At six forty-five one summer morning, a red London bus was crossing Waterloo Bridge.
A group of school children, sitting at the back, were copying each other’s homework and fighting, when one of them looked out of the window, across the river to Cleopatra’s Needle, and saw something very strange.
The boy elbowed his friend. The dark finger of ancient Egypt was pointing towards the sky as it always did, but today the tip of the obelisk was glowing bright red, as it had when it was new and painted and glorious, four thousand years ago, in the Temple of the Sun.
‘Look,’ said the boy, ‘look!’
Riding the river as though it were a road was a phalanx of chariots and horsemen.
The white horses were pulled up on their haunches; the nodding ostrich plumes on their head-collars rose and fell; the fan bearers came forward, the troops stood at ease, and above the kneeling priests was the Pharaoh himself, inspecting his new monument from a burnished car.
Other people turned to stare at the mirage, and the bus driver slowed down, though he did not quite stop; he seemed to be hovering over Time.
In the slowed-down silence no one spoke and nothing moved – except for the river, which to all observation was running backwards.
Then, from downstream, there was a sudden terrible crack, like the sky breaking. A cone of wind hit the bus, knocking it sideways over the bridge and shattering glass across the seats where the children were sitting.
The bus should have crashed down into the river, but instead the wind whirled through the punched-in windows and lifted the bus high above the bridge and out towards the obelisk.
A great wave of water swelled up against the stone piers of the bridge, battering the concrete underside with such force that part of the supporting wall was torn away.
As the tidal wave slammed back down on to the water, the river resumed its normal flow. At the same second the bus spun crazily into the line of chariots. On impact, bus, chariots and horsemen vanished, leaving nothing behind but traces of red-gold sun on the surface of the water.
Big Ben struck seven.
A few days later police found an exercise book floating on the Thames; the name printed in the front of the book identified it as belonging to one of the boys on the bus. The pages had thickened to parchment, and the writing inside was not English, but signs of long-legged birds and half-turned figures under the eye of the great god Ra.
The bus and its passengers were never found.
It was the first of the Time Tornadoes.