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You shouldn't break the promises you make to people. Nobody should. You can't go around saying you promise
to do something and then not do it. Even if you're pretty much certain that the thing you have promised to do is for the birds.

I lay still on the bed the whole time, turning the little key that Granddad had given me over and over in my hand until it was hot. I waited until everything was quiet and there were no bumps or murmurs or clicks coming from anywhere. Then I slid off the bed, and I inched my way downstairs very quietly. Hanging off the back of a chair in the kitchen was Ted's bag. Inside it I found a notebook with a hard black cover, a few pens, and a wallet full of fifties and twenties. I crammed everything back in, grabbed the whole bag, and called a taxi.

The taxi guy came pretty quickly. He wasn't that talkative, but he knew where Blackbrick Abbey was, which was the first relief of that particular day. Soon we were on roads that I'd never been on before, all twisty and black.

When silence grows in a small space, it gets harder and harder to say anything at all. For example, there were loads of times on that journey when I wanted to tell the taxi guy to turn back. I needed to ask Granddad what the heck he had meant and why, out of the complete blue, he'd wanted me to go to a place that I'd never heard of in my whole life, and why it was suddenly so important that he'd made me promise. But I wasn't able to speak. Ages of time went by, and the taxi guy kept on driving, and it kept
on getting darker and foggier. I started feeling quite stupid.

It didn't help that the taxi smelled as if someone had thrown up in it. For a while I thought I was going to throw up myself.

But then there was an old black gate with stone pillars on either side and forbidding walls, and in part of the wall were carved tall letters. It was so shadowy that first I could only see a big
B
, but as we got closer, I saw that the
B
was only the beginning and that the whole sign did say
BLACKBRICK ABBEY
. The huge crumbly black gates were closed and locked. Behind them was the beginning of what looked like a massive driveway covered in brown shiny gravel.

“Anywhere here is fine, thank you,” I said, even though anywhere there was not fine at all.

I uncurled my hand and looked at Granddad's key.

I got out. Taxi Guy was sitting there waiting for me to pay, his big fat elbow resting saggily on the open car window. I felt lousy and on my own, and my heart had started to gallop around. It was something to do with the way the air smelled. Something to do with the sounds of the massive big trees that were creaking like hundreds of old doors opening very slowly, and it was also a little bit to do with the whistling of the wind through the black branches. But it was mainly to do with being in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the stupid night.

“Em, listen,” I said. “Can you take me back, please?”

“Back where?” he asked, looking kind of amazed.

“You know, back to where you picked me up.”

“Sorry. No can do,” he replied. “I've gone out of my way already.”

“Out of your WAY?” I said. “Stop me if I'm wrong, but isn't that the whole POINT of driving a stupid TAXI?”

“Calm down, mate,” he said. “There's no need to be rude.”

As well as hating it when people tell me to calm down, I hate it even more when someone I don't know calls me “mate,” especially if I've never met them before and it's obvious that they don't even like me. I paid him what I owed him, which was thirty-seven fifty, and then I pulled out another twenty. I kept my voice steady, and I said to him, “Okay, listen. I need you to give me fifteen minutes. That's all. If I'm not back by then, you can go.”

He sucked some air in through his nose for a second or two, calculating something in his head.

“All right, then,” he said, snatching the money with impressive skill and transforming it into a crumpled blur as he slid it into his pocket. Then he took a newspaper from under his seat, and it crinkled as he spread it out over the dashboard. “Fifteen minutes. But that's it. I'm not waiting any longer than that.”

I could feel a draft of cold air creeping into my body as I walked toward the gates. I was going to keep my promise to Granddad. It's not like I was going to stay very long or anything. I thought it would be okay to have a quick look
around the place. And then I was going to go back to Ted's before anyone had even noticed I was gone. And next time I saw my granddad, I was going to try to explain to him how I'd done what he had asked. That I'd kept my promise. And that was going to be that.

A massive old padlock hung, dead and heavy, from a bolt where the two gates joined, all caked with knobbles and flakes of rust. It took ages of pulling and twisting. Finally I loosened the padlock and dragged it toward me. It looked as though nobody had opened it for a very, very long time.

I felt around for the keyhole and wiggled Granddad's key into it. At first it didn't look like it was going to work. I was standing in the night with fog all around me and Granddad's key stuck in the padlock now, and I couldn't twist it or move it in any direction, and I couldn't pull it out. I looked back. I could see Taxi Guy lit in a dim orange glow inside his car, reading the paper, not caring about me or anything else, as far as I could see.

I shook the gates backward and forward, and they made a heavy, low clanking noise.

“Where have you sent me? Where am I?” I shouted, and the sound of those questions went floating into the black sky. I cursed myself for being brainless enough to have gone to so much trouble, only to find myself in this empty, cold place. But what else did I expect?

I was just about to turn away, when there was a little crack. The padlock sprang open.

I stopped breathing for a few seconds, pulled the padlock off, and slid the bolt across. It took another huge amount of effort, and my hands got covered in rust, which was gross.

I pushed the gates forward, and the entrance opened like an enormous toothy mouth doing a slow yawn. Small clusters of gravel piled up at the bottom on either side. I walked through and I closed and locked the gates again, just as Granddad's mad instructions had specified, and I shoved the key into my pocket.

It was Monday night. Ted was probably going to be up early in the morning to kick me out of bed for school. I hadn't done any homework because of the traumatic events of the day, so I seriously wasn't planning to stick around for too long.

I couldn't see much. A tiny low wreck of a cottage sat tucked away to the right, but there was no light or sign that there was anyone living there. The driveway looked as if it led to something much bigger, the way it widened and curved and stretched off into the distance.

And then out of the quiet foggy air came a rustle from the trees to the left, and I knew someone was there even before I could see them. The trees parted for a second as if somebody was pushing them to one side, and that's because somebody was, and then the somebody was walking toward me and all I could hear was the echoey
crunch
of their feet stamping on the gravel.

For a while I thought I was going to fall. I wouldn't have
been that surprised if I'd lost consciousness, because in fact you can only get so nervous before you pass out. I saw shadows and I smelled the foggy smell of night there inside the gates of Blackbrick.

And I saw his gradually brightening shape coming toward me.

It was a boy. And soon he was standing, strong and tall on top of this low wall beside the trees, right in front of me with his hands on his hips and his legs wide apart, and there was a soft-looking frown on his young smooth face.

“How did you get in here?” he asked me.

“I've got a key to these gates. I just opened them up,” I said.

“But it's the middle of the night. No one ever uses those gates. They've been locked for a long time. What are you doing here?”

I tried to keep my voice steady.

“I was only having a look around. I have permission. At least I wasn't hiding behind a bunch of trees and giving people massive heart attacks like you were.”

“I live here. I've got a right to be here,” said the boy. “This is where I work.”

“Yeah, well, that still doesn't explain what you were doing, hiding in the trees like that, here in the dark.”

“I love the dark,” he said.

I blinked a few times and looked at him very carefully then.

“Now, tell me,” he said, “who on earth are you?”

He held out his hand, and that's when I could feel my skin tightening all over, and it felt like my body had suddenly become too small to contain all the things that were in me. I could feel a ridge rising all the way along my back as if I were a dog. Because he wasn't pointing, not the way most people are able to. There was something pretty noticeable about the finger he should have been pointing with.

It was missing.

Chapter 6

“WOW,” I whispered.

He put his hand down again, and he looked at me staring at his absent finger.

“Listen here, whoever you are, I might be short a finger, but there are worse things you could be missing, when you think about it.”

His eyes were clear and wrinkle-free, and there were no red veins in them and they weren't watery.

“Wa HA!” My voice went floating into the sky again. “Granddad, you DID it! It's really true, and I thought it was because you were losing your marbles, but you weren't! You're a genius! I always knew it, and now here's the proof! You've made a bloody portal! Ha! You've done it. And it WORKS. You gave me the key, and here I am, and here you are.

“You're, like, a million times better than Albert Einstein or Stephen Hawking. You didn't need any flux capacitors or TARDISes or cosmic strings or gravitational laser solutions. YOU did it with this one tiny key. I always knew it, Granddad. You really are the cleverest guy I ever met. I just didn't
realize you were able to do time travel. But you a hundred percent ARE.”

By then I was jumping around, and all these things were kind of dancing in my brain, mainly about how everything was going to be fine now that I was here. I would be able to tell him a whole load of important things that he should know, like, for example, about Brian falling out the window, and the value of getting into good brain-health habits as soon as possible so he wouldn't lose his memory when he got older. Everything was possible again. Everything was going to be grand.

Prevention is always a million percent better than cure. Everybody knows that.

“What are you talking about?” he said. “I never gave you any key, and you're not to go around telling anyone I did. Now, it would be more in your line to stop with your nonsense talk and tell me what your name is.”

“It's me. It's me, Cosmo!” I said.

“I'm not prepared to listen to lies. I'd ask you please to tell me the truth.”

“I
am
telling it,” I said.

But he said I couldn't possibly be, because for one thing there wasn't anybody in the world who had a name anything like “Cosmo.”