Dispel Illusion (Impossible Times) Read online

  The years passed and travellers came to us in a steady stream, in ones, twos, and once four together. We never did have to turn anyone away. Their reasons for wanting to return were always rooted in some missed opportunity which, like Melissa Reede’s, was deeply personal rather than based on a desire to harm or exploit. We did what we could to check these stories out, but mostly I relied on Mia’s instinct. An actor knows better than anyone else when someone is sincere. Mia had a way of drawing emotion and honesty out of strangers after just a few minutes’ chatting.

  One rich woman dying of cancer remembered cruel words spoken as one child to another, words that hit harder than she could have imagined. ‘I broke her life. It still haunts me. I want to see it whole.’

  An old man with a trucking empire only wished he had asked that girl in 1958 to dance with him. He just wanted to speak to the boy he had been and give him the courage to act.

  A middle-aged film star, whose time in Hollywood had come to an end, had been too far away and perhaps too busy waiting LA tables, hoping for her big break, to visit her mother on her deathbed. She wanted to know that she had visited and that she had told her mother that she loved her one last time, face to face. She wanted to tell her mother that her little girl had made her crazy dreams come true, and found them both more and less than she had imagined.

  So many decisions to be reversed, missed chances taken, words unspoken now given voice, words that could not be retracted now rethought. I let them know that if they wanted the younger them to change their mind then they would literally have to change it for them: to convince their younger selves to act, just as Demus had convinced me. And even if they succeeded, perhaps the girl would say no to the invitation to dance, perhaps the baby they decided to keep would die the next year in its crib. I sold them no guarantees, only a ticket. I wished them all well and let them step back into their time trails, back into their lives.

  And all the time, my eyes would stray to those last two silver tubes that hid me and Mia from view. Would we step back into ours? Mia was never supposed to do that, though the evidence that she had done so or would do so had been standing here since the previous century. Would I really take that final step and become Demus, instruct my younger self, then die in some manner that I’d made myself forget? I didn’t want to die. Not at all. Once, I had thought that by forty I would be old, my ambitions over, my journey complete. As the years between me and 2011 frittered themselves away, those teenage thoughts revealed themselves for the nonsense they had always been. I was scared. Terrified. But the trail that would take me to my death stood before me, just where it had stood for decades, and the reason to take it stood beside me, reassuring each traveller that everything would be OK, setting them at ease as only Mia could.

  And that’s how it went, with the travellers coming in order to the castle gates without further prompts, and going at their appointed time, vanishing from the world. First a handful, then dozens, then scores. The newspapers began to refer to them as ‘the disappeared’. You can’t remove so many of the super-rich from society without someone noticing. Investigators eventually called at our doors, but by that point our shell companies controlled billions, and billions count. Without proof – and there was none – nobody ever came uninvited into the Tower of Tricks; there was nothing for the investigators to do but leave again.

  After that, of course, the ways in which our clients arrived became still more covert. The methods we used could have taught people smugglers across the globe a thing or two.

  Everything went smoothly up until the day in 2009 when Ellery Elmwood, British supermarket magnate and man who had spent a lifetime regretting turning his back on a music career arrived at the Tower of Tricks. In the cave he took a step back towards his timeline, took another, then stopped and said those five fateful words: ‘I’m not sure about this.’

  CHAPTER 11

  1992

  The black SUV crunched up on to the gravel verge and I froze in its metaphorical headlights. Guilder’s men had me cold. I had nowhere to run to. The passenger door opened. Nobody came out. I stood there, muddy, missing a shoe, body frozen, mind racing. Rust had tried to kill me. These men would take me straight to him, if he wasn’t already in the car, that was. I couldn’t see anything past the tinted windscreen.

  The driver’s window lowered smoothly, and unexpectedly a woman leaned out of it. A young blonde woman. A startlingly attractive young blonde woman.

  ‘You’re Dr Hayes, right?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Get in. We’ve got to go!’

  Call it sexism or plain stupidity, but I limped around to the passenger side and got in. There’s no reason why a young blonde woman couldn’t be one of Guilder’s enforcers. It wouldn’t take many years of karate training for her to be able to beat me up, and a few minutes spent on the basics of aiming and firing a handgun would give her the upper hand even more quickly. But even so, something about her put me at ease. I’m going to say it was the worry in her voice.

  She was alone in the car, and the moment I closed the door we were off with a squeal of wheels and the sound of gravel pinging off the paintwork.

  ‘You said you’d be muddy and hard to recognise.’ She took her eyes from the road ahead for a second to glance my way. ‘It’s so weird. You look so young.’

  ‘I said?’

  She swerved round a tight corner too fast, hedges scraping across the doors. ‘Yes. When you sent me back you asked if I could stop by and give you a lift.’

  ‘How long have you been out?’ I gripped the door handle to steady myself.

  ‘Of the cave? Nearly six months now.’

  ‘You’ve done well to stay on the timeline then.’

  She didn’t respond to that, focusing on the road instead, which at least let me let go of the door. ‘I am Natasha. Natasha Volkov.’

  ‘From Russia?’ I’d noticed an accent but there had been a lot going on.

  ‘Moscow, originally.’ She flashed me a perfect white smile.

  We drove into Bristol. I turned several times to check for any pursuit, but saw no signs. Natasha seemed to know the city, parking a little way from the centre and suggesting we got some lunch and had a chat.

  ‘I know a nice restaurant near here . . .’

  She really was unreasonably beautiful. The sort of unreal kind that you might see in magazines but never sitting right next to you.

  I looked down at my torn and muddy shirt. My trousers weren’t in a much better state and were still damp. ‘I doubt they’d let me in.’

  ‘We will get some food from the market, then, and eat it by the river,’ Natasha said. ‘It is a sunny day, no?’

  ‘I need to call Mia.’ Not even the spell Natasha was putting over me could erase the horror of my escape or of what I had been running from. I needed to contact Mia and let her know to get the hell out of Dodge.

  ‘We will find a phone,’ Natasha agreed. She set a crimson-nailed hand on my shoulder. ‘Don’t worry, Nick.’ The way she said it, my name sounded like Neek.

  I opened the car door and shuffled out. She smiled knowingly after me. ‘You were not so shy when we last met, Nicky.’

  I walked slowly around the front of the car to join her, trying to process what she had just said. Did Demus have some sort of . . . thing . . . with Natasha? It seemed at odds with the idea of giving his life to save Mia.

  Natasha, who I now saw was wearing a tight white dress that ended just below her knees and which looked to have been sprayed on to her, came quickly to my side. In her heels she was just a few inches shorter than me. She took my hand and led me down the sunny street.

  ‘I . . . Uh.’ I struggled to find the words. ‘Did we . . .’

  Natasha turned to face me, her Russian accent suddenly more pronounced and seductive. ‘We did, Nicky. And I like you even better this way.’

  We passed a telephone box, one of the older red ones, and, remembering Mia again, I stopped, pulling free of Natasha’s hand. ‘I have
to call my . . . Mia.’

  ‘You told me to tell you there’s no rush,’ Natasha said, following me to the door. ‘Mia is fine. Mr Guilder . . . that is right, is it? Guilder? Anyway, he takes his trip to the future tomorrow and leaves you both alone. So unless you want to chase him to the twenty-second century there is nothing to worry about.’ She set one hand to the phone box door and walked two fingers of the other hand up across my chest. ‘You told me to tell you that we get away with it. Nobody ever finds out. So why don’t we just go to a hotel and have room service send us some food afterwards?’

  ‘I . . . uh . . . really need to make this call.’ I pulled the door open against her push, not roughly but firmly, and slipped inside, escaping her heady scent of flowers and musk to discover the familiar aroma of stale urine. Though why anyone ever chooses to relieve themselves in a glass box I have never figured out. Perhaps the other party just won’t get off the phone and they get desperate . . . Anyway, the phone was out of order so I had to emerge again, rather shamefacedly, into the dazzling light of Natasha’s 500-watt smile.

  ‘You’re not planning to chase Mr Guilder, are you?’ Natasha walked by my side, close enough to show she had no qualms about getting her little white dress muddy.

  I walked along, scanning the road ahead for another phone box and trying not to let Natasha’s proximity distract me from my quest. The pavement felt hot beneath my bare foot. ‘I didn’t ask you to bring me some new clothes, or a shoe?’

  ‘Maybe you forgot?’ Her hand closed around mine again. ‘Maybe we made better memories?’

  Almost every passer-by looked at Natasha, half of the men turning to check her out as she walked away from them, and not a few eyeing me up in mild astonishment as if to ask what a skinny one-shoed geek like me was doing with a supermodel on his arm.

  ‘So, will you go after him?’

  ‘Sorry?’ Despite my efforts I was finding her very distracting.

  ‘Guilder,’ she said. ‘Or will that barrier you talked about stop him?’

  ‘I guess so . . .’

  Natasha squeezed my hand and held it close to her hip. ‘You guess the barrier will stop him?’

  ‘Well, I should think it w—’

  A figure loomed up in front of us and punched Natasha squarely on the nose.

  ‘Come on!’ It was a woman in a business jacket, about fifty years old, stout, with greying hair. ‘Up there!’ She pointed up the alley she’d been waiting in, too narrow for a car even if it hadn’t been a thirty-yard flight of worn stone steps.

  ‘What?’ I glanced back at Natasha, who had staggered back a few paces, both hands over her nose, blood leaking between her fingers.

  The older woman strode past me towards Natasha, shouting at her, ‘That was from Mia!’ She turned back to me. ‘Quick! They’re coming!’

  A big black car with dark-tinted windows was accelerating towards us.

  ‘I don’t understand.’ I moved to help Natasha.

  The new woman grabbed my shoulder, speaking quickly and urgently. ‘Demus told me to say you should trust me. He said to tell you he remembered both Evas – the one from the hospital that you watched die, and the one from the future you had with Helen.’

  It wasn’t an explanation, but it was enough to know I’d sent her. Bewildered, I turned and followed her up the steps. She was quick, despite her age. I was winded by the top and, turning, I saw two men in dark jackets already halfway up and running.

  The steps connected the road we’d been on to another higher up the steep hill that eventually takes you to the Clifton Downs and the suspension bridge over the Avon Gorge.

  ‘Quick!’ The woman got into a small green Ford covered in parking tickets. I scrambled into the passenger seat and she accelerated away before I could even get the door closed.

  ‘I’m Anna Mazur. The woman you were speaking to is employed by Miles Guilder.’

  ‘She’s not from the future?’

  ‘No.’ Anna checked her rear-view mirror, then took a sharp left up a ridiculously steep road. ‘She’s what we call a honey-trap, honey.’ She gave a grim smile. ‘Rust scared you out of the cave and she was waiting to offer you sanctuary. Guilder set it up and told her what to say. It’s an easier way of learning secrets than old-fashioned torture. This way, the victim is more likely to be truthful.’

  ‘Crap. I think I said too much. I should go back and wipe her memory.’

  ‘You can do that? Men in Black style?’ Anna asked.

  ‘Men in black?’

  ‘Too soon?’ She shook her head. ‘I’ll get the hang of the nineties again in a while.’ She took another turn and drew up at the curb in a narrow street of tall dingy townhouses. ‘Come in. You can use my phone.’

  ‘But the girl . . .’

  ‘She was wired. Guilder already knows everything you said to her.’

  Anna opened the street door to one of the terraced houses and led me up several flights of communal stairs to a flat on the third floor. ‘This would have been a lot easier if you . . . I mean Demus . . . had let me pick you up from the cave before she got to you.’

  ‘Yeah. A lot of things would be so much easier if it worked like that.’ I followed her into the flat. ‘It’s kinda hard to explain, but a knot—’

  ‘A knot got tied into the timeline, allowing us to go back without starting new timelines. And if we stick to the script and keep to what you and we remember went down, we get to stay in our own past,’ she recited. ‘But it means we have to play the cards we were dealt when it happened. All the double-guessing got baked in when “the event” happened.’

  ‘I see we’ve had this conversation before.’ I sat on the leather sofa she aimed me at.

  ‘I’ve had it. You will have it.’ Anna passed me the phone from a side table. ‘Guilder and Rust vanish, probably tomorrow. You and I last spoke in 2010 when you sent me back, and at that point you had never seen either of them again. Dr Hayes . . . Demus, I mean . . . he told me to call him that with you . . . Demus is sure they both went forward, but he doesn’t know when they’re aiming at or where they’re hiding while they travel.’

  It made sense that Guilder would take Rust with him. He would need help when he got to the year he’d targeted, and, whatever else you might say about him, Charles Rust was very capable. My finger hesitated above the number buttons on the handset. ‘So . . .’

  Anna shrugged. ‘Call her anyway. Demus said he didn’t entirely trust me when I came back. So he and Mia went into hiding for a week before they were convinced it was safe to return to Cambridge.’

  I still hesitated. Anna had handed me my first chance in years not to be Demus. To break the chain that linked me to him, all I had to do was not do something that I knew for sure that he did. If I didn’t call, if we didn’t go into hiding, then Mia and I wouldn’t be Demus and his Mia any more. And, really, what did I owe the man? My cancer had been in remission for five years now. I didn’t need to be him in order to stand a decent chance that it was gone for good.

  But . . . it was true that even if I trusted Anna, I didn’t trust the whole situation sufficiently to not want to take me and Mia out of Guilder’s firing line for long enough to make sure he was gone. The look in Rust’s eyes and the gleam of his knife were still front and centre in my mind. I made the call.

  After all, if I didn’t want to be Demus, all I had to do was not send the message with Anna when my turn came to dispatch her to the past.

  CHAPTER 12

  1992

  ‘Well, at least you didn’t burn to death!’

  Simon and John had come to join Mia and me at the holiday cottage we’d rented to hide out in. It stood beside two others on a lonely country road just outside Lyme Regis on the Dorset coast. The English summer had decided to really go for it and was currently doing a passable impression of a Mediterranean one, and had even managed to heat the Channel waters to a few degrees above ‘Fuck that!’ Miles of shingle coast stretched out between crumbling cliffs and wild waves,
offering the very best of the Jurassic Coast, a fossil hunter’s paradise. Ammonites littered the beaches in gleaming iron pyrites, or fools’ gold as it’s better known. Belemnites lay like scattered stalactites in lustrous flint-like stone, intermingled with shells galore . . . So, of course, we were all indoors playing D&D.

  Simon had claimed to be worried that Guilder’s men might find him and hurt him to get our location, though the game was the real reason he had left his mother’s house for the first time in an age for any reason other than to go to university. John hadn’t been worried, but his girlfriend was on the warpath about something . . . most likely another girlfriend, and so he had decided that a short vacation might be good for his health.

  It was true that my mage Nicodemus’s possibly foolhardy insistence on disbelieving the inferno in the tunnel leading to the outside world had eventually succeeded. The flames finally gave up existing just moments before his hair would otherwise have ignited. Sadly, the exit to the surface was also an illusion, linked to the first one, and that too vanished with the flames.

  ‘So, let’s have a standing order not to believe anything we see, and soldier on up this damn tower,’ I said. ‘We’ll just take the nearest stairs.’

  I glanced out of the window into the cottage’s sun-dazzled grounds, looking for Rust as usual.

  ‘He’s gone,’ Mia said. ‘And even if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t find us here.’

  Mia and I had formulated our escape plan long ago. I’d told her about the way Guilder used threats against her to keep me from running off, and as soon as I accumulated enough money we had sorted out our escape should things ever reach a point where I could no longer tolerate the man’s control. We would simply mail all our evidence to the police and hop aboard a plane to somewhere hot and cheap, the particular destination being of far less importance than the ready availability of the flight. I reckoned we could last six months on my savings before I had to think of new ways to make money. Mother was also in Rust’s crosshairs and I had broached the subject with her, too. That had been a more difficult talk, especially when it came to stopping her going to the police immediately with her two handfuls of hearsay. In the end, though, I had managed to persuade her to agree to take immediate sick leave if I told her she really needed to. The plan was for her to take one of a score of rental cottages I’d identified in places that she enjoyed. I didn’t think Rust would go after any of the small number of other family members I had out there. If he’d done enough homework to find them, he would also have figured out that I didn’t much care for any of them anyway and hadn’t seen them in years.