Sam had turned away from Curtis, tears flooding his eyes. Because of the existence of the photograph, Sam had assumed that he would cross back into the world to rescue Rachel, but he’d always viewed it as a first step, the second being his return home. Perhaps for good.
Now that dream had been shattered, he felt sick, winded as surely as if he’d been punched in the stomach.
Curtis put the crown down on a nearby bench. ‘I need to show you something.’
Neither of them spoke as Sam followed him up from the cellar and into the kitchen. They passed through the hall and then Curtis took him up several flights of stairs to the top floor of the house, somewhere Sam hadn’t been before. They entered a room which was completely dark, although Sam could tell it was quite sizable from their echoing footsteps. All of a sudden three displays flicked on and Curtis went over to them.
On the desk in front of the screens was a small keypad. Curtis typed on this, then spun a ball set into the surface beside it. Sam could see scenes from the village on the displays as clearly as if he was there himself. In one Damaris, Tom and Vek were standing in the middle of the main thoroughfare. Damaris wore a concerned expression as she talked to the other two.
‘The Ghost of Christmas Present,’ Curtis said. ‘They’re worried about you.’
Sam felt a rush of affection for his friends – the discussion they were having had to be about him. And the view of them was from a low angle and swayed every so often.
‘Is this from one of the dogs?’ Sam asked.
Curtis didn’t answer, stabbing at the keypad and then spinning the ball again. The scenes of the village disappeared and were replaced with a series of images and pages of text which passed across on the screens in such quick succession they were a blur. ‘It’s all in here – thousands of years of Earth’s history.’ As Curtis brought the ball to a stop with his palm, the triptych of displays settled down to show a grainy page from a newspaper spread across all three of them. ‘And here you are. The Ghost of Christmas Past. I found this and tagged it for you.’
Sam recognized the name at the top of the page – it was a local newspaper from the London borough where he’d lived. ‘That’s my house,’ he swallowed, as he spotted the photograph in one of the small columns toward the bottom of the page. There was a police car and ambulance parked in the drive.
‘Yes, this is what you left behind. This is your footnote in history,’ Curtis replied, panning down to the article. ‘You see it’s called the butterfly effect, the theory that the tiniest, apparently most insignificant event may have implications elsewhere, implications for the future.’ As Curtis enlarged the article on the screens, there in stark letters was the title Police verdict on death of teenager.
‘Your death might have only been that beat of a butterfly wing, but it produced its own set of consequences, like ripples spreading across a pond. Exactly what those consequences are we may never know, but your life was cut short and that’s how it was meant to be, and any repercussions were meant to be. If you go back, all that could be changed and history altered. Maybe for the worst, maybe with terrible outcomes.’
Sam was barely listening as he read.
The body of fourteen year-old Sam White was discovered in the early hours of Tuesday morning by his parents in the garden of their house in Grange Road. Police investigators are satisfied that his death was the result of injuries sustained from a fall in his bedroom. DCI Troy Martin from Highgate Police Station said that the boy had been recuperating from a recent operation because he suffered from a rare condition which caused bone deformations, and the impact …
‘So that’s all there was … all I was … a mention in a free newspaper nobody looks at,’ Sam said, as he switched his gaze from the screens to Curtis. ‘And I am dead, aren’t I?’
‘You can’t undo what is done,’ Curtis said softly, then laid his hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘You probably want some time by yourself, old chap. I’ll be downstairs when you’re ready.’
Sam just nodded as Curtis left him staring up at the article in the darkness of the room, mourning his own death.
***
Sam could hear the radio when he finally descended to the ground floor. He followed the sound to the room with the hunting trophies on the walls. As if it was a reward for all his labors over the past fortnight, Curtis was by the old radio again. His head held to one side, he was listening to the distinctive voice which was penetrating the constant cascade of static.
‘One of Churchill’s speeches and it’s live,’ Curtis said, with an expression as if he’d just swallowed something unpleasant. ‘He may have saved the day for good old Blighty, but I can’t help but revile the man for what he did to me.’
‘I’m going back to the village,’ Sam said.
‘I can’t say I’m surprised,’ Curtis replied, getting to his feet. ‘Take as long as you want to think things over.’ As he walked with Sam into the hall he added, ‘And I don’t want to go on about it, but you haven’t got the luxury of time. You’ll need to shed some of that excess energy before very long, unless you want Baby Pain to have a second grave to show off to newcomers.’
Sam came to a halt as they emerged into the bright sunshine on the terrace. It couldn’t have been more out of step with the gloom he was feeling.
‘Take this,’ Curtis said, handing Sam something on a lanyard.
‘A compass?’ Sam guessed, as he examined the circular brass case that clearly pivoted open from the small hinge on one side.
‘Not quite. When you decide you want to help your friend, you can send me a message on it.’ Curtis paused. ‘If you’re on foot it will also enable you to find your way back here again and pass through the protective field around my house.’ As Sam continued to look at the device, Curtis added, ‘The controls are pretty self-explanatory.’
‘I …’ Sam began, feeling as though he should say something after all the days they’d spent working together.
Curtis held up his hand, silencing the boy. ‘No need for that. The car is where you left it – ask it to take you back to the village.’ For a moment he watched a fly as it zig-zagged past. ‘And it won’t go down well if they find out you’ve been here with me. Tell them Renton put you up in his cabin.’
‘Renton?’ Sam repeated.
‘Yes, he’s a loner … a hermit who lives in the woods not far from here, and an ally of mine. He’ll corroborate your story if anyone bothers to ask him. And if they ask you about him, just talk about his massive beard – he hasn’t trimmed it in centuries.’ Curtis half-turned, then stopped. ‘Oh, and mess your clothes up a bit – his cabin is pretty sordid.’ Curtis consulted his watch. ‘If you hurry, you’ll catch your friends at the pond. They’ve just set off for it.’ Then he went inside, leaving Sam by himself on the terrace.
***
As directed by Emma, the fly had alighted on a windowsill so that she and Morgan had a view of Sam and Curtis together on the terrace. They watched the screen as Curtis returned inside and the boy remained where he was, the device in his hand.
‘That’s our ticket in,’ Morgan said, as the screen showed Sam opening the lid of the brass device to examine the controls inside.
‘It is indeed,’ said the figure behind them as he popped open the lid of an identical device, and the two ghastly faces turned toward him. The figure held it out enticingly in the dim light emitted by the screen. ‘The very ticket. I told you how this was all going to come together. Now we just need the great fire to take place, and we’re there.’
Chapter Twenty
Sam had been so preoccupied for the journey back that he hadn’t been taking much notice of his progress through the countryside. As the car swerved from the main track and began in an arc around to the rear of Curtis’s old house in the village, he suddenly realized where he was. ‘Stop! Stop!’ he shouted, then opened the door as the car pulled up in the meadow. ‘Um … go to the house without me.’
Proceed to destination without passenger
on board. Confirm? displayed on the dashboard.
‘Yes, confirmed,’ Sam said. After he’d got out and watched the car eerily drive off by itself, he began in the direction of the pond up by the cliffs. As he thought of his friends there, he broke into a run and didn’t stop running for the rest of the way until he caught Tom and Vek’s voices in the distance. From their laughter he knew they must be playing on the ropes by the edge of the water and could hardly contain his excitement at the prospect of seeing them again. Despite this, he didn’t let them know he was there, keeping behind the poppy-covered mound that encircled the pond as he headed in the direction of the far bank.
He continued round to where the upper branches of the willow tree were visible above the mound, then crawled to the top of it. Once there, Sam inched slowly forward, keeping low and parting the poppies before him so he could see. He made out someone lying under the shade of the tree.
‘Damaris?’ he whispered, hoping it was her, knowing it had to be her. Remaining on all fours, he began down the other side of the mound. That was when he remembered what Curtis had told him; finding a patch of bare soil, he scooped up a handful and rubbed it over his clothes and face.
Resuming on his way, it only took him a short while to reach Damaris. She was sound asleep beside a picnic basket.
‘It’s only me. Don’t make a noise,’ he said in a low voice as, still flattened to the ground, he extended a hand and cupped it gently over her mouth in case she cried out. ‘And don’t get up.’
Her eyes were immediately wide open. As he removed his hand, she rolled onto her side. ‘Sam! Where the heavens have you been? We were so worried.’ She was overjoyed to see him again, her face lit up with a smile.
‘Shh! Keep your voice down,’ he said, throwing a glance at the other two as they fooled around across the water. Then he noticed that the picnic basket was empty, all the food and drink finished. ‘I see everything’s back to normal again. You gave up looking for me.’
She frowned. ‘But we spent days searching for you! Everyone did – even the urchins helped. Where were you?’
‘I’ll tell you,’ Sam began, then hesitated, ‘but as far as everyone else is concerned, I’ve been staying with Renton in the woods. Okay?’
‘Renton the hermit?’ she asked.
‘I’ve actually been at Curtis’s house,’ Sam revealed.
‘Curtis?’ she said, her eyebrows leaping.
He nodded. ‘And Joely. She was there too.’
‘Joely?’ Damaris asked.
‘Are you just going to keep repeating names back at me?’ he grinned.
‘You’ve really met him? You’ve talked to Curtis?’ Damaris said, her expression incredulous.
‘I’m only going to tell you about this. No one else can know.’
She nodded. ‘But you’ve been at his house? What’s it like? And what were you doing there anyway?’ Then Damaris seemed to take stock of what she was saying, as if she couldn’t quite believe it. Running her eyes over the dirt on Sam’s clothes and his smeared face, she inclined her head. ‘Were you really with him? Promise me that’s true?’
‘Yes, I really was. I helped him with his work. Here’s some proof,’ Sam said, delving in a pocket to take out the device with the brass casing. ‘Curtis gave this to me to get in touch with him, and also find his house again if I need to.’ He opened the device and handed to Damaris. She was examining it as Sam continued, ‘I’m going to burn up for sure … he found out from his tests.’
Looking up sharply, Damaris was about to speak.
‘No, listen, it doesn’t have to happen. You need to hear what else I’ve got to say.’ Sam took a breath. ‘He’s come up with a way for me to go through the cliffs. And if I do cross through them, it will take some of the energy away that’s destroying me, or going to destroy me. It will save me, for a while, anyway. Curtis also said that I can never go home to my parents. Maybe he’s right – I don’t know, but it made me want to give up. That’s when I left him.’
Damaris was frowning even more deeply now, and for a moment Sam fell silent, resting his chin on his hands. What he was going to say felt so far away from the glorious blue sky above and the peace of the countryside around them. ‘You know, I saw my own death at his house. I was this mention in a newspaper nobody ever reads, and on the way back here I kept thinking that it can’t be all there is to me. I must do something more than that … even if I can never go home again, maybe I can do something with this extra time I’ve been given.’ He sighed heavily. ‘Remember the photo with the Japanese written on the back you found in my dressing gown?’
‘Of that girl?’ Damaris said, watching him closely as he pulled it from his pocket and placed it on the grass in front of her.
‘Yes, this one. I suppose if I only help her before I burn up or something, at least I’ve made a difference … for someone.’
‘You make a difference for me,’ Damaris said, touching his face to rub a streak of mud from it.
He smiled at her. ‘I know, and that means the world to me, but I also want to do something for Rachel. Curtis talked about fate and what’s meant to be, and I think it’s what I’m meant to do. Help her.’
Damaris glanced at the photograph. ‘Were you very fond of her?’
‘We were friends because we shared all the horrible things that were happening to us, all the pain, and that made it a little better.’ Sam looked into Damaris’s eyes. ‘So the big question is do I go back to the world and get her? And what about you … because from the message her dad wrote it seems that you come with me? But I don’t want you to be put in any d—’
There was a shout from the pond.
‘Sam!’ Tom whooped. Vek was also shouting as they both swam over at a rate of knots.
‘I’ve been rumbled.’ Sam got to his feet, smiling and waving at them.
‘This?’ Damaris asked Sam in a hushed voice, indicating the device in her hand. ‘What shall I do w—?’
‘You keep it. I’m not quite ready to use it yet,’ Sam replied quickly. He saw the photograph was on the ground where he’d left it. ‘And you’d better hide that too,’ he added as, at that moment, his two friends broke from the pond in a flurry of limbs and water and rushed over to greet him.
***
‘We have to find him!’ Damaris cried in desperation. ‘He’s in there somewhere!’
Rosie Plummer, her dress in tatters from the flames, was being helped toward Damaris. The man supporting the little girl went off and she sank to her knees. ‘I was right inside it. I couldn’t see him in the fire,’ Rosie croaked, vapor spuming from her mouth as she spoke, and enveloping her body as it healed after the intense heat.
‘Sam can’t be dead. He can’t,’ Damaris whispered, looking beyond the girl at the house in the terrace which was a wall of solid flames. The inferno was rapidly spreading along the row, sparks like sprites jumping along the ancient timber frames of the buildings, sprites set on devouring and consuming everything in their path.
Damaris had also ventured into the fire to search for Sam, and her face was smudged with blood and soot, her clothes singed. As she watched, the roof above the house shifted and, with a loud groan, collapsed in. ‘Oh no,’ she sobbed as a voluminous wave of smoke and dust billowed across the track and engulfed her and the little girl.
Vek was quick to come over and comfort Damaris. ‘Don’t you worry. We will find him.’
Dusk was deepening but it made little difference because there was ample light from the burning houses. And everywhere in the main thoroughfare people were rushing in all directions as Randall barked commands. Many were transporting buckets of water across from the Dormitories in an attempt to dampen the timbers in adjoining houses before the whole terrace was lost.
‘There’s nothing left of the upper floors,’ Tom said, as he stumbled blindly over to his friends. His words were distorted because his voice box had been seared by the heated air. ‘Sam must be somewhere in the rubble below, but it’s impos
sible to see anything down there.’ Tom had been holding his face with both hands, but now took them away. There was so much vapor issuing from it that it resembled a mask made of cloud. His eyeballs had all but evaporated, although they were being restored as he stood there, barely able to keep on his feet.
Simon suddenly appeared. He’d just dismounted from his horse after racing back to the village as soon as news of the fire had reached him. ‘I can only assume it’s Sam,’ he said sadly, looking at Damaris. ‘What happened?’
Damaris shook her head. ‘He told me he was tired and was going to lie down for a while.’
‘Earlier today we all went to the south side to work in the fields. He seemed fine,’ Vek put in distantly.
‘We’d had a wonderful day,’ Damaris whispered.
‘So there was no indication anything was wrong with him?’ Simon asked.
‘No, definitely not,’ Vek said. ‘The flames must have started while he was asleep, like last time.’ The boy turned to Simon. ‘The first we knew about it, there was choking black smoke everywhere. We tried to find him in his room, but he’d burned through his bed and the floorboards below. He must have dropped right through.’
‘And the floor below that,’ Tom added, his voice more recognizable now.
They watched as one of the villagers braved the heat at the base of the building to pull out one of the urchins who he then laid on the thoroughfare. Although the villager was already seriously burned he didn’t shy from going straight back into the inferno to drag out another body, dropping it next to the second.
‘The twins,’ Simon noted.