The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (58 page)

You’re a man open to
mystery, yes?
a voice said from the dark. I nodded in my
sleep, shook myself awake, not sure whether the owner of the voice was actually
there.

I reached for the torch
to find out.

The beam of light that
sprang out shocked me. I had not expected the old torch to work. My surprise
set the beam quivering across the walls, furniture and reflecting from the
window, and I rested my hand on my raised knee to keep the torch steady. There
was something about the beam and what it revealed, as if this old battery made
old light.

There was a spider on
the wall, a huge wolf spider, its legs curled up to its body in death. I
shifted the torch and sensed sudden movement in the dark, aiming it back at the
spider again. Light passed across the window.

There was someone
outside. Someone with a melting face.

I shouted and dropped
the torch. It struck the floor and blinked off, leaving the bedroom in
darkness. I closed my eyes for several terrifying seconds, letting them adjust
to the dark again before opening them to stare at the window. I could see
nothing, and somehow I reigned in my fear long enough to go and close the
curtains.

“Orfanik.” I whispered
that name again, the fictional character whom my father had often claimed to be
real. “Orfanik, what have you made this time?”

I retrieved the torch and hid it beneath a pillow. Come daylight,
I would see if it was still working. But not now Sleep eluded me as images of
the melted face combined with my memories of the dying man. They were not the
same, and yet surely they were linked At least, my imagination was making me
believe so.

As dawn broke the
darkness I was still sitting on my bed, aware of the weight of the torch lying
beside me. Daylight bled some of the fear, and my conviction that I had had a
supernatural experience faded away. There was an explanation for what I had
seen, I was convinced of that. Orfanik has supposedly been an inventor, not a
conjuror, and whatever the torch had shown me had been through science, not
super-science.

I opened the curtains
quickly, jumping back as a huge spider scurried away behind them. Maybe it had
just been asleep.

As the sun poured in I
mused on the speed of light. Outside there were still a few stars fighting the
dawn, and I wondered whether they were even still there. I was seeing them as
they had been thousands, even millions of years ago. As a child the prospect of
travelling faster than light, then looking back and seeing
myself,
had
disturbed me greatly. It knocked me from the centre of things, which is where
every child believes itself to be, and it was that more than my realization of
death that marked the point when I started growing up.

And now light was
playing with me again.

I decided to return to
the canal to find the dead man. Even as a corpse, he could have answers.

The man was gone. I was
not really surprised. What did surprise me was the total lack of evidence that
he had ever been there. No blood soaked into the towpath, no impression in the
grass, no barriers, tape or fences erected by police.

Here was yet another
mystery. This weekend seemed rich with them.

I started walking along
the towpath, the torch heavy in my pocket. I had yet to turn it on again,
although the chance
of it being broken seemed remote. It was
old. If it had been made by Orfanik (and acceptance of my ancestry had come
without my being able to identify the point at which doubt turned to belief),
then it was hundreds of years old. Unlikely — hell, impossible! — but still
there it was, hanging in my trousers and banging against my leg with each step.

I
saw the future in a
beam of light.
The dying man’s words rang inside my head, and I thought of
the brief image of the face I had seen outside my bedroom window. I shook my
head. Light glinted from the surface of the canal and blinded me for a few
seconds, and when I looked at the woods the world had changed. Of course it
had. It changes every instant.

I took out the torch,
bent down and found a snail crawling along a twig.

I turned on the torch.
The circle of yellow light was weak in the daylight, but it was still there. I
lifted and lowered it, pleased that the light behaved as it should. Then I
moved it over the snail.

Instantly the snail’s
body vanished leaving a hollowed, brittle shell behind. It was holed, probably
by a bird.

I shifted the torch away
and the live snail was still making its way along the twig. Back again, empty
shell. Away, live snail.

I was seeing two times.
The only question was, just how far apart were they? I could turn off the torch
and wait to see when the snail would meet its end . . . but it may be days or
months from now Amazed though I was, understanding still seemed to come easily
to me. Perhaps it was the open mind handed down from my father, the belief in
things we could not see, the acceptance of more things than we could ever know.
Or maybe it was the face I had seen in my bedroom window, and the familiarity
in its eyes.

I stood and walked away,
pocketing the torch once again. Surely it must have its uses. I simply had to
figure out what they were.

Back home in my sitting
room, I sat in the leather rocker and looked around. All about me were hints to
my heritage, yet I had never taken them seriously. A few trinkets my father had
bequeathed me; a pocket watch from the last century that ran backward, a voodoo
doll supposedly from Haiti, a crystal ball that could fly, or so it was said.
Some of the pictures hanging on the walls showed scenes of technological genius
from the past; the Wright Brothers on their first flight, Armstrong taking his
first steps on the moon. The book-lined walls contained at least a hundred
volumes on popular science, and many more on sciences not so well known. I was
surrounded by the wonders of discovery and the vicarious pleasures in
confounding expectations.

The torch showed time,
and the man had wanted me to have it. He must have been a relative, perhaps a
distant cousin from Eastern Europe, descended from Orfanik or some distant
branch of my wild family tree.

I suddenly felt the need
for company. I had become very aware of my own death, and knowing that the
flick of a switch may reveal it to me — however far in the future it may be —
made me feel very vulnerable.

Outside in the hallway I
called Marlene. As I dialled I hoped that she would shed some light on the
subject, and I found myself giggling at the literal image.

“Marlene,” I said, “I
think I’m going mad.”

“Going?”

“Ha ha.
I mean it.” There was silence for a while, and I heard her drawing
on her ever-present cigarette. She used the time to think.

“Alex, you sound
strange,” she said. “Seen a ghost?” “Not exactly. Well . . . are there ghosts
of the future, do you think? Can the dead haunt themselves?”

“Erm . . . .” Another
pull on her cigarette. She never had been able to understand the way my mind
worked, and that had driven us apart. It was hardly surprising. I barely
understood it myself.

 “Honey, the last day
has changed everything, and I need grounding, I need pulling back down.”

“I’m painting for the
next hour, but we could meet at Cicero’s if you like?”

“That would be good. And
Marlene . . . thanks.” Marlene and I had been separated for almost six years. I
adored her.

Being outside made me
feel better. I had brought the torch with me; perhaps that was a bad idea, but
behind all the threat it still felt so precious. Leaving it behind would have
felt like denying the point of the journey. I could
tell
Marlene about
it, or I could
show
her. And there was a small sense of smugness at her
anticipated reaction.

Cicero’s was a great
little café, and Marlene and I had continued meeting there ever since our
break-up. It felt like neutral ground, somewhere we could discard our gripes at
the door and sit in the pleasant, informal atmosphere with a lane and a slice
of peach cake. After every one of these meetings I hated going outside on my
own, feeling the familiar hurt descending again as I glanced back at where
Marlene sat inside, waiting for me to leave. There was something calming about
Cicero’s. Nothing bad ever happened there.

Marlene was waiting in a
window seat and she waved as I walked by. I raised the torch in greeting, and
her eyes tracked it as I lowered it to my side once again. She looked more
worried than interested.

The café was buzzing
already, and I had to weave my way between occupied chairs to reach Marlene.

“Hey honey,” I said, leaning down to kiss her cheek. “Hi.” She
smiled as I sat down, but I could see her gaze drawn again and again to the
torch in my pocket. “That it?” I had not even mentioned the torch to her on the
phone, and for a second her question threw me. “What?”

“The cause of all your
troubles.”

I grabbed the coffee
menu from the table and scanned the list, even though I had the same drink and
cake every single time we came here together. I liked the regularity; it seemed
to preserve something of our past, hold back the change.

“You look tired,” she
said, suddenly sounding truly concerned.

“I am.”

“Been up late? Anyone I
know?”

I snorted and shook my
head.

“You spend too much time
thinking about time.”

I glanced up at her,
surprised yet again at how perceptive she could be. “What do you mean?”

“Dwelling on the past .
. . on us. Thinking about what the future may bring. You should live in the
here and now. Every moment is an instant in your life that you can live without
worry.”

“So when did you become
the great psychologist?” “I’m a painter. I philosophise, I don’t psychoanalyse.”
“Very droll.”

Marlene must have
ordered for both of us. The waitress brought over our coffee and cake and we sat
silently for a moment, sugaring, pouring cream, enjoying the familiar smells
and processes.

“So are you going to
tell me what that thing is?”

I took the torch from my
pocket and laid it on the table. It looked so old set against the clean, crisp
furniture of Cicero’s. “What does it look like?”

“It’s a torch,” Marlene
said. “A bit ostentatious, isn’t it?” “That’s how they built things two hundred
years ago.” She snorted. “Yeah, right.”

I did not care about her
disbelief. There was no need to persuade her as to the age of this thing, nor
even its origins. Once I showed her what it could do, all such doubts would
evaporate.

I took a sip of my
coffee, looked around at the other people in the café. Hands waved, smiles were
given, a dozen stories were being told, and everyone here was unaware of their
future. I could shine their fates upon them, but would they really want to
know? Would anyone, given the chance, truly wish to know the moment of their
death? I doubted it. But being
able
to know would be a terrible
temptation.

OLD UGHT                                                              
379

“What would you do if
you knew you were going to die?” I said.

“I
do
know.”

She’d seen! She’d seen
the torch!

“Everyone dies,” Marlene
continued. “Most people just don’t think about it that much. You’re not ill,
are you?” “I don’t think so,” I said. “But with this, I could find out.” “I
thought it was a torch.”

I stirred my coffee
unnecessarily, watching the bubbles spin on its surface. “You remember me
telling you about my father’s thoughts on our family heritage? The fact that he
connected us with a character in a Jules Verne book?”

“Orfanik,” Marlene said.

“Yes, the inventor. A
mad genius. He made things that no one understood at the time, but reading the
book now it’s so easy to see what he was doing. I always thought that was the
book’s fall-down. It didn’t age well.”

“But you never believed
your father.”

“Not really, no. But now
. . .” I rolled the torch on the table, back and forth, trying to imagine the
source of the power that lay inside.

“You’re confusing me,”
Marlene said, and she hated that. Her confusion over my thoughts and interests
is what essentially ended our life together. She did not have a mind receptive
to mystery.

“What if you could see
your future. What if you could see the moment you were going to die. Would you
choose to see it?”

“No.”

“Even if you could? Even
if seeing might help you prevent it?”

“How could it?”

“I don’t know.”

I rolled the torch. It
grumbled over the table.

“And you think this
thing here can show you the future?”

“It shows the moment of
your death. Orfanik made it, for whatever strange reasons he had. It found its
way to me. And now I have the power —”