A Tale of Time City

“Dears, if you’ve finished your sweet you can run along,” Jenny said. “It’s quite late and Jonathan looks tired.”

Vivian saw that they were being got rid of so that the grown-ups could talk about the Time Lady. Sempitern Walker made that quite clear by leaning back in his chair and fixing them with an agonised stare as they went out. “None of what we said is to go beyond this room,” he said. “I put you both on your honour.”

“Yes, Father,” Jonathan said in a subdued mutter. It was no wonder Jenny had said Jonathan was tired, Vivian thought as they went across the hall. Jonathan was white and his head hung.

“Is something the matter?” she asked.

But Jonathan refused to speak until they had reached his room. Then he flung himself into an empty-frame chair so hard that his pigtail bounded, and threatened to make an emotional scene. “Curse those two time-ghosts!” he almost shrieked. “They made me quite sure you were the Time Lady! But you’re not, are you? I could tell you were a real Twenty Century person with every word you said. Mickey Mouse!” he yelled. “And I’m stuck with you while she’s still out there messing history up!”

“Well, I told you,” Vivian said. A great relief was growing in her. As soon as Jonathan mentioned the time-ghosts, she knew how she was going to get home.

“I hate feeling a fool like this!” Jonathan snarled with his face in his fists and his pigtail draped over his arm.

Vivian took a long happy breath. “I bet I know,” she said, “how you can find the real Time Lady.”

5 TIME-LOCK (#ulink_e3d6b9a3-d76f-5c7b-9ab8-0411e60c89ea)

“No, you don’t,” Jonathan said flatly. “My father and Mr Enkian and Sam’s father went to that station in 1939 and she gave them all the slip. And me too, for that matter.”

“Yes, but I know how she did it,” Vivian said.

“Prove it,” said Jonathan.

“All right,” said Vivian. For lack of anywhere better, she sat on the empty-frame table. The nothing creaked a bit, but it held her up. “She was on that train, wasn’t she? That was why you were all there.”

“I don’t know. All I overheard in the Chronologue was the place and the time. I worked the rest out from seeing our time-ghosts,” Jonathan said. “And I got it wrong,” he added morbidly.

“Just listen,” said Vivian. “Everyone else on that train went straight along to the exit to be shared out to homes. And they were all children on that train – I know that for a fact. So she must be quite small – small enough to pass herself off as an evacuee, mustn’t she?”

Jonathan nodded. He had taken his face out of his fists and was trying not to look too hopeful. “All right. She puts her hand trustingly into a farmer’s wife’s hand and off she goes. How do we find out which farmer’s wife?”

“Easy,” said Vivian. “We go and see Cousin Marty. She lives there. It’s a small place and she’ll know everyone. She can tell us who took in which children, and we only have to go round the houses like detectives to find her.”

Jonathan half sprang up. Then he flopped down again. “It’s no good. She’s time-travelling by now. Didn’t you hear what Sam’s father said about the war in the nineteen-eighties? That must mean she’s got as far as that now.”

As far as Vivian knew, this might have been true. But if she let Jonathan think that, she would never get home. “Not if we go back to the precise moment on the station,” she said persuasively. “We can catch her before she sets off.”

Jonathan sprang up properly. “It might work!” Then he flopped down once more. “It’s no good. We can’t get near a private time-lock after Sam got found with the keys.”

“Can’t we use an ordinary time-lock? Say we’re going to – to the Hundredth Century and change it secretly?” Vivian asked.

“Not a chance!” said Jonathan. “The public locks are all monitored. They don’t let people our age anywhere near the Unstable Eras.”

So this meant Vivian had to use the idea the time-ghosts had given her. Though she had meant to lead up to it all through, it seemed very shaky now she came to put it into words. “But what about our time-ghosts?” she said. “We were coming from somewhere. And we had a look – I mean, we’d be all excited like that if we’d just found a secret time-lock, wouldn’t we?”

“You’ve got it!” Jonathan shouted. He leapt up, crashed out of his room, and went racing downwards through the Palace. Vivian flew after him to keep him excited. The little ghostly blue flowers circling round her white sleeves kept reminding her that she and Jonathan were in different clothes from the time-ghosts. She was fairly sure they would not find a time-lock. But she did not point this out in case Jonathan got depressed again.

Jonathan probably knew something was not quite right. He turned to her with a nervous smile as he moved the chain across to open the old door. “This is too easy. We can’t be going to find anything.” The door creaked open. Jonathan shut it securely behind them and turned on a light that Vivian had not known was there. The stone walls and floor stretched in front of them, very blank and empty. “You walk down here,” Jonathan said. “And I’ll tell you to stop when you get to the place where the ghosts start.”

Vivian paced slowly towards the door to the Chronologue at the other end. A few yards before she reached it, Jonathan called out, “Stop! Can you see anything?”

Vivian looked at the stone floor, the arched stone ceiling, and the bare stone walls. They were all plain, except for a place in the left-hand wall where an old archway had been stopped up with smaller stones than the rest. “There’s a—” she began, pointing. But she found herself speaking through the thump of sprinting feet and Jonathan arrived before she could say another word.

“Let’s see! Let’s see!” he said, shaking and wild with excitement. He put both hands to the smaller stones of the blocked arch and shoved. He pushed this way, and he pushed that. Nothing happened. “I know it must open!” Jonathan cried out, and he kicked the stones the way he kicked the church-organ in his room. “Ow!” he said, hopping on one foot, holding the other in both hands. “I forgot I was wearing sand—!”

The wall of stones swung round, pivoting in the middle of the archway, to leave a narrow black opening on both sides. A dry, dusty smell came out. Jonathan let go of his foot and stared, so white with excitement that his face seemed all flicker from his sight function.

“We found it!” he whispered.

“How do we know it’s a time-lock?” Vivian said. Her plan had worked so easily that it scared her. And she felt very nervous of those yawning black slits.

“We go and look,” Jonathan said. He pressed a stud on his belt and it suddenly gave him a halo of light, as if he were yet another ghost. “This only lasts about five minutes,” he said, sounding quite as nervous as Vivian felt. “We’ll have to be quick.” He started to edge his way into the nearest opening. The light from his belt showed that the back of the swivelled wall was made of something old and grey that was not stone. The stones were just a disguise.

He was halfway through when the door from the Palace creaked. Sam’s voice boomed down the passage. “What are you doing?”

I might have known! Vivian thought. There had to be a reason why those ghosts were in different clothes! “Hush!” she called. “It’s a secret time-lock.”

Sam came down the passage at a rolling, pounding run and got to the archway just as Vivian was edging through after Jonathan. “Just at the right moment!” he said gleefully, in what was meant to be a whisper. “I have all the luck!”

“Shouldn’t you be in bed?” Vivian whispered hopelessly as Sam squeezed through the slit on the opposite side of the wall.

“Of course not!” said Sam. “Hey! There are stairs going down!”

Jonathan was halfway round the turn of a spiral stair that was the only thing in the square stone space beyond the archway. Vivian and Sam followed the unearthly greenish glow from his belt, round and down, and round and down again. The stone steps were steep enough to give Sam trouble and, as they went lower, the steps got steeper still. Each one was a massive block of old stone. By the end, Sam was sitting down, sliding from block to block. Vivian was holding on to the huge wedge-shaped stairs in the ceiling overhead and lowering herself gently, and even Jonathan was having to go carefully. The place felt awfully old. Oldness pressed quietly in on them from all round. It was a cold, non-human feeling.

Vivian thought of the giant stone shape of Faber John, sleeping under the City. Could he have made the bottom stairs long ago? she wondered. And ordinary-sized people built the top ones later?

“I’m down,” Jonathan said softly.

They slid down the last step to join him in a small room built of the same enormous stones. Facing them was a plain sheet of slate, let into the wall like a door. It was glimmering faintly, with little flickers chasing across it. Beside it, one of the stones of the wall stuck out a short way. There was a hollow in the top of it and a thing like a grey goose-egg lay in the hollow. There was nothing else in the room at all.