I went to bed shattered that night, but I couldn’t sleep. My brain was like a nest full of angry wasps. After weeks of inactivity, during which, despite all the evidence to the contrary, I’d begun to worry I might never find the obsidian heart, suddenly things had started to move.
What was ironic was that it had come at a time when I’d least expected it. I’d more or less given up on Christmas week, had resigned myself to the fact that many of my watchers would be too preoccupied with the obligations of the season between Christmas and New Year, and that my best bet would be to start the search again, with a new impetus, at the start of January. But in the course of a breathtaking twenty-four hours we’d had the odd footprints outside the house, and the even odder murder behind the Maybury Theatre. And now our prime suspect for that murder had led us, unbelievably, to Kate’s abductors.
Wheels within wheels. Cause and effect. I couldn’t help but think it was because of my imminent contact with them that the Sherwoods had become (or were about to become) involved in the topsy-turvy craziness of my life. But how and why? And more importantly, was there any way of dissuading or preventing them from taking my daughter?
If I did dissuade or prevent them, though, how would that affect what, as far as I was concerned, had already happened? How much of my past would alter accordingly – or would it unravel altogether? Because if Kate had never been abducted, there would never have been a reason for me to get involved in any of this. I would never have had to steal the heart, which meant I would never have had to kill McCallum, which meant I would never have ended up being pursued by the Wolves of London and living in a time that wasn’t my own…
Which meant I would never have been in the position to dissuade or prevent the Sherwoods from abducting Kate.
As ever, the knot of complexities just seemed to get tighter the more I thought about them, to the point at which it became impossible to unpick the different strands. After giving up and going to bed, my limbs aching with tiredness, I lay sleepless for what seemed an eternity, my thoughts multiplying exponentially, questions branching into yet further questions, until eventually it seemed they were overflowing my head and filling the darkness around me, stifling and souring the air.
In the end, gasping for breath, I lit a candle and threw back my eiderdown. At first I was sweating, but then the sweat turned cold and I started to shake. Out of habit I got dressed – when I was awake I liked to be ready for immediate action – and then, holding the candle to light my way, I went downstairs.
Although the stairs creaked seemingly at every step, no one woke up. And that was fine, because I wanted to be alone. In the drawing room I stoked up the fire, lit a couple of lamps and sat in one of the leather armchairs, breathing in the calming Christmas scents of pine and orange and cloves. I realised there was a part of me that was almost afraid of going to sleep; afraid of losing the momentum gained over the past twenty-four hours; afraid of waking up to find that the previous day’s promise had eluded me again, dissipated like a phantom.
It was a daft idea, but the early hours of the morning are a haven for daft ideas. The reason it was daft was because this afternoon Clover had returned to the house, arriving an hour or so after me, smiling like the cat that got the cream. She told me the Sherwoods were charming, that they were struggling to make ends meet, and that their son was three years old, which meant that – as she’d suggested – they were yet to travel into the future and move into the flat opposite mine. She also told me she’d used her ‘womanly wiles’, as she grinningly called them, to wangle us a dinner invitation for the following evening – which meant, as it was now something like 3:30 a.m., this evening.
It was all a bit surreal. I’d always got on well with Adam and Paula Sherwood – right up until the morning they’d kidnapped my youngest daughter. How I’d respond to them when I spoke to them again I couldn’t say. Would the fact they weren’t yet Kate’s abductors make me feel differently towards them? As Victorians, would they even seem like the same people I’d known? Perhaps I’d feel guilty for imposing myself on their world – and possibly, therefore, drawing them into mine; perhaps I’d feel responsible for them in some way. All I knew for sure was that I’d prefer to meet them with my wits about me, but that the way things were going it was more likely that by this evening my brain would be like cement and I’d be all but dead on my feet.
Not even the thought I was potentially letting Kate down by not getting a proper night’s sleep could make a difference. Maybe a whisky in front of the fire would relax me enough to allow me to slip into a state of unconsciousness? With a groan I hauled myself to my feet, crossed the room to the decanter and poured myself a healthy measure. I was raising the tumbler to my lips when I heard a soft pattering sound, like someone lightly drumming their fingers on the window.
I froze, then turned my head slowly to the left. The sound had come from behind the heavy damask drapes that covered the window closest to me. But had the noise been inside the room or outside? Having faced Tallarian’s army of clockwork horrors and seen what the shape-shifter was capable of, I was primed to expect almost anything. It wouldn’t have surprised me to find a spider the size of a cat perched on the windowsill behind the curtains. Or a squatting, red-eyed goblin. Or even a bubbling tide of green slime oozing its way through the hair-thin gaps around the frame.
I swallowed the whisky in one gulp, blinking at the alcohol burn in my belly. Grateful I was never complacent when it came to carrying my howdah, I put the tumbler down on the velvet cloth draped across the top of the piano and moved as silently as I could to the window. I stood beside the drapes for a moment, alert for the slightest sign of movement. Then, drawing my gun, I stretched out a hand and whipped the drape aside.
Instinctively I stepped to one side, my heart drumming. If this had been a horror movie a cat would have darted out from behind the curtain and gone yowling across the room – but there was nothing. Nothing on the windowsill; nothing attached to the inside of the tall sash window. But as I looked out at the snow-coated ground and the dark white-topped mass of trees and bushes beyond it, I suddenly realised that dotted and daubed on the lacy coating of frost on the outside of the glass were dozens of fingerprints.
I re-focused, staring at them. They reached from the bottom of the window to face height, and covered the area in a haphazard pattern, as if a child had dabbled its fingers over the frosty surface. In daylight such marks would simply have been curious, but now, in a silent house in the dead of night, they were eerie, and I felt a cold shudder ripple through me, negating the heat of the whisky.
What did the fingerprints mean? Were they a message? Or had something been trying – albeit feebly – to get into the house?
Before I had time to think I heard the same soft, rapid patter I’d heard moments earlier – only this time the sounds came from behind the drapes covering the next window.
Something was circling the house, tapping on the windows as it went. My already drumming heart leaped as a thrill of fear gripped me. But that didn’t stop me from darting to the next window and yanking the drape back.
Nothing here either, except for more fingerprints. Whatever was making the marks had already moved on. I wondered what had happened to the men watching the house. Had this thing, whatever it was, slipped through their cordon unnoticed? Was it invisible? Insubstantial like a ghost?
The now-familiar tapping started at the next window. A rapid, flickering sound like a flurry of raindrops. This time I ran not to that window, but to the one beyond it. With a sense of triumph, mingled with a cold, sharp spasm of fear, I wrenched the drape back and stepped forward, raising my pistol.
And saw her.
She was standing in the snow, not close to the house as I’d expected, but further back, beside the hedge. She was wearing what she had worn every other time I’d seen her – a thin white nightshirt printed with a cherry design, the short sleeves edged in lace. Yet despite her lack of clothing she didn’t seem cold; she was smiling at me, her soft blonde hair blowing in the wind, her delicate hands interlaced over her bulging belly. This was Lyn, my ex-partner, as I’d known her over five years ago when she’d been pregnant with Kate. She’d been beautiful then, and sane. Now she was not. Lyn was still alive – or at least, she had been on the day I’d left the twenty-first century. But this version of Lyn was a ghost of happier times.
It was only my reluctance to wake up the rest of the house that stopped me banging on the window, calling her name. I raised a hand – Wait there! – then ran out of the room and across the hallway to the front door.
My hands were all thumbs as I fumbled at the locks. As soon as the door was open I catapulted outside, the cold hitting me like a slap. My instinct was to veer immediately left and keep running, through the snow and around to where I hoped Lyn would be waiting. However, I knew I had to be careful. This might be a trick, designed to draw me out, or destabilise me into leaving the house open to attack.
Feverishly I tugged the door closed behind me, trying not to bang it, and twisted the key in the lock. Then, ignoring the instinct to sprint, I moved swiftly but cautiously around the side of the house, keeping close to the wall, my head darting back and forth as I peered in to the shadows that clustered around and beneath each clump of foliage, trying to cover every angle at once.
Reaching the corner of the house, I sidled around the wall, clutching my howdah. Although I was pointing the pistol at the ground – she might have been an apparition, but I didn’t want Lyn to see me aiming a gun at her – I was more than prepared to jerk it into a shooting position if need be.
As soon as I rounded the corner, I looked across to where Lyn had been standing, and a plume of breath jetted from my mouth as I groaned in despair. She had gone, slipped away, before I could fully connect with her. It was as if she wasn’t properly anchored to this world. As if she was an errant radio signal, elusive, easily lost.
But then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a flash of movement, white against the grey-white of the snow. My head snapped round, and the lurch that my heart gave this time was one of joy, because there she was, drifting around the next corner like a winter spirit.
I hurried after her, half expecting one of the men watching the house to emerge from hiding to check I was okay. I wondered, if they did, whether they’d be able to see what I was seeing, or whether Lyn was visible only to me, my own personal phantom.
Again I wondered whether this was a trap. Since my first encounter with the shape-shifter I’d lived in a world of suspicion. I rounded the second corner, aware I was at the back of the house now, where it was darkest. The glow of the streetlamps, which filtered through the trees and bushes that bordered my property, was so dim it was almost negligible. For a moment I couldn’t see anything but blurred grey shapes on a dark background. I narrowed my eyes, hoping it would bring things into focus, and partially it did.
Lyn was standing two-thirds along the length of the back wall, close to the house. Her head was a pale oval blur above the paler, more voluminous glimmer of her nightshirt. She was facing me, though her right arm seemed to be pointing at the house. Even though I was wary, even though I was clutching the howdah in an icy grip that made my hand ache, I felt a sudden, unexpected pang of longing. At that moment I wished more than anything that I could turn back time, return to that blissful period when Lyn had been sane and beautiful and radiant with life. Back then the two of us had been completely in love, completely happy, and our life together had seemed so simple, untroubled, full of promise.
And then he had come. The Dark Man. Lyn’s personal demon. He had stepped into our perfect world and torn it apart.
Less than six years ago that had been. And yet from this vantage point it seemed like forever. Lyn wasn’t dead, not physically, and yet the Lyn that I had known was dead. She’d been my one true chance of happiness, and she’d been taken from me. Everything else was damage limitation.
At once I felt angry, resentful. I stepped forward, more than prepared to fight, if a fight was what was coming.
‘Why are you here?’ I said gruffly. ‘Why do you keep tormenting me?’
She said nothing. I couldn’t see her face. After a moment she seemed to drift backwards, to melt into the darkness.
‘No you don’t,’ I said, rushing forward, but it was already too late. I knew I was being rash. Hurtling onwards with no notion of what might be waiting for me.
Yet I kept going. Pushing through the darkness. Until eventually I was standing where she had stood moments before. There was no evidence she’d even been there. No footsteps in the snow, no lingering scent on the air. All was silent and still.
So why had she come?
Then I remembered how she had been standing, her right arm extended outwards from her body. I looked at the window she’d been standing beside – and my breath caught in my throat. There were not just fingerprints covering the rime of frost coating the glass this time, but words.
I tilted my head, trying to make them out in the gloom. The light that filtered through was the faintest of gleams, yet by moving my head back and forth, I could just make out what Lyn had etched into the frost with her finger.
Like a child learning to read I spelled out each letter, whispering to myself as I formed them into words.
‘T… E… M… P…’
By the time I’d deciphered the entire message, I’d given up all hope of sleep.