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  He was surprised by what he saw when he got there.

  34

   THE STORMS OF the day before, and of the day before that, and the floods of the previous week, had now abated. The skies still bulged with rain, but all that actually fell in the gathering evening gloom was a dreary kind of prickle.

  Some wind whipped across the darkening plain, blundered through the low hills and gusted across a shallow valley where stood a structure, a kind of tower, alone in a nightmare of mud, and leaning.

  It was a blackened stump of a tower. It stood like an extrusion of magma from one of the more pestilential pits of hell, and it leaned at a peculiar angle, as if oppressed by something altogether more terrible than its own considerable weight. It seemed a dead thing, long ages dead.

  The only movement was that of a river of mud that moved sluggishly along the bottom of the valley past the tower. A mile or so farther on, the river ran down a ravine and disappeared underground.

  But as the evening darkened it became apparent that the tower was not entirely without life. There was a single dim red light guttering deep within it.

  It was this scene that Richard was surprised to see from a small white doorway set in the side of the valley wall, a few hundred yards from the tower.

  “Don’t step out!” said Dirk, putting up an arm, “The atmosphere is poisonous. I’m not sure what’s in it but it would certainly get your carpets nice and clean.”

  Dirk was standing in the doorway watching the valley with deep mistrust.

  “Where are we?” asked Richard.

  “Bermuda,” said Dirk. “It’s a bit complicated.”

  “Thank you,” said Richard and walked groggily back across the room.

  “Excuse me,” he said to Reg, who was busy fussing round Michael Wenton-Weakes, making sure that the scuba-diving suit he was wearing fitted snugly everywhere, that the mask was secure and that the regulator for the air supply was working properly.

  “Sorry, can I just get past?” said Richard. “Thanks.”

  He climbed back up the stairs, went back into Reg’s bedroom, sat shakily on the edge of the bed and picked up the phone again.

  “Bermuda—” he said “—it’s a bit complicated.”

  Downstairs, Reg finished smearing Vaseline on all the joins of the suit and the few pieces of exposed skin around the mask, and then announced that all was ready.

  Dirk swung himself away from the door and stood aside with the utmost bad grace.

  “Well then,” he said, “be off with you. Good riddance. I wash my hands of the whole affair. I suppose we will have to wait here for you to send back the empty, for what it’s worth.” He stalked around the sofa with an angry gesture. He didn’t like this. He didn’t like any of it. He particularly didn’t like Reg knowing more about space/time than he did. It made him angry that he didn’t know why he didn’t like it.

  “My dear fellow,” said Reg in a conciliatory tone, “consider what a very small effort it is for us to help the poor soul. I’m sorry if it seems to you an anticlimax after all your extraordinary feats of deduction. I know you feel that a mere errand of mercy seems not enough for you, but you should be more charitable.”

  “Charitable, ha!” said Dirk. “I pay my taxes, what more do you want?”

  He threw himself onto the sofa, ran his hands through his hair and sulked.

  The possessed figure of Michael shook hands with Reg and said a few words of thanks. Then he walked stiffly to the door, turned and bowed to them both.

  Dirk flung his head round and glared at him, his eyes flashing behind their spectacles and his hair flying wildly. The ghost looked at Dirk, and for a moment shivered inside with apprehension. A superstitious instinct suddenly made the ghost wave. He waved Michael’s hand round in a circle, three times, and then said a single word.

  “Goodbye,” he said.

  With that he turned again, gripped the sides of the doorway and stepped resolutely out into the mud, and into the foul and poisonous wind.

  He paused for a moment to be sure that his footing was solid, that he had his balance, and then without another look back he walked away from them, out of the reach of the slimy things with legs, toward his ship.

  “Now, what on earth did that mean?” said Dirk, irritably mimicking the odd triple wave.

  Richard came thundering down the stairs, threw open the door, and plunged into the room, wild-eyed.

  “Ross has been murdered!” he shouted.

  “Who the hell’s Ross?” shouted Dirk back at him.

  “Whatsisname Ross, for God’s sake,” exclaimed Richard, “the new editor of Fathom.”

  “What’s Fathom?” shouted Dirk again.

  “Michael’s bloody magazine, Dirk! Remember? Gordon chucked Michael off the magazine and gave it to this Ross guy to run instead. Michael hated him for that. Well, last night Michael went and bloody murdered him!”

  He paused, panting. “At least,” he said, “he was murdered. And Michael was the only one with any reason to.”

  He ran to the door, looked out at the retreating figure disappearing into the gloom, and spun around again.

  “Is he coming back?” said Richard.

  Dirk leaped to his feet and stood blinking for a moment.

  “That’s it . . .” he said. “That’s why Michael was the perfect subject. That’s what I should have been looking for. The thing the ghost made him do in order to establish his hold, the thing he had to be fundamentally willing to do, the thing that would match the ghost’s own purpose. Oh my dear God. He thinks we’ve supplanted them and that’s what he wants to reverse.

  “He thinks this is their world not ours. This was where they were going to settle and build their blasted paradise. It matches every step of the way.

  “You see,” he said, turning on Reg, “what we have done? I would not be surprised to discover that the accident your poor tormented soul out there is trying to reverse is the very thing which started life on this planet!”

  He turned his eyes suddenly from Reg, who was white and trembling, back to Richard.

  “When did you hear this?” Dirk said, puzzled.

  “Er, just now,” said Richard, “on . . . on the phone. Upstairs.”

  “What?”

  “It was Susan, I don’t know how—said she had a message on her answering machine telling her about it. She said the message . . . was from—she said it was from Gordon, but I think she was hysterical. Dirk, what the hell is happening? Where are we?”

  “We are four billion years in the past,” said Reg in a shaking voice. “Please don’t ask me why it is that the phone works when we are anywhere in the Universe other than where it’s actually connected, that’s a matter you will have to take up with British Telecom, but—”

  “Damn and blast British Telecom,” shouted Dirk, the words coming easily from force of habit. He ran to the door and peered again at the dim shadowy figure trudging through the mud toward the Salaxalan ship, completely beyond their reach.

  “How long,” said Dirk, quite calmly, “would you guess that it’s going to take that fat self-deluding bastard to reach his ship? Because that is how long we have.

  “Come. Let us sit down. Let us think. We have two minutes in which to decide what we are going to do. After that, I very much suspect that the three of us, and everything we have ever known, including the coelacanth and the dodo, dear Professor, will cease ever to have existed.”

  He sat heavily on the sofa, then stood up again and removed Michael’s discarded jacket from under him. As he did so, a book fell out of the pocket.

  35

   “I THINK IT’S an appalling act of desecration,” said Richard to Reg as they sat hiding behind a hedge.

  The night was full of summer smells from the cottage garden and the occasional whiff of sea air which came in on the light breezes that were entertaining themselves on the coast of the Bristol Channel.

  There was a bright moon playing over the sea off in the distance,
and by its light it was also possible to see some distance over Exmoor stretching away to the south of them.

  Reg sighed.

  “Yes, maybe,” he said, “but I’m afraid he’s right, you know, it must be done. It was the only sure way. All the instructions were clearly contained in the piece once you knew what you were looking for. It has to be suppressed. The ghost will always be around. In fact two of him now. That is, assuming this works. Poor devil. Still, I suppose he brought it on himself.”

  Richard fretfully pulled up some blades of grass and twisted them between his fingers.

  He held them up to the moonlight, turned them to different angles and watched the way light played on them.

  “Such music,” he said. “I’m not religious, but if I were I would say it was like a glimpse into the mind of God. Perhaps it was and I ought to be religious. I have to keep reminding myself that they didn’t create the music, they only created the instrument which could read the score. And the score was life itself. And it’s all up there.”

  He glanced into the sky. Unconsciously he started to quote:

  “Could I revive within me

  Her symphony and song

  To such a deep delight ’twould win me

  That with music loud and long

  I would build that dome in air,

  That sunny dome, those caves of ice!”

  “Hmmm,” said Reg to himself, “I wonder if he arrived early enough.”

  “What did you say?”

  “Oh, nothing. Just a thought.”

  “Good God, he can talk, can’t he?” Richard exclaimed suddenly. “He’s been in there over an hour now. I wonder what’s going on.”

  He got up and looked over the hedge at the small farm cottage basking in the moonlight behind them. About an hour earlier Dirk had walked boldly up to the front door and rapped on it.

  When the door had opened, somewhat reluctantly, and a slightly dazed face had looked out, Dirk had doffed his absurd hat and said in a loud voice, “Mr Samuel Coleridge?

  “I was just passing by, on my way from Porlock, you understand, and I was wondering if I might trouble you to vouchsafe me an interview? It’s just for a little parish broadsheet I edit. Won’t take much of your time, I promise, I know you must be busy, famous poet like you, but I do so admire your work, and . . .”

  The rest was lost, because by that time Dirk had effected his entry and closed the door behind him.

  “Would you excuse me a moment?” said Reg.

  “What? Oh sure,” said Richard, “I’m just going to have a look and see what’s happening.”

  While Reg wandered off behind a tree Richard pushed open the little gate and was just about to make his way up the path when he heard the sound of voices approaching the front door from within.

  He hurriedly darted back as the front door started to open.

  “Well, thank you very much indeed, Mr Coleridge,” said Dirk, as he emerged, fiddling with his hat and bowing. “You have been most kind and generous with your time, and I do appreciate it very much, as I’m sure will my readers. I’m sure it will work up into a very nice little article, a copy of which you may rest assured I will send you for you to peruse at your leisure. I will most certainly welcome your comments if you have any, any points of style, you know, hints, tips, things of that nature. Well, thank you again so much for your time, I do hope I haven’t kept you from anything important—”

  The door slammed violently behind him.

  Dirk turned with another in a long succession of triumphant beams and hurried down the path to Richard.

  “Well, that’s put a stop to that,” he said, patting his hands together. “I think he’d made a start on writing it down, but he won’t remember another word, that’s for certain. Where’s the egregious Professor? Ah, there you are. Good heavens, I’d no idea I’d been that long. A most fascinating and entertaining fellow, our Mr Coleridge, or at least I’m sure he would have been if I’d given him the chance, but I was rather too busy being fascinating myself.

  “Oh, but I did do as you asked, Richard, I asked him at the end about the albatross and he said what albatross? So I said, oh it wasn’t important, the albatross did not signify. He said what albatross didn’t signify, and I said never mind the albatross, it didn’t matter, and he said it did matter—someone comes to his house in the middle of the night raving about albatrosses, he wanted to know why. I said blast the bloody albatross and he said he had a good mind to and he wasn’t certain that that didn’t give him an idea for a poem he was working on. Much better, he said, than being hit by an asteroid, which he thought was stretching credulity a bit. And so I came away.

  “Now. Having saved the entire human race from extinction I could do with a pizza. What say you to such a proposal?”

  Richard didn’t offer an opinion. He was staring instead with some puzzlement at Reg.

  “Something troubling you?” said Reg, taken aback.

  “That’s a good trick,” said Richard. “I could have sworn you didn’t have a beard before you went behind the tree.”

  “Oh—” Reg fingered the luxuriant three-inch growth. “Yes,” he said. “Just carelessness,” he said, “carelessness.”

  “What have you been up to?”

  “Oh, just a few adjustments. A little surgery, you understand. Nothing drastic.”

  A few minutes later, as he ushered them into the extra door that a nearby cowshed had mysteriously acquired, he looked back up into the sky behind them, just in time to see a small light flare up and disappear.

  “Sorry, Richard,” he muttered, and followed them in.

  36

   “ THANK YOU, NO,” said Richard firmly, “much as I would love the opportunity to buy you a pizza and watch you eat it, Dirk, I want to go straight home. I have to see Susan. Is that possible, Reg? Just straight to my flat? I’ll come up to Cambridge next week and collect my car.”

  “We are already there,” said Reg. “Simply step out of the door, and you are home in your own flat. It is early on Friday evening and the weekend lies before you.”

  “Thanks. Er, look, Dirk, I’ll see you around, OK? Do I owe you something? I don’t know.”

  Dirk waved the matter aside airily. “You will hear from my Miss Pearce in due course,” he said.

  “Fine, OK, well, I’ll see you when I’ve had some rest. It’s been, well, unexpected.”

  He walked to the door and opened it. Stepping outside he found himself halfway up his own staircase, in the wall of which the door had materialized.

  He was about to start up the stairs when he turned again as a thought struck him. He stepped back in, closing the door behind him.

  “Reg, could we make one tiny detour?” he said. “I think it would be a good move if I took Susan out for a meal tonight, only the place I have in mind you have to book in advance. Could you manage three weeks for me?”

  “Nothing could be easier,” said Reg, and made a subtle adjustment to the disposition of the beads on the abacus. “There,” he said. “We have traveled backward in time three weeks. You know where the phone is.”

  Richard hurried up the internal staircase to Reg’s bedroom and phoned L’Esprit d’Escalier. The maître d’ was charmed and delighted to take his reservation, and looked forward to seeing him in three weeks’ time. Richard went back downstairs shaking his head in wonder.

  “I need a weekend of solid reality,” he said. “Who was that just going out of the door?”

  “That,” said Dirk, “was your sofa being delivered. The man asked if we minded him opening the door so they could maneuver it round and I said we would be delighted.”

  It was only a few minutes later that Richard found himself hurrying up the stairs to Susan’s flat. As he arrived at her front door he was pleased, as he always was, to hear the deep tones of her cello coming faintly from within. He quietly let himself in, and then as he walked to the door of her music room he suddenly froze in astonishment. The tune she was playing was one h
e had heard before. A little tripping tune that slowed, then danced again but with more difficulty . . .

  His face was so amazed that she stopped playing the instant she saw him.

  “What’s wrong?” she said, alarmed.

  “Where did you get that music?” said Richard in a whisper.

  She shrugged. “Well, from the music shop,” she said, puzzled. She wasn’t being facetious, she simply didn’t understand the question.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s from a cantata I’m playing in in a couple of weeks,” she said, “Bach, number six.”

  “Who wrote it?”

  “Well, Bach, I expect. If you think about it.”

  “Who?”

  “Watch my lips. Bach. B-A-C-H. Johann Sebastian. Remember?”

  “No, never heard of him. Who is he? Did he write anything else?”

  Susan put down her bow, propped up her cello, stood up and came over to him.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  “Er, it’s rather hard to tell. What’s . . .”

  He caught sight of a pile of music books sitting in a corner of the room with the same name on the top one. BACH. He threw himself at the pile and started to scrabble through it. Book after book—J. S. BACH. Cello sonatas. Brandenburg Concertos. A Mass in B Minor.

  He looked up at her in blank incomprehension.

  “I’ve never seen any of this before,” he said.

  “Richard my darling,” she said, putting her hand to his cheek, “what on earth’s the matter? It’s just Bach sheet music.”

  “But don’t you understand?” he said, shaking a handful of the stuff. “I’ve never, ever seen any of this before!”

  “Well,” she said with mock gravity, “perhaps if you didn’t spend all your time playing with computer music . . .”

  He looked at her with wild surprise, then slowly he sat back against the wall and began to laugh hysterically.