Restoration (39 page)

  It told him about the things that went through his head while watching the pretty American girls. The ideas that occurred to him sometimes. The plans that would see him in an electric chair if he did not control them.

  It told him who he was.

  And while Henryk was normally a man who only believed in things he could see or touch there was no denying what it knew. There was also no denying its ability to take that knowledge and hurt him with it. And so he had listened, and wondered, and eventually believed.

  And later – while the boy was at his father's office, making a fool of himself as usual – he had found the box. Had touched it and felt touched in return. It was not something he understood but it was something he believed. And that was as close to religion as Henryk got.

  He had listened over the fuss with Chester and his girl.

  Had smiled at the box's promise of a pretty American girl of his own to play with. Had heard it chuckle as he had unwrapped that drunken little gift.

  He had listened as it had told Chester what to do, where to go, how to find it. He had listened to everything. And now, here he was, charged with tidying up the boy's mess yet again. This time, however – the box promised – the boy had had his chance. From now on it was Henryk that would benefit from the opportunities it offered. Henryk was about to go into business on his own.

  They moved through the winding streets, the boy struggling to run in the heat. He was unfit as well as stupid.

  They turned a corner and came face to face with the old man and the girl.

  "Shoot her!" the box had said and the boy had looked as if, for once, he might get something right. But no, he had hesitated, as Henryk had known he would. If this job was to be done then it needed a strong man to do it.

  Henryk had taken the gun, aimed it at the girl's fastretreating back, and a shot rang out on that hot, Valencian evening.

 
 

 

Ashe had watched in disbelief as Chester had raised his gun to shoot the girl. He had reached for his own weapon before realising that to kill Chester would destroy everything, it would destroy the timeline of the box, it would destroy
him
. Still the gun was in his hand and he raised it in the young man's direction.

  The Valencian street began to distort around him. First he thought it was simply exhaustion, then as the ground trembled beneath him and the rows of houses began to blur, their plasterwork and bricks bubbling and melting like candles, he realised it was more. From above, the seagull from his dream came swooping down through a sky that fizzed and warped around it, becoming more liquid than air.

  "Don't!" it squawked. "You'll destroy everything!"

  "But the girl," he said, his voice as distorted as his surroundings. It sounded like he was speaking underwater.

  "She dies," the gull insisted, "that's history, like it or not."

  Ashe watched as Henryk took the gun from his employer and prepared to fire.

  "No she doesn't," he said and fired his gun.

  Time drew to a crawl. The bullet visible as it left the barrel of his gun, forcing its way through this unnatural, thick air. The girl, barely moving, her young legs rising and falling as if she ran in glue. Henryk, closing one eye and fixing on his target as it drew further and further away. The bullet continued its journey –
please!
Ashe begged, please be in time – spinning as it flew, thin wisps of smoke blossoming from the revolver in his hand. The sound of the discharge followed it like a record played at the wrong speed, a terrible, incessant roar that sustained perpetually. Henryk heard it, his eyes flickering toward Ashe, a sense of the danger he was in dawning slowly in them. Ashe was reminded of those flip books you made as a kid, where you drew lots of near-identical pictures on the corner of a page, small changes creeping into each, so that when you flipped the pages with your thumb the picture seemed to move. Frame by frame, the world moved forward.

  Then time snapped back. The bullet hit Henryk right at the centre of his forehead leaving a tiny hole that would have looked so trivial were it not for the splatter that vacated the back of the man's head and decorated the wall behind him. Henryk's gun fired but his lastminute panic and the impact of the bullet sent the shot a fraction wide, winging past the girl enough to flick her hair but no more. Chester dropped to his knees in a mixture of delusion and panic, the screaming of the box plus the certainty that he would die next driving him loose from whatever stability he had possessed. Ashe stared, watching the world return to normal and the gull float skywards.

  "You tricky old bastard," it said before vanishing over the roofs of the houses, "I hope you haven't ruined everything."

  So do I, Ashe thought, lowering his gun.
So do I
.

 

 

He walked over to Henryk and rifled his pockets for the keys to the boat. He had a use for them. Chester was sobbing and he had to slap him a couple of times before the man would even focus on him.

  "Come on," he said, "if you stay here then the police will have you, or the soldiers, neither will treat you well."

  Chester stared at him and he realised that he likely saw the resemblance, or perhaps he thought of his father. Either idea made Ashe sick. "Come on!" he insisted, giving him a kick and dragging him to his feet. "We need to move."

  They walked away as quickly as they could, Ashe only too aware that they had a matter of minutes before Henryk's body was seen and the authorities called. A city in war doesn't flinch at the sound of a gun, it has heard too many of them, but it doesn't become blind to the dead.

  They aimed for the marina, Chester shuffling in front of Ashe, all fight knocked from him. In his head the box was silent, the peace was breathtaking.

  The girl was where Ashe thought she would be, pacing up and down in front of Chester's boat. She hadn't gone through all this for the box, she had no interest in it, only what it could buy her. He sat Chester down on the wall some distance away.

  "Try and leave and I'll shoot you," he told him. Chester made no sign of having heard for a moment and then nodded.

  Ashe walked slowly towards the girl, his hands held out in front of him to show he was no danger. "You have something you wish to sell?" he asked, remembering to speak Spanish.

  She looked at him suspiciously and shrugged.

  "The box," Ashe said, nodding to her hand. "It's dangerous and you would do well to sell it I think. I don't know how much money you hoped to get but I have none."

  "He does," she said, nodding towards Chester.

  "Maybe he does," Ashe agreed. "And where do you think he would keep it if he did?"

  The girl thought about this for a moment and then nodded towards the boat.

  "I think you're probably right," Ashe said, holding up the keys he had taken from Henryk. "In which case you'll find it when you take whatever else you want. The boat's yours if you give me the box."

  The girl's face contorted, suspicion and excitement fighting over one another for dominance. "You're lying," she said.

  He threw her the keys. "Take it, he has no use for it anymore."

  She kept her eyes on him but scooted down to grab the keys.

  "But please," Ashe continued, "leave the box here, it has nothing you would want."

  She looked at him, biting her lower lip as she decided what to do. Then she put the box on the floor and ran over to the boat.

  "Pleasure doing business with you," Ashe said, picking up the box.

  He walked back to Chester, the box held out so the young man could see it. He shrunk away from it as if terrified. As well you should be, Ashe thought.

  Behind them there was the noise of a boat engine roaring into life and Ashe turned around, startled to see the girl fling loose the mooring rope before dashing back to the wheel house.

  "What the hell do you think you're doing?" he shouted.

  "Running!" she replied. "I am very very good at it!"

  She engaged the throttle and the boat motored forward at speed, the girl whooping with childish glee as it began to bounce its way out of the port.

  "Crazy kid," Ashe muttered, unable not to grin at the sheer joy on the girl's face, as she sped past him and out towards the open sea. "Don't get yourself killed."

  "Now there would be an irony." He turned back to see the seagull perching on Chester's shoulder. The bird stared at him for a moment then rustled its feathers as if annoyed. "She doesn't."

  "Good," said Ashe. He rubbed at the box in his hands. "How much of this is you?" he asked it.

  "The box?" the gull replied. "None at all. I'm not
him
."

  "You're the House," Ashe said, "beginning to think for itself."

  "And act."

  "And act," Ashe nodded. "Was there even any point in my doing all of this?"

  "Of course, I can't do everything, just nudge here and there."

  "Helping select those who travel through this," Ashe held up the box, "and don't?" The gull twitched its head. Ashe took that to be a nod. "Because," he continued, "I can't for the life of me see why the girl would ever have been shot. If she was holding this and her life was in danger then
poof
– off she should have gone. But it doesn't work like that does it?"

  "Not altogether," the gull agreed, "not
anymore
…"

  "You're taking control?"

  "With the help of my friends," it squawked, issuing a caw of a chuckle. "Three is good."

  "Yeah," said Ashe, "three is just great."

  He threw the box onto Chester's lap. The young man, apparently beyond such considerations as to why he had a talking bird on his shoulder, still had an eye for the box. He stroked it gently with his thumbs.

  "Go then," Ashe said to him, "and get your reward."

  The gull squawked, flying into the air as Chester vanished, the box rattling off the wall and tumbling to the floor. Ashe picked it up, put it in his pocket and went in search of Pablo.

 
 

When the door slammed shut behind Leo he spun around only to see more jungle. No sign the door had ever been there. Perhaps there's no sign of it from the other side either, he thought, perhaps it's just vanished having done its job.

  But what job was that? To bring him through here? Why?

  He turned back to the woman. She still appeared semiparalysed, her hands and feet occasionally moving but her face as slack as that of a stroke victim.

  "Can you hear me?" he asked. Dumb question, even if she could she was clearly in no position to acknowledge the fact.

  He squatted down in front of her, happy to fixate on the one thing he might have a chance of dealing with. If he paid too much attention to his surroundings then he might start screaming and once starting down that road he wasn't sure he'd be able to stop.

  He reached for her pulse, knowing full well that she was alive but uncertain what else to do. When the limit of your medical background is watching
House
then you grab at the few ideas that come. Perhaps I should tell her to buck up and stop wasting my time, he thought, works for Hugh Laurie. Her skin was icy cold which came as a surprise given the heat around them.

  "You're freezing," he told her, "but then you probably realised that."

  He looked at her clothes again, heavy furs and padded trousers. They were old-fashioned he noticed, fashion being something he was more comfortable with than medicine. No synthetic fabrics either, cotton, fur, leather. Obviously dressed for the extreme cold. She
felt
cold. A crazy idea occurred to him. If he had just appeared here from somewhere else then the same thing might have happened to her. Somewhere cold… It would explain a few things.

  Listen to yourself, he thought, the idea that you've both been transported here like something out of
Star Trek
"explains a few things"?

  But it did. He had walked through a door and appeared here. The hows and whys of it didn't matter. He had stepped out of Forest Lawns in Glendale and arrived here (wherever
here
is, looks like the goddamn Savage Land… there's probably dinosaurs just past the next bend). She was dressed in snow gear, she felt ice cold… it didn't take a genius to guess that she might have stepped out of Alaska or somewhere and ended up here too.

  But why is she paralysed? You're not…

  "The box…" she whispered, making him jump to his feet with a yell. He had been so lost in his own head that the sound of her voice had been as startling as someone popping a balloon by his ear.

  "Sorry," he said, holding his hands out placatingly. "I thought you…" Hell, he didn't know what he had thought. "Doesn't matter," he dropped back down and touched the side of her face with the back of his hand, she was warming up. "You said something about a box?" he asked, looking around in case she'd dropped something, maybe it was her medication or something, did diabetics go into paralysis if they didn't take their shots?

  "In my pocket," she said. "Felt it move just before he fired, like it was burning…"

  Leo reached into the pocket of her coat and rummaged around. "Nothing there," he said, "no box, burning or otherwise"

  "Do you mind?" she said. "It's hardly befitting a gentleman to be so close when a woman can't…" her face suddenly clenched and one of her legs jolted, kicking up a spray of leaves.