But not Tom. Who?
Riley was useless. Paralysed by a flood of emotions, like an insect in a blob of resin. And, more than that, he was sure to be scarred emotionally beyond all hope of recovery if he did by some miracle walk out of this room.
But the universe was not yet done with unforeseen events. Riley would leave this room, but not through the door and not on his two feet.
Garrick stepped into the meagre light and treated the stunned, silent Tartan Nancy to a wink.
‘What say you, madam? For sheer melodrama? Top marks, surely. I once trod the boards, you know, all over this fair country. The Great Lombardi they called me.’ Garrick held up his palm, which fairly dripped with Tom/Not Tom’s blood. ‘Or perhaps you will remember my infamous moniker, the Red Glove.’
‘Oh, Lord save us,’ gibbered Nancy, and executed a strange combination of crossing herself and repetitive curtsying, shaken to her core by the mention of the murderous magician whom most believed to be a mere theatre legend from the penny dreadfuls. But the Red Glove was as real as Jack the Ripper and, in fact, the former had done for the latter.
It was Garrick’s habit to bow in a theatrical manner whenever the opportunity presented itself, as it transported him back to his theatre days, which were centuries behind him in one way, and mere years in another. Garrick had always been inordinately proud of his stage bow, and he used to deliver weekly lectures to Riley on the importance of rigidity and sweep.
Fold yerself as clean as the queen’s notepaper, Riley my son, he would say.
And thunderheads would brew on Riley’s brow and he would think: I am not your son, devil.
Garrick bowed now, prompted by Tartan Nancy’s botched curtsying.
‘At your service, madam,’ he said, which both the bow-er and the bowed-at knew was balderdash.
As Garrick silently counted to three, which was his rule for the low point of a bow, his nose passed close to Chevron Savano’s chest, within a foot perhaps. And something beeped.
Beeped and then flashed.
Curious, thought Albert Garrick.
It was a strangely electronic beep for the nineteenth century. Unnatural and anachronistic – and yet it was familiar to Albert Garrick and it evoked in him the darkest urges.
His blood-streaked fingers quested towards the flashing light that seemed to emanate from Chevie’s heart.
A twist of lanyard glinted on Chevie’s collarbone and Garrick hooked a thumb underneath it, pulling out the cord until a flashing teardrop-shaped charm appeared.
‘God, no!’ he shouted.
For he realized that this was no simple adornment; it was a cursed Timekey. Much like the one that had been used to dispatch him into the time tunnel.
It should not exist!
Garrick calmed himself. The key is nothing without a pod. Just a lump of plastic.
And I am protected by silver!
Garrick had discovered quite accidentally that the wormhole could not abide the element of silver. He could feel the time force’s pull waning, and sometimes actually recoiling, whenever he wore silver chains or bracelets, which was all the time since he had made the discovery – for the wormhole’s pull was like a cloud in his mind that stopped him thinking clearly and set his heart battering a tattoo inside his chest.
But there were quantum facts missing from Garrick’s argument. Things even Charles Smart had never known when he’d first entered the wormhole. For instance, once a body had been as thoroughly saturated with quantum foam as Garrick’s had, the wormhole did not need a pod to absorb him again. A Timekey would do the job just fine. And, while the wormhole could not take him while he wore silver, the Timekey was more than strong enough to trump the metal’s powers of repulsion.
The Timekey grew warm in Garrick’s hand, then hotter still, and the assassin was hypnotized by it. The last time he had held a gadget like this one, the wormhole had taken him prisoner for nearly two and a half centuries. Garrick had believed himself in hell, such was his torment. He had barely survived with his wits intact and did not wish ever to repeat the experience.
Flee! he told himself, but it was too late. The device had activated and Garrick’s molecular structure was already bonded with the key’s; there was no separating them on this plane. He felt that familiar draw, a sickening pull as the time tunnel welcomed him home. And, though it had been some two hundred and fifty years since he had regained his human form, Garrick remembered the sensation well, and the helplessness that went with it.
Not again! he thought, his ability to form simple thoughts being the only thing left to him. I cannot survive it again.
And then: I never meant to hurt the dove, master. Which was an unrelated memory from an unresolved childhood issue.
Riley, for his part, did not notice the Timekey’s activation; he simply saw the assassin hunched over his fallen friend. The sight brought him round and sent him lurching towards Garrick.
‘Leave her be!’ he snarled. ‘Get away from her, you devil.’
His attack was clumsy and ordinarily Garrick could have casually swatted the youth away, but now reality was bending and solid matter was phase-shifting to quantum foam.
How? wondered Garrick. There ain’t no pod. There ain’t no landing pad.
The truth was that none of the three would ever know the how exactly, no more than the average human can ever truly understand how a bird is able to fly, but that did not change what was happening. A whirlwind rarely stops spinning to explain itself.
Riley’s attack was successful in so much as he reached his target, but a failure in that he did not force Garrick away from Chevie. In fact, his lurch bunched them all together, so that when the orange quantum sparks surged from the Timekey’s heart all three were engulfed.
Garrick’s limbs were already insubstantial. Riley saw his own arms dematerialize and could not believe they were once again being tumbled into the mouth of a time tunnel.
But where will we tumble out? he wondered. Or, more accurately, when?
Chevie thought nothing. In her mind, a photographer’s flash had exploded and would not fade. In her head, she stared at the sun and began to go slowly mad.
In the last seconds before the three disappeared from the Newgate cell in a swarm of orange sparks, Riley could have sworn he heard Big Ben strike in the distance.
As a matter of fact, the sound came from inside the room.
‘Pardon me, I’m sure,’ said Nancy, even though there was no one left to hear her.
Time after Time
Everywhere. Everywhen
And so Albert Garrick was back in the time tunnel, though to be fair he had never truly been fully out of it, which is a difficult concept to comprehend. To quote Professor Charles Smart: We don’t have a clue about the wormhole. None of us. Anyone who says different is talking out of their backside. And, yes, I’m including Einstein in that. I mean, look at him. The guy doesn’t even understand the workings of a hairbrush.
Simply put, Garrick had been so deep in the tunnel that its particles had permeated his every cell. These elements were more minute than protons, quarks or even black-hole singularities – quantum particles so small that they would be immeasurable for centuries.
Riley and Chevie had absorbed a few million of these particles during their jaunts through the tunnels, but their trips had been over a measured span and through the same corridor, while Garrick had been tossed into the tunnel without an exit visa, as it were. He had floated around in there without purpose or direction, and his being had become saturated with the particles, untold billions of them. They had infiltrated his own molecules, colonizing them until he was as much a part of the quantumverse as he was of the universe. Garrick had truly become a time traveller, remade in his own image but with a connection to the wormhole that could ne
ver be broken. Just as the wormhole was forever, so Garrick became forever, and when he fell through the man-made rift (more of which later), he was a changed being. Half mad from his quantum incarceration, for one thing. And when he survived the slings and arrows of good old Father Time, as well as actual slings and arrows and cannon fire, he came to realize that he could not die or be killed.
However, for an immortal to function in a reasonably normal manner, he needs something to aspire to. A goal. So Garrick made it his mission to take revenge on his adopted son, Riley. It was indeed an epic quest, the decision to bide his time for almost two hundred and fifty years to snuff out the life of one boy, but it gave Albert Garrick something to dream about at night and put a smile on his thin lips for near a hundred thousand mornings, which never failed to give the heebie-jeebies to anyone who saw it.
Having never been a slugabed, Garrick did other stuff too. He played quite a substantial role in the East Anglian witch-finding industry (an experience which would shortly prove useful), embarked on a campaign in India, where he found his beloved curved blade in the gut of a disembowelled goat (another story), captained a pirate flotilla out of Tortuga (recycling his Red Glove nickname), and even spent a few decades as a monk in Lancashire trying to change his ways (unsuccessfully, it must be said, as the boredom brought on one of his bloody rages and he murdered half the abbey). There literally is not time to go into the details of all the shenanigans perpetrated on the human race by Albert Garrick since the wormhole spat him out in 1647. Suffice it to say, for our purposes in this particular narrative, that only the thought of killing Riley in the most inhuman way possible kept his upper lip stiffened on most days. As for Chevie, Albert Garrick had almost forgotten the FBI consultant until she made the mistake of jogging his memory in the prison cell with her distinctive accent. Now, as they entered the time tunnel, Garrick dearly hoped the trip would heal her crushed skull, so that he could kill her again.
Each trip through the wormhole is different, and no two outcomes are the same. On Garrick’s last immersion, he had gone deeper than any earth-born being ever had – apart from a prehistoric earthworm who had entered through a rift brought on by a major volcanic eruption, which happened to coincide with extreme levels of solar radiation. That worm went so deep into the wormhole (ha ha) that it emerged substantially enlarged and abides to this day in a Scottish lake.