The Forever Man Read online

  As regards Garrick, Chevie and Riley, their trip had none of the dream-like, time-bending qualities of previous programmed jaunts. This trip was the time-travelling equivalent of being struck in the eye by a bolt of lightning.

  Riley barely had time to see the silhouetted figure of his mother whispering to him: And you, my son, shall carry the name of your proud Wexford clan.

  All Chevie saw was the cat called Tinder she had owned with her pop in their Malibu cottage, and the only thought she could form in this regard was: Miaow.

  The wormhole welcomed Garrick and hugged him close and would have absorbed him utterly this time but for the silver that he had brought with him. Chevie’s Timekey had trumped the silver initially, but now it was like acid in the tunnel, even in a dematerialized state, burning great holes in the quantum foam. The tunnel recoiled and Garrick and Co. were left to free-fall to earth, tumbling through the man-made tear in the wormhole through which Garrick had previously fallen. And, where before there had been a cool-down period to ease them back into the swing of things, this time the comfort blanket of quantum foam was ripped off like a blood-crusted bandage.

  Simply put, Riley and Chevie fell back into the world screaming. Only Garrick had the presence to recognize the time and place in which they had ended up. A time and place where his authority had once been unquestioned and his power absolute, which had pleased him for a while until he had grown bored. And now he was back.

  The Witchfinder had returned.

  Witchfinder

  Mandrake. Huntingdonshire. 1647

  Mandrake was a small plantation of perhaps four-score brick houses, most with fancy functioning chimneys, apart from a small almshouse and the House of Unfortunates where the infirm, unsound and criminal were expected to hold their noses. Mandrake boasted a broad, hard-packed street running down the centre from its northern gate, bisected by a narrower street that ran from east to west. Earthworks, and more recently a strong stone wall, had been raised between the points of the cross. On the wall’s stone buttresses, reasonable artillery had been mounted, which had seen off many a roving band of ne’er-do-wells, pedlars, bandits and plague carriers, with the help of the stout hearts and brawn of the militia.

  It was recounted daily in the Huntings Tavern that on one memorable occasion about a year ago the legendary highwayman Colonel Bagshot and his troop of misbegottens had attempted to impose an embargo on the town, only to be repulsed by the visiting Witchfinder, who led the charge when the northern gate was breached. With every passing telling and tankard of ale, the raid grew in stature from skirmish to pitched battle, though the one detail all could agree on was that the Witchfinder had hanged Colonel Bagshot in the town square the following day, ridding the shire of a notorious brigand.

  On this spring afternoon, Mandrake’s residents were gathered around the stone dais of the same square, engaged in a debate on the town’s charter and whether broader permissions were needed to change the town’s name, which after all appeared on regional survey maps. Debates of this manner were common in Mandrake and all men were free to voice their opinions, even the African dullard Fairbrother Isles, whose head was currently in the stocks for bullish behaviour. This happened so often that the stocks were generally referred to as the Fairbrothers, as in Stick that arch-dolt in the Fairbrothers for an afternoon and see if that won’t halt his gallop. It was said that Fairbrother Isles was the only African man on English soil, apart from in London itself, and that he had escaped from a slaving ship.

  All other business had been dealt with. It had been agreed that the oil lamps hung outside every house could be lit one half of the hour later in the evenings, now that the sun was keeping its nose up that bit longer, and that the watch could be reduced to a single sentry on each gate after nightfall as there had not been an abomination sighting in several weeks. The menfolk had reluctantly conceded that Bundy Dormouse, the travelling balladeer, should not be admitted to Mandrake, as his ballads grew annually more ribald, and was this not a Puritan community? And now it was time to discuss the town’s name and whether or not it was fitting for such a moral town to be named after a plant with magical connotations.

  The debate would be led, as it generally was, by town constable Godfrey Cryer, who was also the town crier, which could make conversing with the man confusing at times, as he insisted on using the word ‘cry’ in every odd sentence.

  Cryer was not a man to see the humour in this; indeed he was a humourless man, thin of mouth and sharp of bone, with little to differentiate him from a long-handled axe besides the boxy hat he habitually wore as a mark of his various offices.

  ‘As town crier, I decry the name Mandrake,’ cried Cryer, to the moans of the assembly. ‘I decry it, as the Witchfinder decried it.’

  ‘A crybaby is what you are, Godfrey,’ shouted Fairbrother Isles from the stocks.

  Cryer, who was as Puritan as they come and considered humour base Satanism, dealt the African a sound kick to the rump. ‘Enough of your prattle, dullard. This is a serious issue.’

  ‘This we know,’ said the mason and brick worker, Jeronimo Woulfe, who was of good standing as his fingers had a hand in many of Mandrake’s walls, so to speak. ‘For every week you raise it, when there are other important matters to be discussed.’

  ‘Indeed,’ shrieked Cryer. ‘Indeed and surely I do raise it, for the Witchfinder himself who cleansed our town not a year since made a point of it on several occasions.’

  ‘He mentioned it once in passing,’ said Isles, who’d always had a strange manner of speech and many suspected was a full-dolt as well as an ale-sot. ‘No big deal, Cryer. Listen to Jerry and get a life.’

  Cryer’s hands raked the air. ‘Good people of Mandrake, or Mandrake’s Groan, to give the town its full and proper name! It is the sound the root makes when torn from the earth. All who hear it are struck dead and damned to hell. Mandrake is Lucifer’s very representative in our soil.’

  ‘Yep,’ said Fairbrother Isles. ‘And pig bum-blasts are the devil’s breath. You’re a moron, Cryer. I decry you. Why don’t you go and have a good cry?’

  General laughter and sniggering ensued. There was no denying that the prisoner had a certain wit about him, though his often confusing use of the King’s English was a trial to the brain.

  Jeronimo Woulfe, a short, stocky workhorse of a man with outsized hands and flat fingers that seemed too large for the deftness his masonry work required, decided to make peace. ‘Come now, Constable. The war has concluded, and did not the Witchfinder move on? Mandrake has known peace this past year. The plague has not crested the hills in many months and our strong bricks are sought after from Huntingdon to London itself. Rejoice, I say. Indeed we all say it.’

  Cryer’s face swelled and empurpled. ‘Rejoice, Master Woulfe? Rejoice, says you. There are creatures in the fens. Abominations born from witches. Have we not seen them with our own eyes? We are truly in the age of darkness, and you would have us rejoice?’

  ‘Not all darkness, surely. Mandrake’s red bricks are famous,’ countered Woulfe, rubbing his hand over the bristles of his shorn scalp. ‘Shall we throw our customers into confusion with a new name for our brand?’

  This now was good sense spoken plainly and was greeted with a smattering of applause and even some stamping of feet.

  Cryer’s shin bone of a face turned brick red. ‘Bricks! Bricks, say you? You would place a higher value on bricks than souls? This town has fallen low since the Witchfinder left us. The fens are blighted by weird creatures. Crops rot at the root and our elderly disappear from their very beds. We are being tested. Souls against bricks. Pah!’

  This gross exaggeration was the general run of things and would probably go on for some time. Cryer was the last true disciple of the Witchfinder, truth be told. That particular fashion had waned since the Battle of Naseby, to the relief of every good woman in the county. It had got to the point where a mother could not mix a poultice without being accused of witchcraft. Cryer was tolerated fo
r now, but his days were being counted down by the residents of Mandrake and the unspoken plan was to remove him from office by the summer’s end before he could attempt to enforce Parliament’s declaration that Christmas was henceforth and forever banned. But for now his argument must be at least given a fair hearing and then it would be on to the new name itself.

  ‘Garrwick!’ said Cryer, spreading his arms wide, a wedge-of-cheese grin on his pale face, as though the good residents of Mandrake had not heard this proposal a hundred times before.

  ‘Garrwick.’ And now he raised a finger as if about to impart a valuable nugget of information. ‘Or I am prepared to shake on Garrickston.’

  Doubtless a debate would have ensued had not an impish spark ignited itself not half a yard from Cryer’s beak of a nose and chased itself into a full-grown fireball.

  ‘Witchcraft!’ quoth he, seeming not too perturbed, as he had always enjoyed abetting the Witchfinder.

  It was a difficult declaration to argue against, for what else but witchcraft would ignite a spiralling fireball that sucked air from the surroundings and grew exponentially, revealing some forms in its depths? Limbs were perceptible and features, all a-jumble at first like a melting pot of humanity but then separated and vomited forth into the square in three distinct forms that glowed with a dusting of orange sparkles.

  Upon which sight Fairbrother Isles quoth, ‘Now there’s something you don’t see every day,’ before Cryer struck him from consciousness with his boot heel.

  The figures writhed in a jumbled tangle of limbs and trunks until one main form emerged, sloughing off the uncertainty that had made his person hazy, until there was not an adult soul in the crowd who did not recognize him.

  ‘Witchfinder Garrick,’ said Cryer, and it seemed like he would weep. ‘You have returned to us.’

  Albert Garrick shook himself like a hound, his limbs stretching with each undulation to their correct length, then spat a mouthful of blood on the ground. ‘That I have, Constable. And just in the nick of time, it would seem.’

  At the sight of Albert Garrick, two lasses fainted dead away on the benches where they sat, and three young men also, toppling forward into the mud-like sacks of the bricks Mandrake was so famous for. Only Jeronimo Woulfe had the presence of mind for positive action, stooping to free Fairbrother from the stocks and drag him clear of any potential turmoil.

  ‘I am returned from hell,’ quoth Garrick. ‘And see what I have found sneaking into the town – a witch and her familiar!’

  There could be no doubt that the materialized female was indeed a witch, for her eyes were those of a cat, not to mention that a bloody wound on her forehead magically healed itself as the people of Mandrake watched. And, as for the boy, if Witchfinder Garrick proclaimed him a familiar, then that was what he must doubtless be.

  Garrick pointed at Chevie and Riley with a finger that was accustomed to people looking where it pointed.

  ‘Take them!’ he said.

  And taken they were with rough hands and no delay.

  Riley knew all about the ‘Zen Ten’ because he had personally experienced those delightful moments when the brain decides a time traveller’s phase shift from a quantum-foam state back to bog-standard flesh and blood might be a bit too much for the teeny-weeny human brain to handle, and so provides a gentle pillow of fuzzy happiness to ease the traveller back into the real world. The ‘Zen Ten’ (a phrase coined by Professor Charles Smart – who else?) was basically the only thing that kept the traveller’s brain from short-circuiting on touchdown.

  However, when a person has been up and down the wormhole a few times, the brain gets almost blasé about the entire process and decides to divert any emergency power to life support; that is, it puts any available electricity into making certain that the body a person went in with is the one it emerges with, which worked out more or less OK for Riley but not particularly well for Chevron Savano.

  As Riley was dragged across Mandrake’s main square, he saw the townsfolk descend on Chevie like rats on a sack of offal, their fingers greedy for a limb to tug. Though he was instantly alert and quaked with terror, it was not for himself.

  Chevron, Chevie, dear friend, he thought frantically. What has been done to you?

  For his companion’s eyes were indeed those of a cat. Golden and slitted. But there was something more distressing about this new Chevron Savano. She wore not the dreamy smile of the emergent but rather a terrified and vacant expression that displayed not a hint of higher intelligence.

  She is more cat than human, Riley realized, and he knew he must help her. It was a compulsion that did not require any thought or concern for his own person, for he had never had a friend like Chevie Savano. And, in that split second of mortal fear for her dear life, Riley felt a spark flicker in his heart and he drooped into action.

  For drooping is the proper course of action when beset by multiple assailants; Garrick had schooled him in this.

  The curs will be expecting a thrashing resistance, he’d informed Riley during one of their Holborn tutorials. So we takes our lesson from the drunkards of old London town. Did you ever try to roust a cove in his cups? He is the very devil to catch a grip of, so we must fight our instincts and loosen where we might be fairly expected to tighten. Do you comprehend, my son?

  To which Riley would nod and think: I am not your son.

  And so Riley employed his ex-master’s methods, but added a twist or two of his own. One bewarted fellow he pinched hard in the webbing between forefinger and thumb, which loosened the chap’s grip sharpish. And another bowl-cut gent he cracked on the stockinged shin with the heel of his shoe, which Riley was happy to see had made the time trip with him. The others were unprepared for the almost liquid droop of their captive and in a trice Riley was rolling free, towards Chevie, who was hissing at the men encircling her.

  She may not even recognize me! he realized, and this thought dismayed him more than he could bear.

  ‘Fight, Chevron!’ he called. ‘Fight!’

  But Chevie would do nothing but paw and hiss and wriggle till her dress was torn from her in rags, leaving her clothed in the FBI jumpsuit. This from the girl who had faced down the Battering Rams gang in their own digs. From the girl who had given Albert Garrick a run for his money.

  Riley scrambled towards her until his progress was blocked by two high black boots that seemed to absorb the light. It took no more than the acid foreboding in his innards to inform Riley who was at the other end of those boots.

  ‘I love it,’ Albert Garrick said, laughing. ‘Fun all the livelong day.’

  Before Riley could shift another inch, a boot descended on his crown, crunching his forehead into the ground and rendering him unconsciousness.

  Riley woke some time later that same day; the light seemed lower and of a more russet hue as it shafted the arched windows of the stone chapel where he was trussed.

  Or possibly it is tomorrow evening, he thought. For that was quite the bonk on my poor noggin.

  A noggin that still felt thoroughly bonked and swollen.

  Then he thought of Chevie and believed he might weep.

  What have they done to her?

  She was dead, he was certain of it.

  Dead, and we never spoke of things. Of feelings. Never nothing but gallivanting and adventures.

  Spoke of what precisely? Riley could not say nor even think the word. And so he decided that Chevie would be not dead in his mind until she was dead in his arms.

  But for now … For now his magician’s cape was gone and he knew that he had been thoroughly searched for any picks or tricks hidden on his person. He was restrained in the intractable grip of a most unusual contraption. Some class of double crossbow, with arrows pointed directly at his own neck, and a mess of springs, strings and pins that made the whole apparatus seem a feather away from loosing its deadly bolts. The device extended to milkmaid handles, which held Riley’s hands wide in wooden struts that curled upward at each end, and his feet were
chained to a half-sunken hoop in the stone altar.

  This was Garrick’s business, Riley knew, for he recognized elements of the design from his ex-master’s stage illusions. He built it himself or had it done from his drawings.

  Garrick was undeniably alive but changed terribly. He seemed barely human with his alabaster skin and skeletal appearance.

  Riley wondered whether or not he was terrified, and was surprised to find that he was almost relieved.

  I always knew this day would come and now it has.

  But how did Albert Garrick yet live? How?

  The how nagged at his brain, but not as much as it once had or once would, because he had seen so much in the past year. There were so many hows that their intensity faded like echoes. Even when did not seem to matter so much.

  Chevie.

  This was all he had room to care about in his noggin, and all his actions would be driven by that.

  To that end, he must attempt to escape this diabolical contraption. Riley sent his senses scurrying outward, across the floor and up the rough walls, trying to glean some information that might help him to break free, though it seemed hopeless with the arrowheads scraping his neck.

  A chapel it was, sure enough, but not one of your fancy London cathedrals. It was something altogether more modest, with limed walls and hard benches for squirming on. And there, lounging on the rear bench with those infernal black boots poking from the shadows, which was becoming something of a trademark look, lounged the man himself: Albert Garrick, a cloying odour of tallow and rancid meat drifting from his flesh.

  ‘Welcome to the town of Mandrake, Riley boy. Welcome to the era of witch-hunting. Sixteen forty-something, if memory serves.’