When Phyllis tumbled out of the TimePocket onto her basement stairs, her knee was no longer a mass of stabbing pain. It felt as good as normal.
She stopped at the bottom of the stairs and rubbed her leg. Seems that an injury is only real at the Time and place it occurred, she thought. Maybe if I went back there, my knee would be killing me again.
She vowed she’d never return to the Froux-Froux Levité Opera House on the 24th of October, 1931, if she could at all help it.
Daisy leapt off the sofa and bounced over. Phyllis scooped her up and snuggled the pup into her chest. Daisy gave her a quick snouting under her chin, and then wriggled to be put down on the floor again; it had only been a few minutes in present Time since Phyllis had Transited to Paris, and Daisy didn’t feel the need to give her a longer welcome back.
Phyllis took off her coat and sat on the sofa. She took out her cell phone and called Clement.
‘Clem?’
‘Phyll?’ He sounded anxious. ‘You back already?’
‘Uh-huh. Can you—?’
‘How’d it go? You okay?’
‘Yeah, I’ll tell you all about it when we meet. Can you be outside Police Headquarters in twenty minutes?’
‘Sure.’
‘Good. I’ll take this makeup off and see you then.’ And she rang off.
She wanted Clement to be with her when she met with the Chief Inspector. Even though Barry Inglis was aware of the world in which she moved, this was going to be a story that might need back-up.
‘Myrddin?’ Barry Inglis repeated. He was sitting behind his desk, looking confused.
‘Also known as Merlin,’ said Clement, before Phyllis could elucidate any further. It was the first time Clem had been into Barry’s office and he was all goggle-eyed. ‘Hey, you’ve got some view, Baz,’ he said, going over to the windows and looking out over City Park as he stroked his fake ginger goatee.
‘Chief Inspector to you, Clement.’
‘Sorry, Chief Inspector.’
‘I know who Merlin is,’ said Barry. ‘I’ve read the stories and seen the movies. But surely he was just a myth, Miss Wong?’
‘No, Chief Inspector. He’s real. He’s the one who created the TimePockets and Transiting.’
‘Good lord,’ he uttered.
Phyllis said, ‘I didn’t tell you this part of the story before—only the stuff about Sturdy and W.W.—because you seemed to have enough on your plate with the Sturdy attacks.’
‘Which are still happening, Miss Wong. Another three people pushed in the way of buses and down stairs and into ponds. Every time, we see Sturdy on the CCTV footage. And every time, he gets away.’
Clement listened intently to all of this . . . he had no idea all this had been going on.
‘I think I know what he’s up to,’ said Phyllis.
Barry gave her his steady detective’s gaze. ‘Enlighten me.’
Phyllis did. She told him of Wallace Wong’s quest to find the wizard. She told him about her trip to Stonehenge with Daisy and Clem and how they’d found the inscription in the eclipse, and how they’d gone to Calanais and stumbled into Myrddin’s belvedere over seven hundred years ago. She told him of the connection between Myrddin and Perkus and the theft of Jaunty Jasper.
Then she said, ‘But now it gets really serious. When I first went into Sturdy’s dressing room, before he caught me in there, I saw some books on his dressing table. They were dark books, Chief Inspector. They were of a magic that shouldn’t be; not magic like my stage and parlour magic, but magic that pulls out black things from places that we don’t know about.’
Barry Inglis frowned, and a small shudder went up his back as he listened carefully to the conjuror’s low, grave tones.
Clement came back to the desk. He stood beside Phyllis, who was sitting with Daisy in her lap.
Phyllis continued: ‘One of the books was called Dark Secrets, and the other, Bringing Forth the Whimpering.’
‘The Whimpering?’ said Barry. ‘Good lord, what on Earth—?’
‘We first came across a mention of the Whimpering—The Great Whimpering,’ said Phyllis, pulling out her Transiting journal and flicking through it, ‘when we discovered the Stonehenge inscription. This is what it said.’ She found where she’d copied the words, and read them aloud:
‘ “The Great Whimpering will see the final days of this world. But it will not be here . . . it will not be until after the reigns of many kings beyond your time. No great winds or storms. No mighty destructions. Merely the Great Whimpering, and the collapsing of the knowledges above . . .” ’
‘The end of the world!’ Clement added.
Daisy barked loudly.
‘That was written to King Arthur, from Myrddin,’ Phyllis continued.
‘Many kings beyond his time,’ said Barry. ‘Now is a very long time after Arthur . . .’
Phyllis flicked further through her journal. ‘Then, on my last trip, just a few minutes ago, I went back to the theatre in 1931, to the same date as the time before. When I got there Sturdy had already stolen Jaunty Jasper, and his dressing room was empty. But I discovered that he’d written something.’ She found the page where she’d rubbed in the words from the dressing table, and read them aloud:
‘ “to wreak Great Whimpering
obliterate Mantle
come to my Time! come for your magic, Myrddin!” ’
‘The Mantle?’ Barry gasped. ‘He intends to . . . obliterate the Mantle?’
‘What’s the Mantle?’ Clement asked.
‘Ah,’ said Barry. ‘It’s only just been announced in the last few days. It’s an enormous new superhighway for all cloud-based technology. Internet, data storage, you name it. They say it’ll speed up access to information by up to five hundred per cent or something. And they reckon it’ll be a person-based platform that could even be activated by your own shadow.’
‘Wow!’ gasped Clement. ‘Imagine how fast you could battle zombies!’
‘They must’ve announced it while we were Transiting,’ said Phyllis.
‘And it’s reported that the satellites of the Mantle will be positioned at so many spots above the planet there won’t be anywhere in the world that won’t have access to it. It’s going to be launched in a few days,’ said Barry. His brow creased.
‘Hey,’ said Clement, ‘that’s probably why the net’s been going down so often lately. They’re setting up the Mantle, and everything’s shifting around. Maybe?’
Barry regarded him thoughtfully.
‘Or maybe Sturdy’s been meddling,’ said Phyllis.
Barry looked at her. ‘Go on, Miss Wong.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘if he’s into wicked magic, he could’ve found ways to disrupt the web. But maybe his magic isn’t powerful enough to bring down something as colossal as the Mantle. Maybe he knows that, and he knows that he needs a more powerful magician . . .’ Suddenly some of the words from the Stonehenge inscription came rushing into her mind. ‘ “The collapsing of the knowledges above,” ’ she gasped. ‘He’s bringing the power here!’
‘So, he’s enticing Merlin—’ began Barry.
‘Myrddin,’ interjected Clement.
‘Myrddin,’ Barry said, giving Clem a there’s no need to split hairs look.
Phyllis took up the thought: ‘So he’s enticing Myrddin to come here—“come to my Time!”—and do the deed! To destroy the satellites!’ She quickly stood, dropping Daisy to the carpet. ‘He’s holding Myrddin to ransom, with Jaunty Jasper!’
‘Ransom?’ said Barry.
‘He wants Myrddin to come and do the task for him. To wreak the more powerful magic. Then, and only then, will he give Jasper back to him,’ Phyllis said.
Barry scratched his head. ‘But a ventriloquist’s dummy?’ he wondered. ‘What’s so valuable about a lump of wood that talks and sings?’
Phyllis’s dark eyes narrowed. ‘Jasper’s no ordinary dummy. No. There’s something different about it. Something I saw in the back of it. Perhaps Sturdy saw it, too. Perhaps that’s how he figured that Jasper belongs to Myrddin, and that Hercule S. Perkus was really the wizard.’
‘What is it?’ Barry asked. ‘What did you see?’
Phyllis bit her lip and pictured the scene again in her mind’s eye. ‘I’m not sure,’ she answered after a few moments. ‘I saw it in the opening of Jasper’s back, where Perkus would’ve put his hand to work the dummy. I don’t know what it was, but it was weird . . .’
‘Weird?’ The Chief Inspector waited for more, as did Clement, but all they got was a look of perplexity on Phyllis’s face.
Barry stood and went to the window. ‘Well,’ he reflected, ‘weird is certainly the word for everything that’s going on. But in my acquaintance with you, Miss Wong, the whole notion of weird loses much of its meaning. You move in enlightened circles.’
‘So,’ Phyllis said, ‘do you think I’m right?’
He turned and addressed her. ‘If anyone’s right about anything when it comes to all this, your thinking is probably closer to the mark than anyone else’s.’
‘So what should we do?’
‘Yeah, Baz—er, Chief, what do we do?’
‘First things first,’ said Barry. ‘The most important thing is we have to get Myrddin here, into our Time. If he doesn’t come, that deranged Alexander Sturdy will continue wreaking havoc, hurting people, and worse . . . but at least if you, Miss Wong, can bring Myrddin, there’s a chance—and we don’t know how strong a chance, but a chance is better than a poke in the eye—that we can flush Sturdy out and apprehend him. We can lock him up, away from any stairs, so he can’t Transit away again . . . It’s a gamble, I admit, if Sturdy gets the upper hand on Myrddin. But it’s a gamble we have to take. These attacks have to be stopped!’
‘We’ll go back to Calanais,’ said Phyllis, ‘and see if we can find Myrddin again.’
‘You must find him,’ Barry insisted. ‘People’s lives are at stake, not to mention the entire fabric of humankind’s knowledge and freedom. If Sturdy gets his way, if he does bring down the Mantle, then life as we know it will be plunged back into times long past. And people will suffer.’
‘What if Myrddin doesn’t want to come here?’ asked Clement.
‘You’ll have to persuade him,’ Barry said to Phyllis.
Phyllis nodded. Then her face clouded. All at once she felt like she had the full weight of the world pressing down upon her shoulders.