Child of Time Read online

  ‘Hi there,’ he growled.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, slightly confused. ‘Why am I... Why are you...?’

  ‘Let’s worry about that later,’ he said. ‘For the moment, let’s get out of here.’

  Emily smiled and allowed him to put her down and help her onto her feet. ‘I feel odd,’ she said. ‘As though my memories are back, but I feel somehow detached from them.’

  Honoré grinned. ‘I think that’s a parting gift from Violet.’

  He raised a hand in farewell, and Emily turned to see the three gifted children smiling broadly. They raised their hands too, then faded out of existence.

  Honoré focussed in on the timesnakes of the acolytes racing for the exit. ‘They’re all back to normal,’ he muttered. ‘The future has been changed.’

  ‘What?’ asked Emily, still confused.

  ‘The timesnakes. When I looked before, they all terminated. Now, they all extend into the future. Whatever it was that was going to happen to wipe out all these people has been prevented. Time has been changed.’

  One of the running Sodality guards veered towards them as he raced for the exit. Honoré grabbed Emily’s hand. ‘Here’s our ride,’ he said.

  As the running man came within grabbing distance, Honoré made contact with him, Emily looked into his eyes, and they vanished from sight, travelling back along the man’s timesnake to an earlier time – any time, did it really matter when? – and place, where there was no Dæmon, no collapsing Cathedral, and they could recuperate and, eventually, make their way home.

  In St Paul’s, Mastho writhed in increasing agony. Its species was powerful, but governed by the laws of its own psionic science: once any individual Dæmon had been summoned for the third time, it had either to bequeath its powers to a suitable candidate and leave, or else destroy the experiment it had been assigned to monitor. There was no third option. Mastho had intended to transfer his powers to the captive Child of Time, binding her to him and returning with her to the home planet, Dæmos, but she had outwitted him.

  Like Azal, the previous monitor assigned to Earth, Mastho had failed, and was now being consumed by the psionic energies it had once commanded. Roaring with rage and frustration, the Dæmon started to glow with an incandescent white light, then finally self-destructed, detonating like a huge bomb in the middle of St Paul’s, bringing the roof crashing down and razing London’s once-proud monument to the ground, forever.

  The Beginning – Night and Fog

  London 1949

  It was a typical East End fog; it wasn’t white.

  Like all true Londoners, and despite what he saw at the flicks, Cranfield knew the fog was green. It was a damp, tubercular, reassuring shade. For years the night sky had glowed livid pink, shot through with dust and flame, though that was fading now. With time the tiny clumps of black or red flowers that bloomed on the rubble would die out. Cranfield was a young man, he hoped to be pounding this beat twenty, thirty years on. His father had walked these streets when the first tentative bombs fell; his great-uncle had hunted the Ripper and the Limehouse Phantom nearby; he was walking in their footsteps and in the labyrinth of fogs he could almost believe their paths would cross, three generations of policemen at the same crossroads.

  There came the peal of a bell from Shoreditch, hairs prickled on the back of his neck, a memory of sirens and all-clear whistles and the chime calling all hands to help pull bodies from the river.

  His beat took him past Spitalfields Market, which was shut up for the night though the gate still thronged with people. The church opposite attracted them like doodlebugs. It was bone-white, yellowed with neglect then scorched black by a Luftwaffe handprint that might not fade for generations. To one side there was a scrub of grass where vagrants slept under newsprint blankets, though Cranfield couldn’t imagine the dreams the church would give them. By day, when the streets filled with human heat, old women would sit on the steps beneath the angular spire and suck green oranges and spit the pips onto the street to mock austerity. Cranfield felt great sympathy for them, the living public. By night the stones absorbed all the heat and people stayed huddled round pub doorways till closing time, then at the market gate. Ragged around the gate were the dark façades of houses, pitted with gaps where other homes had stood until, one night, they had been transformed into cairns of brick rubble and human pulp.

  Outside the market a woman was singing, a broken voice, eerily. Cranfield couldn’t see where it was coming from. They were mainly women here, in their clusters. Vagrants stood shivering by a fire on the scrub. A dirt-faced boy ran in the street, grinning, clipped past Cranfield and the policemen instinctively felt like lashing out, but checked himself. There was a woman squatting on the steps, older than she looked, wrapped in a dark shawl but bare-headed; she sold flowers by day and had a flower’s name but he couldn’t place it right now. There was an old soldier beside her, tall and heavy in his black cap and coat; he turned to look at Cranfield with a long dead slab-face that probably hadn’t twitched since 1918. Cranfield tipped the rim of his hat and nodded automatically, but the eye that watched him was white and sightless.

  He moved through them, watching them bristle as he passed. Overhead was a shiny bomber’s moon; they could all feel it, despite the fog. There was a patch of darkness on the far side of the church. The girl came stumbling out of that, a splash of violent pink in the midst of green. Cranfield wasn’t the first to see her, it was the commotion that made him turn, but he was the closest and when she lost her footing he was there to catch her.

  A few days later he would barely remember what she looked like. There was just the memory of her as she shambled towards him, taking each step as though it were her first, wearing nothing but a baggy pink pair of pyjamas. Not silk, not cotton, not even nylon, just pink and shiny in the moonlight. She was barefoot, her feet were blue. The pink pyjamas hung crumpled on her wiry frame. She was small enough for Cranfield to mistake her for a child, though once he got close he realised she was probably in her twenties. She was a skinny pale thing, she shivered in the autumn fog, but she looked hurt rather than cold. Her eyes told him that – they had a grey traumatised sheen, witness-eyes. He could tell, just by looking, that her grasp on the everyday had been ripped away, and savagely.

  It had been over four years since Cranfield held anyone like this. Then it had been a girl no older than twelve, and he cradled her in his arms as the life left her body. You heard stories of Blitz miracles all the time, unlikely survivors, but he had never seen one with his own eyes. This woman wasn’t going to die. Her stare leapt wildly round the faces of the gathered crowd. He could feel delicate bones through her pyjamas.

  ‘What’s happened to you?’ he asked. She was smiling. He tried a more basic approach: ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘I don’t remember,’ she said. ‘What year is this? I don’t remember the year.’ Someone mumbled it, embarrassed. The girl nodded and grinned. It was hard to tell if she understood the date. Cranfield thought shell-shock, though that made no sense. She had a Blitz-twitch. There were no signs of violence on her face, on her clothes.

  ‘I don’t know who I am.’ Her eyes opened wider and she grabbed his uniform frantically. ‘Police...’ she said, and again he knew she was a victim.

  ‘Are you hurt?’

  ‘I remember light,’ she insisted. ‘I was going to die! There was so much light.’

  She held open palms out for Cranfield to inspect, as if she’d been clutching the light in them, but her hands were just dark, bruised pink. A chill rippled through him anyway. Someone else was kneeling beside him, the flower-seller, holding out a worn out bloom, so blackened it was impossible to tell what it had ever been. The girl took it mutely, keeping her mouth tight shut as if holding back a scream.

  Then her eyes closed and her head lolled back but she was only asleep.

  In the fog-wreathed shadows, two figures watched as C
ranfield helped Emily away. The flower seller returned to sit with her wares and the cracked voice continued with its broken melody.

  The two figures, a large, dark-skinned man with a neatly trimmed beard in a long black leather coat and a petite, long-haired girl wrapped in a warm shawl, turned and hugged each other long and hard. The girl was crying gently and the man was struggling to hold himself together, to look strong for her.

  This was where it had all started. And this was where it ended. The house where Maria had died was just around the corner, her body due to be found in two years’ time or so, setting in motion a train of events through time and space, but all leading back to this time, this place.

  The man put a friendly arm around his younger companion, and together they walked away, the green fog swirling around their legs and finally swallowing them up.

  Out there in London, the future was waiting for them.

  [1] See the DVD film release Dæmos Rising

  [2] See Time Hunter: Echoes

  About The Authors

  George Mann was born in Darlington, County Durham, in 1978. He has been reading science fiction since he first managed to lay his hands on a copy of The War of the Worlds on his eleventh birthday.

  The Human Abstract for Telos Publishing was his first work of fiction, and The Severed Man his second. More recent novels include The Affinity Bridge, The Osiris Ritual and Ghosts of Manhattan, as well as numerous short stories, novellas and an original Doctor Who audiobook. He has edited a number of anthologies including The Solaris Book of New Science Fiction, The Solaris Book of New Fantasy and a retrospective collection of Sexton Blake stores, Sexton Blake, Detective.

  David J Howe wrote the book Reflections: The Fantasy Art of Stephen Bradbury for Dragon’s World Publishers and the screenplay for the video drama Dæmos Rising and has contributed short fiction to Peeping Tom, Dark Asylum, Decalog, Perfect Timing, Dark Horizons and Shrouded by Darkness: Tales of Terror, and factual articles to James Herbert: By Horror Haunted (Hodder & Stoughton) and The Radio Times Guide to Science Fiction (2001, BBC).

  The Time Hunter Series