"You know you did." The look in Penelope's eyes was colder than the wind outside.
"I don't know
anything
about you," Ashe insisted. "Look at the book," he said, kicking it towards them. "You know what the worms do…"
Carruthers picked it up and opened it. "The first section's all but eaten," he said. "You can't read a thing until you get to–"
"Me walking along a roadside with no knowledge of who I am." Ashe said. "Whenever we met – and you have to understand that it's news to me we ever did – it must have been before then."
"Oh," said Miles, "that's OK then, I suppose it doesn't count if you don't remember it."
"I'm not saying that…" Ashe ground his teeth in exasperation. "Look… a man is the sum of his memories." He stared pleadingly at Penelope. "I'm not the person you knew. You have to accept that."
"I don't have to accept a damned thing from you," she spat, "not then and not now. What about Dolores? Should I accept that you let your driver rape her? Should I accept that because you don't remember having done it? Well? Stripping me naked in the back of your car, beating me, threatening me… I should just accept all that, should I? And the box… if it wasn't for you then I wouldn't even be here in the first place!"
"I had the box?"
"Of course you had the box!" Penelope was screaming at the top of her voice by now, "it was because you wanted to open it that you did what you did!"
Ashe just stared at her, every dream, suspicion and uncertainty falling into place. He dropped the gun, fell back into one of the chairs and began to cry.
Carruthers grabbed the gun from the floor and held it loosely trained on Ashe.
"How dare you!" Penelope shouted, "how dare you be the one to cry! What have you got to cry about?"
Ashe sniffed, wiping at his face. "Because I hoped I was a good man," he said, "and that was all I ever cared about."
"Good?" Penelope scoffed, "you were the very worst!"
"Fucking
kill
you." Whitstable opened eyes gummed shut by drying blood, the lids peeling apart like parched lips to reveal the ceiling of the corridor. "Fucking
kill
you," he repeated. It was his mantra of the moment, his motivational chant. In the real world, his team had gathered at the start of each day, a few minutes before the markets opened, and chanted the team motto: "Buy cheap, sell dear!" They would shout this over and over again like an unruly football crowd or an army marching into battle. That and the couple of lines of coke he shoved up his nose in his executive washroom – his snowy breakfast – had been the fuel that got him through the day. Now his motivation was even simpler. "Fucking kill
you!"
He rolled over to be greeted by the sight of his pink and weeping face, multiplied in the broken shards of the mirror that littered the carpet. He selected a larger piece and held it up, taking in his cracked and bent spectacles, the blisters and a smile that would have terrified him had he seen it being worn by anyone else.
"Fucking
kill
you!"
"We need him, my dear," whispered Carruthers, "which is not to lessen what he did to you, not even for a moment, but he knows where we're going and that is invaluable."
"How can he possibly know?" Penelope asked.
"Because I've been here before," Ashe interjected, "in fact I'm here right now… twice over in fact."
Miles groaned. "What's he talking about? I don't trust a word this arsehole says…"
"I have been to this house three times, once as a young man, then in my middle age and now one last time. All three visits take place in the same relative period for the house, so all three of me are here right now."
"How lucky," Miles said "As if one of him wasn't enough."
"Why come here so many times?" Carruthers asked.
"The first…" Ashe shrugged "…I don't know. Whatever my experience, I was left with no memories but a subconscious memory of the box. It drove me to hunt it out, thinking it would answer a lot of my problems."
"And why are you here now?" asked Penelope.
"Because I have to stop what's going to happen to Sophie."
Alan and Sophie fell for only a short time, the darkness around them thickening until they were hardly moving. Just when it seemed they would draw to a complete halt they were shoved forward, erupting in a spray of oceanic blue and titanium white from a portrait of an eighteenth-century sailing vessel.
"You OK?" Alan asked Sophie as they lay on the carpet of a house corridor. She didn't appear to be listening, just staring at the picture they'd fallen out of. "Sophie?" He tugged at her sleeve until she turned and focused slowly on him. "You OK?" he asked again. She considered her answer for a moment. To Sophie this was far from a simple question. In the end she nodded, though Alan suspected that was as much because it was the easiest answer as anything else.
He looked along the corridor and realised they were not alone: a man lay slumped against the door at the far end, a man he took a moment to recognise. He pulled himself to his feet and drew closer, moving cautiously as if approaching a dangerous animal, which, in a way, he was. Alan dropped to his haunches and reached out to touch Chester's cheek.
"You," said Sophie, who had walked up behind him, "but not so Very Old."
Chester stirred, opening lazy eyelids. He tried to focus on Alan's face. "Do we know one another?" he asked.
"No," Alan replied. Chester's eyes drooped closed, his lips twitching as if about to say something but robbed of the strength to do so. Alan sighed. "And that's always been my problem."
"This house," Ashe explained, "you don't even begin to understand what it's for. It's a prison, and the creature it was built to contain… we
can't
let it out."
"Oh, can't we?" Miles replied, before realising that he was just scoffing automatically now, and that Ashe might actually have a point. "Erm… What sort of creature are we talking about exactly?"
"I can't even begin to say," Ashe admitted, "it looks human but…"
"Why are we even listening to him?" Penelope interrupted. "Do I have to remind you both who this is?"
"Of course not, my dear," said Carruthers reassuringly, "but you must accept that he knows more about all of this than we do. I'm not suggesting we offer him our trust but our attention costs us nothing, and we may learn something of value."
"I wish I could reassure you that I mean no harm," Ashe said, "but even if I knew how, we certainly don't have time." He glanced towards the mouth of the cave. "In fact we only have a few hours. Soon the door will open and after that… well, who knows how we can deal with him?"
"All right," Penelope said in exasperation, "talk and we'll listen, but no promises."
An arm erupted from the flood water, desperately trying to find something to hold on to. Wet fingers grabbed a rough edge in the brick, dug in their nails and pulled. Tom emerged behind them, his wild hair plastered across his face as he spat out water. He dragged himself on to the narrow ledge in the tunnel wall, his lungs desperately pumping air. For a moment he lay there, trying, and failing, not to think about Elise and the look on her face as she had fallen back against him with a bullet in her head. He thought of Pablo too but only briefly – sorry, El Toro, there was just no room for anyone else, hadn't been for years.
The flood was settling, having run its course. He sat forward, and a stomachful of water shot from between his lips. He wiped his mouth with the sleeve of his jacket, feeling wretched – not only from the death of Elise but also the contaminated water. He would move in a minute, just as soon as his head cleared. He passed out.
"What makes it even more complicated," said Ashe, "is that I remember all of it. What happens when he leaves the room, what he does to Sophie… I was there as a younger man – and will be there again, in this body, in a couple of hours' time. I know how it all works out… but I have to change it."
"Who is this Sophie?" asked Penelope. "Not some new woman, I hope? Knowing how you like to treat them…"
"She's a child," Ashe spat, angry at Penelope for the first time, "and she means a lot to me. We met here, she looked after me. I like to think I looked after her. Up until I let the prisoner touch her, of course… not that I could have stopped him, not then. Now that I know how everything works out I just need to make sure we get there first, stop the door from being opened. If he's never let out then everything will be fine, not just Sophie, everything… You have to understand: the power this creature has… if it gets out then none of us will survive it, here or back in the real world."
"Oh, nothing too worrying then," joked Miles.
"I mean every word of it," said Ashe. "Don't forget I've seen it. I know what it can do."
"Forgive my, perhaps, archaic comprehension of these things," said Carruthers. "Bar the romance of HG Wells I have no understanding of the workings of time travel – but if it has already happened then how might we stop it?"
"It's about perspective," offered Miles, "Ashe – I mean, Chester… Or Alan…"
"Stick to Ashe," Ashe suggested, "it makes it easier."
"Thank you," said Miles, somewhat dismissively; he was still far from sure he trusted a word the man said. "Ashe has witnessed these events from a dual perspective: he was there as a younger man and therefore has a memory of how things played out then. He also knows that he will be there as an old man – because he saw himself – though no idea of the events leading up to it from that point of view. So it all comes down to whether his foreknowledge will be enough for him to change how things occur this time."
"And, therefore, how they will have always occurred," Ashe chipped in.
"It's a paradox," added Miles.
"It's a nonsense" was Penelope's opinion.
"But can we afford to take the risk?" asked Carruthers. "I still can't claim to fully comprehend this but if, as Ashe insists, the stakes are so high then how can we not play the game out?"
"Because we don't trust him an inch?" suggested Penelope.
"I'm sorry," said Carruthers, "but that's not enough, people can change and if he has, and if what he says is true…"
"A lot of 'if's, you notice," said Miles.
"Indeed," agreed Carruthers, "but not enough to counter the final one: if he's right and we don't follow his lead then our obstinacy will cost the lives of countless others."
"We have to do it," said Penelope, "even though it makes me sick to spend a moment longer in his company."
Carruthers looked at Miles. "This is not a decision to be made lightly. Miles, are you with us?"
Miles sighed. "Of course, we do it." He looked at Ashe. "Though if you hurt Penelope in any way I'll bloody kill you, all right?"
Ashe smiled. "All right."
"So," said Carruthers, "with that agreed…" He held up the revolver and began loading it with the bullets he had confiscated earlier. "May I suggest you lead the way? You can explain more as we walk."
Elise came to Tom while he slept. She rose up in front of him, a line of brown liquid trickling from the hole in her forehead. A column of water reached up to the roof for her to grip and swing on, shaking the wares that had kept her rent paid when she was alive but were now just meat to swell and bloat and rot.
"No touching," she whispered, a dribble of water cascading over her blue lip, "no extras."
"Not who you were," Tom muttered, "not to me."
She moved slowly, to music only the dead can hear, swinging her hips to the trumpet of a graveyard Quincy Jones or Miles Davis, splashing Tom with spray from her body as she gyrated.
"Loved you," said Tom, "not for this… for Thursday nights, for your eyes."
He passed out again.
Ashe led them to the rear of the cave, running his hands over what appeared to be a solid stone wall. "In this place," he said as his hands disappeared into the stone, "nothing is what it looks like." He walked through the wall as if it weren't there, the others following behind him. "When we met, I told my younger self how to find the creature's cell," Ashe explained, "which means I can remember it now."
"Another paradox," said Miles, "in case anyone was wanting to keep count."
"As always, darling," said Penelope, "you make sense only to yourself." She squeezed his hand to reassure him she meant it kindly.
They were in a narrow tunnel, Ashe marching ahead with his lantern held aloft. Soon he had no need of it, as a faint luminescence in the walls brightened the further they walked. The tunnel began to change shape, becoming more regular, the walls, floor and ceiling flattening. A little further and a faint
fleur
de lys
pattern could be seen in the walls, as if there was wallpaper just beneath the surface of the stone.
"It's becoming another corridor," Penelope observed, as they came upon a series of alcoves filled with decorative busts, "part of the house again."
"We never left, of course," said Carruthers, "however much our recent climb may have made us think so."
"The house is constantly changing," explained Ashe. "Though it looks like an old building it's nothing of the sort. It's more like a living being than bricks and mortar."
"But where is it?" Miles asked.
"That I don't know," Ashe said. "Outside the reality we're used to but still linked… in fact fuelled by it."
"Fuelled by it?" asked Carruthers.
"The library," Ashe answered, "though don't ask me to explain in too much detail. I only know the vagaries. The house needs human minds to perpetuate it. It is their imagination – nightmares, mostly, you'd assume, from being in the damn place – that gives it form and substance."