Child of Time Read online

  Emily rubbed her lower back as she paced the room, deciding what to do with herself. She couldn’t bear another day locked up in her small apartment, reading books and staring out of the window at the encroaching winter. Neither did she have anywhere else to go; Honoré was her only friend in London – in all the world – and she’d already spent the last couple of weeks haunting the libraries and museums of the city. No, it was time she took matters into her own hands. Today was the first day of December, and as good a time as any for a fresh start. Besides, if she didn’t do something soon, she was going to go crazy. Lately she’d been carrying her amnesia around with her like a dead weight on her shoulders, and every possible avenue she’d explored had come to nothing. There seemed to be no resolution in sight, either; so far, the affliction had shown no signs of fading away naturally, and she’d convinced herself that the answer wasn’t going to be found in medicine or science, but only in exploring her abilities, in meeting other travellers like herself and Honoré, trying to piece together the full story. Only Honoré could help her with that. And, she reasoned, only she could really help Honoré. They were like two lost souls, drifting amongst the living, and it was only when they were together that Emily felt truly whole.

  It was time to make Honoré listen. He’d ignored her visits over the last couple of weeks; he wouldn’t be able to ignore her today.

  She walked to the bathroom and started running herself a bath. Within an hour she’d be on her way to his apartment, and this time she wasn’t going to take no for an answer.

  The wind and rain outside were bitterly cold as she stalked across town, her head held low, her small frame wrapped in a thick woollen coat that made her look like a little girl who was playing at dressing up in her mother’s clothes. Still, she felt invigorated by her resolve to find Honoré and challenge him on his reluctance to talk to her. She knew that she could make him see sense, given time; and at the moment, time was something she had in plentiful supply.

  The city was bustling, the traders and shoppers all apparently immune to the fierce weather as they went about their business, preparing for the winter and the coming Christmas season. Fruit and vegetable stands had set up along the side of the road, and further ahead, Emily could see a man roasting chestnuts, his breath steaming in the frigid air.

  It wasn’t the life for her. She was convinced of that, if nothing else. She may not know her own history, but she knew her own mind, and a life full of nine-to-five and painted-on smiles would have driven her mad long ago. That was the root of her recent despondency, she realised, and probably the key to Honoré’s too. How could someone who had seen the things they’d seen, who had visited other worlds and other times, who had the potential, deep down in the very fibre of their being, to make such a difference to other people’s lives – how could someone who had tasted all that settle down to a normal life? The very thought of it was repellent to her. Not only that, but she was sure that the key to her amnesia – and thus to her very existence – lay somewhere out there, waiting for her and Honoré to uncover it, somewhere lost in time.

  She dodged an oncoming child being chased down the street by another boy, shouting and laughing as they sped past. She smiled. Perhaps it wasn’t all that bad. People carved their own lives out of what they had. But whatever the case, whatever the arguments against the idea, she was on her way to see Honoré now, and that would be the end of the matter, one way or another.

  Half an hour later, she turned into the street where Honoré lived. She could see his bicycle, an old and slightly-rusty artefact from before the War, propped up against the railings outside Mrs Bag-O-Bones’ house – which she supposed suggested that Honoré was at home. Of course, that wasn’t a guarantee that he’d answer the door, but it was as good a starting point as any.

  The wind and rain had continued to batter her as she made her way across town, and now she was wet through to her bones, her thick woollen coat sodden, her hair plastered across her face. Surely he’d at least take pity on her and let her in to get dry? She stood in the relative shelter of a tree for a moment, hugging herself to keep warm. The leaves had all fallen back in early November and she couldn’t help feeling how dreary and barren the whole place looked. The weather was reflecting her mood. She steeled herself, fixing her resolve. And then, just as she was about to make a dash for it across the road and bang on the door, Honoré stepped out onto the street.

  She darted back under the tree and held her breath, catching hold of a railing. He hadn’t seen her, or at least he appeared not to have seen her; he simply tipped his hat against the driving rain, plunged his hands into his trench coat pockets and started off in the other direction at a brisk pace. Emily started forward again, thinking she could catch him up, but then stopped herself. He was probably just off to see a client, and to confront him now, in the middle of the street, would only ruin her chances of talking to him properly. She needed to get him alone somewhere where he wasn’t going to be distracted. She thought for a moment about turning back for home, where she could dry herself out and curl up in front of the fire, but in the end, the temptation passed and curiosity got the better of her. And besides, she’d promised herself that things were going to come to a head today, one way or another.

  Turning her collar up against the driving rain, she set off after Honoré, to follow him wherever his adventure would take him.

  4

  Spitalfields. Why did everything come back to Spitalfields? Again and again he found himself drawn here. It was as if the place had been touched in some way, as if it were a kind of nexus or centre point, a place where bifurcating timelines collided with one another and ruptured the flow of time, spitting out oddities and drawing time sensitives towards it like moths to a flame. At least, he realised, that had recently become his theory about what had happened to Emily – that she’d somehow gotten herself caught up in something she shouldn’t have, an innocent bystander with a talent she didn’t understand, whipped out of her own timeline and dumped unceremoniously here at Spitalfields, stranded, out-of-time and out-of-luck. It wasn’t a bad theory, and it seemed to fit the bill; it explained why he couldn’t see Emily’s timesnake, it explained why he kept finding himself drawn back to this place – this haunted place – and it explained why, months ago, Barnaby Tewkes had chosen this place as a refuge against a malignant time entity.

  And now this. An unexplained death in a collapsed building just off the square where Emily had first appeared from the mist, the victim’s body covered in bizarre runes that had somehow been carved or etched onto the skeleton itself. It just didn’t feel right. Honoré was the first to admit that murders – like most real police work – were well outside his remit. He had no real experience in dealing with killers, save for the monsters he’d encountered during his travels with Emily, be they human or alien; but something about the ritualistic nature of the death, and, more importantly, the location of the death, meant that he felt the need to investigate further. He’d decided not to tell Emily about it yet – he didn’t want to get her hopes up and set her thinking that the mystery was somehow related to her amnesia – but all the same he knew his gut was telling him something different. This was something he couldn’t ignore.

  Honoré glanced around the marketplace, evaluating the lie of the land. It was busy, both from people streaming into the market itself and from the small crowd that had gathered around the site of the police investigation. To the left, the old church loomed over the whole scene, the Luftwaffe handprint still evident where the stone had been blackened by an explosion. There was something morose about the ruin, and he’d already seen enough of the place in this lifetime. Too many bad memories. He rubbed his hands together thoughtfully.

  He knew he should be on his way over to Hammersmith by now, and was pained that he’d be letting down his clients – an emotional couple awaiting news of their missing daughter. But he also knew he had nothing to give them yet. The girl, Emmeline
, had been missing for nearly a week, and the parents were convinced that something unspeakable had happened to her, but Honoré was unsure. He had his own suspicions that the father had been mistreating the girl, and that she had chosen to run away rather than confront the issue with her mother. He’d been tightening the net for a few days now, working through his network of contacts across the city to track her down, and was more convinced than ever that she was alive and well and living on the streets, moving around from place-to-place, looking for shelter. Still, he wanted to catch up with her himself before he talked to the parents. If he was right, and the nub of the problem lay at home, he didn’t want to force her back into a situation where she might end up harmed, or worse.

  He glanced at his watch. He’d go and visit his clients later. Right now, he needed to see if he could get to the bottom of the bizarre find at Spitalfields, if only to put his own mind at rest.

  Pushing his way through the onlookers, he found himself up against a police barrier. The murder scene, if that’s what it was, had been totally destroyed by the collapse of the building, and workmen were in the process of erecting screens to stop the people from getting too close. It was obvious from the strewn rubbish that the building had been ruined for some years. As with a lot of the bombed-out shells around the city, it was only now that workmen and housing associations were starting to clear the debris to make things safe. Indeed, most of the shattered husks were being demolished altogether to make way for newer, more modern buildings, since the repair work was simply too big a job to be worthwhile. This was evidently the case here – half of the site had already been cleared, and it was obvious where the body had been uncovered from the way the workmen had avoided a particular area of rubble.

  In truth, there was nothing much to see. The body had already been removed and taken to the morgue and the police presence at the scene was minimal. Honoré presumed they’d already decided that the site itself wasn’t about to yield any secrets, so had retreated to their offices to await news of the autopsy. He backed out of the crowd, dodging the sea of umbrellas that had closed around him when he’d pushed his way forward. The constant drumming of the rain was wearing him down and he needed to get away from it for a while. But before he did, he had another call to make.

  Leaving the crowd to ogle at the sole policeman who stood watch while the workmen raised the barriers around the crime scene, he moved away.

  Silently, after a moment or two had passed, a shadow slipped out behind him and followed.

  5

  Honoré had visited the morgue before. In fact, he’d visited several morgues in his time, some of them immediately after the War, some of them more recently, usually during the course of his investigations. But this morgue in particular held gruesome memories for him. This was the place where he’d first seen Emily dead.[1]

  The sight of her lying cold on a slab was burned brightly into his memory. At the time, he remembered, he’d felt so numb, so appalled by the sight of her pale, waxy body, that it had been all he could do to focus his rage on trying to find her killer. He’d buried his emotional reaction in the same place he’d buried his memories of the War: a little box in his psyche, the contents of which would probably drive him insane if he ever opened it. He’d chosen just to lock it down and keep moving, to hold off his grieving until such a time as he was able to catch the perpetrators and deal with them in the appropriate fashion. Still, as things had transpired, it hadn’t proved necessary that time; the true Emily – his Emily – had turned up alive and well, and the nightmare scenario that had followed had eventually ended well, with both of them back home, safe and sound.

  He knew now, though, that after seeing Emily dead, he’d developed a neurosis about letting her come to harm. He couldn’t bear to see her hurt. This over-zealous protectiveness was half the reason he’d forced himself to stop travelling, to root himself to this time and place. If he couldn’t travel, then neither could Emily, and that – in his opinion – was the best way to keep her safe. That and the fact that he had been so damn angry with himself when he’d met his alter-ego and seen what he could have become. The only way he could think to stop himself becoming that person was to stop travelling with Emily, to stop interfering with other people’s lives and get on with living his own. Only, as he was finding, things were never that simple, and not only had he continued to interfere with other people’s lives – this time for money – but here he was standing outside the morgue, about to go in and try to talk his way into seeing the body of a murder victim who was covered in bizarre runes, for no other reason than it just didn’t feel right. Life was full of complications.

  Honoré glanced around out of habit, and then pushed the door to the morgue and stepped inside. Shaking himself off, and leaving a trail of water behind him, he approached the man on the desk.

  ‘Good afternoon. I’m here about the body of the young woman who was pulled out of the wreckage down by Spitalfields yesterday.’ He took off his hat and placed it down on the counter, causing water to pool on the lacquered desk.

  The man on reception looked old enough to be retired, with wispy grey hair and a moustache that appeared to have adopted a yellow, mottled hue after many years of nicotine abuse. Honoré could see that he didn’t have long left to live.

  The man pushed his spectacles back up his nose, laid his pencil down neatly on the journal or log book, and looked up slowly.

  ‘Don’t I know you?’

  Honoré smiled warmly. ‘Indeed you do. My name is Honoré Lechasseur, and I’ve been to visit your establishment a number of times in the past. I carry out advisory work for the Metropolitan Police. Would you like to see my credentials?’

  ‘No need, sir. The body is in room six. It’s not a pretty sight, though; I’ll warn you that much.’

  Honoré breathed a sigh of relief. His ‘credentials’ consisted of a rolled up note in his pocket that he hoped a reluctant receptionist might accept as a bribe. The fact the man had recognised him was both a happy coincidence and a slightly alarming one. Nevertheless, he was in now, so, collecting his hat, he nodded at the man, thanked him, and made his way down the corridor to room six.

  The room stank of disinfectant and blood. He clicked the door shut behind him and took a moment to look around. There was no-one else there; just the corpse stretched out before him on the slab – looking like nothing so much as a sacrifice on a large, white dais, offered up to the gods to atone for someone else’s mortal sin. He gave an involuntary shiver.

  A small metal table next to the slab bore a range of surgical instruments and paraphernalia, everything from a saw to a scalpel, including a large kidney bowl for samples. Ceiling-mounted strip lights gave the room a clinical gleam, and an overhead lamp on a moveable arm was poised over the body, illuminating the woman’s now-skeletal face and casting eerie shadows in the sockets where her eyes used to be. Two other slabs were laid out in the room, both unoccupied. Honoré was thankful for the opportunity to take a look at the body alone. He edged closer to the table, removing his hat, partly as a gesture of respect, partly to allow him to see more clearly. Bending cautiously over the body, he understood immediately what had confused the police, and also what had drawn him here. The upper torso of the woman was covered in a black, gossamer-like material that Honoré instinctively knew wouldn’t be invented for at least another 50 years. What was more, the runes that had been etched into her bones – bizarre pictograms and swirling, concentric symbols – seemed to give off a faint blue glow. Honoré knew – although he wasn’t quite sure where the knowledge came from – that the etchings had been done not only well before the building collapsed, but also while the woman was still alive. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to drown out the sudden sound of her screaming inside his head; a twisted yowl of torment that sounded more animal than human. He opened his eyes again, confused, only to be struck by a vision of a twisting, dancing timesnake that seemed to swirl out from th
e body on the slab, a wreath of time lines swimming through the air like an electric blue halo. He reached his hand out to touch it, then drew back immediately, as if it burned. He tried to focus, to regain control of his vision and his mind.

  He was seeing the timesnake of a dead person! What’s more, no living person he had ever encountered had had a timesnake that had left as deep an impression on the timelines as this, not even the other time travellers he had met, not even...

  Honoré turned his back on the woman and breathed. He closed his eyes, blotting out the world. When he opened them again, Emily was stood in front of him, watching him intently.

  ‘Is everything all right, Honoré?’ She laid a hand on his arm, concerned. ‘You look ill.’

  ‘What? How?’ he stuttered, completely at a loss. There was a connection here and he couldn’t find it.

  Emily guided him slowly away from the body. ‘I told them I was your assistant, running late because of the weather.’ She shrugged, her coat dripping water all over the floor. ‘I needed to talk.’