Part Two
 

I locked up, sailed the waves to Cuxhaven and trained it to Harburg-Hamburg.

Everyone spoke English at a push, and I felt like the dumb tourist.

I set myself up for six days and nights at her son’s last hotel, der Janus. After that, it was uphill all the way down.

I flicked through his notebook: the dates, the times, the places he’d been, the bars. There were a lot of them. And that’s all they were—dates, times, places—but there was no key as to why he had written them down in the first place.

I opened the map and drew red lines around the streets he’d written down, and the dates that he’d visited each one, and stepped back. I was looking at a zigzag in a circle that turned out to be an eight-point star.

Four of the lines crossed from one star point to the one opposite. The last date and place he’d written down was dead centre. After that, the son was no more.

It was time.

I drank an absinthe-vodka double, no ice, and made my way down to the outside world. It was like walking into the heat of a tomb.

The street was narrow enough to be mistaken for a rattrap.

The shopfront lights blinked out as I walked by.

Most of the streetlights didn’t work, and those that did didn’t help me to see further than the next recessed doorway.

And the streetlights that did work hung like little green flying saucers hovering over the tramlines.

Live wires crisscrossed the road from one side to the other like electrified barbed wire that twanged with an electric-blue flash occasionally. But a tram never came trundling along the rails.

From daylight to dark, the area of St. George had changed entirely. It was like walking onto a film set. Things looked real but felt more like artifice with my walk further into the dark.

Damned absinthe: I should have known better.

Shadows oozed in and out of doorways. The place was crawling at the seams.

Cops came and went in silence and picked up shadows here and there. The shadows didn’t put up any kind of resistance, and the cops and the perps, for whatever they had done, left in a red trail of rear lights disappearing into nothing.

I didn’t look back.

Every kneipe was a basement; every floor inside was potholed with craters and red ripped linoleum. I squeezed my way through the streets and staggered into the bars in turn.

Boats, quays, harbours, marinas I had to remind myself. This is Hanseatic country with canals as big as the Grand Canyon and ships as big as the Taj Mahal.

The city was an industry on the waves, and I was bobbing along on its rapids in a little rubber dinghy that bashed me around every twisted bend.

I had one point on a map, one dead kid to find alive, seven million suspects, and nothing was happening until I came to the place without windows.

It had no name.

It had no sign.

It looked like a red-brick mausoleum with one big door that was thick with black paint. And it was in the kid’s notebook.

‘One, two, three, here goes.’

You’d think I was getting ready to be launched on the back of a doodlebug into outer space.

I reached out, bit my lip, and held my breath.

I touched the door. And when I didn’t drop dead, I pushed it open wide.

Optics glittered at me like chrome lasers. It was the same with the mirrors. I stepped inside, let go of the hatch, and heard the only emergency exit squeeze itself shut behind me with a click.

I strolled up to the bar as an orchestra of zithers sliced through a squeezebox mentality.

I gave my best shot at not falling flat on my face as I swayed under a glitter-ball revolving in a haze of cigar smoke trapped at the ceiling.

Did I need a beer?

And before the bartender could jabber on about which one I wanted, I pointed at bottles leaning together on the sagging shelf behind him. I kept saying ja ja ja louder and louder until his long creepy fingers touched the one that glowed at me the brightest. And when he did, the glow died.

Not a good sign.

He popped the cap with a Coke opener chained to his belt and dumped the foaming bottle in front of me. He marked the placemat, and I took it, and the beer, with me and slid off to the cover of a dark corner.

The patrons were either barefaced skinheads, or they had handlebar moustaches, hairy, and full of last week’s sweat. Their voices yelled, fell, and dulled the more I drank.

Is there lightning in here, or is it me? I thought.

I turned to see the tail end of a greatcoat sweep through the crowd and vanish under the mezzanine at the back. A mezzanine where biceps flexed and leathered crotches bulged through the gaps in the balustrade.

There was a full-on light explosion from nowhere, and a flicker that echoed into nothing before I could find the source.

I was packing my Polaroid sunglasses, but I would have looked obvious if I’d put them on.

I thought I was being intelligent.

Flash. Flicker.

What was that?

The light was so bright it bleached the flesh around me to bone-white translucent.

No one else seemed to notice, but every time the flash hit, my head gave a thud.

I decided to leave.

Not by front ways but by back alleyways.

Eyes crawled over me as I pushed my way through the crowd. I crept into shadows and around baffleboards hiding a snooker hall at the back of the bar. And with no one there but me, the voices behind me faded to nothing.

I reached out to walls that were pushing in at me on either side. They were soft and warm, like pulsating guts, and sweat dripped off them.

I clumped down wooden steps, my feet slipping.

There was a stink of burning wires and rancid butter, and it was thick.

I stopped for a second and heard slow waves suck at the bottom step.

Something glinted down there, and it felt like mucus was oozing over my boots.

Deciding it was time for the torch, I took it out and flicked on the beam to see that the steps had disappeared into thick black stuff.

‘Bruder (Brother),’ a voice said.

I squinted at liquid tar from here to eternity.

The thing rose in a big bubble of black. Only it wasn’t a bubble. It was a head.

When the torch beam bounced off it, a mouth opened, the eyes opened, and it looked right at me. The whole thing was surrounded by a snot-green halo.

‘Bruder,’ it said again.

It rose up more dripping crude oil.

The fumes were overpowering, and my head reeled.

‘Komm zu uns (Come with us),’ it said.

And I wanted to. I really did.

It waded toward me, its legs sucking up and down through the tar.

Its hands reached out, and a dense streamer of green snaked out of them, then fanned wide like a big mouth, and sucked at my face.

‘Du kommst wir gerade rechts mein kleiner bruder (Come to us, my little brother).’

I took a step into the sludge. My legs gave way. It would have been so easy.

I watched the walls tilt back and the oil tilt up at my face.

I was falling for a tar baby.

Mr Pink, my shirt designer, won’t be too happy, I thought, when the collar of my shirt ripped.

The buttons popped and flew off like shrapnel. From forward to back, something had grabbed me by the scruff of the neck.

‘Idiot!’ the voice said.

Hands grabbed me under my arms, but I didn’t protest. I couldn’t. Why should I? It felt too good, too easy.
Before I knew it, I was outside lying on the cobbles.

My head was allowed to rest back, and I opened my eyes. Eyes looked down at me and closely.

‘Hi,’ I grinned.

The face pulled away, and I was yanked back onto my feet.

‘Halt!’

So, they did, and me too.

I recognised the face. The hair was different, shorter. But the face was the same. He had something in his hand. It didn’t look nice.

Then I could hear the Bren guns; see the bullet tracers, their orange lines firing through the night.

‘Er verstehe nicht (He doesn’t know),’ said one of the guys holding me up by the armpits.

A grenade exploded in a doorway, and boots scraped through the carnage of smoke and bricks.

The explosion brought me around. Everyone dived for cover. Without support, I crashed to my knees.

In the confusion, I scrambled for the nearest corner. And there went that flashy flickering light again, bright, and white.

The guy with the gun, with the face I thought I knew, lurched for me. My heels shot out and kicked out Thumper style. His head shot back on impact, and the gun flew out of his hand.

I clawed out for it, but when I did, there was acceleration in the pit of my gut. The next thing I knew was the sound of feet hammering down the steps in the cellar to me. I was sprawled, legs akimbo, with gun in hand. I looked up at them, then down to that well of an oil place.

There was nothing there now but crates of beer and barrels of Bremen.

One of the guys hunkered down and looked me in the eyes. Reaching out, he took the gun from me as easy as taking a popgun from a kid.

‘Pay, null, acht, Luger,’ he said to someone, but not me. And did I care anyhow?

He stuffed the gun into his pocket and dragged me to my feet.

No one said anything until they had me in the street.

‘Sind Sie, okay?’

‘Huh?’

‘Go home, Bruder,’ another said.

They walked away and left me there with a torn collar, torn-off buttons, busted knees, and ruined chinos.
No cops, no nothing, I staggered back to the hotel and crashed down on the bed.
 


I knocked on the front door. No one answered. I knocked harder until the glass broke.

I stepped over splinters and made my way into the front room. There was nothing there. The father who had claimed he wasn’t a father wasn’t there either. It looked as though no one had been living there in years.

I made for the mother’s house. It was the same thing; nothing and no one there, no pictures, no passports, no cups, and no coffee.

Three guys were dead and one more almost dead. Me.


 
I searched through the archives.
 
Hamburg 1943.
 
I flicked through pictures of destruction, faces of the dead and the dying, and the burnt beyond recognition.
 
Bremer Reihe.
 
Thule Orientals in green gloves chanting mantras to a machine in some basement under fire.

And there were six others standing in the shadows behind them.

Some people just don’t know when to die.

I hit print, and the print slithered out like a dried-up tongue.

The picture was grainy, but there he was, sitting in some sleazy little bar with two young guys on one side of him, one on the other with five shot glasses up front. Someone was missing.

Take a guess.
 


I took the print home with me and looked at my face in the mirror.

If I didn’t know any better, I would have said I was looking at the sins of my father, the man who had slaughtered hundreds of men in the Wenceslas mines all those years ago. And now he was looking for a way out. But what might he be capable of here if he did?

It was dark. I poured a vodka straight. The phone rang. I picked it up.

‘Yeah?’

‘Now do you understand?’ the non-father father of the son that never was said. ‘Now do you remember? It’s taken such a long time to find you again, even longer to convince you. Why don’t you come to the Manor in Warminster and join us for a celebration?’

I slammed down the phone.

Einstein. Relativity. Tesla. The Egg of Columbus. The Torsion Tensor Effect. And the Wenceslas mine.
Und Schutzstaffel, SS General Dr Ing Hans Kammler, mein vater.

I looked at his pinched face, his eyes. Black and white pictures didn’t do their evil justice. I just hoped at least that the heels of my boots had.

They’d put me in that machine way back then after I’d taken their pictures. Alles mein brüder und mich. I’d made it through in that giant bell jar, and now they were after me to prove that it worked.

Now I understood why little things kept appearing around me out of the blue: machine gun magazines stuffed with bullets, pineapple grenades, quills and inkwells, quack pills in cobalt-coloured bottles. And a pay, null acht Luger. It seems that my metal turns out to be metal more attractive to doodlebugs in the ether looking for a target.

I stuffed my carpetbag with what I needed and made my way to Norton Broadmoor.
 


Old fogies climbed out of their old, polished, pristine black Fords in the grounds at front of the house.

I stepped towards them.

A rotund guy with a handlebar moustache held out his hand to me and smiled.

‘Glad you could make it,’ he said. ‘Sorry about the shenanigans, but you wouldn’t have believed any of it otherwise, would you? The way you ran away and vanished when you came through gave us quite a scare, you know.’

I expected his hand to be cold and slimy. It was.

‘Sir Conan Doyle, I presume,’ I said.

‘Actually, no,’ he chuckled, ‘though I believe the fat old sod is around here somewhere. I’m Alwen de Brindle Hurst. But most people just call me Brindy.’

He pointed to a woman stepping out of an old Ford that looked as if it had just come off the production line.

‘That’s Lady Margaret Dalton over there,’ he said.

I recognised her right away. The grieving mother with the long-lost, or was that dead, son that never was.

She looked at me, smirked and followed the others into the manor.

‘And that’s Sir Franklin Soames,’ Brindle Hurst said.

The other half of that swindling duo, I presumed. I thought I caught a glint of red in his eye but soon realised my mistake. It was orange.

And of course there was Robard Hailsham, Bosworth Hall, Girard de Bruce, and a lot more besides.

‘It’s just about time for the show to start,’ Brindle Hurst said. ‘You’re very special you know, our very first successful live one to make the transition. All the rest of us had to die first.’

He giggled, God knows why, then walked away and left me to think it over.

I looked around at them all making their way to the house.

It looked like it was a black bow-ties, pearls and opera glasses night, as I headed for the entranceway, the one with the triple locks. By the time I got through the third, I was standing in the hallway where most of them were congregated under the amber light of a crystal chandelier. Others were climbing the African Blackwood mahogany staircase surrounded by its Borromini carvings. It took me a little while to figure out what was wrong.

I was the only one breathing.

I made my way up into the attic-chamber where some were already seated, poised and straight-backed, right out of finishing-off school.

The metal seats were out, set in prefect rows, all facing front, the chamber dimly lit by translucent green radium glass up-lighters along the back wall.

The conversation settled down to a murmur, and everyone, except me, was seated waiting for the show to start.

I looked towards the blacked out bay window, then up at the mahogany beam, to the pulley dangling over the oak dais with its rubber circle embedded into it. The big wooden chair was already clipped into place, and the bell jar, looking as if it weighed a ton, was hanging over it waiting to be lowered.

There were three or four tungsten lamps, like giant vacuum valves, set around the back and sides of the dais.

I looked around at the audience. Every one of them wore dark glasses.

A young man was dragged in, drugged up to the eyeballs by the look of it, then dumped on the chair. They strapped him down with thick leather belts around his arms and legs, then stepped away.

An old guy walked in with a nail gun, pulled the trigger a few times, and nailed the young man’s hands to the wooden arms of the chair. I flinched. After that the old guy took a box cutter to the young guy’s neck and nicked it a few times. Not enough to kill him, but enough to get his blood flowing.

Then the lights went down, and the bell jar was lowered from the ceiling, until it rested on the thick India-rubber ring set in the floor, trapping the young man inside.

There was a hiss, the seal was set, and the tungsten lamps lit up with a pink-lilac hue.

The audience quietened, and I stood in the central aisle to watch.

The young man inside the bell jar woke up. I could see that he was trying to say something, but the glass was so thick I couldn’t hear what.

Then the show really began.

The bell jar hummed and glowed with a dullish yellow green. The sound of the glass vibrating like a speeded-up tornado that made me want to slap my hands over my ears. Sparkles of purple and blue shot out of the glass then back in.

The young guy yelled and struggled even more. I don’t think I’ve seen so much terror in someone’s eyes.

I let my carpetbag thud to the floor as strands of luminescent violet mist wove around over our heads.

The tornado sound increased for a higher-pitched screeching whistle like iron vibrating on iron, and the audience were delighted. And the young guy, trapped in the glass machine, slumped over as the air was pumped out of it. When his head jerked back violently a thick black sludge pumped out of his mouth.

The audience clapped, the young guy was dying, and I looked at my watch.

It’s now or never.

I stepped down the aisle, stood in front of the thing, and took off my Polaroids.

I wanted to see him with my own eyes.

His face blurred with the vibration. His skull cracked and slumped forward again.

I reached into my pocket when his head shot back up again. The young guy’s face had aged twenty years in front of my eyes. His mouth opened in a beatific grin and his teeth shone though the black sludge still pumping from the mouth. Then slowly his eyes opened, glowing a radiant orange, green.

That’s when he caught sight of me. And I glared right back at him.

He was almost here and looking as I’d last seen him in Hamburg 1943. And as long as that airtight seal remained intact, he would make it.

I held the Luger ten feet in front of the bell jar and fired off the first shot.

The bullet glanced off the glass and ricocheted into the skull of some old ghost in one of the front seats.

I fired again, and this time the glass cracked with a giant hiss.

There was nothing I could have done to save the young guy. Besides, I didn’t know him, anyway. But mein vater, now he was a different story.

He was neither fully back there in that cellar in Hamburg in 1943, nor fully here, either.

I took another step and fired another shot.

This time the glass cracked.

I could see him panic. His mouth yelling, unheard above the noise of that machine: ‘I’m not fully formed yet!’

He ripped his hands free of the nails, but it was too late. The young guy he was oozing into wasn’t quite dead yet either, which was what my father needed. And now it wasn’t going to happen.

The audience screamed, chairs fell over, and they clambered over one another to get out the door. But all I could think, watching that thing struggling to free itself from the nails inside that bell jar was, die monster, just fucking die. And the rage in my father’s face said it all.

I’d like to say his head exploded; something visceral and dramatic like that. But it didn’t. All that happened was that the light in his eyes dimmed to a dead glass white before his head slopped forward into black vomit. It wasn’t quite his head, or that of the young man’s either, but a mangled version of both.

I chucked a couple of grenades at it as I walked out the door and blew up quite a few dead bodies running for the stairs.

Evil bastards.

I checked my pulse. It felt steady enough and walked into the night a happy man.

Well, my life was pretty fucked up, anyway. I mean, could it get worse? But at least I’d stopped the mad man from spreading his cancerous ideology here.

It looks technical on the surface, but it’s necromagia by any other name, bottling the souls of the dead, and using them as a means of transport for the living.

Only I’m not quite alive, am I? I’m Schrödinger’s cat still inside the box. And if the box isn’t opened, as long as no one takes a close peek, I’m alive and dead at the same time.

I’m the unrealised, un-collapsed wave function that scooted from one place to another, one time to another, riding along the illogical waves of the quantum world now living by Newtonian Laws.

But that leaves one problem, three of them to be exact. It meant that three other somebodies had also come through, which might explain the dead ones back in Hamburg. But the two that mattered, my mother and father, are quite possibly still sitting there in that dingy little beer cellar in Bremer Reihe with my father’s machine.

Die Glocke, the Nazi war machine that promised so much in zero-point gravity, with a nasty side effect. And I’m here to prove it worked.

Life is cheap they say, but eventually they managed to find a way to use the spirits of the dead. All they had to do was bottle some live ones first and suffocate them to death.

Perhaps all those glass things appearing at Norton Broadmoor were just test shots; right place, wrong time, until someone started to figure it out. Apports; things appearing out of the ether. Not uncommon in psychic circles I hear.

So maybe they kept sending out things in little glass bottles, hoping that someone somewhere, in some other timeline, got it and built another machine at the other end. And they eventually did, didn’t they, at Norton Broadmoor.

But in all honesty, I think my mother had as much to do with it. Her Helena Blavatsky volumes were part of it, but so was the table tipping and her experiments with harmonics. But it was the grimoires that added the final ingredient to the mix, and from the grimoires she found out about necromagia, and how to bottle ghosts, a means to an end.

Dad must have finally listened to her.

And the film no longer exists either. If it ever did that is. To me it’s just a hi-tech version of crystal gazing, anyway.

So, I’m stuck here, forever a stranger, wondering how long it will take for this place, this time, to realise I will never register as someone alive for long enough for anyone to find out that I’m dead and alive at the same time.

I went back home and took one last look at my reflection in the mirror. I couldn’t help grinning at myself. I just felt so good. I mean, I can just about get away with anything now, can’t I?

I put on my shades, the light dimmed, and I saw my father’s reflection looking back at me. I took aim with my Luger, fired, and shattered his face to kingdom come. Then I reached up, plucked a lump of glass from my forehead, with not a drop of blood spilled, or a scratch to be seen, and yanked down on the light cord. Then walked out the door, into the night, and never looked back.

A drape twitched in a window as I walked under a streetlight and then it dropped back.

And now that the world is mine for asking, all I need now is somewhere new, a place with nothing but night and an infinite sky, and a brushwood perimeter of hemlock to prevent the merging dimensions from coming in at me again.

No money in the account, the ATM said. Easy fixed with a little quantum tunnelling, I thought.

I tapped the screen, and a flare of green changed all that. All cash with no questions and I was the visible man invisible once more.

I’m limitless now.

And the world is mine to do with what I so well please.

I looked at their faces. I looked at him. They all looked like him, they all looked like her. And I could just tell who was holding the Brownie camera taking the black and whites.

Five glasses and four guys and all of them were waiting for the prodigal son to return.

I took the print back home with me. I looked at my face in the mirror.

If I didn’t know any better, I would have said I was looking at my own father or my brother from a different time. An older twin if that was possible; one who didn’t age.

Something had happened back then; something beyond desperation.

‘He’s not mine,’ he’d said. ‘Neurologists checked him out,’ she’d said.

A big lie, a radio wave from the past to rein me in, something to get me close to where that machine had been, to get me back, to prove to them that the thing worked; the right guy at the wrong time to help them all escape from the horror they had created.

It was dark. I poured a vodka straight. The phone rang. I picked it up.

‘Yeah?’

But no one talked; just another dead end.

Einstein. Relativity. Tesla. The Egg of Columbus. The Torsion Tensor Effect. And the Wenceslas mine.

I looked at my father’s pinched face, his cold eyes. The black and white pictures didn’t do their evil justice. I just hoped that at least the heels of my boots had.

They had put me in that machine along with my brothers after I had taken that picture. Alles mein brüder und mich (All of my brothers and me), and now everyone was after me for the sins of my father. Me, the problem paperclip still being sucked back to that magnetron from the past; the after-effect.

Now their mansions were empty. No traces, no signs, no mother, or father to be seen. There never had been, not in this time. That was all they needed though. Their machine was still stuck back there with enough power to reach out with their bait and drag me back into their trap.

Enough to have me sucked back there and let them know it was a safe means of travel; me, their own son, their test rat, the only rat who had survived. If I had made it here and gone back, there then maybe they would have been brave enough to use it to save their own skins.

And destroy the planet.

The good guys guarding that cellar, where it had all happened in the first place, had saved me. The bad guys were still stuck back there where they belonged. But if they had seeped back through with their influence once, then they could sniff me out again. So, I packed the few things I owned and slung a rucksack over my back.

It was time to move on. Stay long enough anywhere, and they’d home in on me again.

I took one last look at my reflection. I put on the shades and the light dimmed. I saw my father’s face smile behind me in the mirror. I reached up and yanked down on the light cord and made him disappear back to hell where he belonged.

I walked out the door, into the night, and down the street, and I didn’t look back.

I’m a ghost, I thought. So, I kicked a pebble. It skittered away. When a fox showed its face, I stamped my foot, and it ran away.

So far so good.

A drape twitched in a window as I walked under a streetlight and then it dropped back.

The whole thing had been a setup, a smoke and mirrors job, a phantasm. I was all right, and they weren’t, not in this timeline anyway.

I was the twist in their fate, the bend in their time.

Our parents had put my brothers and I through first to see what happened rather than risk their own lives and ended up in a bell jar in hell house in the Wiltshire countryside. But it wasn’t me who was strapped down to that railway sleeper chair in the film, at least not initially.

It was some poor transient schmuck taken from the streets and used in part of their experiment. What makes it worse is knowing that I had to have had something to do with it. For without him, I wouldn’t be here. He was the missing ingredient. I had sat at one end of that wormhole set up in a cellar May 1945 and ended up at the other end, in the present day, just as the guy was suffocating to death, when he became me, me as I am now.

The firework display in and around the bell jar had recorded the transition at Norton Broadmoor, Wiltshire. And the kicker was that they didn’t even know what was really going on.

Life is cheap they say, but eventually they managed to find a way to bring back the spirits of the dead, live and screaming, onto the earthly plane. At least that was what they thought. Talk about being bipolar; in two places at once. She hadn’t been here anymore than he had, at least not in the physical sense.

So, I’m stuck, forever a stranger, wondering how long it will take this place, this time, to realise that I will never register as someone alive long enough for anyone to find out that I’m dead.
 
THE END.