“The first time we used it, it almost exploded. Then, the next time, David wore one of the bracelets, walked through the mirror and back out, immediately. At least, that’s how it seemed to us, but he said he had been back to 1969 and spent two days there. His clothes were dirty, he was unshaven, and he had a photograph of himself holding a newspaper. I remember how I just sat there, staring at it…We were so amazed. We thought if we can do that, we can do anything. Change time. Change history. Avoid the accident. Bring her back.” He gripped his fingers tight together, a knot of tension. “I can’t tell you what it felt like to be given a glimpse of that. We drank, we dreamed, we flung all the windows of the house open and whooped and whistled for joy. But then. Two days later we tried again. After our pride, the fall.”
Suddenly he stood up. “I can’t do this. Tell them, Piers. Give him the key to David’s room.”
Abruptly, he went out, ducking under the low arch.
Piers cleared his throat in the awkward silence. One of the cats leaped on the table and head-butted him; he stroked it idly. “Ah. Well, it hit him hard, you know. So much hope, so much despair. But your father is a determined man, Jake, and he was desperate to help his friend. I advised against another attempt until we had the web finished, because it was clear the power of the machine could drag us all into it without some safety device. But David wouldn’t wait. He put on the silver cuff and we activated the Chronoptika. There was a tremendous crack of sound, and every one of the lights in the house blew out. I knew then. We tried…believe me, Jake, we really did. But David was gone. And the mirror was black and hard and empty.”
Jake was silent. Without looking up, he turned the mug with his forefinger. “What did you do?”
“Waited, and waited. He never came out.”
Wharton leaned back, squeaking his chair. “I have to say, it all seems incredible.”
“No,” Jake said. “It doesn’t.” He took out the crocodile-skin wallet, pulled the photo from it, and placed it on the table. “It explains this.”
Sarah swiveled the photo around and stared at it. She looked astonished. “He had this taken?”
“It came with the note from my father. Someone sent them to me.” Jake took the letter out and gave it to her; she read it quickly.
He turned to Piers. “It was you, wasn’t it.”
Piers shrugged, shifty. His small body seemed to shrink. “Well, yes. But for God’s sake, don’t tell Venn. I’m in deep enough doo-dah as it is.”
“Stand up to him. He doesn’t own you,” Wharton growled.
“Actually he does.”
“Why send it?” Sarah asked quietly.
“Because it would get Jake here. And I thought his presence would affect the mirror; I was right.”
“Venn lied to the police,” Jake said, grim. “My father never left this house.”
“Depends on how you define left. But we couldn’t have the plods ferreting around here. I’m really sorry, Jake. I’m an expert at getting things wrong.”
“Venn wouldn’t have cared.”
Piers stood. “He was in no fit state to care about anyone.” He went to the wall, took down a bunch of keys and selected one. “I saw him spend nights sitting before that mirror, drinking, waiting. It’s taken months to get back to where we were. But last night showed me that there is still a chance. So tonight, I’m sure he’ll try again.”
Sarah looked up, alert. “So soon?”
Jake took the letter from under her fingers and folded it back into the wallet. “Well, this time I wear the bracelet. Not her. And not Venn.”
Piers slid a key over. “That’s for you. It opens your father’s room.”
Jake took it, but before he could answer, the rapid high peeping of an alarm startled them all, bursting out like a pulse in the silent house.
“What’s that?” Sarah leaped up so fast, her chair fell over.
“The gate.” Piers flitted out of the room and she ran after him, quickly, through the old scullery and into the dairy, though now its cold marble counters held only TV monitors and a keyboard.
Piers’s long fingers flicked on the keyboard. Sarah stared at the screen. She was looking down at the wrought-iron gates from a high, awkward angle, through a camera grimy with dirt. No one was there.
“Odd.” Piers clicked the camera; it panned left and right, up and down. They saw the rutted lane, a high hedgerow, bare brambles, some mud slashed with tire tracks. Then the left-hand pillar with its stone lion.
“There’s no one there,” she said, anxious.
“Well, something set it off.”
“A fox?”
“Maybe.” He touched a switch and the image flickered; she saw by the digital clock in the corner that he was running the footage backward.
“So we really can go back in time,” she said, trying to joke.
“Mortal time is only an image. The capture of images.” Piers stopped. “There! See! What’s that, I wonder.”
A figure. The edge of a dark shape, standing in the untidy tangle of the high hedges. Someone motionless, blurred in the grainy image, there and then not there, so swift, it might have been a movement of branches and thorns.
She stared at it, knowing it was Janus.
Piers looked grave. “Houston, we have a problem. Tell me, Sarah, did that look like a man with a scarred face to you?”
“Why?”
“We’ve had such a man hanging around in recent months. Maybe one of Summer’s, but I fear he knows something.”
“Who’s Summer?”
Piers giggled, nervous. “You don’t want to know.”
She didn’t answer. She was peering at the mud in front of the gate, where the tires of cars had flattened it. Even in the dim image she could make out the prints. Broad splayed paw prints.
“It could be anyone,” she said, in a whisper.
12
Throughout the early days of the Revolution, Janus worked stealthily behind the scenes. He gathered power, began to denounce former colleagues. We do not know how he gained possession of the Chronoptika, but at some stage he began experimenting with it. As a result we believe that he created as many as a thousand Replicants, including several of himself. The youngest known is a nineteen-year-old self. It displays its Original’s cunning and ruthless nature. But it hasn’t yet developed his full maturity of evil. Like all Replicants, it appears to be immortal.
Illegal ZEUS transmission
“FOR A START, she’s not Piers’s niece.”
“I gathered that.” Jake turned the stiff key in the lock of his father’s room and opened the door. The room was dim, the curtains drawn. He crossed the room and dragged them open. Pale winter sunlight lit the bed, a neat dressing table, its shaving things set out carefully. A comb and brush, snagged with a few hairs, lay under a thin film of dust.
He didn’t touch them. Instead he opened the wardrobe.
“Yes, but I’ve discovered exactly who she is.” Wharton sat thoughtfully on the bed. “And I have to warn you, Jake, this isn’t good.”
He wasn’t listening. The scent of his father hung in the clothes, it came out and seemed to enfold him, and the memories it brought caught in his throat like choked breath. The aftershave, the cheap French cigarettes, the indefinable musty mix that had made David Wilde. Always joking, always full of dire puns and stupid pranks.
He reached out and touched the stiff, hanging clothes, the old tweed suit from some charity shop in Oxford, the check shirt, the black overcoat that Dad had thought made him look like a pre-electric Bob Dylan. Underneath, in casual pairs, his boots and shoes, his sneakers standing as casually as if he’d just stepped out of them.