Mrs Rokabye was eating breakfast.
It was rather a good breakfast of kippers and toast and hot chocolate, and she was glad that no Silver had appeared to come and spoil everything. She had promised herself the last kipper, and she was eyeing it so greedily that Sniveller got up with a sigh and slapped it down on her plate.
‘If the child wants to sleep, she can’t expect breakfast,’ announced Mrs Rokabye.
‘Sleep she may, but not today,’ said Sniveller.
‘What are you talking about?’ asked Mrs Rokabye, who longed to be alone with her kipper.
‘She’s run away.’
Mrs Rokabye put down her knife and fork. ‘Run away? From here? From me?’ She bit the head off her kipper. ‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth.’
‘Found a bone, have you?’ said Sniveller.
‘How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is a thankless child,’ finished Mrs Rokabye, who only ever quoted the nastier bits of the Bible.
‘Last night, what a sight!’ said Sniveller. ‘Master blames me. You never said she didn’t eat tomato sauce.’
‘I have never given her any tomato sauce! Children should not be indulged.’
‘Master hypnotised her, and –’ Before Sniveller could continue, the door to the dining room opened and in came Abel Darkwater in his outdoor clothes.
He sat down heavily, and motioned to Sniveller to fetch him coffee.
‘Have you found the child?’ asked Mrs Rokabye, who had no interest in Silver’s welfare, but every interest in her own get-rich-quick opportunity. Mrs Rokabye had slept soundly, not knowing she had been drugged, and she had awoken to find herself happy, in her own mean-minded way. Yes, happy at last, and now the wretched child had upset everything.
‘I have not found her but I know where she is,’ said Abel Darkwater. ‘I know a number of things that I did not know until last night, oh yes.’
‘Was the hypnosis successful?’ asked Mrs Rokabye eagerly.
‘It was, and it was not,’ replied Darkwater opaquely.
‘Well, what are we to do now?’
‘Wait,’ said Abel Darkwater, ‘and see.’
He got up and left the room. Mrs Rokabye had the distinct feeling that she was being left out of something important. She poured herself more hot chocolate and brooded.
As she brooded and sipped, and sipped and brooded, there was a horrible howling from the landing, and Sniveller came tumbling through the door, with blood pouring from his nose.
‘What on earth?’
‘He’s beating me again, oh, oh, oh, no, no, no.’ Sniveller fell into a chair. ‘It’s the prophecy.’
‘What prophecy?’
‘You don’t think he wants the bloody clock, tick-tock to tell the time, do you?’
‘I have no idea why he wants it,’ said Mrs Rokabye. ‘All I know is that he will pay me a magnificent sum of money when he finds it.’
‘If he finds it. He’s been looking for it all his life and never had a wife.’
‘What nonsense you talk. Tell me in plain English why he wants this clock.’
Sniveller spat out a blood-stained sentence. It was all he could manage, and anyway, he didn’t rightly understand it all himself.
‘Whoever controls the Timekeeper controls Time.’
Mrs Rokabye pricked up her ears. If she could get it she would never have to wait for the bus again.
‘But only the Child with the Golden Face can bring the Clock to its Rightful Place.’
‘You can’t mean Silver?’
Sniveller nodded and mopped his face with his neckerchief. ‘And now we’ve lost her like a penny down the floorboards.’
‘But she has no idea where the Timekeeper is, I am quite sure of that.’
‘Yes, Master knows that now, but Master says …’ Sniveller lowered his voice. Mrs Rokabye’s eyes grew wide, but before Sniveller could finish his snivelling sentence, Abel Darkwater had burst into the room, his round face excited.
‘It is of great importance that you stay in the house today, Mrs Rokabye. I can feel faint changes in the surface of the Earth. There is a Time Tornado approaching us.’
‘A Time Tornado!’
‘Yes indeed, oh yes indeed!’
‘I think I had better go back to Tanglewreck,’ said Mrs Rokabye, who never thought she would hear herself say such words. ‘This London living is very bad for my nerves.’
‘You cannot go anywhere,’ said Abel Darkwater, ‘unless you want to run the risk of being swept up in Time and deposited who knows where?’
‘Why does no one here speak plain English?’
‘Madam, it is very simple. Since the Industrial Revolution, which you will recall began with the invention of the steam engine, our world has been moving faster and faster. For most of his evolutionary life, a man could go no quicker than his legs or his horse could carry him. Now he may travel in a jet plane across the world in a matter of hours. His factories churn out more goods per hour than an artisan could make in his entire lifetime. We have no more interest in the slow round of the seasons; we grow our food by artificial light, and our hens lay eggs all year because they do not know when it is winter. Children are given Easter eggs, but they do not know it is because Easter is the Spring point of the Equinox, when hens would begin to lay again as the light from the sun increased.
‘It is strange, but the machine age and the computer age both promised to give mere mortals more time in their lives, but less time is what it seems we have. We are using up Time too fast, just as we are using up all the other resources of the Earth.
‘Human beings do not understand Time, but they have tampered with it. In consequence, Time is not what it used to be. Time is becoming unreliable.’
‘But what is going to happen?’
‘That remains to be seen,’ said Abel Darkwater. ‘Hark!’
Mrs Rokabye heard a terrible noise, like an air-raid siren.
‘That is the warning! You are quite safe in this house, but under no circumstances should you do more than look out of the window, and do not try and interfere, whatever it is that you may see. Now I recommend you wait here. I shall stand at the front door out of curiosity.’
‘But –’
‘Oh, I shall be quite safe, oh yes.’
Mrs Rokabye sat by the window just in time to see a ginger cat fly past, followed by a satellite dish. That was enough for her; she hated upset, though she liked to cause it. She decided to go and lie down.
As she climbed the stairs, it occurred to her to search Silver’s bedroom. What had the child taken with her? Had she packed her clothes?
Mrs Rokabye went quietly up the stairs, and loudly shut the door to her own room, so that Sniveller would not suspect anything. Then she hurried on to the little rooms at the top of the house.
The bed was unmade. Silver’s clothes were lying about. She had gone without her shoes! She must have wanted to get away very badly, thought Mrs Rokabye, and wondered what it was that had taken place here. There was her duffle coat … Mrs Rokabye fished through the pockets; a conker, a pencil, a few sweets from the train, a little plastic wallet with a picture of her mother and father and Buddleia inside. Nothing else. Nothing … or, what was this? She rummaged inside the lining and pulled out the diamond pin. She gasped. Where had Silver found this? It must be worth a fortune if it was real. Perhaps it was part of the treasure she had heard was buried at Tanglewreck? Never mind the clock! If there was treasure … Her face hardened from surprise to anger. Horrible wicked child to keep the treasure to herself. Well, now these diamonds belonged to Mrs Rokabye!
She hid the pin in her knickers, slipped back down the stairs and lay on the bed. Her heart was beating fast. Abel Darkwater had taken her for a fool, but he would see who was the clever one! Perhaps she would have to persuade Sniveller to help her. Yes, she would have to use her charm. It would need practice, like smiling, but she was up to the task.
Her brain was whirring. She put on her pink earmuffs and lay on the bed with the pillow over her eyes, and both hands on the diamond pin.
Abel Darkwater went downstairs and opened the door.
Men and women were running down the street into shops and cafes and offices. Drivers pulled over anywhere they could, and lay down on the seats of their cars.
The sky was dark. Rain began to fall. The rain turned to snow.
The snow melted. The sun shone so brilliantly that the windows blazed like fire. Then there was a moment of absolute stillness in the deserted street, before a huge wind pulled through that part of the city like a beast dragging its prey behind it.
Abel Darkwater braced himself in the doorway and consulted his pocket watch. The hands were spinning wildly, and he could see from his Annometer that Time was lurching backwards and forwards in short bursts, like a learner driver crashing the gears.
The Annometer was another of his own inventions. This one told him whether or not Time was slipping. Even before the time troubles had begun, Darkwater had noticed that in certain places Time could slip. People who experienced that strange feeling of going backwards or forwards in Time were sometimes right. Time slipped its gears occasionally and went into reverse, then it could lurch forward. Now this was happening so fiercely that everyone could feel it. But it had always happened here and there.
The Time Tornado hit, and a whole building across the street was torn from its foundations and carried up into the air, like a child throwing a doll’s house. Darkwater watched with interest as the occupants of the building waved wildly out into the air, shouting for help. There was no one who could help them. The house disappeared into a black cloud.
Abel Darkwater studied the gap opposite him in the street. It was not a gap like a bomb or an explosion would make, but more like the house had been cleanly sliced away from the ground by a knife.
Darkwater checked the Annometer. It was registering 2060. The wavering images of two buildings appeared in outline in the now vacant plot. Since the future was not fixed it was not possible to see what would definitely happen in 2060, but possibilities of happening could be seen. The first possibility was a stainless steel tower. The second possibility was a museum called the Time Museum. Underneath them both he thought he could see the outlines of a children’s playground with swings and slides. He smiled. That was a very faint possibility indeed.
There was another rending crack in the sky, and to Abel Darkwater’s surprise, books began to rain down on the street. He ducked under his lintel to avoid being hit on the head, then he stepped out to pick up the nearest volume. It was old and leather bound. He read the spine:
THE ORIGIN OF SPECIES by Charles Darwin.
Hmmm …
March 17th 1859. John Samuel Martin, a bookseller of Charing Cross, London, was walking to dinner with a book under his arm when a great wind of the day snatched it from his fingers and flew it into the air. To his surprise it did not seem to fall back to Earth, which is against the laws of gravity.
Consulting his Annometer, Darkwater realised that Time was behaving differently today. It was like a child throwing a tantrum. It had taken a book from the past, and hurled it into the future. It had taken a house, and hurled it – who knew where?
As he stood in the street, indifferent to the chaos around him, he said out loud, to himself, ‘This hasn’t happened before.’
‘Is Before a Time or a Place?’ said a voice, silky and soft and edged with some harder material.
Darkwater turned round. He was taken aback, and he was displeased.
‘It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?’
‘I rather hoped it would be for ever,’ said Abel Darkwater.
‘If there is such a thing,’ said Regalia Mason.
And there she was – in her white suit and white shoes, her long blonde hair simply tied back. Only her eyes were as dark as he remembered them.
Abel Darkwater switched off his Annometer.
‘Still using your Home Inventions?’ said Regalia Mason, in a voice full of sympathy. ‘Here, try this. It’s only a prototype, of course.’
Regalia Mason took out a sleek black box, about the size of an Ipod, and pressed the buttons. ‘Who was it you were trying to find?’
‘I’m not trying to find anyone!’ snapped Abel Darkwater.
‘Oh, pardon me,’ said Regalia Mason. ‘I had the distinct impression that you were.’
‘I am following the Time Tornado. That is all.’
‘That’s why I’m here,’ said Regalia Mason. ‘I flew in from New York this morning. I have a meeting with the Committee.’
‘At Greenwich?’
‘At Greenwich. They are very concerned about these distortions in Time. The public don’t like them at all. It seems you may need my help.’
‘I certainly don’t,’ said Darkwater.
‘The Government does. They need to get Time back under control. To do that they need money and they need expertise. That means America.’
‘When I think that you were once a colony,’ said Abel Darkwater.
‘I was never anyone’s colony,’ said Regalia Mason.
Abel Darkwater looked at her with dislike. ‘Are you still running your little business?’
‘Well, I’m not selling clocks and watches, if that’s what you mean.’ She glanced briefly into the windows of the shop. ‘Time to move on, don’t you think? See you later, alligator.’
Tall, elegant, unperturbed at the sight of overturned cars and smashed windows, Regalia Mason walked briskly away.
Abel Darkwater watched her. There was no reason at all for Regalia Mason to be walking past his shop that morning. In any case, she was not the kind of woman who walked anywhere.
All through the night he had been thinking about the hypnosis, and how Silver could not take him further, and how she claimed to have had no knowledge of the Timekeeper at all. He did not like the child but he was sure that she usually told the truth. There had been a memory – he had found it – but something or someone had blocked that memory, and done it so powerfully that even Abel Darkwater had not been able to recover it from its hiding place.
Something
or
someone.
A black Bentley Continental drove silently past him and pulled up a little way down the street. Regalia Mason got in. She did not look back.
Darkwater felt something pressing against his chest. It was his Warning Signal. He took it out. DANGER, it flashed in red number nines. DANGER.