The Eternal War Read online

  Liam stepped towards Maddy. ‘Me an’ Bob need to go back again, Maddy. We didn’t manage to …’ He stopped. Saw Sal’s eyes suddenly wide, a white-gloved hand raised to her mouth.

  ‘What’s up?’

  Behind him the crackling burr of energy around the portal suddenly ceased as it snapped out of existence and the archway was its normal quiet hum of computers and the fizz of tube lights flickering a cool clinical glow down from above.

  ‘GOOD GOD! … WHAT IS THIS … DEVILRY?’

  Liam spun round on his heel to see a tall young man crouched and cowering in panic and confusion in the middle of the floor, eyes as wide, terrified and startled as a bull in an abattoir.

  ‘Oh great,’ sighed Liam.

  CHAPTER 14

  2001, New York

  The man recoiled fearfully at the sight of Bob, taking several quick steps away from him. ‘WHAT IS THIS P-PLACE?’ he bellowed anxiously. His eyes darting from one of them to the next.

  It was Maddy who reacted first. She took several steps forward. ‘Liam? Is that …? Oh crud, that’s not …?’

  ‘Yes, I’m afraid it is, Mads. It’s Lincoln.’

  Her jaw hung slack. ‘Oh my God!’ She advanced slowly. ‘Mr Lincoln? Abraham Lincoln?’

  Lincoln’s manic eyes settled on her. His shaggy eyebrows scowled, covering his fear with suspicion. ‘You … you know me, ma’am?’

  Maddy nodded. She even offered him something that looked like a polite curtsey. ‘Yes, Mr Lincoln. Yes we do.’

  Lincoln’s voice softened from an outraged courthouse bellow to something quieter and altogether more agreeable. ‘Then … please, ma’am, tell me where in tarnation I have suddenly ended up.’ He looked around the brick archway. ‘Just a moment ago I was in the Jenkins storehouse.’ His eyes fell on Liam. ‘Listening to you, sir, and your two friends talking about things incomprehensible to me.’

  Liam cursed his carelessness. ‘Jay-zus, he must have been following us!’

  Lincoln carried on. ‘And then I saw that … that round … doorway appear out of –’ Lincoln’s deep growl of a voice became a breathless whisper and his mouth snapped open and shut like a fish caught on a hook and landed on a riverbank. ‘It arrived out of nothing! Like smoke, like … like a vision of angels. Like …’

  Sal chuckled at that.

  ‘Fool that I am, I dared to step through.’ He glanced at Liam. ‘To follow you through, sir, through the … that … that doorway, and find myself in a … an unearthly whiteness!’ He scratched anxiously at the thick bristles of his beard. ‘Then I find myself here … in this strange place!’

  Maddy took another step forward, now only a yard from him. ‘You can relax, Mr Lincoln. Please … it’s all right, it’s OK. You’re perfectly safe here.’

  Lincoln studied her in suspicious silence for a moment. ‘You, ma’am. You sound less foreign to me than the others.’ He nodded at Bob. ‘Particularly that ugly ox of a man there. Good God! If I had a dog as ugly, I’d shave its posterior and teach it to walk backwards!’

  Lincoln chortled drunkenly at his own joke.

  Maddy shook her head. He’s been drinking.

  ‘Now you, ma’am,’ he said, eyeing Maddy warily, ‘you have the sound of New England in your voice.’

  ‘Boston,’ she replied. ‘I’m from Boston.’

  Lincoln nodded slowly. ‘And I trust you have a name?’

  ‘Maddy. Maddy Carter.’ She offered her hand to him. ‘We mean you no harm … In fact, we came back in time to save you.’

  For several moments he regarded her hand as if it was a snarling dog ready to snap at his fingers. ‘Save me?’

  She nodded. ‘You nearly stepped right in front of a speeding wagon.’

  ‘Aye. It was Bob here,’ said Liam, slapping his meaty shoulder, ‘that yanked you back out of the way. Do you not remember?’

  Lincoln remembered that. Remembered being winded and lying on his back. But then it was all a confusing mixture of things he might or might not have seen or heard. The only thing he’d been sure of was the whispered conversation in the dark of the dockside. The mention of his name. The mention of a destiny. The mention of the Jenkins storehouse and the specific time of some mysterious rendezvous.

  ‘Yes, perhaps I do remember something of that,’ uttered Lincoln. He cocked a bushy eyebrow, narrowed his eyes as he struggled to make some sense of his whisky-soaked recollection. ‘A big … fast wagon? Barrels on it … was it?’

  Liam nodded. ‘Aye. A distillery wagon. The horses were running wild, so they were.’

  ‘There, you see?’ said Maddy. ‘Liam and the others went back to save you.’

  ‘Back?’ Lincoln nodded. ‘That’s some of what I heard these three say to each other. Back … they came back in time?’

  Maddy shot a look of irritation at Liam and Sal. Careless talk. They should’ve been much more cautious in what they were saying and where they were saying it.

  ‘Yes, Mr Lincoln,’ she admitted. ‘Yes … they actually came back in time.’

  Lincoln’s scowl vanished and was replaced in an instant with a smile that looked horrifically out of place beneath his dark brooding eyes. ‘INCREDIBLE!’ He suddenly grasped her hand firmly and shook it. ‘Most incredible!’ He let her hand go and advanced towards the others.

  ‘Sir!’ he said, reaching out for one of Bob’s large paws. ‘Sir! As unsettlingly strange as you look, I am indebted to you for saving my life as you did!’ Lincoln’s energetic voice filled the archway as he pumped Bob’s arm furiously.

  Bob looked at Liam for help.

  ‘Just say “no problem”, Bob.’

  ‘No problem,’ he rumbled.

  ‘And you, sir!’ he greeted Liam. ‘You, sir, I suspect, by the way you talk, are from Ireland!’

  ‘Cork in Ireland, aye. Liam O’Connor at your service.’

  ‘A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Mr O’Connor!’

  He let Liam’s hand go and then graciously bowed in front of Sal, taking a gloved hand and kissing it. ‘Young madam!’

  Sal giggled as if his kiss had tickled. ‘I’m Saleena Vikram. Uhh … just call me Sal.’

  He glanced at Becks, reaching for her hand. She eyed him distrustfully as he grasped it and then, about to kiss it, he hesitated, taken aback by the livid ribs and swirls of scar tissue running across her hand, her forearm, all the way up to her elbow. He quickly released his tight grasp.

  ‘You … you have been in a fire. I am sorry. I hope I haven’t hurt you, ma’am?’

  ‘I am called Becks,’ she said coolly. She looked up at Maddy, who offered her a subtle nod. ‘Yes, that’s right, a fire. But I am all better now.’

  He nodded politely. Finally he turned back to Maddy. ‘And you, Miss Carter, I presume you lead this small and remarkable group of mysterious heroes and heroines?’

  She shrugged self-consciously. ‘I muddle through somehow I guess, Mr Lincoln.’

  He stood back, hands on hips to study them all. ‘Quite remarkable,’ he uttered again. ‘And am I to truly believe that I am standing in a time that is in my future?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Maddy.

  Lincoln looked at the row of computer monitors on the desk, different sizes displaying different news feeds from around the world. ‘And those pictures … those moving pictures, they are of this time?’

  ‘Yes … live cable-news feeds,’ she replied, realizing as she did that there was little in that answer he’d understand.

  He leaned forward, studying them closely one after the other. ‘Remarkable. Like … like little windows looking out upon every corner of this world of …’ His words died as he pulled in a gasp.

  ‘Good Lord!’ he yelled, stepping towards the monitor on the end. ‘These buildings! Are they as giant as they appear?’ he said, pointing at one screen. Maddy turned round. On one screen MSNBC was doing a news story on Wall Street. There was a library image taken from a news helicopter of Manhattan’s skyscrapers.

  ‘Oh yeah �
� that’s New York. Where we are right now.’

  ‘New York, you say?’ Lincoln bent over the messy desk, peering closely at the monitor. ‘That is New York! Remarkable!’

  Liam gently nudged Maddy as Lincoln’s gaze wandered from screen to screen, muttering with ever-increasing incredulity.

  ‘Are we not causing contamination here, Maddy?’ he whispered. ‘I mean he has to go back, so … to be the President of the Union states?’

  ‘Yes, you’re right,’ she replied.

  ‘Surely we can’t send him back to his time knowing about all this?’

  She cursed quietly. ‘He already knows too much. I need to think what we’re –’

  ‘GOOD GOD!’ Lincoln suddenly exclaimed. ‘A DISASTER!’

  ‘What now?’ Maddy pulled away from Liam and rushed forward. ‘What is it?’

  Lincoln’s pointed finger was shaking. ‘A calamity, Miss Carter, a calamity I tell you! Right there through this window! Look!’

  She followed his goggle-eyed gaze and saw he was watching the looping footage of tomorrow’s trade towers disaster.

  ‘No … no, see, relax, this isn’t live.’ She shook her head, wondering how she was going to explain the difference between live footage and recorded footage to a man who’d never seen a moving image before.

  ‘Are there people living in that structure? That tall tower?’ He turned to her. ‘In what city is that explosion happening?’

  ‘New York.’

  ‘Tarnation! You mean here? This very place?’ Lincoln turned to the others. ‘Is this future of yours in the middle of some war?’

  Maddy shrugged. ‘Well, sort of …’

  ‘Then we must join the fight!’ Lincoln turned and rushed into the gloom towards the far end of the archway.

  ‘Mr Lincoln!’ called Maddy. There was no answer. But she could hear the corrugated-iron shutters rattling under the impact of his fists. ‘Oh crud … he’s a real pain,’ she groaned, and made her way across the floor to join him.

  ‘Mr Lincoln?’

  ‘Where is the door, Miss Carter? We must join this fight and defend our –’

  ‘Mr Lincoln … will you please calm down!’ She pressed the green button to one side of the shutter door and with the whine of the motor and the clank of chains, the shutter lifted, spilling evening light across the archway’s floor through the slowly widening crack.

  ‘There’s no war going on right now! No invasion of America!’

  ‘But I saw it just then, Miss Carter, with my own eyes! A vast explosion!’

  ‘It’s just an image of something that’s going to happen. That’s all. Nothing you need to get all upset about! OK? Look … everything’s fine outside right now!’

  The shutter rattled to a halt. For a moment she was unsure whether to show Lincoln the world outside. The more details he learned of the future, the more contaminated his mind was going to be. For an anonymous man with little or no influence on history, that might be an acceptable contamination. But for a man destined to be president …? Well, like she’d said, he already knew too much. A little more wasn’t going to make any difference either way.

  ‘Take a look … everything’s just fine.’

  She gently ushered Lincoln forward, stepping into the cobbled alley. She grabbed his shoulders and turned him to his left, so that he faced the end of their backstreet and the dirty, rubbish-strewn quayside beyond. Above them the Williamsburg Bridge swept across the East River towards the glowing lights of Manhattan. It boomed and rumbled as a train went over above, drowning out the tooting of bridge-borne traffic above and the distant wail of a police siren.

  ‘See now? Nothing’s going on. There’s no war!’

  ‘God help me! This … is … quite … rem–’

  ‘Let me guess. Remarkable?’ she finished for him.

  Lincoln didn’t reply. Instead she heard a gurgling sound. She turned in time to see Lincoln’s eyes rolling drunkenly until she could see only the whites. His head lolled to one side; his body slackened like a rag doll, but remained upright and standing. It was then she noticed the thick fingers of Bob’s hand round his throat, and Bob standing behind.

  ‘My God! You just killed him! You just snapped Abraham Lincoln’s neck!’

  ‘Negative,’ said Bob. ‘He is unharmed and unconscious. I have compressed a nerve cluster in his neck.’

  Sal, Liam and Becks emerged into the flickering amber lamplight of the backstreet. ‘I’m sorry. It was my suggestion,’ said Liam. ‘I gave Bob the order to do that.’

  Maddy looked anxiously at Lincoln’s body slumped in Bob’s arms. ‘You sure he’s not … you know, dead?’

  ‘He will be fine,’ said Becks. ‘Information: he will experience some bruising and some minor swelling only.’

  Maddy pulled on her bottom lip for a moment, then finally nodded. ‘Right … yeah, in that case, good idea, Liam. With any luck he’ll wake up back in New Orleans thinking this was all some sort of a drunken dream. He’ll blame it on the whisky.’ She stepped back inside the arch. ‘Quick, let’s get the displacement machine charged up before he comes round.’

  CHAPTER 15

  2001, New York

  It took ten minutes to get three-quarters of the LEDs on the charge display lit up. Maddy was certain that was going to be enough. She only needed to send the unconscious form of Lincoln and Bob, perhaps Liam too, back to 1831. She turned round to check Bob and Sal were still keeping an eye on the man, curled up on one of the armchairs.

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘Still out,’ replied Sal, looking up from reading something on the table.

  ‘OK, computer-Bob, we’ll use the same drop-location data as the last trip. Punch them in to just before they rescued Lincoln from that wagon.’

  > Affirmative, Maddy.

  ‘When he wakes up, he’ll think he passed out right outside that inn you mentioned, Liam.’

  ‘Right. Then me an’ Bob need to sniff out what caused that wagon to go hammer and tongs.’

  ‘You got it.’ She turned to the webcam. ‘Oh, and get a density probe running.’

  Last thing they needed was a dock worker in there witnessing the arrival of Lincoln and heralding him as some kind of prophet from God.

  > Density probe is activated.

  Liam was standing beside her. ‘He’s a character, so. That Lincoln fella.’

  ‘A regular firebrand,’ she tutted. ‘Too much energy for his own good, like a freakin’ toddler on a sugar rush.’ She pulled up the density-probe display bar and nodded with satisfaction that nothing so far had stepped through their drop space. ‘If he’d been alive in my time, I guess he’d make a pretty good children’s TV presenter … except for the fact he’d scare the kids with that monobrow.’

  Liam laughed. He got the gist of that. ‘Still … I suppose it’s energy like that that makes a poor farmer’s son a president?’

  She nodded. ‘I guess so. I’d like to think that –’

  The MSNBC news feed flickered. Both of them caught the sudden change out of the corner of their eyes – the news reporter standing outside the White House and reporting on President Bush’s sliding approval ratings had been wearing a pale blue shirt and a black tie … all of a sudden he was now wearing a white shirt with a dark red tie.

  ‘Did you see that?’ said Maddy.

  More than the shirt and tie, a second ago his skin had been a coffee colour, now it was white. The same face, the same dark hair slicked back, but the skin had lightened a tone, as if some studio engineer had adjusted the contrast setting on a camera.

  Maddy turned in her chair. ‘Sal … I think we just had another wave. Bigger one, this time.’

  Sal was on her feet. ‘I’ll go look outside.’ They’d left the five-dollar note just outside the shutter, hidden beneath a discarded McDonald’s carton. On one side was the Abraham Lincoln image. She wondered if this time wave would have wiped his face off the note and replaced it with another scowling president.

  Maddy turn
ed in her seat back to Liam. ‘OK, I think we need to put Abe back pretty fast.’ She winced at the sight of the empty perspex tube. It would take too long filling it up again. ‘You guys are going back dry.’ She looked at Liam, still wearing his morning coat and cravat … and Bob, still dressed like a dock worker. ‘And you’re still all dressed right … so we’re good to go.’

  The noise of the shutter cranking up echoed across to them. Sal stepped outside into the evening. ‘Looks the same!’ she called in. ‘Manhattan’s still there!’

  Maddy sniffed and wiped her nose. ‘Well, that’s something, then.’

  ‘Jahulla!’ Sal came rushing back in.

  ‘What?’

  She ran over to the computer desk. ‘Look! See?’ She spread the five-dollar note out on the desk. Lincoln’s face was gone and, just as Maddy had expected, in his place was another elder statesman with mutton-chop whiskers and a joyless frown.

  Becks joined them, looking down at the note. ‘Lincoln’s presence has been completely removed from this timeline.’

  Maddy nodded. ‘No Lincoln memorial in Washington, then … or –’

  ‘STOP!’ Bob’s voice suddenly boomed. They all turned just in time to see the heels of Bob’s boots disappear out of sight through the open shutter door and out into the alley. Becks responded immediately and sprinted across the archway to join him.

  Liam looked at the armchair where Lincoln had been slumped unconscious just moments ago. ‘He’s only gone and done a bleedin’ runner!’

  Lincoln’s long legs carried him swiftly down the cobbled backstreet, the soles of his boots slapping the ground like an audience clapping applause at his death-defying escape into the darkness.

  Behind him, two dozen yards and no more, he could hear the heavier footfall of that giant of a man moving with a quite unbelievable agility. Lincoln was a fast runner; as a boy in Coles County, Illinois, he had won every race with his friends – legs like a stallion, his father used to say.

  The busy end of the street opened up in front of him. He could see mesmerizing lights of all kinds and all colours: lights on horseless carriages, lights down the sides of buildings, distant winking lights far up in the sky.