Time Out Of Mind (v1.0), page 10
An hour later they clambered aboard a frail, twin-hulled ephemera and shook out the sail of pink, translucent gossamer. As the breeze nuzzled into it they ghosted out from the shelter of the marina on to the blue waters beyond. Within seconds they were skittering across the twinkling surface, the twin ribbons of their wake creaming out behind them, one among thousands of similar craft all glittering and darting hither and thither in the warm spring sunshine. Beneath them the exhausted lake lay dead and sterile to its uttermost depths, but its surface still sustained the exotic and alien life of the creatures whose selfishness had contrived to poison it.
Carol piloted them up as far as Yvoire where they disembarked and had lunch. While they were eating she chose to tell Laurie something of her life’s history. “My father always wanted me to be a doctor,” she said, “and I thought I wanted to be one too, but after he was killed I realized the idea had died with him.
There just didn’t seem to be any real point. Yet I still feel guilty from time to time—as though his shade is shaking its head over me.”
Laurie nodded. “Dad had plans for me too. He’s an engineer. But it’s not for me. What made you choose NARCOS?”
“I’m not really sure. I suppose, in a way, I saw it as a sort of compromise—a superstitious genuflection toward Daddy’s spirit. He was a great believer in service to humanity.”
“He was a doctor himself, was he?”
“Oh no, he was a parson. He was a lot of other things too, but professionally speaking he was a pastor of human souls.”
“Are you his only child?”
“I am now,” she said. “My brother was killed-in the same plane crash as Daddy.”
“Good God! That must have been terrible!”
“It was,” she said simply. “When it happened I thought it was the end of the world. But life goes on, you know. And then, one day, you discover you’ve somehow ‘managed to pick up the pieces and stick them together again. You don’t quite know how it’s happened, but you know it has.”
“And that’s what you did?”
“That’s what I did.”
“Did it take long?”
“About two years, I think. I ran pretty wild. I just couldn’t come to terms with life at all. I mean he’d been such a good person in the old-fashioned sense of the word, and there he was, dead. The whole thing seemed so utterly pointless. And then one day I was lying out on the cliffs with a boy I knew and he said to me, “When are you going to bury him, Caro?” That’s when I realized that it was no use going on fighting a battle that was over before it was ever begun. Mind you, I seem to recall I tore him to pieces at the time.”
“I can believe that,” said Laurie.
“Do you know,” she said, “you’re .the first person I’ve ever spoken to about that part of my life.”
“Really?”
She nodded. “There’s definitely something about you, Laurie. Something odd. But I can’t make out what it is. Do you have the same effect on other girls?”
“I’ve never thought about it,” he confessed. “But then I’ve never met anyone with the same sort of hole in their past that you’ve got in yours.”
“If it comes to that,” she retorted, “there seems to be a pretty odd hole in yours too.”
“That’s rather different.”
“Is it?” she said. “I wonder.”
Laurie turned his head and looked down the lake toward Lausanne. He had a curious sensation of unease and foreboding that was wholly out of keeping with the sparkling scene around him. Having purposely avoided discussing what had happened last night out of regard for Carol, he was determined not to be the first to raise it now. But he knew that he was only delaying the inevitable, and when she said: “Tell me what did happen in the summer of ’87,” he heard her almost with a sense of relief.
He turned back, looked at her, and then lifted his shoulders in the slightest possible shrug. “I saw a ghost,” he said. “At least I think I did.”
“A ghost?”
He nodded.
“What sort of a ghost?”
“What sorts are there?” he smiled. “It was a man. He was wearing a kind of dark blue uniform—a bit like our ’taskers,’ in fact. He had some sort of metal band across here”—he touched his forehead—“gold, I think. And a sort of gold bracelet thing around each wrist.”
“Did he say anything?”
He frowned. “I’m not sure. It spoke—well, its lips moved. But I didn’t hear anything. I know it wanted to talk to me…”
“How do you know?”
“I just do. There was something almost desperate—pleading really. I can’t explain.”
Carol looked at him as though she’d never really seen him before. “You really believe in ghosts?”
“No,” he said. “That’s just it. I don’t. Yet I believe in that one. I know I didn’t imagine it. It really was there.”
“Where was it?”
“Beside the river. In a sort of gulley place. I was fishing.”
“Is that what you were talking about the other night? When we had supper with Manders?”
Laurie gnawed his lower lip. “Not altogether,” he said. “It was part of it. You see there was something else too. Later…”
“You saw it again?”
“No,” he said slowly. “I didn’t see it. I was it.” “You what?”
“I know,” he said ruefully. “Mad as a hatter. But I can’t explain it any other way.”
“But what happened, Laurie?”
“Well,” he said, “that same night, when I was lying in bed going back over what had happened, I suddenly sort of saw myself as I would have been from his point of view”
“His?”
“The ghost’s—the man’s—call it what you like. No, wait. Let me finish. I tell you I was there, Carol. I was him, looking at me down this gulley. And there was something else too—something I know I’ve got to remember. But I can’t. Not yet. And it’s that part that you’re mixed up in somehow. Well, not you—Billie.”
“And Magobion? What about him?” she asked curiously.
Laurie shook his head. “Somebody said the name to me then. Or I heard it somehow.”
“That’s all they said? Just ‘Magobion’?”
Laurie closed his eyes and drew in a deep breath. “Kill Magobion” he_whispered.
“They said that?” •
He shook his head.
“Well, who said it?”
He opened his eyes as slowly as though each lid had its own lead weight. “I did,” he said. “I said it.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“But I was him” he insisted. “Then, when I heard it, I was saying it. If was him! Don’t you see, Carol, we’d swopped over somehow. I’d become him!”
“Oh Christ,” she said. “Have a heart!”
“I know,” he agreed. “Why do you think I’ve buried it for nine years? It’s not exactly something you can learn to live with, is it?”
“Who else have you told?”
“No one. Well, Manders, I suppose. You were there.”
“That was the first time?”
“Yes. I really didn’t know how I knew the name ‘Magobion’. As far as I knew I’d never heard it before in my life.”
“And ‘Billie’?”
“If you could tell me,” he said wearily, “I’d be more than grateful.”
“But what makes you so sure you didn’t just imagine it all? Kids do have incredibly vivid imaginations. I know I did.”
“Because if I had there’d have been other occasions, wouldn’t there? Other ghosts. That was the only time ever.”
“Did you ever go back there again?’To where it happened?”
“Almost whenever I went fishing. Dozens of times.
The place is all being altered now though. They’ve started building a high dam across the valley. Dad’s working on it. It won’t be finished till 2005.”
Carol shook her head. “It’s one of the weirdest stories I’ve ever heard,” she said.-
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Laurie. “What about your dream?”
She shook her head. “Don’t let’s talk about that.”
“Why not? Are you afraid we might find a link somewhere?”
“A link?” she echoed doubtfully. “What do you mean?”
“I’m not really sure myself,” he admitted, “but I meant what I said last night. I’m convinced there’s somewhere where you’re Billie and I know you as Billie.”
“That’s impossible! How could there be anywhere?”
“Well, some when, maybe.”
Carol would not have it. Perhaps the tissue covering the old wound was still too tender to withstand his probing. “I stopped being Billie nine years ago,” she said, “and I’ll never be it again! Not for you. Not for anyone. Billie’s dead, understand? Stone dead!”
“She wasn’t dead last night.”
“You bastard!” she whispered. “Drop it, will you?” Laurie regarded her levelly. “All right,” he said. “But on one condition.”
Carol said nothing.
. “You help me to find Magobion.”
For a moment he was sure she was going to refuse and then, very slowly and deliberately, she shook her head. “You just never, never give up, do you?”
“Not on this one. I can’t, Carol.”
“And if I tell you to go and get lost?”
He shrugged. “I am lost. Utterly and absolutely.” She took a single, thick strand of her long golden hair and wound it slowly around her finger. “Did you think I’d say no?”
“I honestly didn’t know what you’d do.”
She gave a rueful, lopsided grin. “So much for the Haarlem Festival,” she said. “Oh, what the hell. I never did care much for tulips anyway.”
They caught the midnight veetol out of Geneva. It deposited them in Battersea at fifteen minutes past two. At three o’clock, creased and gummy-eyed, they tottered out of the lift on the twenty-second floor, a third of the way up the tower block in Earls’ Court where Carol rented a minute apartment. “It’s a real grot,” she apologized, stabbing the key into the lock and twisting it. “I’ve never been much of’ a one for—Oh my. God!…”
Peering over her shoulder Laurie saw what had evoked her exclamation. The room looked as though a cyclone had whirled through it. Carol gazed around, momentarily speechless, and then burst into tears. “Jesus!” she sobbed, “Oh Jesus, that’s all I’m short of!”
Laurie put his arm around her and surveyed the havoc. “Come on,” he said grimly, “it probably looks worse than it is.” He heeled the door to behind them and, hearing the lock click, turned and glanced at it. There was no visible trace of forced entry. “Has anyone else got a key?” he asked.
Carol shook her head. “The janitor,” she gulped. “I never see him.”
He picked his way over to the window but it was still securely fastened from the inside, the burglarproof screws wound right down. Nor could he see any sign of forced entry in the kitchenette. Whoever was responsible must have let themselves in with a key.
He went back into the main room, heaved the divan back on to its feet and then picked up the easy chair. “Can you see what’s missing?”
Carol wiped her eyes, retrieved a cushion shaped like an owl from beneath an upside-down occasional table, and clutching it forlornly to her breast subsided on to the divan. “I feel as if I’ve been raped,” she mourned.
Laurie busied himself as best he could restoring some sort of order to the chaos. He unearthed a little Victorian carriage clock from a jumble of books in a comer and pressed the repeater button. The pure little chimes rang out sweetly. “No ordinary cat would have left something like that,” he said. “Has anyone got it in for you?”
Carol shook her head miserably. “They must have, mustn’t they?”
“But you can’t think of anyone offhand?”
“No,” she said.
“Then what’s missing?”
She gazed around and her look of despair slowly changed to a puzzled frown. She put down the cushion she was nursing, climbed to her feet and walked across the room where she stooped and gathered up a drawer from the wall unit. “Look!” she cried, and held up four £20 notes.
“Well, that settles that,” said Laurie. “You haven’t been burgled. Come on, let’s put it all straight.”
In less than half an hour everything was back in its place; the only casualty a single shattered wine glass which Laurie had trodden on inadvertently. Carol brought in two mugs of coffee and handed him one. “It just doesn’t make sense,” she said. “What could they have been after?”
“You, maybe.”
“Is that meant to be funny?”
“Well, we know it wasn’t your money, and what else is there?”
“But I’m no one, Laurie. You know that.”
“I know nothing of the sort,” he retorted. “In fact I’m beginning to wonder if you and I aren’t two of the hottest pieces of property in the whole world.”
“You’re out of your mind.”
“Am I? You know, Carol, I’ve been thinking a hell ’ of a lot of unthinkable thoughts in the last day or two.”
“And that’s one of them?”
He nodded. “Do you remember what old Martell said—about some weird drug they’ve been experimenting with?”
“Which one?”
“I’ve forgotten what he called it but he said it might have the power of enabling someone to skip around in time.”
“In that case ‘might’ is right,” she chuckled.
“No, but wait! Say someone had discovered it? Just suppose.”
“But it’s impossible, Laurie. You know that.”
“Martell didn’t seem to think so.”
“Martell!”
“All right, so it is impossible—now. But what about in the future?”
“One day, maybe,” she conceded to humor him.
“O.K., let’s make it in ten years’ time then. Twenty if you like.”
“What are you trying to say?”
“I’m saying that just suppose someone did discover such a drug. Martell didn’t suggest it could make anyone travel forward in time, only backward. And only in a very limited and peculiar way. He said it might let someone make contact with this earlier self! Now do you see what I’m getting at?”
Carol breathed on to her coffee and regarded him quizzically through the feathering steam. “Go on,” she said in a neutral tone. “I’m still listening.”
“All right,” he said. “Now what happens? Someone takes this drug, goes backward in time, and meets himself years earlier. Yet that very meeting could change the whole future! It could even change him! Make him into a different person, maybe! Or take another example. Say he—the one who takes this drug—knows that a certain obscure company is going to become fantastically successful. So he tells his earlier self to buy a packet of shares in it. The moment he does it, presto! —his adult self’s worth a fortune.”
“That’s ridiculous!” Carol protested. “Why, if it worked—the drug, I mean—then everybody would be on it! They’d be zooming in out of the future passing on the latest stock market tips to themselves. Why hasn’t it happened?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe for the same reason that I couldn’t face up to what happened in July ’87. Perhaps you can’t make contact. Or maybe there are an infinite number of possible futures and each one’s different. Maybe…”
“What is it?” she asked curiously. “What were you going to say?”
“Billie,” he murmured. “You were Billie.”
“What?”
“Yes, of course! That’s it! I’m blind! Blind!” In his excitement he jumped up from his chair and began striding up and down the room. “’87!” he cried exultantly. “July ’87! Don’t you see?”
“I see you’re spilling your coffee on my carpet,” she observed crushingly.
He raised the mug to his lips and gulped. Then he came and squatted down beside her. “It’s all beginning to make sense, Carol. Fantastic sense, maybe, but if you can accept the idea, the rest follows.”
“That’s nice,” she said. “Well, go ahead and explain what happened to my room.”
“I can’t yet. But I will. I’m sure of it. Listen. In ’87 you were going to be a doctor, weren’t you? If you had been—if your father hadn’t been killed—you’d have been a doctor by now, and you’d still have called yourself Billie. But in ’87 everything was knocked sideways. Your father was killed and you reverted to being Carol, f I’m on the right track, then I suspect all this must have happened more or less at the same moment. Some time early one morning in July. Or maybe that same evening. No, just a minute! Let me finish! Now I guess—I don’t know—how could I?—that that dream of yours was something to do with how it happened—that we—you and I and this Steve character had somehow decided we’d got to make contact with me—me as I was then. Me as a kid, I mean. Yes, maybe making that contact was what knocked it all off sideways! Once I’d got the message they were done for—or their future was done for!…No, I can’t follow that one through…But don’t you see, Carol, it could be the link I was talking about?”
“You’re really high, aren’t you?” she observed. “I wonder what you’ll say when I tell you that Daddy’s plane crashed at ten o’clock in the’ evening on July 17 th?”
“I can’t remember the exact day I saw my ghost,” he said. “It must have been about then though. I wonder…”
“What is it?”
‘
He shook his head. “Why was it so important to them? Surely they must have known the risk they were taking?”
“Assuming they ever did,” she said.
“Oh they did,” he said with complete conviction. “I’m sure of it.”
“You, Mr. Linton, are what is commonly called a nut case.”
“I wonder what that makes Magobion?” he mused. “Why did they have to tell me about him?”
“Oh Laurie,” she sighed, “It’s just an idea.” The way she said it made it sound as though she were telling him regretfully that Santa Claus didn’t really exist. “And as ideas go it’s gone just about as far around the bend as anyone can push it. These things don’t happen in real life.”
