The Forever Man Read online

  Maccabee did not trouble the cell with verbals or histrionics, but fell over dead, into the cage as it happened, catching the barred door with a hand so that it swung and clunked behind him. Very neat.

  How this could be was not really an issue, as it clearly was. This strange Garrick was certainly ghostly, but no ghost. The fist that held Tom aloft was skin and bone, albeit the first the colour of the second.

  The hand lifted Tom clear off the ground.

  ‘Family!’ Garrick screeched. ‘Family? Ain’t it?’

  Riley could do nothing.

  All his nightmares had come true and were standing before him, holding his dream by the neck. He was nine years old again, lying in a West End gutter with Garrick’s boot at his throat, waiting for the stamp that would crush his windpipe.

  Chevie too was shaken to her core, but she was also trained, and she knew that a sudden attack while Garrick was focused on Riley and his vengeance could be their only chance.

  She was wrong.

  Chevie bent low and darted towards Garrick’s kidney area, hoping to put her knuckles deep in the spongy tissue. Her Quantico instructor, Cord Vallicose, who was to become a woman in this reality (don’t ask), had assured her that there is not a man alive who can shake off a ruptured kidney.

  Perhaps Vallicose had been/would be right, but Chevie was not to confirm her instructor’s maxim on this day. Her attack was met with one of Garrick’s blacker-than-black boots, which whipped up and stopped her dead in her tracks, leaving her with an indent in her skull that any fool could see was a fatal wound. She fell to the cold floor like a tossed sack of coal and spasmed alarmingly.

  ‘Chevie!’ said Riley, and then: ‘Tom!’

  ‘ Chevie!’ mimicked Garrick mockingly. ‘ Tom!’

  Riley wanted more than anything to weep. He wanted to fall to his knees and beg, but he knew from bitter experience that Garrick despised overt displays of weakness or emotion, and so he stood his ground and put together the most complex sentence he could in the circumstances.

  ‘What do you want?’

  Garrick laughed, delighted. ‘What do I want? No, that ain’t it. That ain’t the question. The question is, my son: what do you want?’

  The assassin grinned like a naughty child, relishing his moment of vengeance. ‘To know your name, is it?’ A curved Arabic blade appeared, curling round Tom’s neck like the coil of a snake. ‘This fella here. Perhaps he knows your true name. Why don’t you ask him?’

  Riley did not, for he felt that to play Garrick’s game would mean death for Tom.

  ‘ ASK HIM!’ roared Garrick, hamming it up for the imaginary stalls, and the blade jittered at Tom’s neck, drawing a spurt of blood.

  ‘Wh-what is my name?’ Riley stammered, the choice taken from him.

  But all Tom could say was, ‘Mercy. Mercy, please. I don’t understand. I never even played cards with these gentlemen. I ain’t no debtor. Being ginger ain’t no crime.’

  Garrick was theatrically appalled. ‘You don’t know my friend’s name? Why, it’s like you ain’t even family. And if you ain’t family I don’t have a use for you.’

  And without further ado he drew the curved Arabic blade crosswise, slicing his captive’s throat, then dropped him like a slaughtered animal.

  ‘Tom!’ cried Riley, sinking to the floor beside the dying man, whose blood issued from his neck in a broad rippling sheet, drenching Riley’s person in a second. Even as Riley tied one of his magician’s scarves round Tom’s neck he knew that it was futile. There was no help for Tom. The best thing for him with these injuries was a quick death, which would surely be granted.

  ‘Damn you!’ Riley swore. ‘Damn you to hell, Albert Garrick.’

  Garrick’s face was serene. ‘You tried that, my boy. You sent me to hell and now I have returned.’

  Chevie flailed on the floor, blood leaking from one ear. Garrick noticed and affected a sad face. ‘Oh, it don’t look good for the Injun maiden, does it now? No, not good at all. I would rather have dragged it out a bit, given her part in my – what shall we call it? – inconvenience. But Albert Garrick never did know his own strength, and I had forgotten the little vixen’s trademark bursts of speed. As a matter of fact, I had almost forgotten her entirely, believe it or not.’

  Chatter and babble was all Riley heard and even that at the back of his mind. Nothing was making sense to the lad. Tom was dying, perhaps dead already, and Chevie, his dear Chevie, was surely breathing her last.

  ‘Oh,’ he said or perhaps sobbed. ‘Oh … oh.’

  Garrick seemed not to care whether Riley paid attention or not, so wrapped up was he in his moment.

  ‘So, my plan in a nutshell,’ he continued, ‘was to subject your traitorous person to the same pain that poor, betrayed Albert Garrick was subjected to.’

  Chatter and babble. Babble and chatter.

  Tom spasmed on the cold floor and gave up the ghost entirely. Chevie was moaning with each breath.

  ‘I took you in like a son. But you denied me a family, and so I am denying you a brother. First, however, and this was the genius of it –’ Garrick twirled an imaginary moustache – ‘I made you beg for his life. I made you value it above your own. This made the killing all the sweeter, for you now realize, Riley, just how much this dead man meant to you.’

  Garrick nudged Tom’s corpse with his toe. ‘And here’s the last nail in your coffin, my son. This bag of bones ain’t even Tom. You have doomed yourself for a stranger.’

  Riley knew the meaning of each individual word but could not fathom their collective gist.

  ‘It ain’t even Tom? Not Tom, then?’

  Tom or not, there was a dead man on the cold floor and Riley was drenched in his blood and the sour smell of it was in his nose.

  And Chevie. Oh, poor Chevie.

  Riley had seen an Irish tinker boy kicked by a donkey at the Islington market several years since. He had never forgotten the sight of the poor Gypsy lad all a-quiver in the mud with his eyes rolled back till they were mostly white and his body racked by convulsions.

  She will die horribly, like Tom who ain’t Tom. Two dead on my account.

  Garrick gloated on. ‘How you are feeling at this precise moment, Riley my boy, is unimaginable to most common folk. Lured to a foul pit by a master you had given up for dead. To have the gift of hope granted you, only to be snatched away just as sudden. And then for the awful realization that your dear kin ain’t nothing more than a patsy. A ringer, as it were. A common longshoreman stitched up on account of his ginger mop.’ Garrick smiled an uncommonly wide smile that was rarely seen but which, when fully extended, bisected his head like a zipper. His ivoried teeth were made all the more yellow by his unnatural pallor.

  ‘Ain’t you going to say anything?’ said Garrick, his grin gone. ‘Just moping, is it? I must say, after all this time, all these centuries, I had dreamed up such an amount of lively conversations we would have. And now all I get for my trouble is a weeping boy. I am quite the disappointed fellow. In truth, I cannot fathom how you outfoxed me on the first go-around. But I was younger then. Now I am the Forever Man.’

  This was undeniably a decent villain’s monologue, but it was all blah and blabber to Riley. Garrick could have been a huffing gorilla for all the sense the boy could put to his words. And, as for Chevie, she was beyond attaching sense to anything. Her automatic functions would keep her alive for another minute or so, but it was already too late for her brain. Her skull was fractured and leaking fluid like a cracked gin jug.

  So fast it had happened. One boot-heel crack in the forehead and she was a goner. After all the diverse scrapes and tumbles she had endured, to be done for almost casually was indeed cruel.

  A thought formed in Riley’s mind: Chevie doesn’t know what’s happening. It’s for the best.

  But he would not deal with this notion, would not even glance sideways at it, for that would mean admitting that Chevie was dying.

  As will I be presently.


  Another thought. This one did not seem so important now. There was only one door in this room and to leave through it meant passing Garrick and that was inconceivable.

  Oh, Chevie. Oh, Tom.

  But not Tom. Who?

  Riley was useless. Paralysed by a flood of emotions, like an insect in a blob of resin. And, more than that, he was sure to be scarred emotionally beyond all hope of recovery if he did by some miracle walk out of this room.

  But the universe was not yet done with unforeseen events. Riley would leave this room, but not through the door and not on his two feet.

  Garrick stepped into the meagre light and treated the stunned, silent Tartan Nancy to a wink.

  ‘What say you, madam? For sheer melodrama? Top marks, surely. I once trod the boards, you know, all over this fair country. The Great Lombardi they called me.’ Garrick held up his palm, which fairly dripped with Tom/Not Tom’s blood. ‘Or perhaps you will remember my infamous moniker, the Red Glove.’

  ‘Oh, Lord save us,’ gibbered Nancy, and executed a strange combination of crossing herself and repetitive curtsying, shaken to her core by the mention of the murderous magician whom most believed to be a mere theatre legend from the penny dreadfuls. But the Red Glove was as real as Jack the Ripper and, in fact, the former had done for the latter.

  It was Garrick’s habit to bow in a theatrical manner whenever the opportunity presented itself, as it transported him back to his theatre days, which were centuries behind him in one way, and mere years in another. Garrick had always been inordinately proud of his stage bow, and he used to deliver weekly lectures to Riley on the importance of rigidity and sweep.

  Fold yerself as clean as the queen’s notepaper, Riley my son, he would say.

  And thunderheads would brew on Riley’s brow and he would think: I am not your son, devil.

  Garrick bowed now, prompted by Tartan Nancy’s botched curtsying.

  ‘At your service, madam,’ he said, which both the bow-er and the bowed-at knew was balderdash.

  As Garrick silently counted to three, which was his rule for the low point of a bow, his nose passed close to Chevron Savano’s chest, within a foot perhaps. And something beeped.

  Beeped and then flashed.

  Curious, thought Albert Garrick.

  It was a strangely electronic beep for the nineteenth century. Unnatural and anachronistic – and yet it was familiar to Albert Garrick and it evoked in him the darkest urges.

  His blood-streaked fingers quested towards the flashing light that seemed to emanate from Chevie’s heart.

  A twist of lanyard glinted on Chevie’s collarbone and Garrick hooked a thumb underneath it, pulling out the cord until a flashing teardrop-shaped charm appeared.

  ‘God, no!’ he shouted.

  For he realized that this was no simple adornment; it was a cursed Timekey. Much like the one that had been used to dispatch him into the time tunnel.

  It should not exist!

  Garrick calmed himself. The key is nothing without a pod. Just a lump of plastic.

  And I am protected by silver!

  Garrick had discovered quite accidentally that the wormhole could not abide the element of silver. He could feel the time force’s pull waning, and sometimes actually recoiling, whenever he wore silver chains or bracelets, which was all the time since he had made the discovery – for the wormhole’s pull was like a cloud in his mind that stopped him thinking clearly and set his heart battering a tattoo inside his chest.

  But there were quantum facts missing from Garrick’s argument. Things even Charles Smart had never known when he’d first entered the wormhole. For instance, once a body had been as thoroughly saturated with quantum foam as Garrick’s had, the wormhole did not need a pod to absorb him again. A Timekey would do the job just fine. And, while the wormhole could not take him while he wore silver, the Timekey was more than strong enough to trump the metal’s powers of repulsion.

  The Timekey grew warm in Garrick’s hand, then hotter still, and the assassin was hypnotized by it. The last time he had held a gadget like this one, the wormhole had taken him prisoner for nearly two and a half centuries. Garrick had believed himself in hell, such was his torment. He had barely survived with his wits intact and did not wish ever to repeat the experience.

  Flee! he told himself, but it was too late. The device had activated and Garrick’s molecular structure was already bonded with the key’s; there was no separating them on this plane. He felt that familiar draw, a sickening pull as the time tunnel welcomed him home. And, though it had been some two hundred and fifty years since he had regained his human form, Garrick remembered the sensation well, and the helplessness that went with it.

  Not again! he thought, his ability to form simple thoughts being the only thing left to him. I cannot survive it again.

  And then: I never meant to hurt the dove, master. Which was an unrelated memory from an unresolved childhood issue.

  Riley, for his part, did not notice the Timekey’s activation; he simply saw the assassin hunched over his fallen friend. The sight brought him round and sent him lurching towards Garrick.

  ‘Leave her be!’ he snarled. ‘Get away from her, you devil.’

  His attack was clumsy and ordinarily Garrick could have casually swatted the youth away, but now reality was bending and solid matter was phase-shifting to quantum foam.

  How? wondered Garrick. There ain’t no pod. There ain’t no landing pad.

  The truth was that none of the three would ever know the how exactly, no more than the average human can ever truly understand how a bird is able to fly, but that did not change what was happening. A whirlwind rarely stops spinning to explain itself.

  Riley’s attack was successful in so much as he reached his target, but a failure in that he did not force Garrick away from Chevie. In fact, his lurch bunched them all together, so that when the orange quantum sparks surged from the Timekey’s heart all three were engulfed.

  Garrick’s limbs were already insubstantial. Riley saw his own arms dematerialize and could not believe they were once again being tumbled into the mouth of a time tunnel.

  But where will we tumble out? he wondered. Or, more accurately, when?

  Chevie thought nothing. In her mind, a photographer’s flash had exploded and would not fade. In her head, she stared at the sun and began to go slowly mad.

  In the last seconds before the three disappeared from the Newgate cell in a swarm of orange sparks, Riley could have sworn he heard Big Ben strike in the distance.

  As a matter of fact, the sound came from inside the room.

  ‘Pardon me, I’m sure,’ said Nancy, even though there was no one left to hear her.

  Time after Time

  Everywhere. Everywhen

  And so Albert Garrick was back in the time tunnel, though to be fair he had never truly been fully out of it, which is a difficult concept to comprehend. To quote Professor Charles Smart: We don’t have a clue about the wormhole. None of us. Anyone who says different is talking out of their backside. And, yes, I’m including Einstein in that. I mean, look at him. The guy doesn’t even understand the workings of a hairbrush.

  Simply put, Garrick had been so deep in the tunnel that its particles had permeated his every cell. These elements were more minute than protons, quarks or even black-hole singularities – quantum particles so small that they would be immeasurable for centuries.

  Riley and Chevie had absorbed a few million of these particles during their jaunts through the tunnels, but their trips had been over a measured span and through the same corridor, while Garrick had been tossed into the tunnel without an exit visa, as it were. He had floated around in there without purpose or direction, and his being had become saturated with the particles, untold billions of them. They had infiltrated his own molecules, colonizing them until he was as much a part of the quantumverse as he was of the universe. Garrick had truly become a time traveller, remade in his own image but with a connection to the wormhole that could ne
ver be broken. Just as the wormhole was forever, so Garrick became forever, and when he fell through the man-made rift (more of which later), he was a changed being. Half mad from his quantum incarceration, for one thing. And when he survived the slings and arrows of good old Father Time, as well as actual slings and arrows and cannon fire, he came to realize that he could not die or be killed.

  However, for an immortal to function in a reasonably normal manner, he needs something to aspire to. A goal. So Garrick made it his mission to take revenge on his adopted son, Riley. It was indeed an epic quest, the decision to bide his time for almost two hundred and fifty years to snuff out the life of one boy, but it gave Albert Garrick something to dream about at night and put a smile on his thin lips for near a hundred thousand mornings, which never failed to give the heebie-jeebies to anyone who saw it.

  Having never been a slugabed, Garrick did other stuff too. He played quite a substantial role in the East Anglian witch-finding industry (an experience which would shortly prove useful), embarked on a campaign in India, where he found his beloved curved blade in the gut of a disembowelled goat (another story), captained a pirate flotilla out of Tortuga (recycling his Red Glove nickname), and even spent a few decades as a monk in Lancashire trying to change his ways (unsuccessfully, it must be said, as the boredom brought on one of his bloody rages and he murdered half the abbey). There literally is not time to go into the details of all the shenanigans perpetrated on the human race by Albert Garrick since the wormhole spat him out in 1647. Suffice it to say, for our purposes in this particular narrative, that only the thought of killing Riley in the most inhuman way possible kept his upper lip stiffened on most days. As for Chevie, Albert Garrick had almost forgotten the FBI consultant until she made the mistake of jogging his memory in the prison cell with her distinctive accent. Now, as they entered the time tunnel, Garrick dearly hoped the trip would heal her crushed skull, so that he could kill her again.

  Each trip through the wormhole is different, and no two outcomes are the same. On Garrick’s last immersion, he had gone deeper than any earth-born being ever had – apart from a prehistoric earthworm who had entered through a rift brought on by a major volcanic eruption, which happened to coincide with extreme levels of solar radiation. That worm went so deep into the wormhole (ha ha) that it emerged substantially enlarged and abides to this day in a Scottish lake.