Time and Time Again

39

STANTON’S CAB CLIP-CLOPPED through the darkened streets from the Pera Palace Hotel and headed down to the dockside area. The last time Stanton had made the journey he’d been in a Mercedes limousine with McCluskey beside him. The memory seemed already strange and distant. He was becoming an early-twentieth-century man.

The cabby spoke a little English and a little German and was inclined to chat, particularly when he heard the address that Stanton was heading for. It seemed that the hospital had only recently been the venue of a terrible double murder. There had been a break-in and a doctor and a night nurse had been killed.

Stanton was a little unnerved. Break-ins happened from time to time of course and they sometimes turned violent. But that one should have occurred in this specific house, Newton’s house, seemed somehow ominous.

He asked the cab driver if he could recall the date.

‘A couple of months ago,’ came the reply. ‘The end of May or the beginning of June … yes, that’s it. The morning of the first of June. I remember it was my wife’s name day.’

Stanton swallowed hard.

The break-in had happened on the morning of his arrival.

He had been there. Just shortly after midnight. The house had been so peaceful and but for the gramophone record so quiet.

Yet now it seemed that had Newton’s coordinates been timed to occur only a little later, Stanton would have stepped from the future into the middle of a violent crime.

His mind went back to the nurse he’d seen, bent over her desk as he’d crept past her half-open door. Had she been a victim? Almost certainly, she had been the only person up. He recalled thinking that she was the first human being he had seen in his new world. Now it seemed that he was also the last person who saw her alive. Except for her killer. Stanton remembered the bearded man he’d surprised at the front door as he dragged the semi-conscious McCluskey out of the house. Not long after that encounter the man must have become the killer’s other victim.

Stanton felt cold. Was it him? Had he brought death with him?

To a doctor and a nurse in Constantinople?

To the Jews of the Russian Steppes? The Socialists of Germany?

The flower girl in Sarajevo? To Churchill? The man so crucial to the salvation of the previous twentieth century but already dead in this one?

Somewhere a bell was chiming. It was 2 a.m.

What passing bells for these who die as cattle?

The opening line of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem For Doomed Youth’.

Stanton whispered it under his breath. A reminder of why he had done the things he’d done. Yes, many were dying now, but their numbers were as nothing compared to those who had died before. A whole generation would not now ‘die as cattle’ as Wilfred Owen’s had done. And Stanton would leave his warning in Newton’s cellar lest any future Chronations act in haste to change another century. Stanton wished he had brought the Owen anthology with him to leave in the cellar beside his letter. No document could better demonstrate the appalling human capacity for self-inflicted disaster or show how bad things could really get.

He paid off his cab and walked up the same street that he’d escorted McCluskey along two months earlier. Approaching the same door from which he’d emerged into the early twentieth century.

The house looked completely quiet. Just the same as when he’d left it, apart from the fact that the windows were now barred. He hoped very much they hadn’t added bolts to the door. His skeleton keys wouldn’t help him if they had.

But the door opened and he slipped inside.

He crept along the familiar corridor and past the half-open door. Glancing in he saw that a nurse was sitting at the table as before, but this one was older and grey-haired.

He looked away. He had never been a remotely superstitious man but nonetheless he couldn’t help wondering whether it had been his evil eye that marked that other nurse for death. Fate avenging itself against the efforts of Chronos to cheat it?

He told himself he was being a fool.

Fate? Evil eyes? Ridiculous?

But no more ridiculous than a man breaking into a house in order to visit its cellar in the hope that a hundred and eleven years hence somebody might read the history of a century that never happened.

Stanton crept to the cellar stairs door, unlocked it and made his way down. He moved the wardrobe, unlocked the second door and slipped back inside Newton’s cellar.

It was pitch black but he’d brought his torch and in its bright LED light he could see the footprints he and McCluskey had left, and the mark in the middle of the room where she had lain at his feet. He flashed his torch about; he was looking for the not yet broken chair and the table. His idea was to put his letter on it.

But as he walked further into the cellar, something caught his eye on the edge of his torch beam.

Something dark a little way across the floor.

A line of marks in the dust.

Playing his torch on them Stanton recognized them for what they were. Another set of footprints. Footprints that most definitely had not been there before. Somebody had been in this cellar since Stanton had last been here.

For a moment a sort of panic gripped him as if he’d seen a ghost. It was an unusual sensation for Stanton and he mastered it only with difficulty. His heart had begun to beat furiously; he gulped for breath. He struggled to get a grip of his thoughts. There had to be a logical explanation, and of course there was one.

Those marks must have been made by the intruder. The man who broke into the hospital and had killed the doctor and the nurse. No ghost, just a house breaker.

But why had he come down here?

What was he hoping to find?

Stanton played his torch along this other line of prints. They seemed to lead nowhere. They began at the door and then … stopped. As if the man had entered the cellar, explored it for a few steps and then … disappeared.

Stanton took a step towards the prints, his free hand closing round the handle of the pistol in his pocket. Was the intruder still in the cellar? How could that be? The break-in had happened two months ago.

But if the man wasn’t still there, why did his footprints stop in the middle of the room? Where had he gone? He couldn’t have just evaporated. It occurred to Stanton that billions of people had done exactly that in the century from which he had come. Evaporated into thin air. But those billions had taken their world with them. They had left no footprints.

Where was the man who had left these?

Stanton’s body tensed, as if expecting some furious killer to leap from the darkness as he stared down at the line of marks in the dust.

And then he realized.

Heel – sole – heel – sole.

The footsteps weren’t leading from the door into the middle of the cellar.

They were leading from the middle of the cellar to the door.

The intruder hadn’t made them and then disappeared.

He had appeared and then made them.