A Tale of Time City

“What? From the future?” said Vivian.

“Yes, but it isn’t really the future here,” Jonathan explained. “I told you how Time City uses the same small piece of time over and over again. Past and future go round and round, so they’re almost the same thing. What did you think of the Endless ghost?” he asked her eagerly. “Did he mean anything to you?”

The only thing Vivian could think of was Robin Hood because of the green clothes. “No,” she said. “Should he?”

Jonathan looked a little disappointed. “Well, a fresh mind from an Unstable Era,” he said. “You might have had a new idea. Let’s have lunch before the tourists fill all the cafés.”

“Butter-pies. You promised,” said Sam.

“I said No,” said Jonathan. “Ordinary food. It’s cheaper.”

“Slant-eyed meanie!” Sam muttered. But he took care to say it when Jonathan was pushing through the crowd some way ahead.

They went up steps between the houses. These steps were called The Decades and there were ten steps between every landing, until they were quite high up near the golden dome of The Years. There was a place to buy food at the top, with a slant of lawn to eat it on, under an old grey tower. They had sweet buns with meat in them, sitting in the sun, which was warm, but not too warm. I’m enjoying this! Vivian thought. I feel like a tourist on holiday! While they ate, Jonathan and Sam told her about other once-ghosts. There was a man who dived daily into the River Time, trying to rescue a drowning girl; the Time Patroller who got shot in the hall of Millennium; and the girl who was a Lee, and therefore a long-ago ancestress of Sam’s and Jonathan’s, who threw her engagement-ring angrily into the fountain in Century Place every day at sunset.

“She was awfully embarrassed about it later,” Jonathan said, getting up. “She nearly left Time City, but she couldn’t face living in history. Get moving, Sam. I want to show V.S. Faber John while the tourists are eating.”

“You mean he’s still here!” Vivian said.

“You’ll see,” said Sam, with his largest two-toothed grin.

The way to Faber John was at the bottom of the old tower, below the lawn. There was a dark doorway down there, with a lady in the dimness inside who demanded to see Jonathan’s credit. When Jonathan pressed his belt stud and held out his hand, the glowing green numbers on his palm changed quite noticeably as the lady punched a machine in front of her. This was expensive. Vivian understood now why Jonathan had been so careful to buy a cheap lunch.

After that, they went down a flight of steps with a rope railing, down and down, under little balls of blue light fixed in the rocky ceiling, until they came to a muddy floor deep under Time City. They could hear laughs and shrieks from a few tourists ahead of them, but those were nearly drowned by a noise of water pouring and dripping. Round a rocky corner, there was a notice.

FABER JOHN’S WELL: A Drink brings Health and Luck, it said, in letters almost too strange for Vivian to read. Beyond that, water came gushing from a groove in the roof and spilt into a small stone basin that was obviously made naturally from the water wearing the rock. A few coins glittered under its dark ripples.

“You don’t need to pay,” said Sam.

All the same, Vivian dropped a big round penny with 1934 on it into the strange little well. She felt she needed some luck to get her back home. Then she took one of a stack of jewelled goblets from one side and held it under the running water. The goblet was really only papery stuff, but it looked so real Vivian decided to keep it. The water tasted fresh and slightly rusty, both at once.

She followed Sam and Jonathan along the bends of the mud-floored passage, clutching her goblet, hoping it did mean luck. They went past cunningly lighted rock-formations, like folded cloth and like angel’s wings, and one beautiful one that was a dark unmoving pool with a rock growing out of the middle of it that was just like two cupped hands, fingers and all. All the time, there was the sound of water pouring and raining and gushing. At first Vivian thought it was the sound of Faber John’s Well, but it grew steadily louder, until they entered a wider part of the passage with an iron railing down one side. Here it was warmer, and a little steamy, and the sound of water was a thunder with loud pattering in its midst.

“River Time rises here,” Jonathan shouted, pointing to a deep crevice beyond the railing, where much of the thunder seemed to come from. They went round another corner and found the tourists they had heard before were just going on ahead. “Good,” Jonathan said. “We’ve got it to ourselves. Look.”

Beyond the rail and beyond the dark crevice, there was a smooth oval cave many yards long in the wall. Water poured and dripped inside it. But lights had been placed to shine through the sheet of water into the cave. Vivian saw a shape inside. It was long and high and it reminded her of—She had a sudden vivid memory of sharing a bed with Mum once, on holiday at Bognor Regis, before Dad could get there from work. In the morning she had woken up to find Mum lying on her side, facing away from her, but looking very near and large, so that Vivian saw Mum’s rather thin back and shoulders like a cliff in front of her. What was inside the cave looked just like that. For a moment, Vivian could have sworn she was looking at part of a giant’s back, with the giant’s head hidden inside the rock to the left and the rest of him stretched out to the right under the City. There was a shoulder-blade, and the knobby dent a person has down the middle of his back. But the shape was a shiny clay-colour. It looked like rock. Water pattered and poured on it perpetually, showing it must be hard as rock too.

“It can’t be a person, can it?” she said. “He’d be huge if he stood up! It must be rock.”

“We don’t know,” said Jonathan.

“But surely somebody’s climbed in there and made sure!” Vivian said.

Jonathan took a quick look up and down the passage to make sure nobody else was there. Then he took hold of the iron handrail and twisted a length of it loose. People had done that often before – Vivian could tell by the easy way the bar came out. He handed her the long piece of iron. “Lean over and poke him,” he said. “Go on.”

The bar looked as if it would just about reach. Unsteadily, with her paper goblet in one hand and the bar in the other, Vivian leaned across the steamy wet space and prodded the bar at the cave. And as soon as the end of it reached the sheet of pouring water, it refused to go any further. Vivian shoved, as if the bar was a spear, and the railing bounced back again so hard that she almost overbalanced into the black gap where the river rose. Sam and Jonathan both caught hold of her by her shirt.

“Why? What’s stopping it?” Vivian demanded.

Jonathan took the bar out of her fist and put it back in the railing. “It’s some kind of forcefield, but nobody can discover what kind,” he said. “Ongoing Scientists have tried to find out for centuries. And it can’t be there for nothing, can it? It does look as if that really is Faber John, doesn’t it?”

“It does rather,” Vivian agreed. She was surprised at how sober and awed this made her feel. She took a last amazed look at the giant’s back under the constantly pouring water and followed the boys slowly round another corner. There was another long flight of stairs there, and then a way out, where a man checked them off on a screen.

Then they were blinking about at a wonderful view of the City. “There,” said Jonathan. “Don’t you think this place is worth saving?”

The mysterious stone giant had upset Vivian. “Yes, but what’s that got to do with me?” she said snappily. “I don’t want London to be bombed either.”

“I’ll have my next butter-pie now,” said Sam.

Jonathan pressed a belt stud and flashed the clock-face quickly to his wrist and away. “Later,” he said. “I must show V.S. Millennium now. That’s it, at the other end of the Avenue of the Four Ages. You mustn’t miss seeing it. It’s got all the greatest pictures in history in it.”

He pointed. Millennium was vast, glittering with rows of windows and twisted glass spires and a gigantic blue glass dome. Vivian quailed. “Oh, no more buildings, please!” she said. “My mind’s got indigestion!”

“Then perhaps we ought just to go quietly back to the Annuate,” Jonathan suggested, with great sympathy.

Vivian almost believed the sympathy for a second, until she saw Sam looking up at Jonathan with his mouth slightly open as if he had that moment caught on to something. “Great idea!” he said, much too heartily. “I don’t need a butter-pie really.”

That last touch overdid it, to Vivian’s mind. She knew they were up to something. What is Jonathan planning now? she wondered, as she followed Sam’s flapping shoelace down a cobbled alley. Another unreal adventure?

4 TIME-GHOSTS (#ulink_7f76b747-24fc-5ca5-98b9-993ed35306aa)

Jonathan checked his clock-face several times on the way back through the City. Sam never mentioned butter-pies once. Back they trotted, across Aeon Square, through the archway and up Time Close, and Vivian followed, quite certain that they were up to something. Her legs were aching as she went up the steps to the glass doors of the Annuate.

I want some peace, she thought. I want to read a film magazine and listen to the wireless. But I don’t think there’s such a thing as a wireless in this place!

The hall of the Annuate was empty and quiet. Jonathan turned to Vivian with his most lordly, casual air. “There are some more once-ghosts I can show you if you like,” he said. “Here in this very Palace.”

This is what we’ve come back here for! Vivian thought. “Then you’d better show me,” she said. “Now you’ve dragged me all this way for them.”

“Along here then,” Jonathan said, and strode off, pigtail bouncing, the opposite way to the way he had taken her that morning. Sam went after him at a rolling trot. It’s the way we came last night, Vivian thought, walking behind across the coloured marble patterns of the floor. They went round a corner and, sure enough, Vivian remembered the long space with showcases against both walls. It had reminded her of a museum. Now she saw that it was indeed a sort of museum. And since she was rather sick of Jonathan hurrying her about, she purposely loitered, looking at the things in the cases.

Each exhibit had a card written in neat, easy-to-read writing. Seventy-three Century American Golf Club, said the first. Forty-five Century Indian Wedding Chalice, said another. But some of the exhibits were decidedly odd, like the Hundred-and-five Century Gas Iron and the Thirty-three Century Icelandic Decorators’ Paint, while in the next showcase – Vivian found herself looking at her own luggage, labelled in the same neat writing: Twenty Century Refugee Equipment (Cases open to show Clothing and Protective Mask).

They were open too. Her suitcase was artfully propped ajar, with that wretched liberty bodice arranged to show on top, and her gas mask was half out of its box. And there was her precious string bag spread open to show sandwich paper, magazine, gloves and socks. Vivian stared at them in outrage. “The cheek!” she said. She was also rather scared, for how was she to get at her things when she went home? But it was worse than that somehow. It was as if someone had taken away the person she really was, so that she was forced to turn into somebody else. “But I won’t!” Vivian said angrily. “I’m me!”

Sam and Jonathan came anxiously galloping back. Sam tugged at her arm. “You’ve got to come now!”

Vivian was too dismayed to care. She pointed to the showcase. “Look! Look at that! All my things.”

“Yes. Good old Elio’s been busy as usual,” Jonathan said. “Androids are like that. But the ghosts are due to walk any second now. Do come and look at them. Please!”

Vivian looked from him to Sam. Sam was staring at her anxiously. Jonathan was so urgent that he had gone white. He is highly strung! Vivian thought. She knew Mum would call Jonathan that. But it was plain to her that it meant a lot to both Jonathan and Sam that she should see these ghosts. “Oh, very well then,” she said, and let Sam pull her down to the far end of the museum.

There was a dark old door there. It was the one Vivian remembered as creaking horribly the night before, but, to her surprise, it was as locked as a door could be. A big shiny chain, made of transparent stuff with wires embedded in it, was fastened across it from one metal box fixed to the door-frame by the hinges, to another fixed to the door-frame by the handle. Cables led from both boxes into the floor. It looked as if anyone trying to open that door would get some kind of nasty shock.

Sam reached out a chubby hand, somewhat coloured with butter-pie and mud from Faber John’s cave, and deftly slid the metal box across from the door-frame on to the door just beneath the big iron handle. The cable stayed where it was, but the door still looked locked to anyone who did not look too closely. “I shorted it,” Sam said proudly. “The first day of half-term.”

“And I asked him to,” Jonathan said, checking his clock again. “It was my idea. When I was little, everyone had heard of these ghosts. They’d walked here every day for hundreds of years. So when my father was elected Sempitern six years ago, I wanted to see them. But my mother went and looked at them first, and when she had, she screamed and had the door chained up. I’ve been wanting to see them ever since, but I had to wait until Sam turned out to be a genius with energe functions.” Sam beamed proudly. Jonathan checked his clock again. “About now,” he said.