for a hit; dealers on the other hand didn’t give a shit. They got rich quick and, like lottery ticket winners, usually blew it all on pimped-up cars and tasteless bling.

  ‘So, Mr Jones, this is it — our very last day,’ Mr Bell said as he closed the doors of the van. ‘Next time you’ll probably be going straight to jail. Do not pass go.’

  ‘No, sir.’ Josh smiled. ‘I’m not going down. Not like those retards.’ He nodded at the rest of the gang.

  ‘It’s odd. Seems like I’ve known you for years. When was it now?’

  ‘2013. Three years ago.’

  ‘Yes. The fire, wasn’t it? I seem to remember the school didn’t reopen for weeks.’

  ‘Wasn’t my fault, sir. Wrong place, wrong time.’

  Mr Bell laughed. ‘It never is, Joshua.’ He extended his hand. ‘Your future is in your hands.’

  Josh realised this was the first time Bell had ever treated him with any respect, and he could tell that the guy actually meant what he was saying. He shook his hand quickly before anyone could see and walked over to the group of boys.

  ‘See you later, suckers,’ he said, catching the phone as it spun past. He tossed it back to its owner nonchalantly and pulled up his hoodie.

  ‘Got a message for you, Crash,’ said Delland, who had a bandage over one hand. ‘Lenin wants to see you tomorrow.’