Dispel Illusion (Impossible Times) Read online

  ‘We didn’t spend months climbing sixteen levels of the Tower of Illusion to decide that the Crystal of TIME was hidden in the CLOCK,’ I said. ‘I have more faith in Mia than that.’ I glanced at her and grinned. ‘Apologies in advance if Mr Merchant Banker here is right.’

  ‘OK . . .’ John spread his hands. ‘If there are clues, what are they? Nothing he said sounded like a clue.’

  ‘What did he even say?’ It had run through my mind like water through a sieve.

  Simon promptly repeated Mia verbatim, without the theatrics. ‘It is easy to fool an audience. Harder to deceive a friend. Hardest of all to trick yourself. You have one chance to find the crystal. Do it and it’s yours. Fail and you will be gone from my sight, never to return,’ he concluded.

  ‘Hmmmm.’ I really had no clue. ‘I take out the last scroll of “dispel illusion” and read the spell.’

  ‘What?’ John cried. ‘You don’t know what to cast it on yet.’

  ‘It’s late. It’s our last day at the cottage. We’re back to our lives tomorrow. I say let me go with my hunch,’ I said.

  ‘But we don’t even know what it is yet.’ John scowled at me.

  ‘If I tell you, you’ll talk me out of it. Sometimes you just need to rip the bandage off, right?’ I had the edge of an idea, but it was the nebulous sort of idea that words would undermine. Logical examination would reduce it to meaningless corners.

  ‘If we can talk you out of it then it’s not much of an idea,’ John said.

  ‘See! You’re doing it already. One more word and I won’t trust it either, and then what will we have?’

  ‘Simon, tell him.’ John set a hand to Simon’s round shoulder.

  Simon looked up. ‘I think he should do it.’

  ‘What?’ John sounded as surprised as I felt.

  ‘Go on.’ Simon nodded.

  Quickly, before the conviction left me, I set my finger to Hoodeeny’s figure. ‘I cast the spell on him.’

  John threw up his arms in disgust. Simon bit his lip. Mia rolled dice behind her screen.

  ‘He shivers,’ Mia said, ‘Like someone walked over his grave. His face twists up and very slowly, like he absolutely does not want to say the words, he says, “Stoic fretwork”.’

  John snorted. ‘What the hell?’

  ‘Nicodemus tells him to say it again,’ I said.

  Mia rolled some more. ‘He’s really trying to clamp his jaw shut. He’s shaking with the effort, and this time the words are much quieter. “Firework Scott”.’

  ‘Again!’ I said.

  Mia shook her head. ‘He presses his lips together and says nothing.’

  I turned to the others. ‘Stoic fretwork, firework Scott? Some kind of code?’

  John shrugged.

  Simon frowned and then smiled. ‘Fineous approaches the throne and says, “Two sicker fort.”’

  Mia smiled back. ‘He grates out an answer through gritted teeth. “Woof trickster.”’

  ‘Will someone tell me what the fuck is going on!’ John banged the table in frustration. All the figures wobbled, but only Sir Hacknslay fell over.

  ‘Anagrams,’ I said. And suddenly it hit me. ‘Nicodemus takes another step forward and says in a loud clear voice, “Tower of Tricks.”’

  Mia took the throne and its occupant from the table and replaced them with an old man in a white robe. ‘He has a long white beard,’ she said. ‘And he’s holding a crystal about eighteen inches long. It’s emitting a curious flat blue light.’

  ‘It’s that man from the Tower of Tricks!’ John sat up straight, finally catching on. ‘But we got out of that ages ago!’

  ‘You’re still in the Tower.’ Mia took on the tone of a querulous old man. In fact, she sounded like Elton taking on the voice. The Tower of Tricks had been his masterpiece, the last campaign he ran for us before his dad was killed and he withdrew from our little circle. Well, from me. ‘You never left.’

  ‘What?’ John edged his warrior back from the man.

  Mia croaked out her startlingly accurate impression of Elton’s impression of an old man. ‘We are all still in the Tower. We were born in it and nobody ever gets out of it alive.’

  ‘You’ve been working on this with Elton all these years?’ I boggled at Mia as if seeing a whole new woman sitting there behind the dungeon master’s screen.

  Mia just smiled. ‘All good stories come full circle in the end. You should know that, Nick.’

  ‘How did you know?’ Simon asked. ‘To cast the spell on him?’

  ‘Well . . . I kinda guessed,’ I confessed. ‘Only . . . what kind of number is thirty-one? Everything else was powers of two: one chance, two scrolls of “dispel illusion”, four adventurers, eight ways into the Tower, sixteen storeys to the Tower, thirty-one objects to choose from to cast my spell on? Thirty-one? It didn’t make sense. So I guessed Hoodeeny was the thirty-second and most likely to be concealing the time crystal.’

  Mia laughed. ‘Most of that was just chance! There were ways to get more “dispel illusion” scrolls. But yes, I did think the number of wonders would bug you.’

  ‘So what now? Can we get Sharia back and get out of here?’ John asked.

  He had a point. The time crystal was never the end game. Going back and saving Mia’s cleric, Sharia, was. ‘Nicodemus bows to the old man and asks if he may now have the time crystal?’

  ‘The old man nods and hands it to you.’ Mia looked me straight in the eyes. ‘He tells you that you have won the means to find your love. All you have to do now is take her.’

  And if that wasn’t an invitation to end the game and go to bed, I don’t know what is.

  CHAPTER 21

  1986

  My final destination loomed ahead of me in the frosty air: the squat research centre and fabrication lab where John’s father worked and where they had the only example in Europe of the prototype processor chip that I needed to make my memory bands work. The building in which I was destined to die.

  The night had wrapped itself around London hours earlier, and very few people found they had a need to be walking the streets of what was essentially an urban industrial estate. Young Nick and the others wouldn’t be here for a good ninety minutes. I had the place pretty much to myself. Elton’s father was the sole security guard. There were supposed to be three, but one had quit two weeks earlier and had not yet been replaced, and the other had called in sick.

  The van I had purchased was parked in a nearby street. I would bring it to the front entrance if I needed it later.

  I’d had the place bugged by a shady-looking fellow who I met in the early 2000s and who told me the sorts of things he used to get up to. I’d been looking for people like him at the time. It turned out he also liked to exaggerate about his past exploits, but he was still handy enough to furnish me with keys to the place, security codes for the alarms, a staff roster and, of course, access to their phone conversations.

  Yes, it was cheating, but there I was with my head half-frozen because I’d shaved off my own hair to fit the memory, and a wrist covered in make-up that I had to keep checking to ensure that my tattoo wasn’t showing because I sure as hell didn’t remember Demus having a tattoo there any time I met him. So, yes, I was playing to the letter of the law, but not the spirit.

  A few days earlier I had been brooding on the fact that I had lied to myself about where I arrived at the end of my time travels, and implicitly about the very mechanics of the travelling itself. Why, I asked myself, would I have told myself such a stupid lie? One that would easily be found out as the years went by? Bizarrely, I found myself remembering our marathon D&D session way back in 1992 – that week we spent holed up in a cottage ignoring the glorious countryside in favour of more or less continuous gaming. I remembered how Simon and John had lied to me about Boris, and that despite it being a bald-faced stupid lie they had skilfully maintained it through sixteen nightmare levels of the Tower of Illusion, or Tower of Tricks as it was revealed to be. And at the last, just
when I had been about to undo their good work, dispel Boris and expose the lie, thereby denying all of us access to Hoodeeny, they had managed without cheating to make me think about the message behind the lie.

  While thinking on those good old days, a moment of epiphany had struck me, perhaps belatedly; but, in my defence, I am a man dedicated to uncovering secrets, exposing flaws, shining a light on the mechanics behind the magician’s tricks. I have never been an actor, a deceiver, a liar. But I realised that, somehow, just as all manner of highly inconvenient nonsense had been baked into our timeline – this business with the microprocessor, for example: I could just have come back to 1988 and avoided the whole mess – this lie was the baked-in remains of some message, something I was trying to tell myself. I was trying to tell myself to lie, to cheat, to deceive, to do anything and everything I could to have things my way just so long as I didn’t break the fundamental rules. Young Nick had to live the life I had lived. He had to see and remember what I’d seen and remembered. Everything else was open to interpretation.

  I checked the street and went on past the security barrier, crossing the car park and making my way to a side door around the side of the building.

  ‘This is it. The final show.’ My breath plumed into the night. I sounded about as confident as I felt. Which was not very.

  The key my fixer had secured fitted the lock. The door opened without any alarms sounding and I had been assured that the small red light, which should now be blinking on and off on the security guard station, would remain unblinking.

  I had the official timings of Mr Arnot’s rounds and planned my route through the building accordingly. Elton’s dad remained my biggest regret. He was going to die tonight and I wished I could save him. But if I stopped Rust killing him, then I would just start another timeline. Mr Arnot would still die on the timeline that I remembered, and all that would have changed was that I could no longer affect the future that I’d left behind. In my 2011, my Mia would be lying there in that hospital bed, still attached to all those machines, and whatever was on that memory stick I had left with the doctors seemed unlikely to be her memories. In fact, a possible outcome would be that the building paradox shredded her reality and everyone in it.

  The dark corridors lay oppressively silent. I made my way with utmost caution, inching along the walls. I knew Rust was coming. I assumed he followed Young Nick and the others in through the fire escape on the third floor. The exact timing and nature of his entry into the building remained unproven, though, and I had no intention of meeting him ahead of the others. I’d wiped my memory of my previous visit to the building but, despite half my brain screaming at me that it was a terrible idea, in 2011, in the week following Mia’s accident, I had picked John and Simon’s brains regarding the events of that evening. It was precisely the thing I’d wiped my memory to avoid, of course. I hadn’t wanted to go to my death knowing the details. That just seemed like a form of morbid self-destruction. But in the end I had been unable to leave it alone. Like picking at a scab.

  John, of course, had been useless, but Simon’s perfect recall, along with the coroner’s reports, police records and newspaper write-ups, had furnished me with a reasonably clear picture of events. I even had some insight into the action in the restaurant, where Mia and I were the only surviving witnesses, but both with our memories wiped. Before erasing our memories in the park a few days later we had both let some details slip to the others. Simon resisted telling me. He said that I had told him never to speak of any of it, especially to me. I explained that a child had given him that instruction. A child twenty-five years from having to re-enter that building. And now a man was asking for answers. His oldest friend.

  Simon spilled the beans, and being Simon he remembered every bean, including any that Mia and I had dropped in his path before we wiped the two weeks from our minds. One thing he recalled was that I’d told him how sick Demus had looked. Perhaps, like the hair, it was some nod to the idea that Demus had come back from the following summer where he had got radiation poisoning while arranging the time hammer at the nuclear power plant. But I felt fine; those events hadn’t truly happened, or if they had it was in some strange loop of paradox. Even so, I had a role to play, so I had applied more make-up to create a sallow complexion and hollow, dark-ringed eyes. Maybe this was part of the message I was sending to myself: deliberately easing myself into the idea that I could play a role. Put on a performance.

  I went to the restaurant first. The lights were off. No sound but the hum of refrigeration units. The thin beam of my torch swept the room, offering up tables and chairs. I let it linger on the table where the police report had surmised the fight between Ian Rust and ‘John Doe’ commenced, and tracked it across the short path of the struggle that had left both men dead, Rust from blunt trauma to the head and John Doe from blood loss associated with a machete being stuck through him.

  I swung the torch beam to play across the spot where the report marked the body of Jean Arnot (fifty-two) as having been found sprawled in another pool of blood. The furniture hid it from where Rust and Mia would have been sitting. At least she wouldn’t have had to see him lying there while Rust held his blade to her throat.

  I moved slowly around the room, making a few adjustments here and there, then left with a last backward glance. The next time I entered the room would be my last.

  Curiosity led me up past the mainframe room on the second floor, and I let myself in. The computers hummed away just as I remembered them. Or rather they hummed away less impressively now, since I’d seen more processing power in a 2011 wristwatch than was present in all the cabinet-sized mainframes looming around me. I turned to check the back of the door. Someone had hung a whiteboard on it, and written on the board in red marker pen was the legend ‘Tower of Tricks’.

  Simon had mentioned the curious coincidence, and part of me had wondered whether I, Demus, had written it before Young Nick arrived. But no, here it was, waiting for me. I shone my pencil torch across the board again and leaned in close. Simon said that I’d thought there was something familiar about the handwriting, and I still thought it; though, just as a quarter of a century earlier, I was unable to pin down exactly what it was. Déjà vu, maybe.

  I left with a frown, closing and relocking the door behind me.

  I went on up to the top floor, still creeping almost on tiptoe. Both the Rust brothers terrified me and no part of me truly wanted to be in that building save for the part of me that loved Mia, and that was all of me. It seemed that I was made entirely of paradox, though fortunately not the world-ending kind. I carried on, heart thumping, sweating despite the cold, doing that thing that we do our entire lives: not thinking about the inevitable death that we know is always waiting for us and might be around any given corner.

  I found the skylight window that Elton would manage to get in through. I unlocked it for him. Then I went and hid myself in one of the offices close to the fire escape that they would enter by. I checked through my equipment, then sat down to wait.

  That was the longest hour I’d spent in the whole forty years of my life: sitting in the dark, staring at the handful of lights visible from the window. Going over and over my plan, constantly interrupted by thoughts of the approaching psychopath, the severed head in his bag, the machete he had with him. Other thoughts intruded, too. Your life is supposed to pass before your eyes in the final moment before the truck hits you or gravity hauls you along the short journey from rooftop to concrete. Mine crawled by in a succession of bittersweet fragments over the course of that hour.

  I was wearing the watch that Simon ‘gave’ me in 2011. I illuminated the dial to check the time every few minutes, or every thirty seconds as it more accurately informed me. My light in dark places, Simon had called it in his nerdy reference. Checking it in the dark had very rapidly become a nervous habit.

  When Elton opened the fire door I nearly jolted out of my chair. I’d been so deep in contemplation that I hadn’t even heard him pass
by outside the office I was in.

  The others came clattering up the fire escape to join him.

  ‘You got in, then.’ Young Nick, talking to Elton, I guessed.

  ‘Catch on a skylight was gone. No alarms up there. Dropped down on to a posh desk. Probably John’s dad’s.’ A pause. ‘You sure they’re keeping this super seekret chip here? It all seems a bit easy.’

  ‘Let’s find out.’ Mia’s voice, followed by the sound of feet as they all trooped off into the building to search for the computer room.

  I sat back and carried on waiting, checking the time even more often now. It only took another three minutes and eleven seconds. Ian Rust came up the metal steps on feet so soft I almost missed his arrival entirely.

  I heard the faint sound of heavy bags being set down and then nothing. I waited. Had he gone or was he still out there, also waiting, pricked by some animal instinct that told him someone else was nearby?

  I found myself holding my breath and released it slowly. A minute crawled by, then another. I couldn’t sit paralysed by fear all night. He must have moved off so quietly that I missed him going.

  The handle creaked no matter how slowly I turned it. Expecting a machete in the face, I eased the door open and peered through the crack. Darkness. Either he had gone or was standing there as blind as I was.

  I turned on my torch. An empty corridor! Just two Tesco bags abandoned by the wall, one bulging with something wet-looking, the other almost empty. I didn’t have to examine them. The police report came with vivid photographs that I wished I had never seen. One contained the severed head of the drug dealer whose street name was Sacks. The other contained the hammer that would deal the killing blow to Rust and a hacksaw that had been used to decapitate the victim.

  I retreated to the office once more. Young Nick would be in the computer room by now. Simon would be trying to find the combination for the safe holding the prototype microchip. Soon they would set to searching for the safe. My task was to wait for Young Nick’s search to bring him to my door. I sat and went back to my watch-watching.