The Sideways Door

  Title Page

  TIME HUNTER

  THE SIDEWAYS DOOR

  by

  R J Carter and Troy Riser

  Publisher Information

  First published in England in 2006 by

  Telos Publishing Ltd

  17 Pendre Avenue, Prestatyn, Denbighshire, LL19 9SH, UK

  www.telos.co.uk

  Digital Edition converted and distributed in 2011 by

  Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  Telos Publishing Ltd values feedback. Please e-mail us with any comments you may have about this book to: feedback@telos.co.uk

  The Sideways Door © 2006 R J Carter and Troy Riser

  Cover artwork by Matthew Laznicka

  Time Hunter format © 2003 Telos Publishing Ltd

  Honoré Lechasseur and Emily Blandish created by Daniel O’Mahony

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Dedication

  RJ –

  For Albert, Nathan and Boris for laying out the blueprints for the bridge; and for Charles, who knew it was there the whole time.

  Troy –

  For Maggie and Jacob.

  The Time Hunter

  Honoré Lechasseur and Emily Blandish … Honoré is a black American ex-GI, now living in London, 1951, working sometimes as a private detective, sometimes as a ‘fixer,’ or spiv. Now life has a new purpose for him as he has discovered that he is a time sensitive. In theory, this attribute, as well as affording him a low-level perception of the fabric of time itself, gives him the ability to sense the whole timeline of any person with whom he comes into contact. He just has to learn how to master it.

  Emily is a strange young woman whom Honoré has taken under his wing. She is suffering from amnesia, and so knows little of her own background. She comes from a time in Earth’s far future, one of a small minority of people known as time channellers, who have developed the ability to make jumps through time using mental powers so highly evolved that they could almost be mistaken for magic. They cannot do this alone, however. In order to achieve a time-jump, a time channeller must connect with a time sensitive.

  When Honoré and Emily connect, the adventures begin.

  Quote

  ‘Oh, Kitty, how nice it would be if we could only get through into Looking-glass House! I’m sure it’s got, oh! such beautiful things in it! Let’s pretend there’s a way of getting through into it, somehow, Kitty. Let’s pretend the glass has got all soft like gauze, so that we can get through. Why, it’s turning into a sort of mist now, I declare! It’ll be easy enough to get through –’

  – Through the Looking Glass: and What Alice Found There

  Lewis Carroll

  Prologue

  Tired as he was, the young Army lieutenant dozed uneasily on the train ride to London from the coast. Lungs scorched by chlorine gas a few weeks before, Jonah Rankin could not sleep lying down. Lying down filled his lungs with fluid; lying down was drowning. Jonah spoke French, and had been with the allied forces in the trenches, coordinating artillery, when the yellow-green cloud had rolled over and through them. He flashed on a memory of hundreds of men choking, clasping their hands to their throats, falling to the ground, convulsing, twitching out their final seconds of life like insects in a giant killing jar.

  ‘Are you all right, there?’ A woman’s voice in the here-and-now. Worried. Warmly maternal.

  Jonah started fully awake. The woman seated before him was dressed in middle-class mourning black, her features gauzy and indistinct behind a veil. From her high-pitched, reedy voice and ponderous, thickset carriage, Jonah guessed her to be 50 or so.

  Jonah started to respond to the woman’s concern, but broke off in a fit of coughing. He no longer spat blood into his ’kerchief or worried he might bring up raw pieces of his lungs, but the fit was still bad enough that it nearly doubled him over. After a moment, the coughing subsided, but the hollow, scraped raw feeling persisted.

  ‘He’ll be fine, Mother,’ said the man squeezed next to her, closest to the aisle. ‘He’s up and around, after all.’ He was gaunt, balding and angular, with a prominent, predatory nose. He was dressed – like his wife – in mourning black, and his suit was overlarge and ill-fitting. With a quick, nervous movement, the husband reached into his breast pocket and produced a small silver flask, curved to conform to the slight convex bend of his narrow chest. The older man unscrewed the cap and extended the flask to Jonah. Jonah saw that the man’s hand was shaking, vibrating like the wing of a wounded bird, and doubted the tremor was from age or alcohol. His dull, rheumy eyes were watery and red from weeping, not drink. Quite a lot of that going round, Jonah thought.

  ‘Here, sir. Good for what ails you,’ the man said, with a forced heartiness, and waited while Jonah sipped from the flask. The liquor was harsh going down, but the warmth of it spread comfortably from his belly to his chest and dulled the broken-glass edge of the pain.

  ‘Gas, was it?’ the older man said. ‘We read about the gas. Nasty bit of business, that.’

  Jonah handed back the flask and mumbled a thanks. It still hurt to speak. The older man acknowledged his thanks with a tired nod and turned his attention back to The Times. The woman, who had seen Jonah take in the colour of their clothes, said simply, ‘Our son. He was at the Salient.’

  ‘So was I,’ he whispered hoarsely.

  She brightened. ‘Private Johnny Moorehead. Did you know him?’

  Still facing forward, the husband said, ‘There were thousands of boys there, Liz. Besides, this young man is a gentleman. Not likely he would know our Johnny, anyway.’

  Jonah didn’t say anything, but knew the truth of the father’s statement, and took no offence, because he had heard no bitterness there. A young career officer, a graduate of Sandhurst, Jonah wouldn’t have known Private Johnny Moorehead even if he had known him. The gulf was too wide.

  ‘Fred and I are off to claim the body,’ Johnny’s mother said.

  ‘What they could find of the body.’

  ‘Please, Father. Enough of that. You’re being an imposition.’

  ‘Not an imposition,’ Jonah said. ‘Glad for the company, thanks.’ It was a lie, of course. He wanted nothing more than to be left alone, but he knew no way to say so without causing offence. Jonah felt the tickle in his throat that threatened another spasm, closed his eyes, and willed it away until the feeling passed. ‘So sorry for your loss,’ he said, or tried to say. The words came out as a croak.

  Mrs Moorehead saw his discomfort and clucked her tongue. ‘Don’t try to talk, dear. We can see how much it tries you.’

  ‘We just want our boy home,’ Fred said, more to himself than to anyone, almost too low for Jonah to hear.

  Jonah settled back in the worn upholstery of the seat. Soon, he thought, I begin my assignment at the Ministry. Colonel Merrick, his regimental commander, giving him the news in hospital, had assured him that solid staff experience added much-needed diversity and administrative polish to an already promising record. Over time, Jonah had been told, he might even come to view the gas attack as a blessing.

  A blessing, he thought.

  Jonah had no idea what the new position required. The orders were vague. He assumed it would have something to do in a general way with the killing of Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, Turks, and Croats. He was,
after all, a professional soldier.

  Killing is my business, he thought, and business is very good, indeed.

  His mind wandered. Jonah wondered about the scientist who had thought up the chlorine gas trick. What, exactly, had been running through this man’s head when he had hit upon the idea? Had it played out like a dream in his fevered brain – all of those poor blokes writhing and choking in the mud – or had it been more like a particularly difficult mathematical abstraction, killing ratios and all that, worked out on a blackboard, refined with a slide rule? Had a group of them talked it calmly over in committee? Jonah imagined a world of such men: white-coated hive drones: scheming, plotting, calculating …

  ‘On your way home, then?’ Mrs Moorehead asked.

  Jonah shook his head and forced a smile. ‘London,’ he said. ‘Orders.’

  The woman opened her mouth to say more, but her husband nudged her quiet, cutting her off, and said, ‘Hush, Mother, loose lips and all that. We don’t need to know where the lieutenant is going. We don’t want to know, right?’

  Jonah was grateful. He didn’t know how much more of her kindness he could stand. One more solicitous glance from a passer-by, he thought, and I’ll take out my revolver and start potting them like pigeons.

  Mrs Moorehead, poor dead Johnny’s mother, filled with maternal concern, leaned over and touched his knee. ‘Why don’t you rest, dear? We’ll wake you at the station. It’s no bother. No bother at all.’

  Jonah nodded in thanks and settled back, closing his eyes. At first he determined simply to feign sleep, so these good people would just leave him alone, but exhaustion and the rhythmic motion of the train combined to lull him into an uneasy in-between. His thoughts rambled, jumping from association to association, interspersed with half-formed memories and jagged images – the doctors in the hospital, looking over him, shaking their collective heads. He saw their images waver, shift and change into demonic creatures from some unnamed hell. The intense night terrors often caused him to wake from sleep screaming. Back in the hospital, the nurses had been finally instructed to sedate him until the nightmares stopped coming. He mentally pushed the images away. He put a face to the dead Private Moorehead, imagining the lad as a red-faced, still chubby boy with his mother’s beaky nose and his father’s blocky jaw, lying tangled in the wire, the body ballooned to twice its normal size after three days in the sun, body gases farting and hissing through the orifices and open wounds festering with maggots squirming in spoiled meat; we’re all just meat after all just screaming squirming choking puking bags of blood breathing red hot chlorine fire crying out for mama mama mama make it stop here now look at this –

  ‘Costume party, right?’

  Jonah woke to the voice, which was only a few feet away, nearly at his ear. He caught himself reaching for his weapon and cut the movement short. Not at the front, he thought. On a train to London from the coast. All is well. He noted with mild annoyance that a young man was now next to him in the seat that had been empty thus far. Something about him was vaguely familiar, although Jonah was sure he had never seen him before.

  ‘Beg pardon?’ Jonah spoke before remembering the rawness of his throat, and the pain brought him fully awake and alert. He straightened in his seat, assumed his bearing.

  ‘I said,’ the young man began, emphasising each word as if speaking to a child or an especially slow adult, ‘are you on your way to a costume party?’

  At first, Jonah was tempted to ignore the question. True, the tone bordered on impertinence and deserved a forceful response, but each spoken word hurt. He merely shook his head. Still bleary-eyed and disorientated, he looked to his front and saw that the Mooreheads had gone, their place taken by another middle-aged couple who seemed well-turned-out and comfortable – although Jonah thought it strange that a woman of her age would go about without a hat in public. After the fuss Mrs Moorehead had made over him, Jonah was more than mildly surprised that she, if not her husband, had forgotten to awaken him before disembarking, if only to say goodbye.

  The young man, plainly puzzled, pointed to Jonah’s sidearm. ‘Is that real?’

  ‘Is what real?’

  ‘The pistol. Is it real?’

  ‘Of course it’s real. What kind of question is that?’ The pain of his throat was stretching Jonah’s nerves taut as piano wire, but he was determined to endure this obvious provocation as best he could. Slapping this cheeky rodent the length of the car simply wouldn’t do.

  The man seated to Jonah’s front spoke without looking up from his newspaper. ‘Leave ’im be, boy. The poor man isn’t bothering anyone.’

  At the sound of the man’s voice, Jonah felt his heart quicken to a gallop, his breath halt in his lungs, the hair on the nape of his neck rise and bristle and itch against the stiff, starched woollen collar. He felt as he had when stricken with fever as a boy: discombobulated, detached; all was unreal, mirrors and mirage. The sense of unreality was reassuring, because Jonah could tell himself he was still in the middle of a dream no matter how real all of it seemed: the sights, the sounds, the solidity of the seat beneath him and the car around him. But then the man to his front looked up and ruined everything.

  Jonah found his voice. His voice, though hoarse from the gas, was strangely calm, but he had been trained to steady his voice in even the most chaotic of circumstances. ‘Mr Moorehead,’ Jonah said, saying the man’s name aloud and letting it hang on the air. It wasn’t a question. The man, although somehow miraculously radically different in dress and demeanour, was clearly the same man who had accompanied Jonah since Millborough. This Mr Moorehead, unlike his nearly identical twin of only a few minutes before, glowed with good health and vigour. His eyes were focused and clear. Jonah saw no grief lines, smelled no cloud of alcohol.

  The new Mr Moorehead tilted his head quizzically to the side. ‘We’ve met before?’ He shook his head ruefully. ‘Forgive the lapse, but I honestly don’t recall.’

  ‘Part of getting older, dear,’ his wife said, in a gently chiding tone. Jonah very badly did not want to see beyond the powder and rouge, somehow sensing beforehand that the shock of another Mrs Moorehead would be worse, but he did and it was. ‘And while you’re at it, young man, forgive our son, too. No excuse for bad manners, I say. He’s certainly old enough to know better. It’s just that he’s never seen one of those things –’ she nodded at Jonah’s holstered revolver – ‘outside of pictures.’ Her smile brightened. ‘Are you with the government?’

  Jonah nodded and stretched his lips in a grimace he hoped would pass for a friendly smile, struggling to keep his expression composed, fighting hard to slow down the runaway train of his thoughts, desperately clinging to the hope that this awful, disorientating dream would fade soon and bring him back to the proper here and now. Take hold of yourself, Jonah thought, forced himself to think. His mind flashed on pictures of the front, now seemingly made as distant as the moon. You’re a soldier, he told himself. You’re an officer, a leader of men in battle.

  As casually as he could, testing his courage and self-control, Jonah loosened his white-knuckled grip on the edge of his seat and turned to face the young man sitting beside him. Jonah was bathed in sweat, and felt clammy and cold and weak; but deep down where it counts, he felt a burning determination to see this through no matter where it led him. I am casual, he thought. I am relaxed, he thought. I am in complete control of the situation.

  ‘And you must be Johnny,’ he said.

  Chapter One

  At a casual glance, any visitor to the National Gallery would have assumed that the well-dressed black man was another art student or Degas enthusiast. He was seated on a bench, long legs akimbo, scribbling furiously in a sketchbook, deeply immersed in his work, looking up from time to time to ponder ‘Woman Bathing’ – noting, perhaps, the way Degas had used a deceptively freehand style when rendering the lines of the woman’s form, or the way the vibrant pinks of her bac
k meshed with the white of her skin to give the illusion of sunlit shadow, or the way the blur of her left elbow implied movement in a way the Futurists, active years after Degas’ prime, could never have hoped to achieve.

  A young woman tapped the man on the shoulder. He had sensed her presence, but still her touch seemed to startle him.

  ‘Finished, Honoré?’ she said, peering over his shoulder for a look at the diagrams and notes he had been working on. All the main floor windows, she saw, were circled and ‘X’ed, Honoré’s shorthand for sealed and watched. So much for the direct approach, she thought.

  Honoré shook his head. ‘The skylight on the top floor looks to be the best access route, Emily, but I’m still hoping to find a way that doesn’t entail climbing a rope. You?’

  ‘I’ve noted and inventoried three pieces from the timeframe we’re looking for, but there’s still a long way to go.’ Both of their voices were whispered, relaxed and low, just below the level of normal conversation. Honoré and Emily weren’t conspirators, no, but patrons enjoying the respectful quiet. No-one passing by would think differently, or pay particular attention to what they were saying.

  Honoré frowned thoughtfully. ‘We’ll have only seconds from entry to exit. Did you pace the distance?’ He paused from his work and glanced up at her. ‘Without looking obvious about it?’

  ‘Of course,’ she said.

  Honoré held up the sketchbook. ‘I’ll need a few more minutes. I need to note the details while they’re fresh in mind.’

  Emily nodded. ‘I’ll leave you to it, then. Look for me by the Watteau when you’ve finished.’

  ‘The what?’