THE MONSTER TRILOGY
BRIAN ALDISS

Table of Contents

Title Page

Introduction

Dracula Unbound

Frankenstein Unbound

Moreau’s Other Island

About the Author

Also by Brian Aldiss

Copyright

About the Publisher

Introduction

Multitudes of wise men have speculated on what we may call the human predicament. It seems there can be no resolution to the questions: why are we here? Or, what is life?

A long while ago in the seventh century, these questions were pondered on by an old man in a Northumbrian monastery, an old man we remember as the Venerable Bede.

Picture a winter’s night, a draughty hall, reed lights flickering, a good old man wrapped up against the chill.

And this is what he said:

‘O King, seems to me the present life of men on earth, in comparison with that time which to us is uncertain, is as if when on a winter’s night you sit feasting with your ealdormen, and a simple sparrow should fly into the hall. And, coming in at one door, instantly fly out through another. In that time in which it is indoors it is indeed not touched by the fury of the winter; but yet, this smallest piece of calmness being passed almost in a flash, from winter going into winter again, it is lost to our eyes. Somewhat like this appears the life of man, but of what follows or what went before, we are utterly ignorant.’

I wrote a verse on his declaration –

We are such stuff as birds are made of,

Our lives passed in the Halls of the Unknown.

The ancient Bede speaks truth,

A truth indeed we're wise to be afraid of

Before we find our little Day has flown.

Behind this trio of novels lies something much like the bafflement expressed by Bede. What exactly made the teenage Mary Shelley (Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, as she was then) write her striking novel Frankenstein? What compelled Bram Abraham Stoker (victim as a child of a mysterious illness, personal assistant in adult years to actor Henry Irving and business manager of the Lyceum Theatre) to write the ultimate horror story, Dracula?

And the third writer, H. G. Wells? Wells was a professional writer. He wrote of invading Martians with ‘vast and cold and unsympathetic’ intellects. But what moved him to create the Beast People, beings of our world and yet apart from it?

It remains forever a question of how such matters come about and are born. Perhaps, for these authors, we will never know.

Certainly, these three novels were not written from a great desire of emulation. I was engaged – don’t ask me why – in trying to bring books and stories worth preservation to a new readership. With my staunch friend Harry Harrison, I produced a short-lived critical journal, SF HORIZONS. Perhaps more effectively, Harry and I were also bringing out an annual series of anthologies entitled Best SF on both sides of the Atlantic, which contained visitors such as Fred Hoyle and Franz Kafka.

I ran a two-volume collection of Galactic Empires, while my most ambitious series was published by New English Library, a master science fiction series. That series included writers such as Josef Nesvadba, Frigyes Karinthy, Philip K. Dick, and many others. Each volume carried one of my introductions. I was keeping busy.

Decades later, I have to write this introduction. I am calm, indeed, mild, slouching comfortably at my desk. Pondering the question of how these books came about and were born. What notion was at the heart of the trilogy?

Perhaps the matter is best summarized by Bodenland’s experience in Frankenstein Unbound. He is injured and lost outside Geneva. There had been a storm overnight. Someone has brought him food:

‘It was the smell as much as the taste which convinced me I was still Joe Bodenland, and still destined to struggle on among the living.

‘I was now just impersonally a man, striving against the elements.’

As, of course, many of us have to be and do.

DRACULA UNBOUND

BRIAN ALDISS
Dracula Unbound

FOR FRANK

who was sitting at our dining table

when the spectre arose

Nicht sein kann, was nicht sein darf.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Author’s Note

Copyright

Introduction

‘I have to get on that train. I’m sure it could be done. It’s no worse than your sky-diving. Leap into the unknown – that’s what we’re all about, darling!’

‘Oh shit,’ she said.

And occasionally that is what a writer asks of his reader: take a leap into the unknown.

Bram Stoker was a man of the theatre, but he also wrote Dracula, a book never to be excelled in horror. I had already written of Frankenstein when, one fine morning on Boars Hill – the place we lived when the children and our cats were young – I realised: here was a pair. Frankenstein and Dracula. So I sat down at my desk and switched on my computer . . .

A lot of weight goes into what one might consider an over-ambitious thriller. Well, I have nothing against these considerations, or against thrillers. And I’m definitely on the side of over-ambition.

As proof of the latter, I went to Chelsea in London to inspect the famous Bram Stoker’s house. But for the purposes of my story, I removed it to my house on Boars Hill, a mile or so outside Oxford. Just to make it creepier.

Just for fun.

Dracula Unbound is a frivolous book in some aspects, but at its core is a serious consideration. For countless centuries, humankind considered Earth to be the centre of the universe: solid, immoveable, and indeed named after its most basic feature, the ground on which we walk. We still have no other, no better, name for it. Earth. (How about Hyperdrome?)

It was only in the year 1610 A.D. that everything changed. The astronomer Galileo Galilei had a telescope; he developed and improved its lenses and trained it on the great planet Jupiter. There he espied what came to be known as the Medicean stars – ‘four planets never seen from the beginning of the world right up to our day’ – in orbit about Jupiter. These are the bodies we now know as Io, Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede. Each has been visited in its turn by science fiction writers.

From that date on, only the deluded could believe in Earth’s centrality within the universe. Galileo wrote of his amazing discoveries in a book known in English as The Starry Messenger (Sidereus Nuncius). A copy of the book was sent at once to the English king, James the First. More importantly, the celebrated mathematician John Kepler also received a copy, and wrote that he at once accepted these discoveries: ‘Why should I not believe a most learned mathematician?’ he exclaimed.

Later, Kepler wrote The Dream (Somnium). Part of the purpose of his story was to describe what practicing astronomy would be like from the perspective of the Moon, to show the feasibility of a non-geocentric system. Some therefore regard Kepler as the first science fiction writer.

Galileo was warmly received by the ruling Medicis. But as the world changed about him, his personal world also changed. An account of some of these remarkable events is contained in a book by Dava Sobel, entitled Galileo’s Daughter. (Happily, I resemble Galileo in at least one respect: I too have a loving, brilliant and supportive daughter.) Through his eldest daughter Maria Celeste we learn something of Galileo and of life as it was before the dawn of the Renaissance. As a result of this remarkable period and what followed, we now see ourselves adrift in a solar system which forms just a minor part of the galaxy.

In my story, Van Helsing says of Bram Stoker, ‘He regards himself as discovering the secret of the universe, which of course he is about to reveal. You can never trust a man who thinks he knows the secret of the universe.’

Brian Aldiss

Oxford, 2013

Gondwana Ranch

Texas 75042

USA

18 August 1999

Dearest Mina,

Soon we’ll be living in a new century. Perhaps there we shall discover ill-defined states of mind, at present unknown. You, who have returned from the dead, will be better able to face them than I.

For my own part, I am better prepared than I was to acknowledge that many people spend periods of their lives in more unusual mental states – not neurotic or psychotic – than science is at present inclined to allow. I also know those nameless psychic states valued by many rebels of society. They are not for me. In the account that follows – in which we both feature – there’s terror, horror, wonder, and something that has no name. A kind of nostalgia for what has never been experienced.

Did all this happen? Was I mad? Did you pass through those dreadful gates at the end of life? I still see, with shut eyes but acute mental vision, those unhallowed things that appeared. And I believe that I would rather be mad than that they should run loose on the world.

Have patience and hope. We still have a long way to go together, dearest.

Your loving Joe

A sale of books was held in the auction rooms of Christie, Manson & Woods, Park Avenue, New York, on 23rd May 1996.

A first edition of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula was sold for £21,700 to an anonymous buyer. The volume was published in Cr. 8vo. by Constable & Co. of Westminster, in May 1897, bound in yellow boards blocked in red. This copy was in remarkably fine condition.

On the flyleaf was written, in faded Stephens’ ink:

To Joseph Bodenland,

Who gave the mammals their big chance –

And me a title –

Affectionately

This perplexing message was dated Chelsea, May 1897, and signed with a flourish by the author, Bram Stoker.

In the region of the planet enduring permanent twilight stood the Bastion.

All the territory about the Bastion was wrinkled and withered as aged skin. Low ground-hugging plants grew there, some with rudimentary intelligence, capable – like the creatures inhabiting the Bastion – of drinking human blood.

Six men were walking in single file through this dangerous area, progressing towards the dark flanks of the Bastion. The men were shackled to each other by a metal chain clamped to their upper arms. In the heat of the perpetual evening, they were scantily clad. They went barefoot.

They made no haste as they progressed forward, walking with heads and shoulders drooping, their dull gaze fixed on the ground. The stiffness of their movements owed less to the weight of their chains than to a prevailing despair, to which every limb of their bodies testified.

Low above them flew the guardian of this human line. The flier exhibited a degree of majesty as his great wings beat their way slowly through the viscous air. He was as much a creature of custom as the six men below him, his duty being merely to see that they returned to the warrens of the Bastion.

Before their fighting spirit was eroded, these six had often in the past plotted escape. It was rumoured that somewhere ruinous cities still stood, inhabited by tribes of men and women who had managed to hold out against the Fleet Ones as the centuries declined: that somewhere those virtues by which humans had once set great store were still preserved, against the onslaught of night.

But no one incarcerated in the Bastion knew how to reach the legendary cities. Few had stamina enough to endure long journeys overland.

All the six desired at present was to return to their prison. Their shift as cleaners in the Mechanism was over for the day. Soup and rest awaited them. The horror of their situation had long since dulled their senses. In the underground stabling, where humans and animals were indifferently herded together, the myrmidons of the Fleet Ones would bring round their rations. Then they could sleep.

As for the weekly levy of blood to be paid while they slept … even that nightmare had become mere routine.

So they negotiated the path through the bloodthirsty-plants and came with some relief to the stoma gaping at the base of the Bastion, waiting to swallow them. The guardian alighted, tucked away his wings, and directed them through the aperture. Hot and foetid air came up to meet them like a diseased breath.

The concretion into which they disappeared rose high into the saffron-tinted atmosphere, dominating the landscape in which it stood. It resembled a huge anthill. No conceptions of symmetry or elegance of any kind had entered the limited minds of its architects. It had reared itself upwards on a random basis. Its highest central point resembled a rounded tower, reinforcing the impression that the whole structure was a kind of brute phallus which had thrust its way through the body of the planet.

Here and there on the flanks of the Bastion, side features obtruded. Some resembled malformed limbs. Some twisted upwards, or sideways. Some turned down and burrowed again into the ravaged soil, serving as buttresses to the main structure.

The main portions of the Bastion lay below ground, in its unending warrens, stables, and crypts. The structure above ground was blind. Not a window showed. The Fleet Ones were no friends of light.

Yet on higher levels orifices showed, crudely shaped. Much coming and going was in evidence at these vents. Here the Fleet Ones could conveniently launch themselves into flight: as they had done at the beginning of time, so now at its end.

Only the orifice at the top of the pile, larger than all the others, was free of sinister traffic. It was reserved for the Prince of Darkness himself, Lord Dracula. This was his castle. He would launch himself from this great height whenever he was about to go on a mission into the world – as even now he was preparing to do.

As the shift of six began its winding descent into underground levels, to rest in the joyless inanition of slaves, four other men of different calibre were preparing to leave the Mechanism.

These four, in luckier days, had been scientists. Captive, they remained free of shackles, so that they could move without impediment in the building. The genetically non-scientific species who held them in captivity had abducted them from various epochs of past history. They were guarded. But because they were necessary for the maintenance of the Mechanism, their well-being within the Bastion was assured. They merely had to work until they died.

The leader of the quartet came down from the observatory, checking the time on his watch.

This leader, elected by common consent, was a tall man in his late thirties. The Fleet Ones had captured him from the Obsidianal Century. His brilliant mind and indomitable spirit were such that others took courage from him. Someone once claimed that his brain represented the flowering of the sapient Homo sapiens. The plan about to be transformed from theory to action was a product of his thought.

‘We have two minutes to go, friends,’ he said now, as they were closing down their instruments.

The Mechanism – ignorantly so called by the Fleet Ones – was a combined solar observatory and power house. All space observatories had long been destroyed by the deteriorating sun.

It was the power function which was all important. From the platforms of the Mechanism, shelving out like giant fungi, the solar satellites were controlled which drained the energies of the sun. These energies were redirected to meet the needs of the Fleet Ones. And in particular the needs of the Fleet Ones’ single innovatory form of transportation.

The scientists were forced to work for their hated enemies. They ran everything as inefficiently as possible. Because the Mechanism was lighted brilliantly to allow the humans to work, the Fleet Ones would not enter. They posted their guardians outside, continually circling the immense structure.

‘Delay here,’ said the leader, sharply. The four of them were in the foyer, preparing to go off shift and be returned to the Bastion. He glanced again at his watch.

‘According to our predictions, there’s now a minute to go.’

Beyond the glass doors, they could see the familiar tarnished landscape like a furrowed brow. In the distance, failed hills, shattered river beds, all lost in an origami of light and shade. Nearer at hand, the prodigious thrust of the Bastion, circled by leathery fliers. As a sudden stormy wind buffeted them, the fliers resembled dead leaves blowing at autumn’s call. Shunning the light, they had no knowledge of the phenomenon approaching from space.

Just outside the doors, fluttering like a bat, the lead guardian on duty came down to an unsteady landing. He braced himself against the wind.

Lifting a hand to shield his brow, he stared in at the scientists, his red eyes set amid the dark skin and fur of the sharp-fanged visage. He beckoned to them.

They made some pretence of moving towards the doors, heading instead for a metal reception counter.

Thirty seconds to go.

The lower western sky was filled with a sun like an enormous blossom. It was the flower which had already destroyed all the flowers of Earth. Imperfectly round, its crimson heart crackled with stamens of lightning. The solar wind blew its malevolent pollens about the planets. Round it orbiced the four solar stations which were leaching it of its energies, sucking them down into the subterranean storehouses of the Mechanism. On the face of this great helium-burner moved vortices which could swallow worlds. They showed like rashes of a disease, as if they worked at the débridement of an immense bloated organ.

In the midst of this solar turmoil – as those in the observatory had discovered – a magnesium-white eruption flowered.

‘Now,’ cried the leader. The thirty seconds were up.

They flung themselves down on the floor behind the metal barrier, burying their heads in their arms, closing their eyes.

Precisely on the time they had estimated, the shell flash ejected from the sun. It illuminated the world with floods of light and fury. Screaming wind followed it in a shock wave, travelling along down the throat of the system until, many hours later, it punched itself out beyond the heliopause and far into outer space. As it radiated outwards, it licked with its scorching tongue much of the atmosphere from the vulnerable worlds in its path.

Only the four scientists were prepared for the event.

They lay behind their shelter while the world smouldered outside. Their guardian had fallen like a cinder.

They rose cautiously at last. They stood. They stared at each other, stared at the blackened landscape outside, where the Bastion remained intact. Then, according to plan, they headed for the stairs leading to the upper floors.

Their hair sparkled and sang as they moved. Electrostatic action in the tormented air rendered the elevators inoperative.

Oxygen was scarce. Yet they forced themselves on, knowing they must act now, while the Fleet Ones were stunned.

Through waves of heat they climbed, dragging the vitiated air into their lungs. On one landing they collected a wing from a store cupboard, on another landing another wing. Sections of body structure, improvised from dismantled parts of the Mechanism, were also gathered as they climbed. By the time they reached the observatory on the highest level, they needed merely to secure the various parts together and they had a glider large enough to carry a man.

The landscape they surveyed was covered in fast-moving smoke. The pall washed against the two edifices of Bastion and Mechanism like a spring tide.

One detail they did observe. The bloodthirst-plants were cautiously poking their muzzles from the ground again. They were intelligent enough, yet part of nature enough, to sense when the shell flash was coming, and to retreat underground from it. But the men wasted little time in observing the phenomenon.

‘Is the air calm enough for flight?’ a small bearded man asked the leader. ‘Suppose all the cities containing men have just been destroyed by fire?’

‘We’ve no alternative but to try,’ said the leader. ‘This is our one chance. The next shell flash is many lifetimes away.’ Yet he paused before climbing into the glider, as if to hear what his friends had to say at this solemn moment.

The bearded man perhaps regretted his hesitations in the face of the other’s courage.

‘Yes, of course you must go,’ he said. ‘Somehow we have to get word of what is happening here back to the far past. Stoker has to be informed.’

The scientist standing next to him said, in sorrowful disagreement, ‘Yet all the old legends say that Dracula destroyed Stoker.’

The leader answered firmly, addressing them all, with the sense of parting heavy upon them. ‘We have argued the situation through sufficiently. Those old legends may be wrong, for we well understand how history can be changed. Our given three-dimensional space is only one dimension within the universe’s four-dimensional space. Time is a flexible element within it. No particle has a definite path, as the uncertainty principle states. We have been enslaved here at the end of the world in order to help generate the colossal voltages the Fleet Ones require to regiment those paths. I shall seek out the other end of their trail – and there I believe the legendary Stoker is to be found. It is Stoker after all who is one of Earth’s heroes, the stoker – as his name implies – who brought fire with which to burn out a great chance for all mankind.’

‘So he did,’ agreed the others, almost in chorus. And one of them, the youngest, added, ‘After all, this horrendous present, according to the laws of chaos, is a probability only, not an actuality. History can be changed.’

The leader made to step into the glider. Again the bearded man detained him.

‘Just wait till these winds have died. The glider will have a better chance then.’

‘And then the Fleet Ones will be back on the attack. It’s necessary that I go now.’

He looked searchingly into their faces. ‘I know you will suffer for this. My regret is that we were unable to fashion a plane large enough to carry all four of us. Always remember – I shall succeed or die in the attempt.’

‘There are states far worse than death where the Fleet Ones are concerned,’ said the bearded man, mustering a smile. He made to shake the leader’s hand, changed his mind, and embraced him warmly instead.

‘Farewell, Alwyn. God’s grace guide you.’

The leader stepped into the machine.

The others, as prearranged, pushed it to the edge of the drop – and over. The glider fell until its wings bit into the air. It steadied. It began to fly. It circled, it even gained height. It began heading towards the east.

The scientists left behind stood watching until the glider was faint in the murk.

Their voices too went with the wind.

‘Farewell, Alwyn!’

1

State Route 18 runs north from St George, through the Iron Mountains, to the Escalante Desert. One day in 1999, it also ran into a past so distant nobody had ever dared visualize it.

Bernard Clift had worked in this part of Utah before, often assisted by students from Dixie College with a leaning towards palaeontology. This summer, Clift’s instincts had led him to dig on the faulty stretch of rock the students called Old John, after the lumber-built jakes near the site, set up by a forgotten nineteenth-century prospector.

Clift was a thin, spare man, deeply tanned, medium height, his sharp features and penetrating grey eyes famous well beyond the limits of his own profession. There was a tenseness about him today, as if he knew that under his hand lay a discovery that was to bring him even greater fame, and to release on the world new perspectives and new terror.

Over the dig, a spread of blue canvas, of a deeper blue than the Utah sky, had been erected, to shade Clift and his fellow-workers from the sun. Clustered below the brow of rock where they worked were a dozen miscellaneous vehicles – Clift’s trailer, a trailer from Enterprise which served food and drink all day, and the automobiles and campers belonging to students and helpers.

A dirt road led from this encampment into the desert. All was solitude and stillness, apart from the activity centred on Old John. There Clift knelt in his dusty jeans, brushing soil and crumbs of rock from the fossilized wooden lid they had uncovered.

Scattered bones of a dinosaur of the aurischian order had been extracted from the rock, labelled, temporarily identified as belonging to a large theropod, and packed into crates. Now, in a stratum below the dinosaur grave, the new find was revealed.

Several people crowded round the freshly excavated hole in which Clift worked with one assistant. Cautious digging had revealed fossil wood, which slowly emerged in the shape of a coffin. On the lid of the coffin, a sign had been carved:

Overhead, a vulture wheeled, settling on a pinnacle of rock near the dig. It waited.

Clift levered at the ancient lid. Suddenly, it split along the middle and broke. The palaeontologist lifted the shard away. A smell, too ancient to be called the scent of death, drifted out into the hot dry air.

A girl student with the Dixie College insignia on her T-shirt yelped and ran from the group as she saw what lay in the coffin.

Using his brush, Clift swept away a layer of red ochre. His assistant collected fragile remains of dead blossom, placing them reverently in a plastic bag. A skeleton in human form was revealed, lying on its side. Tenderly, Clift uncovered the upper plates of the skull. It was twisted round so that it appeared to stare upwards at the world of light with round ochred eyes.

The head offices and laboratories of the thriving Bodenland Corporation were encompassed in bronzed-glass curtain walls, shaped in neo-cubist form and disposed so that they dominated one road approach into Dallas, Texas.

At this hour of the morning the facade reflected the sun into the eyes of anyone approaching the corporation from the airport – as was the case with the imposing lady now disembarking from a government craft in which she had flown from Washington. She was sheathed in a fabric which reflected back something of the lustre from the corporation.

Her name was Elsa Schatzman, three times divorced daughter of Eliah Schatzman. She was First Secretary at the Washington Department of the Environment. She looked as if she wielded power, and did.

Joe Bodenland knew that Elsa Schatzman was in the offing. At present, however, he had little thought for her, being involved in an argument with his life’s companion, Mina Legrand. While they talked, Bodenland’s secretary continued discreetly to work at her desk.

‘First things first, Birdie,’ said Bodenland, with a patience that was calculated to vex Mina.

Mina Legrand was another powerful lady, although the genial lines of her face did not proclaim that fact. She was tall and still graceful, and currently having weight problems, despite an active life. Friends said of her, affectionately, that she put up with a lot of hassle from Joe; still closer friends observed that of late he was putting up with plenty from Mina.

‘Joe, your priorities are all screwed up. You must make time for your family,’ she said.

‘I’ll make time, but first things first,’ he repeated.

‘The first thing is it’s your son’s wedding day,’ Mina said. ‘I warn you, Joe, I’m going to fly down to Gondwana without you. One of these days, I’ll leave you for good, I swear I will.’

Joe played a tune on his desk top with the fingers of his left hand. They were long blunt fingers with wide spade-like nails, ridged and hard. Bodenland himself resembled his fingers. He too was long and blunt, with an element of hardness in him that had enabled him to lead an adventurous life as well as succeeding in the competitive international world of selling scientific research. He set his head towards his right shoulder with a characteristic gesture, as he asked: ‘How long has Larry been engaged to Kylie? Under a year. How long have we been pursuing the idea of inertial disposal? Over five years. Millions of dollars hang on today’s favourable reception of our demonstration by Washington. I just have to be here, Birdie, and that’s that.’

‘Larry will never forgive you. Nor will I.’

‘You will, Mina. So will Larry. Because you two are human. Washington ain’t.’

‘All right, Joe – you have the last word as usual. But you’re in deep trouble as of now.’ With that, Mina turned and marched from the office. The door closed silently behind her; its suction arm prevented it from slamming.

‘I’ll be down there just as soon as I can,’ Bodenland called, having a last-minute twinge of anxiety.

He turned to his secretary, Rose Gladwin, who had sat silently at her desk, eyes down, while this heated conversation was going on.

‘Birth, death, the great spirit of scientific enquiry – which of those is most important to a human being, Rose?’

She looked up with a slight smile.

‘The great spirit of scientific enquiry, Joe,’ she said.

‘You always have the right answer.’

‘I’m just informed that Miss Schatzman is en route from the airport right now.’

‘Let me know as soon as she arrives. I’ll be with Waldgrave.’

He glanced at his watch as he went out, and walked briskly down the corridor, cursing Washington and himself. It annoyed him to think that Larry was getting married at all. Marriage was so old-fashioned, yet now, on the turn of the century, it was coming back into fashion.

Bodenland and his senior research scientist, Waldgrave, were in reception to welcome Miss Schatzman when she arrived with her entourage. She was paraded through the technical floor, where everyone had been instructed to continue working as usual, to the laboratory with the notice in gilt on its glass door, INERTIAL RESEARCH.

Bodenland’s judicious answers in response to her questions indicated that Schatzman had been properly briefed. He liked that, and her slightly plump forties-ish figure in a tailored suit which signalled to him that human nature survived under the official exterior.

Various important figures were gathered in the lab for the demonstration, including a backer from the Bull-Brunswick Bank. Bodenland introduced Schatzman to some of them while technicians made everything finally ready. As she was shaking hands with the Bank, one of Bodenland’s aides came up and spoke softly in Bodenland’s ear.

‘There’s an urgent call for you from Utah, Joe. Bernard Clift, the archaeologist. Says he has an important discovery.’

‘Okay, Mike. Tell Bernard I’ll call him back when possible.’

In the centre of the lab stood a glass cabinet much resembling a shower enclosure. Cables ran into it from computers and other machines, where two assistants stood by a switchboard. The hum of power filled the air, lending extra tension to the meeting.

‘You have all the technical specifications of the inertial disposal principle in our press and video pack, Miss Schatzman,’ Bodenland said. ‘If you have no questions there, we’ll move straight into the demonstration.’

As he spoke, he gave a sign and an assistant in a lab coat dragged forward a black plastic bag large enough to contain a man.

Waldgrave explained, ‘The bag is full of sand, nothing more. It represents a consignment of nuclear or toxic waste.’

The bag was shut in the cabinet, remaining in full view through the glass as computers briefly chattered their calculations.

‘Energy-consumption rates are high at present. This is just a prototype, you appreciate. We hope to lower tolerances in the next part of the programme, when we have the okay from your department,’ Bodenland said. ‘Obviously energy-input is related to mass of substance being disposed of.’

‘And I see you’re using solar energy in part,’ Schatzman said.

‘The corporation has its own satellite, which beams down the energy to our dishes here in Dallas.’

Waldgrave got the nod from his boss. He signalled to the controls technician, who pressed the Transmit pad.

The interior of the cabinet began to glow with a blue-mauve light.

Two large analogue-type clocks with sweep-hands were visible, one inside the cabinet, one on a jury-rig outside, facing the first one. The sweep hand of the clock in the cabinet stopped at 10.16. At the same time, the clock itself began to disappear. So did the black plastic bag. In a moment it was gone. The cabinet appeared to be empty.

A brief burst of applause filled the room. Bodenland appeared noticeably less grim.

The party went to have drinks in a nearby boardroom, all tan leather upholstery and dracaena plants in bronze pots. There was a jubilation in the air which even the formality of the occasion did not kill.

As she sipped a glass of Perrier, Schatzman said, ‘Well, Mr Bodenland, you appear to have invented the long-awaited time machine, no less.’

He looked down into his vodka. So the woman was a fool after all. He had hoped for better. This woman was going to have to present his case before her committee in Washington; if she could reach such a basic misunderstanding after studying all the documentation already sent to her over the computer line, the chances for government approval of his invention were poor.

‘Not a time machine, Ms Schatzman. As we’ve made clear, our new process merely halts time-decay – much as refrigeration, let’s say, slows or halts bacterial action. We found a sink in real time. The bag in the cabinet disappeared because it became suddenly stationary with regard to universal time-decay. It remained – it remains at 10.16 this morning. We are the ones who are travelling forward in time, at the rate of twenty-four hours a day. The bag remains forever where we put it, at 10.16. We can reach back and retrieve it if necessary, though the expenditure of energy increases geometrically as we progress further from entry point.

‘The inertial disposal process is far from being a time-machine. It is almost the reverse.’

Ms Schatzman did not greatly enjoy being talked down to. Perhaps her remark had been intended humorously. ‘The department will need to enquire into what happens to substances isolated in 10.16, or any other time. It would be irresponsible simply to isolate considerable amounts of toxic waste in time with no clear picture of possible consequences.’

‘How long do you estimate such an enquiry might take?’

‘We’re talking about something unprecedented, a disturbance in the natural order.’

‘Er – not if you have an understanding of the science of Chaos.’

She understood she had been snubbed. ‘An enquiry will of course occupy some weeks.’

Bodenland took a generous swig of his vodka and inclined his head in her direction.

‘The disposal of toxic waste represents one of the world’s most pressing problems, Ms Schatzman. No one wants the stuff. Only a decade ago the cost of disposal of nuclear waste as prescribed by US law was $2,500 per tonne. It’s twenty times higher now, and rising. Only last week the death of a whole village through the dumping of an illegally manufactured pesticide, Lindane, was reported in Bulgaria.

‘That’s where we come in. Bodenland Industries have developed a foolproof way of ridding the world of such evils. All we need is your department’s clearance. You must persuade your committee not to stand in the way of progress.’

She pronounced the last word at the same moment as he did. ‘Progress,’ echoing it ironically. ‘“Progress” cannot be achieved at the expense of safety. You’re familiar with that concept. It’s what we call the Frankenstein Syndrome.’ She attempted lightness of tone. ‘You know the Department will do what it can, Mr Bodenland. You also know how thoroughly this new advance will have to be investigated. We have our responsibilities – there are security aspects, too. May I suggest that meanwhile you turn your inventive mind to other matters?’

‘Sure,’ he said, setting his glass down and rising. ‘I’m going to turn my inventive mind to being a late guest at my son’s wedding.’

A jazz band was playing an arrangement of ‘Who’s Sorry Now?’ when Joe Bodenland entered the main reception rooms of the Gondwana Ranch, the home in which he and Mina had lived for a decade. At present it was full of flowers and guests.

Some of the wedding guests were dancing, some drinking, and some no doubt otherwise engaged. The caterers hired for the occasion were bearing savoury and sweet dishes to and fro, while the popping of champagne corks could be heard above the noise of the band.

Bodenland exchanged compliments and good wishes with a number of family friends as he made his way to where Larry Bodenland stood with his bride, receiving congratulations.

Kylie greeting Joe warmly enough, flinging her arms round his neck and kissing him on the mouth. Kylie was a beautiful girl with a round face on which good features were set wide apart, giving her a singularly open appearance. Joe had already discovered that Kylie was no mere innocent. She had – beside the considerable fortune accruing from her father’s transport business – a sharp and enquiring mind. But for the moment it was enough to feel her slender body against his as he revelled in her sunny good looks and wished her all future happiness.

‘Just see that Larry behaves himself,’ he said, giving her an extra hug.

Larry overheard the remark. As he shook his father’s hand, he said, ‘How about behaving yourself, Joe? How come you were late for my wedding? Was that deliberate? We know how irrational you are on the subject of matrimony.’

‘Now don’t you two start in,’ Kylie said. ‘Not today of all days.’ She raised a hand half-way to her throat, as if to indicate the crucifix hanging there. ‘You know my funny religious principles, Joe, and you must honour Larry for respecting them.’

‘Well, bless you both, and I hate myself for missing the ceremony. Don’t blame me – blame the Department of the Environment in Washington, who nailed me to this morning’s appointment.’

‘Family certainly can’t compete with a whole Department of the Environment,’ Larry said, huffily.

‘Joe has to follow his daemon,’ Kylie said, winking at her new father-in-law.

‘What demon’s that?’ asked Larry.

‘Now, Larry – your pop is a technophile of the old school. He’s crazy about machines and you must allow him that.’

‘Just as you’re crazy about religion, if I can put it that way.’

‘Religion still has a place, even in an age of science, and —’

‘Spare us!’ cried Larry. ‘I need another drink. It’s my wedding day.’ As he turned away, his mother came up, smiling in a brittle way at Joe.

‘You missed the ceremony and hit the champagne,’ she said angrily. ‘Larry and Kylie will never forgive you for this.’

‘I’m sorry, Mina.’ He took her hand, looking compassionately into her green eyes. For all his kind of hasty blindness, one of his characteristics, he knew very well what was in her mind at that moment. They had had another son, Larry’s older brother Dick, killed in an automobile crash together with his young wife Molly. Dick had always been his father’s favourite, a brilliant youngster, athletic, and with a deep interest in science, particularly particle physics. Molly too had been clever and high-spirited, a redhead whose body, at the age of twenty-two, had been inextricably merged with her husband’s in the fatal crash. It was Molly, not Dick, who returned to Joe in dreams. Dick had gone beyond recall, leaving no space for his younger brother in his father’s affections.

With the long habit of a couple who have spent years together, Mina understood something of what passed through Joe’s mind. Her mood softened.

She said, ‘Odd how Kylie has the religious impulse, just like Molly.’ It was the first time Molly’s name had passed between them in years. ‘I hope that doesn’t mean …’

‘Molly wasn’t religious. She just had an intense interest in the supernatural.’

‘You’ve forgotten, Joe. Maybe just as well.’ She took his arm. ‘Let’s take a turn outside. It’s not too hot. I’m sorry I flew off the handle earlier. But Larry and Kylie are our only kids now. Let the dead bury the dead.’

As they reached the terrace, he half-turned to her, smiling.

‘That’s kind of a dumb expression, when you think, isn’t it? “Let the dead bury the dead …” What a macabre scene that conjures up! They’d have a problem with the shovels, eh?’

She laughed. The terrace, which overlooked the swimming pool, was roofed over with reinforced glass, the supporting pillars of which were entwined with different colours of bougainvillea. He took Mina’s hand and they began to stroll, happy to get away from the noise indoors.

A phone on the wall rang as Joe and Mina were passing it. She answered by reflex, then passed the receiver to her husband with a wry look. ‘You’re wanted, Joe. The world needs you.’

He stood in the partial shade, gazing at her face, listening to his old friend Bernard Clift speaking slowly to conceal his excitement.

‘Bernie, that can’t be,’ Bodenland said. ‘It’s impossible. You must have got it wrong. You know you’ve got it wrong. Your reputation —’

He listened again, shaking his head, then nodding. Mina watched him with amusement, as his eyes lit up.

‘I’ll be right over,’ he said, finally, ‘and I may bring some of the family along.’

As he hung up, Mina said, ‘Some fresh madness brewing! Whatever it is, Joe, count me out. I want to take part in an air display over Austin tomorrow.’

‘You can freefall any time, Mina. This is terrific. Would you have wanted to have been fishing in Bermuda while the Revolution was going on on the mainland?’

‘It was Bernie Clift?’

‘Clift doesn’t fool around. He’s made a find in Utah.’

He explained that Clift had rung to tell him about the discovery of a human-like skeleton. Clift had subjected fragments of bone to carbon-dating analysis. The remains dated out as 65.5 million years BP, before the present. This checked out with their discovery in late Cretaceous rock. They came from a time over sixty million years before mankind in its most primitive form walked the earth.

‘That doesn’t make any kind of sense,’ Mina said.

‘It’s a revolution in thought. Don’t ask me what it means but this we really have to see. It’s – well, incredible.’ He whistled. ‘Just to prove that Larry and Kylie do mean something to me, we’re going to take them along too.’

He was already moving back into the house. She caught his sleeve impatiently.

‘Joe, easy now. You’re so impetuous. Larry’s off in a couple of hours to honeymoon in Hawaii. They’re not going to want to stop off in Utah, to help us.’

He was looking at his watch.

‘They’ll love it, and so will you. That’s wonderful desert country where Bernie is. Utah’s Dixie, they used to call it. If we move, we can be there by nightfall. And remember, tell no one why we are going. Bernie’s discovery stays under wraps for now. Otherwise the world’s media will be on his back. Okay?’

She laughed, not without a hint of bitterness. ‘Oh, Joe – are you allowing me time to pack?’

He kissed her. ‘Grab your toothbrush. Tell Kylie to shake the confetti out of her hair.’

2

As the helicopter spiralled downwards over the Escalante Desert, a light flashed up at it, the setting sun reflected from the windscreen of a parked car. Looking down, Joe Bodenland could see cars and trailers clustered round a square of blue canvas. Four minutes later, they were landing nearby in a whirl of dust.

Joe was first from the copter, giving Mina a hand, followed by Kylie, looking around her rather nervously, with Larry, who had piloted them, last. Bernard Clift was standing there, waiting to greet them.

‘There’s an atmosphere of something here,’ Kylie told him, as they were introduced. ‘You must feel it, Bernie. I can’t explain it. I don’t like it. Oppressive.’

Clift laughed shortly. ‘That’s the Bodenland family, Kylie. You have to get accustomed to them. Now listen, Joe, I’m grateful for your prompt arrival, although frankly I didn’t expect you all to show up. We can find a place for you to sleep.’ He ran a hand through his hair in a self-conscious gesture. ‘This discovery is so important – and top secret. I have shut down our one phone line to Enterprise. The students are forbidden to leave the site, at least without my express permission. No radioing or any form of communication with the outside world. I’ve made them all swear to keep secrecy on this one, until I’m ready.’

‘As a matter of interest, Bernie,’ Bodenland said, ‘how did you get them to swear?’

He laughed. ‘On their mother’s virginity. On whatever they took seriously. Even the Bible.’

‘I’d have thought that custom had worn thin by now,’ Joe said.

‘Not with all of us, Joe,’ said Kylie, laughing.

Clift looked at her approvingly, then said, ‘Well, come and see before the light fades. That’s what you’re here for.’

He spoke jerkily, full of nervous energy.

As they followed him along a narrow track among low sage winding up the mountain, he said, ‘Joe, you’re a rational man and a knowledgeable one, I figured you’d know what to make of this find. If it’s what I think it is, our whole world view is overturned. Humans on the planet sixty million years earlier than any possible previous evidence suggested. A species of man here in North America, long before anything started crawling round Olduvai Gorge …’

‘Couldn’t be a visitor from somewhere else in the universe? There’s just the one grave?’

‘That’s why I’m insisting on secrecy. My findings are bound to be challenged. I’m in for the Spanish Inquisition and I know it. But if we could find a second grave … So I don’t want anyone interfering – at least for a few days.’

Bodenland grunted. ‘Our organization has its own security unit in Dallas … I could get guards out here tomorrow prompt, if you need them. But you must be wrong, Bernie. This can’t be.’

‘No, it’s like the comic strips always said,’ Larry remarked, with a laugh. ‘Cavemen contemporary with the brontosaurus and tyrannosaurus. Must have been some kind of a race memory.’

Ignoring her son’s facetiousness, Mina said, ‘Bernard, hold it. I’m not prepared for this ancient grave of yours. I’m no dimmer than the next guy, but I can’t attach any meaning to sixty-five million years. It’s just a phrase.’

Clift halted their ascent abruptly. ‘Then I’ll show you,’ he said.

Bodenland glanced quickly at his friend’s face. He saw no impatience there, only the love a man might have for the subject that possessed him and gave his life meaning.

Before them, streaked now by the shades of advancing evening, was a broken hillside, eroded so that strata of rock projected like the ruins of some unimaginable building. Sage grew here and there, while the crest was crowned by pine and low-growing cottonwoods.

‘For those who can read, this slope contains the history of the world,’ Clift told Mina. ‘What interests us is this broken line of deposit under the sandstones. That’s what’s called the K/T boundary.’

He pointed to a clayey line that ran under all the shattered sandstone strata like a damp-proof course round a house.

‘That layer of deposit marks a division between the Cretaceous rocks below and the Tertiary rocks above. It represents one of the most mysterious events in all Earth history – the extinction of the dinosaurs. It’s only centimetres thick. Below it lie kilometres of rock which is – as you might say – solidified time, the long millennia of the ages of reptiles. It has been verified beyond doubt that the K/T deposit line was laid down sixty-five million years BP, before present. Our grave lies just below that line.’

‘But there were no humans living then,’ Mina said, as they started walking again, taking a trail to the left.

‘The K/T layer preserves evidence of a worldwide ecological catastrophe. It contains particles of shocked minerals, clues to massive inundations, soot which bears witness to continental-scale firestorms, and so on. Some gigantic impact occurred at that time – scientists guess at a meteorite capable of creating a vast crater, but we don’t really know.

‘What we do know is that some large-scale event ended a majestic era of brilliant and strange living things.

‘Our grave suggests that what perished at the end of the Cretaceous Period – or the Mesozoic Era, which contains all reptilian periods – was not only the dinosaurs but also a human-like race perhaps so thinly distributed that no remains have turned up – till now.’

‘Homo Cliftensis,’ said Kylie.

They halted where the sandstones had been excavated and there were tokens of human activity, with planks, brushes, jackhammers, and a wheelbarrow incongruous nearby. They stood on a bluff overlooking the desert, across which mesas were sending long fingers of shadow. A well of shadow filled the excavation they now contemplated, as it lay like a pool below the ancient crusts of the K/T boundary.

Kylie shivered. But the air was cooling, the sky overhead deepening its blue.

Two students, a man and a woman, were standing guard by the dig. They moved back as the new arrivals appeared. Clift jumped down into the hole and removed a tarpaulin, revealing the ancient grave. The skeleton remained lying on its side, cramped within the coffin for an unimaginable age. The Bodenland family looked down at it without speaking.

‘What’s all the red stuff?’ Kylie asked, in a small voice. ‘Is it bloodstains?’

‘Red ochre,’ Clift said. ‘To bury with red ochre was an old custom. The Neanderthals used it – not that I’m suggesting this is a Neanderthal. There were also flowers in the grave, which we’ve taken for analysis. Of course, there’s more work to be done here. I’m half afraid to touch anything …’

They looked down in silence, prey to formless thought. The light died. The skeleton lay half-buried in ochre, fading into obscurity.

Kylie clung to Larry. ‘Disturbing an ancient grave … I know it’s part of an archaeologist’s job, but … There are superstitions about these things. Don’t you think there’s something – well, evil here?’

He hugged her affectionately. ‘Not evil. Pathetic, maybe. Sure, there’s something disconcerting when the past or the future arrives to disrupt the present. Like the way this chunk of the past has come up to disrupt our wedding day.’ Seeing Kylie’s expression cloud over, he said, ‘Let the dead get on with their thing. I’m taking you to have a drink.’

‘You’ll find a canteen at the bottom of the hill,’ said Clift, but he spoke without looking away from his discovery, crouching there, almost as motionless as the skeleton he had disinterred.

The sun plunged down into the desert, a chill came over the world. Kylie Bodenland stood at the door of the trailer they had been loaned, gazing up at the stars. Something in this remote place had woken unsuspected sensibilities in her, and she was trying to puzzle out what it was.

Some way off, students were sitting round a campfire, resurrecting old songs and pretending they were cowboys, in a fit of artificial nostalgia.

City ladies may be fine

But give me that gal of mine …

Larry came up behind Kylie and pulled her into the trailer, kicking the door shut. She tasted the whisky on his lips, and enjoyed it. Her upbringing had taught her that this was wickedness. She liked other wickednesses too, and slid her hand into Larry’s jeans as he embraced her. When she felt his response, she began to slide herself out of her few clothes, until she stood against him in nothing but her little silver chain and crucifix. Larry kissed it, kissed her breasts, and then worked lower.

‘Oh, you beast, you beast,’ she said. ‘Oh …’

She clutched his head, but he got up and lifted her over to the bunk.

Lying together on the bunk later, he muttered almost to himself, ‘Funny how the marriage ceremony annoys Joe. He just couldn’t face it … I had to go through with it to spite him … and to please you, of course.’

‘You shouldn’t spite your father. He’s rather a honey.’

Larry chuckled. ‘Pop a honey? He’s a stubborn-minded old pig. Now I’m adult, I see him in a more favourable light than once I did. Still and all … Grocery’s a dirty word to him. He resents me being in grocery, never mind I’m making a fortune. I’ve got a mind of my own, haven’t I? It may be small but it’s my own. To hell with him – we’re different. Let me fix you a drink.’

As he was getting up and walking naked to his baggage, from which a whisky bottle protruded, Kylie rolled on to her back and said, ‘Well, it’s Hawaii for us tomorrow. It’ll be great for you to get from under Joe’s shadow. He’ll change towards you, you’ll see. He may be an old pig but he’s a good man for all that.’

Larry paused as he was about to pour, and laughed.

‘Lay off about Joe, will you? Let’s forget Joe. For sure he’s forgotten about us already. Bernie Clift has given him something new to think about.’

Only a few metres away, Clift and Bodenland were walking in the desert, talking together in confidential tones.

‘This new daughter-in-law of yours – she is a striking young lady and no mistake. And not happy about what I’m doing, I gather.’

‘The religious and the economic views of mankind are always at odds. Maybe we’re always religious when we’re young. I lost anything like that when my other son died. Now I try to stick to rationality – I hate to think of the millions of people in America who buy into some crackpot religion or other. In the labs, we’ve also come up against time. Not whole millennia of time, like you, but just a few seconds. We’re learning how to make time stand still. As you’d expect, it costs. It sure costs! If only I can get backing from Washington … Bernie, I could be … well, richer than … I can’t tell you …’

Clift interrupted impatiently. ‘Rationality. It means greed, basically … Lack of imagination. I can see Kylie is a girl with imagination, whatever else …’

‘You have taken a fancy to her. I saw that when we met.’

‘Joe, listen, never mind that. I’ve no time for women. And I’ve got a hold here of something more momentous than any of your financial enterprises. This is going to affect everyone, everyone on earth … It will alter our whole concept of ourselves. Hasn’t that sunk in yet?’

He started off towards the dark bulk of the mountain. Bodenland followed. They could hear the one group of students who had not yet turned in arguing among themselves.

‘You’re mad, Bernie. You always were, in a quiet way.’

‘I never sleep,’ said Clift, not looking back.

‘Isn’t that what someone once said about the Church? “It never sleeps.” Sounds like neurosis to me.’

They climbed to the dig. A single electric light burned under the blue canopy, where one of the students sat on watch. Clift exchanged a few words with him.

‘Spooky up here, sir,’ said the student.

Clift grunted. He would have none of that. Bodenland squatted beside him as the palaeontologist removed the tarpaulin.

From down in the camp came a sudden eruption of shouts – male bellows and female voices raised high, then the sound of blows, clear on the thin desert air.

‘Damn,’ said Clift, quietly. ‘They will drink. I’ll be back.’

He left, running down the hill path towards the group of students who had been singing only a few minutes earlier. He called to them in his authoritative voice to think of others who might be sleeping.

Bodenland was alone with the thing in the coffin.

In the frail light, the thing seemed almost to have acquired a layer of skin, skin of an ill order, but rendering it at least a few paces nearer to life than before. Bodenland felt an absurd temptation to speak to the thing. But what would it answer?

Overcoming his reluctance, he thrust his hand down and into the ochre. Although he was aware he might be destroying valuable archaeological evidence, curiosity led him on. The thought had entered his mind that after all Clift might somehow have overstepped the bounds of his madness and faked the evidence of the rocks, that this could be a modern grave he had concealed in the Cretaceous strata at some earlier date – perhaps working alone here the previous year.

Much of Bernard Clift’s fame had sprung from a series of outspoken popular articles in which he had pointed out the scarcity of earlier human remains and their fragmentary nature in all but a few select sites round the world. ‘Is Humanity Ten Million Years Old?’ had been a favourite headline.

Orthodoxy agreed that Homo sapiens could be no more than two million years old. It was impossible to believe that this thing came from sixty-five million years ago. Clift was faking; and if he could convince his pragmatic friend Joe, then he could convince the world’s press.

‘No one fools me,’ Bodenland said, half-aloud. He peered about to make sure that the student guard was looking away, watching the scene below.

Crouching over the coffin, he scraped one shoulder against the rock wall and the stained line that was the K/T boundary.

The ochre was surprisingly warm to the touch, almost as if heated by a living body. Bodenland’s spatulate fingers probed in the dust. He started to scrape a small hole in order to see the rib cage better. It was absurd to believe that this dust had lain undisturbed for all those millennia. The dust was crusty, breaking into crumbs like old cake.

He did not know what he was looking for. He grinned in the darkness. A sticker saying ‘Made in Taiwan’ would do. He’d have to go gently with poor old Clift. Scientists had been known to fake evidence before.

His finger ran gently along the left floating rib, then the one above it. At the next rib, he felt an obstruction.

Grit trickled between his fingers. He could not see what he had hold of. Bone? Tugging gently, he got it loose, and lifted it from the depression. When he held it up to the light bulb, it glittered dimly.

It was not bone. It was metal.

Bodenland rubbed it on his shirt, then held it up again.

It was a silver bullet.

On it was inscribed a pattern – a pattern of ivy or something similar, twining about a cross. He stared at it in disbelief, and an ill feeling ran through him.

Sixty-five million years old?

He heard Clift returning, speaking reassuringly to the guard. Hastily, he smoothed over the marks he had made in the fossil coffin. The bullet he slipped into a pocket.

‘A very traditional fracas,’ Clift said quietly, in his academic way. ‘Two young men quarrelling for the favours of one girl. Sex has proved a rather troublesome method of perpetuating the human race. If one was in charge one might dream up a better way … I advised them both to go to bed with her and then forget it.’

‘They must have loved that suggestion!’

‘They’ll sort it out.’

‘Maybe we should hit the sack too.’

But they stood under the stars, discussing the find. Bodenland endeavoured to hide his scepticism, without great success.

‘Experts are coming in from Chicago and Drumheller tomorrow,’ Clift said. ‘You shall hear what they say. They will understand that the evidence of the strata cannot lie.’

‘Come on, Bernie, sixty-five million years … My mind just won’t take in such a span of time.’

‘In the history of the universe – even of the earth, the solar system – sixty-five point five million years is but yesterday.’

They were walking down the slope, silent. A gulf had opened between them. The students had all gone to bed, whether apart or together. Over the desert a stillness prevailed such as had done before men first entered the continent.

The light came from the west. Bodenland saw it first and motioned to his companion to stand still and observe. As far as could be judged the light was moving fast, and in their direction. It made no noise. It extended itself, until it resembled a comet rushing along over the ground. It was difficult to focus on. The men stood rooted to the spot in astonishment.

‘But the railroad’s miles distant —’ Clift exclaimed trying to keep his voice level.

Whatever the phenomenon was, it was approaching the camp at extreme velocity.

Without wasting words, Bodenland dashed forward, running down the slope, calling to Mina. He saw her light go on immediately in the camper. Satisfied, he swerved and ran towards the trailer his son occupied. Banging on the door, he called Larry’s name.

Hearing the commotion, others woke, other doors opened. Men ran naked out of tents. Clift called out for calm, but cries of amazement drowned his voice. The thing was plunging out of the desert. It seemed ever distant, ever near, as if time itself was suspended to allow it passage.

Bodenland put his arm protectively round Mina’s shoulders when she appeared.

‘Get to some high ground.’ He gave Larry and Kylie similar orders when they came up, dishevelled, but stood firm himself, unable not to watch that impossible progress.

The notion entered his head that it resembled a streamlined flier viewed through thick distorting glass. Still no sound. But the next moment it was on them, plunging through the heart of the little encampment – and all in silence. Screams rose from the Dixie students, who flung themselves to the ground.

Yet it had no impact, seemed to have no substance but light, to be as insubstantial as the luminescence it trailed behind it, which remained floating to the ground and disappeared like dying sparks.

Bodenland watched the ghastly thing go. It plunged right into and through one of the mesas, and finally was swallowed in the distances of the Utah night. It had appeared intent on destruction, yet not a thing in the camp was harmed. It had passed right through Larry’s trailer, yet nothing showed the slightest sign of disarray.

Larry staggered up to his father and offered him a gulp from a silver hip flask.

‘We’ve just seen the original ghost train, Joe,’ he said.

‘I’ll believe anything now,’ said Bodenland, gratefully accepting the flask.

When dawn came, and the desert was transformed from shadow to furnace, the members of the Old John encampment were still discussing the phenomenon of the night. Students of a metaphysical disposition argued that the ghost train – Larry’s description was generally adopted – had no objective reality. It was amazing how many of these young people, scientifically trained, the cream of their year, could believe in a dozen wacky explanations. Nearly all of them, it seemed to Bodenland as he listened and sipped coffee from the canteen, belonged to one kind of religious cult or another. Nearly all espoused explanations that chimed with their own particular set of beliefs.

Larry left the discussion early, dragging Kylie away, though she was clearly inclined to pitch into the debate.

One of the students who had been engaged in the previous night’s scuffle increasingly monopolized the discussion.

‘You guys are all crazy if you think this was some kind of an enemy secret weapon. If there was such a thing, America would have had it first and we’d know about it. Equally, it ain’t some kind of Scientology thing, just to challenge your IQs to figure it out or join the Church. It’s clear what happened. We’re all suddenly stuck here in this desert, forbidden to communicate with our parents or the outside world, and we’re feeling oppressed. Insecure. So what do we do? Why, it’s natural – we get a mass-hallucination. Nothing but nothing happened in Old John last night, except we all freaked out. So forget it. It’ll probably happen again tonight till we all go crazy and get ourselves shipped to the funny farm.’

Bodenland stood up.

‘People don’t go crazy so easily, son. You’re just shooting your mouth off. Why, I want to know, are you so keen to discount what you actually saw and experienced?’

‘Because that thing couldn’t be,’ retorted the student.

‘Wrong. Because you try to fit it in with your partial systems of belief and it won’t fit. That’s because of an error in your beliefs, not your experience. We all saw that fucking thing. It exists. Okay, so we can’t account for it. Not yet. Any more than we can account for the ancient grave up there on the bluff. But scientific enquiry will sort out the truth from the lies – if we are honest in our observations!’

‘So what was that ghost train, then?’ demanded one of the girls. ‘You tell us.’

Bodenland sat down next to Mina again. ‘That’s what I’m saying. I don’t know. But I’m not discounting it on that account. If everything that could not be readily understood was discounted by some crap system of belief, we’d still be back in the Stone Age. As soon as we can talk to the outside world again, I’m getting on to the various nearby research establishments to find who else has observed this so-called ghost train.’

Clift said quietly, ‘I’ve been working this desert fifteen years, Joe, and I never saw such a thing before. Nor did I ever hear of anyone else who did.’

‘Well, we’ll get to the bottom of it.’

‘Just how do you propose to do that, Mr Bodenland?’ asked the girl who had spoken up before. Supportive murmurs came from her friends.

Bodenland grinned.

‘If the train comes again tonight, I’m going to be ready to board it.’

The students set up such a racket, he hardly heard Mina say at his side, ‘Jesus, Joe, you really are madder than they are …’

‘Maybe – but we’ve got a helicopter and they haven’t.’

Towards evening, Mina climbed with Bernard Clift to an eminence above the camp, and looked westwards.

Joe had been away most of the day. After having persuaded Larry and Kylie to stay on a little longer, he had ridden out with them to see if they could track down any signs of the ghost train.

‘What’s out there?’ Mina asked, shielding her eyes from the sun.

‘A few coyotes, the odd madman rejecting this century, preparing to reject the next one. Not much else,’ Clift said. ‘Oh, they’ll probably come across an old track leading to Enterprise City.’

She laughed. ‘Enterprise City! Oh, Joe’ll love the sound of that. He’ll take it as an omen.’

‘Joe doesn’t believe what we’ve got here, does he? That’s why he’s allowing this train thing to distract him, isn’t it?’

Mina continued to stare westwards with shielded eyes.

‘I have a problem with my husband and my son, Bernard. Joe is such an achiever. He can’t help overshadowing Larry. I feel very sorry for Larry. He tried to get out from his father’s shadow, and rejected the whole scientific business. Unfortunately, he moved sideways into groceries, and I can see why that riles Joe. No matter he’s made a financial success, and supplies a whole south-eastern area of the USA. Now marrying into Kylie’s family’s transport system, he’ll be a whole lot more successful. Richer, I should say.’

‘Doesn’t that please Joe?’

She shook her head doubtfully. ‘Whatever else Joe is, he’s not a mercenary man. I guess at present he’s just waiting to see if a nice girl like Kylie can cure Larry of his drinking habits.’

‘As you say, she’s a nice girl right enough. But can she?’

She looked straight at Clift. ‘There’s danger just in trying. Still, there’s danger in everything. I should know. My hobby’s freefall parachuting.’

‘I remember. And I’ve seen the articles on you in the glossies. Sounds like a wonderful hobby.’

She looked at him rather suspiciously, suspecting envy. ‘You get your kicks burrowing into the earth. I like to be way above it, with time and gravity in suspense.’

He pointed down the trail, where three figures on mules could be discerned in a cloud of dust.

‘Your husband’s on his way back. He was telling me he’s also got time in suspense, in his laboratories.’

‘Time isn’t immutable, as the science of chaos proves. Basically Joe’s inertial disposal system is a way of de-stabilizing time. Ten years ago, the principles behind it were scarcely glimpsed. I like that. Basically, I’m on Joe’s side, Bernard, so it’s no good trying to get round me.’

He laughed, but ignored the jibe.

‘If time isn’t immutable, what is it? Being up against millions of years, I should be told.’

‘Time’s like a fog with a wave structure. It’s all to do with strange attractors. I can send you a paper about it. Tamper with the input, who knows what output you’ll get.’

Clift laughed again.

‘Just like life, in fact.’

‘Also subject to chaos.’

They climbed down the hill path to meet Bodenland and his companions, covered in dust after the ride.

‘Oh, that was just wonderful,’ Kylie said, climbing off her mule and giving Mina a hug. ‘The desert is a marvellous place. Now I need a shower.’

‘A shower and a dozen cans of beer,’ supplemented Larry.

‘It was wonderful, but it achieved nothing,’ Bodenland said. ‘However, we have left a pretty trail of flags behind. All I hope is that the ghost train calls again tonight.’

‘What about Larry?’ she asked, when they were alone.

‘He’s off with Kylie tomorrow, whatever happens tonight.’

‘Don’t look so sour, Joe. They are supposed to be on honeymoon, poor kids. Where would you rather be – on a beach in Hawaii, or in this godforsaken stretch of Utah?’

He smiled at her, teasingly but with affection. ‘I’d rather be on that ghost train – and that is where I’m going to be tonight.’

But Bodenland was in for disappointment.

The night brought the stars, sharp as diamonds over the desert, but no ghost train. Bodenland and his group stayed by the mobile canteen, which remained open late to serve them. They drank coffee and talked, waiting, with the helicopter nearby, ever and again looking out into the darkness.

‘No Injuns,’ Kylie said. ‘No John Wayne stagecoach. The train made its appearance and that was it. Hey, Joe, a student was telling me she saw ghostly figures jumping – no, she said floating – off the train and landing somewhere by the dig, so she said. What do you think of that?’

‘Could be the first of later accretions to what will be a legend. Bernie, these students are going to want to bring in the media – or at least the local press. How’re you going to handle that?’

‘I rely on them,’ Clift said. ‘They know how things stand. All the same … Joe, if this thing shows up tonight, I want to be on that helicopter with you.’

‘My god, here it comes,’ Mina screamed, before Bodenland could reply.

And it was there in the darkness, like something boring in from outer space, a traveller, a voyager, an invader: full of speed and luminescence, which seemed to scatter behind it, swerving across the Escalante. Only when it burst through mesas did its lights fade. This time it was well away from the line of flags planted during the day, heading north, and some miles distant from the camp.

Bodenland led the rush for the helicopter. Larry followed and jumped into the pilot’s seat. The others were handed quickly up, Mina with her vidcam, Clift last, pulling himself aboard as the craft lifted.

Larry sent it scudding across ground, barely clearing the camper roofs as it sped up into the night air.

‘Steady,’ Kylie said. ‘This isn’t one of your models, Larry!’

‘Faster,’ yelled Mina. ‘Or we’ll lose it.’

But they didn’t. Fast though the ghost train sped, the chopper cut across ground to it. Before they were overhead, Joe was being winched down, swinging wild as they banked.

The strange luminous object – strangely dull when close, shaped like a phosphorescent slug – was just below them. Bodenland steadied himself, clasped the wire rope, made to stand on the roof as velocities matched – and his foot went through nothingness.

He struggled in the dark, cursing. Nothing of substance was below his boots. Whatever it was, it was as untouchable as it was silent.

Bodenland dangled there, buffeted by the rotors overhead. The enigmatic object tunnelled into the night and disappeared.

The shots of the ghost train in close up were as striking as the experience had been. Figures were revealed – revealed and concealed – sitting like dummies inside what might have been carriages. They were grey, apparently immobile. Confusingly, they were momentarily replaced by glimpses of trees, perhaps of whole forests; but the green flickered by and was gone as soon as seen.

Mina switched the video off.

‘Any questions?’ she asked, flippantly.

Silence fell.

‘Maybe the trees were reflections of something – on the windows, I mean,’ Larry said. ‘Well, no … But trees …’

‘It was like a death train,’ Kylie said. ‘Were those people or corpses? Do you think it could be … No, I don’t know what we saw.’

‘Whatever it was, I have to get back to Dallas tomorrow,’ Joe said. ‘With phantom trains and antediluvian bones, you have a lot of explaining to do to someone, Bernie, my friend.’

Next morning came the parting of the ways at St George airport. Bodenland and Mina were going back to Dallas, Larry and his bride flying on to their Hawaii hotel. As they said their farewells in the reception lounge, Kylie took Bodenland’s hand.

‘Joe, I’ve been thinking about what happened at Old John. You’ve heard of near-death experiences, of course? I believe we underwent a near-death experience. There’s a connection between what we call the ghost train and that sixty-five-million-year-old grave of Bernard Clift’s. Otherwise it’s too much of a coincidence, right?’

‘Mm, that makes sense.’

‘Well, then. The shock of that discovery, the old grave, the feeling of death which prevailed over the whole camp – with vultures drifting around and everything – all that precipitated us into a corporate near-death experience. It took a fairly conventional form for such experiences. A tunnel-like effect, the sense of a journey. The corpses on the train, or whatever they were. Don’t you see, it all fits?’

‘No, I don’t see that anything fits, Kylie, but you’re a darling and interesting girl, and I just hope that Larry takes proper care of you.’

‘Like you take care of me, eh, Pop?’ Larry said. ‘I’ll take care of Kylie – and that’s my affair. You take care of your reputation, eh? Watch that this ancient grave of Bernie’s isn’t just a hoax.’

Bodenland clutched the silver bullet in his pocket and eyed his son coldly, saying nothing. They parted without shaking hands.

No word had come from Washington in Bodenland’s absence. Instead he received a phone call from the Washington Post wanting an angle on governmental procrastination. Summoning his Publicity Liaison Officer, Bodenland had another demonstration arranged.

When a distinguished group of political commentators was gathered in the laboratory, clustering round the inertial disposal cabinet, Bodenland addressed them informally.

‘The principle involved here is new. Novelty in itself takes a while for governmental departments to digest. But we want to get there first. Otherwise, our competitors in Japan and Europe will be there before us, and once more America will have lost out. We used to be the leaders where invention was concerned. My heroes since boyhood have been men like Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Alva Edison. I’m going to do an Edison now, just to prove how safe our new principle of waste disposal is.’

He glanced at Mina, giving her a smile of reassurance.

‘My wife’s anxious for my safety. I welcome that. Washington has different motivations for delay.’

This time, Bodenland was taking the place of the black plastic bag. He nodded to the technicians and stepped into the cabinet. Waldgrave closed the door on him.

Bodenland watched the two clocks, the one inside the cabinet with him and the one in the laboratory, as the energy field built up round him. The sweep hand of the inside clock slowed and stopped. The blue light intensified rapidly, and he witnessed all movement ceasing in the outside world. The expression on Mina’s face froze, her hand paused halfway to her mouth. Then everything disappeared. It whited out and went in a flash. He stood alone in the middle of a greyish something that had no substance.

Yet he was able to move. He turned round and saw a black plastic bag some way behind him, standing in a timeless limbo. He tried to reach it but could not. He felt the air grow thick.

The stationary clock started to move again. Its rate accelerated. Through the grey fog, outlines of the laboratory with its frozen audience appeared. As the clock in the cabinet caught up with the one outside, everything returned to normal. Waldgrave released him from the cabinet.

The audience clapped, and there were murmurs of relief.

Bodenland wiped his brow with a handkerchief.

‘I became stuck in time, just for five minutes. I represented a container of nuclear waste. Only difference, we would not bring the waste back as Max Waldgrave just brought me back. It would remain at that certain time at which it was disposed of, drifting even further back into the past, like a grave.

‘This cabinet is just a prototype. Given the Department of the Environment’s approval, Bodenland Enterprises will build immense hangars to cope with waste, stow it away in the past by the truckload, and become world monopolists in the new trade.’

‘Could we get the stuff back if we ever wanted to?’ someone asked. ‘I mean, if future ages found what we consider waste to be valuable, worth reclamation.’

‘Sure. Just as I have been brought back to the present time. The point to remember is that at the moment the technology requires enormous amounts of energy. It’s expensive, but security costs. You know we at Bodenland Enterprises are presently tapping solar energy, beamed down from our own satellite by microwave. If and when we get the okay from the DoE, we can afford to research still more efficient methods of beaming in power from space.’

The two men from the Post had been conferring. The senior man said, ‘We certainly appreciate the Edison imitation, Mr Bodenland. But aren’t you being unduly modest – haven’t you just invented the world’s first time machine? Aren’t you applying to the wrong department? Shouldn’t you be approaching the Defence top brass in the Pentagon?’

Laughter followed the question, but Bodenland looked annoyed. ‘I’m against nuclear weapons and, for that matter, I’m enough of a confirmed Green to dislike nuclear power plants. Hence our research into PBSs – power-beam sats. Solar energy, after many decades, is coming into its own at last. It will replace nuclear power in another quarter century, if I have anything to do with it.

‘However, to answer your question – as I have often answered it before – no, I emphatically reject the idea that the inertial principle has anything to do with time travel, at least as we understand time travel since the days of H. G. Wells.

‘What we have here is a form of time-stoppage. Anything – obviously not just toxic wastes – can be processed to stay right where it is, bang on today’s time and date, for ever, while the rest of us continue subject to the clock. That applies even to the DoE.’

As the last media man scooped up a handful of salted almonds and left, Mina turned to Bodenland.

‘You are out of your mind, Joe. Taking unnecessary risks again. You might have been killed.’

‘Come on, it worked on mice.’

‘You should have tried rats.’

He laughed.

‘Birdie, I had an idea while I was in limbo. Something Kylie said stuck in my mind – that the ghost train and the discovery of Bernie Clift’s grave were somehow connected. Suppose it’s a time connection … That train, or whatever it is, must have physical substance. It’s not a ghost. It must obey physical laws, like everything else in the universe. Maybe the connection is a time connection. If we used the inertial principle in a portable form – rigged it up so that it would work from a helicopter —’

‘Oh, shucks!’ she cried, seeing what was in his mind. ‘No, no more funnies, please. You wouldn’t want to be aboard that thing even if you could get in. It’s packed with zombies going God knows where. Joe, I won’t let you.’

He put his hands soothingly on her shoulders. ‘Mina, listen —’

‘How many years have I listened? To what effect? To more stress and strain, to more of your bullshit?’

‘I have to get on that train. I’m sure it could be done. It’s no worse than your sky-diving. Leap into the unknown – that’s what we’re all about, darling.’

‘Oh, shit,’ she said.

3

At some time in the past, the cell had been whitewashed in the interests of cleanliness. It was now filthy. Straw, dust, pages of old newspaper, a lump of human ordure, littered the stone-paved floor.

A mouse ran full tilt along one of the walls. Its coat was grey, with longer russet hair over the shoulders. It moved with perfect grace, its small beady eyes fixed on the madman ahead, and more particularly on his open mouth.

Strapped within a straitjacket, the lunatic lay horizontal on the floor. The straitjacket was of canvas, with leather straps securing it, imprisoning the arms of the madman.

He had kicked his semen-stained grey mattress into a corner, to lie stretched out on the stones, his head wedged in another corner.

He was motionless. His eyes gleamed as he kept his gaze on the mouse, never blinking. His chops gaped wide, his tongue curled back. Saliva dripped slowly to the ground.

The mouse had been foraging in one of the holes in the old mattress when the madman fixed it with his gaze. The mouse had remained still, staring back, as if undergoing some internal struggle. Then its limbs had started to twitch and move. It had slewed round, squealing pitifully. Then it began its run towards the open jaws.

There was no holding back. It was committed. Scuttling along with one flank close to the wall, it ran towards the waiting face. With a final leap, it was in the mouth. The madman’s jaws snapped shut.

His eyes bulged. He lay still, body without movement. Only his jaws moved as he chewed. A little blood leaked from his lips to the floor.

With much cracking of tiny bones, he finished his mouthful. Then he licked the pool of blood from the stained stones.

Outside the cell stretched a long corridor, a model of cleanliness compared with the cell in which the madman was imprisoned. At the other end of the corridor, Doctor Kindness had his office, which connected with a small operating room.

The office was furnished with phrenological and anatomical charts. On one of the wood-panelled walls hung a day-to-day calendar for the current year, 1896, with quotations from Carlyle, Martin Tupper, Samuel Smiles, and other notables.

The furniture was heavy. Two armchairs were built like small fortresses, their soiled green leather bulging with horsehair, their mahogany shod with brass studs.

A general air of heaviness, of a place where, in the interests of medicine, oxygen was not allowed to enter, hung about the room. In the black lead grate, a coal fire had died, in despair at the retreat of the last of the oxygen. Only the black meerschaum pipe of the doctor glowed, sucking oxygen from the lungs of this pillar of the asylum. Clouds of smoke ascended from the bowl of the pipe to the ceiling, to hang about the gas brackets looking for release.

In order to make the room less inviting, a row of death masks stood on the heavy marble mantelshelf above the dead fire. The masks depicted various degrees of agony, and were of men and women who, judging by this plaster evidence involuntarily left behind, had found life with all its terrors preferable to what was imminently to come.

The doctor was perfectly at home in this environment. As he sauntered through, smoking, from the operating room, he set a blood-stained bone-saw down among the papers of his desk before turning to his visitor.

Dr Kindness was pale and furrowed, and enveloped almost entirely in a blood-stained white coat. In his prevailing greyness, his only vigorous signs of life were exhibited through his pipe.

His visitor was altogether of a different stamp. His most conspicuous characteristic was a bushy red beard, which flowed low enough over the lapels of a suit of heavy green tweed to make it impossible to tell if he was wearing a tie. He was of outdoor appearance, solid, and with a normally pleasant expression on his broad face. At this moment, what with the smoke and the bone-saw and the oppressive atmosphere of the asylum, he looked more apprehensive than anything else.

‘Well, it’s done,’ said Dr Kindness, removing the pipe for a moment. ‘If you’d like to come and have a look. It’s not a pretty sight.’

‘Sure, sure, I’d be glad …’ But the ginger man rose from his armchair by the dead fire with reluctance, and was aided into the operating room only by Dr Kindness’s pressure behind him.

The reason for Dr Kindness’s heavy generation of smoke-screen was now apparent. The stench in the operating room was pervasive. To breathe it caused an agitation in the heart.

On a large wooden table much like a butcher’s slab lay a naked male body streaked with dirt. The genitals were scabbed, and whole areas of stomach and chest were so mottled with rashes and ulcers they resembled areas of the Moon’s surface.

The doctor had sawn off the top of the skull, revealing the brain. Blood still seeped from the cavity into a sink.

‘Get nearer and have a good look,’ Dr Kindness said. ‘Light’s rather bad in here. It’s not many people who get the chance to see a human brain. Seat of all wisdom and all wickedness … What do you observe?’

The ginger man leaned over and peered into the skull.

Rather faintly, he said, ‘I observe that the poor feller’s good and dead, doctor. I suppose the corpse will get a decent burial?’

‘The asylum will dispose of it.’

‘I also observe that the brain seems to be rather small. Is that so?’

Dr Kindness nodded. ‘Poke about in there if you wish. Here’s a spatula. You’re correct, of course. That’s an effect of tertiary syphilis. The brain shrivels in many cases. Like an orange going bad. GPI follows – General Paralysis of the Insane.’

The doctor smote himself on the chest and, in so doing, awoke a husky cough. When he had recovered, he said, ‘We doctors are fighting one of mankind’s ancient scourges, sir. Satan and his legions now descend on us in modern form, as minuscule protozoa. As you probably know, this disease threatens the very foundations of the British Empire. Indeed, the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s were passed in order to protect the young men of our army and navy from the prostitutes who spread VD.’

At the mention of prostitutes, the ginger man did a lot of head shaking and tut-tutting. ‘Terrible, terrible it is. And the prostitutes must get it from the men.’

‘The men get it from the prostitutes,’ said Dr Kindness, sternly.

A small silence fell, in which Dr Kindness cleared his throat.

‘And there’s no cure once you’ve contracted it?’ said the ginger man, with a terrified expression.

‘If treated early enough … Otherwise …’ The doctor removed his pipe to utter what was intended to be a laugh. ‘Many of the inmates of this institution die of GPI. Men and women. If you’d like to come back tomorrow, I’ll be able to show you a really excellent corpse of an old woman in her sixties. Mad as a hatter the last eight years.’

‘Thanks, doctor, but I’m busy tomorrow. Sorry to take up so much of your time.’ He thrust his hands deep in his pockets, in an effort to still their trembling.

As he hurried from the bleak building with all its stone wings and stone walls and stony windows, he muttered a verse from Psalm XXVI to himself. ‘Oh shut not up my soul with the sinners: nor my life with the bloodthirsty …’

And as he climbed into his waiting carriage, he said aloud, ‘Holy Lord, but I need a drink. It’s a terrible way for a man to end up.’

Bodenland and Waldgrave were in the construction wing consulting with senior mechanics when a call came through from Bodenland’s secretary, Rose Gladwin, that Bernard Clift wanted to see him urgently.

‘I’ll be there, Rose.’

He could see Clift through a glass door before Clift saw his approach. The younger man still wore the dusty clothes he had had on at Old John in Utah. His whole manner suggested excitement, as he paced back and forth in the waiting room with a springy step, punching the palm of one hand with the fist of the other, and talking to himself with downward gaze as if rehearsing a speech.

‘You’ll wonder what I’m doing in Dallas,’ he began, almost without preamble, as Bodenland went in. ‘I’m on my way to PAA ’99 in Houston. Progress in Advanced Archaeology. We’re still fighting a rump of idiots who think Darwin was the devil. I’ve been scheduled to speak for some months. Well, I’m going to announce that I’ve uncovered a humanoid creature going back some sixty-five million years. I’m in for the Spanish Inquisition, and I know it.’

‘I thought you’d come to inspect our inertial project,’ Bodenland said, smiling.

Clift looked blank. ‘I wanted to see you because I’ve had a rethink about secrecy in the last forty-eight hours. Our security broke down. The students told the tale to a local radio station. I don’t want a garbled message getting about. I have to ask you for some support, Joe – I mean financial. My university won’t fund me on this.’

‘You asked them and they turned you down?’ He saw by Clift’s expression that his guess was correct. ‘They said you were crazy? What makes you think I don’t think you’re crazy? Come and have a coffee, Bernie, and let me talk you out of this.’

Clift shook his head exasperatedly, but allowed himself to be led into the secretary’s room, where he sank into a chair and sipped black coffee.

‘The experts I told you about – both able young men from the archaeological research departments of the museums in Chicago and Drumheller – took a look at the evidence. Of course they’re cautious. They have to make reports. But I think I have won their backing. They will be at Houston, at PAA ’99. Don’t shake your head, Joe. Look at this.’

He jumped up, almost upsetting his cup. From his briefcase he spilled on the table black-and-white photos of the site and the grave, taken from all angles.

‘There’s no way this can be a hoax, Joe.’ He made an agitated movement. ‘It would be to your company’s advantage to associate yourself with this momentous discovery. I’m positive there was a – at least a pseudo-human species contemporaneous with the duck-billed dinosaurs and other giant herbivores and, of course, with major predators such as Tyrannosaurus Rex. I’m going to overturn scientific knowledge just as Lyell and Darwin and others overturned the grip of false religion in the nineteenth century. You realize the amount we know for sure about the Cretaceous is virtually all contained in a lorry-load of old bones? The rest is guesswork. Inspired imagination.’

Bodenland interrupted his eloquence. ‘Look beyond your personal excitement. Suppose you were taken seriously in Houston. Think of the effect on the stock market —’

Clift jumped up, heedlessly upsetting his coffee. ‘I change the world and you worry about the Dow Jones Index? Joe, this isn’t like you! Grasp the new reality.’

‘My shareholders would shoot me if —’

‘Here’s a kind of human with burial customs not unlike ours – flowers in the grave, ochre, even some kind of meaningful symbol on the coffin lid – but below the K/T boundary. Maybe it developed from some offshoot of early dinosaurs. I don’t know, but I tell you that this is – well, it’s greater than the discovery of a new planet, it’s —’

‘Hold it, Bernie,’ said Joe, laughing. ‘I do see that it might be all you say, and more – if it proved to be true. But how could it be true? You want it to be true. But suppose it’s like the Piltdown man, just a hoax. Something some of those brighter students of yours tried on for fun … I can’t possible associate this organization with it at this early stage. We’ve got responsibilities. If you want a few hundred bucks, I’d be glad —’

Clift looked angry. ‘Joe, are you hearing me? I just told you, this is no fucking hoax. How many of the world’s great discoveries have been laughed at on first appearance? Remember how men thought that flying machines were impossible – and continued to do so even after the first flying machine had left the ground? Remember how the great Priestley discovered the role of oxygen in combustion – yet still believed in the old phlogiston theory?’

‘Okay, okay.’ Bodenland raised his hands for peace. ‘Quite contrary to Priestley’s case, in this case popular mythology is entirely on your side. The comic strips and movies have always pretended that mankind and dinosaurs co-existed. You’re just claiming that Fred Flintstone was a real live actual person.’

He saw this remark was not appreciated, and went on hurriedly, ‘Bernie, honestly, I’d be happy if I could swallow all this. Seeing orthodoxies overturned is my kind of meat. But you don’t stand a chance on this one. Go back to the goddamned Escalante, find a second grave in that same stratum. Then I’ll take you seriously.’

‘You will? Okay.’ He paused dramatically and gestured towards the table. ‘Take a look at the photos. You’ve scarcely glanced at them. You’re like the Italian authorities, refusing to look through Galileo’s telescope. You’ve taken it for granted you know what the photos are all about. These are shots of a second grave, Joe. We struck it even when you were leaving to get your plane.’

Bodenland gave his friend one baffled look, then peered at the plates.

The grave much resembled the first, which was why he had hardly bothered to look at the photos. The remains were enclosed in a similar coffin, with the same mysterious sign on the lid. In this case, the lid had been removed with little damage.

The skeleton, sunk in red ochre, lay on its side, in the same position as the first skeleton. Distance shots showed that this grave was no more than fifty metres from the first, still just below the K/T boundary, but deeper into the hill, where the strata curved inward.

‘You observe,’ Clift said, now using his voice of icy calm. ‘The second grave. There are two significant differences compared with our first discovery. In this case, the skeleton is of a female. And she lies with a wooden stake through what was her heart.’

‘I’m sure your beautiful young daughter-in-law would tell you that you know nothing about human nature, Joe,’ Clift said, as they walked through the building. ‘I can’t keep this secret. I’m bursting with it. There’s the scientific aspect, and that’s predominant. This is something that is going to cause shock waves. It’ll be hotly contested. I’m in for the Spanish Inquisition and I know it. I also know I can defend my case.

‘But there’s more to it than that. You’ve had plenty of publicity in your time, what with your association with Victor Frankenstein and Mary Shelley and all that. I also want publicity. I want recognition, as every man does, if he’s honest. Publicity will give me the funding I require.

‘Millions of dollars are needed. Millions. The whole Iron Hills area must be torn apart. We’ve got a new civilization to explore – beyond our dreams. Imagine, civilization started here, in the USA, long before apes came out of the African jungles!’

‘Yes, and when this hits the media, you’re going to have the whole universe invading your pitch. You’re not going to be able to work. The site will be ruined. And I won’t be able to chase that phantom train.’

‘That’s where you can help. If your organization will back me, I want you to get an army of security personnel down at Old John straight away.’

‘Do you want a bed for the night? I’ll ring Mina, if she isn’t twenty thousand feet up.’

‘I’ll ring her, Joe, thanks. And Joe – thanks a million. I know you’ll be in the hot seat too. One day, I’ll return this favour.’

They shook hands.

Joe said, ‘Mina will take care of you. I may be a little hard to contact, just for a while.’

‘How’s that?’

‘Never mind. Up guards and at ’em, Bernie. Shake the world! I’m on your side.’

The great green-and-white waves of the Pacific came curling into Hilo Bay, Hawaii. The foam scattered in the sunlight, the water lost its power, crawled up the volcanic sands, sank down again, and miraculously revived, to make another assault on the beaches.

Larry and Kylie came out of the ocean shaking the water from their hair.

‘I just know something is wrong, Larry. Please let’s get back to the hotel,’ she said.

‘Nothing’s wrong, sweetie. Forget your intuitions. It’s something you ate. How can anything be wrong? We’ve only been down on the beach an hour.’

‘I’m sorry, Larry,’ Kylie said, reaching for a towel. ‘I just feel kind of edgy inside. I need to get back to the hotel to see if there’s a message or something. You don’t have to come. I can go on my own.’

‘Oh, shit, I’ll come. You’ll be making me nervous next.’

Back in the Bradford Palace, where they had now been staying for three days, everything was normal. Phoning down from their room to Reception revealed no message. Nothing had happened.

‘I’m sorry, darling,’ Kylie said, nuzzling him. ‘I just had that silly feeling. You want to go back to the beach?’

‘No, I don’t want to go back to the beach. Supposing you get another funny spell directly we’re down there. We could be bouncing back and forth like yo-yos all day. I’m going to drag a six-pack on that balcony and tan. Forget it.’

‘Don’t be like that, Larry. I wish you wouldn’t drink so much.’

He turned and grinned as he headed for the fridge. ‘You got some religious objections or something?’

She stood in the middle of the room, nibbling an index finger. She said nothing to him when he returned, switching on the TV too loud on his way to a cushioned lounger on the balcony of the suite. She looked out past him, through the tall palms, past the busy road and the other hotels and the whole vulgar commercial razzmatazz of Hilo Bay, to where there was the green line of the ocean, beyond the shallows where the swimmers and surfers sported, a line that offered at least the prospect of infinity.

Sadly, she turned away, changed into a loose caftan, and took a copy of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula over to a side-sofa to read, out of range of the TV screen.

She had marked her place with the wrapper of a Hershey bar.

With a part of her mind, Kylie was aware of a commercial on television for the local Hedge’s Beer. It’s slimming, it’s trimming – get a Hedge against inflation. A news bulletin followed.

Absorbed in her reading, she hardly took it in until Larry yelled from the balcony: ‘Bernie Clift!’

There was Clift’s face on the screen.

Against library pictures of desert, the announcer was speaking. ‘The scientific world – or at least that part of it meeting yesterday at a conference in Houston – was in uproar over a statement made by famous palaeontologist, Bernard Cliff. Cliff claims he has discovered a race of human-like beings who lived millions of years before the Stone Age, in the time of Ally Oop.’

Clift was seen at a microphone, brushing back a lock of hair from his forehead and speaking above a hubbub. ‘On the evidence of a pair of graves in Utah we cannot generalize too freely. But the workmanship of the coffins, which is surprisingly modern in technique, suggests a high degree of culture. Dating methods indicate beyond doubt a date of some 65.5 million years ago. This clearly places the coffins and the bodies they contain back at a period when the tyrannosaur and other giant dinosaurs were still roving the continents.’

The clip ended. Back came the announcer, saying, ‘Later, Cliff revealed that a preliminary analysis of the two fossilized bodies indicates strong shoulder development with much enlarged shoulder blades. Which leads to the hypothesis that Cliff’s new discoveries could possibly have evolved from a flighted species, such as the pterodactyl or pteranodon. As shown in this artist’s impression.’

Over the sketch, his voice continued, ‘A natural wave of scepticism greeted the Utah announcement …’ By this time, Larry and Kylie were arm in arm before the TV set, exclaiming in excitement.

‘Scepticism!’ Larry exclaimed. ‘What else?’

‘… and it’s not from the Bible Belt only that these protests have come. Within the last hour, Professor Danny Hudson of the Smithsonian Institute has issued a challenge to Bernard Cliff to put up or shut up. He is reported as saying he expects the evidence to become available to quote unbiased scientific examination unquote.’

Mina’s face appeared on the screen.

She was in mid-spate. This was evidently an excerpt from a longer interview in Clift’s defence. She had time to say only, ‘They all laughed at Christopher Columbus, remember? Columbus thought the world was round, the idiot.’

She laughed and was faded. The station announcer reappeared.

‘Professor Cliff is unavailable for further comment. That was attractive green-eyed 46-year-old Mina Legrand, close associate and intimate friend of legendary Joe Bodenland, who once claimed he had gone back in time to shake hands with Frankenstein. Bodenland now heads the multi-national Bodenland Enterprises.

‘Our sources report that Bodenland himself is missing. Mina Legrand could not comment, beyond stating Bodenland was interested in the amazing new discovery. Meantime, let’s hope all those Utah critters are well and truly extinct …’

‘Oh God …’ Kylie switched off the power before the commercials popped up, and turned to Larry.

He set down his half-empty glass.

‘You were right all along, sweetie. Something is wrong. My father needs me. We’re going to have to catch the next plane.’

‘Oh, no, Larry. Your father has to look after himself, just as you say he always made you look after yourself. You’re only going to lay yourself open to a snub if you interfere now. He’ll be okay. Joe’ll be okay. Let’s go back to the beach.’

‘Jesus!’ He waved his hands above his head. ‘Who just now wanted to get off the beach? Women – I’ll never understand them. Pack, Kylie. We’re off. Utah. That’s where Joe’ll be. Old John.’

She blocked his way to the bedroom, angry and pugnacious.

‘I’m not going back to Old John. Nor are you. Screw Old John. Think, will you? You are married to me. You are no longer going to live under your father’s shadow. I love the old boy, but he is going to ruin your life if you are weak. Can’t you understand that? Everyone else does.’

‘Weak, am I? We’ll see about that.’ He grabbed her wrist and twisted her round until she sank to the ground. ‘Baby, I’m all action when I get going, and I’m going right now.’

As he ran into the bedroom, Kylie got to her knees and shouted, ‘Buster, if you go you’re gone for good, get that? Your parents have already loused up our honeymoon once. I’m not having it again. Ring your mother if you’re so anxious about your father. But if you leave this hotel, you leave it on your own, and our marriage is a dead duck.’

Striding by her with a hastily packed overnight bag, he stared at her bitterly, and made a threatening gesture.

‘“Goodbye was all he wrote”,’ he said. The suite door slammed behind him.

Kylie walked about the suite for a while. She went into the bedroom and collected up all of her husband’s clothes from the cupboards and elsewhere, stuffing them into his travel case. When she had cleared the room of his belongings, she took the case to the window and flung it out into the gardens below.

She stripped down until she wore nothing but her crucifix, whereupon she took a shower. After that, she sat in her caftan and attempted to read Dracula for a while. But her mind was elsewhere.

When the time came, she put on a cocktail dress in which to go down to dinner. In the Bradford’s outdoor restaurant, she ate a lobster thermidor and drank half a bottle of white Australian wine.

Thus fortified, she went into the ballroom, where a blond-haired young man on vacation from Alaska immediately asked her to dance.

She did dance.

4

In the night that enveloped Utah, Larry was half-drunk. ‘This chopper’s easier to fly ’n one of my model planes,’ he called to Bodenland.

Neither Bodenland nor Clift made any response, if they heard.

‘I’ve got a World War Two Boeing I just made,’ Larry shouted. ‘A beauty. Fifteen feet wing-span. You should see it. Goes faster than the real thing!’ He roared with laughter.

Beneath them went the rushing phantom of the ghost train, its eerie luminance shining from the roof as from its sides.

Bodenland lowered himself cautiously, with Bernard Clift just behind, his boots almost touching Bodenland’s helmeted head. When Bodenland gave the Thumbs Up signal, Larry switched on the improvised inertial beam. It shone down, vividly blue, encompassing the two men and the top of the train. From Larry’s careering viewpoint, they disappeared.

‘You’ve gone!’ he yelled to the rushing air. ‘Gone! The invisible men … That’s you and Kylie – both gone!’ The train was getting away from him. Cursing, he tried to kick more power from the labouring engines, but it was not there.

The train pulled away ahead, and he gave up trying. When he switched off the inertial beam, the wire rope was empty. Bodenland and Clift had indeed gone. He wound in the rope.

Larry’s feelings were mixed. He had had no opportunity to say anything about the quarrel with Kylie. His father had been too absorbed in this venture. His arrival had been taken for granted, to Larry’s mixed relief and disappointment. He had found Old John surrounded by vehicles and uniformed personnel from Bodenland Enterprises. The students were gone. Now the site of the two graves more resembled an armed camp than a dig.

Only now, as he headed back alone to the camp and another drink did it occur to Larry that perhaps his mother was feeling the same kind of anger with Joe as Kylie felt for him.

‘Ah, I’ll phone her in the morning, damn her,’ he said. He sensed Joe’s warmth for Kylie, and dreaded his rebuke.

Directly the beam was off them, the outside world disappeared. They clung to the train roof, and edged themselves carefully through an inspection hatch, to drop down into a small compartment.

Neither Bodenland nor Clift had any notions of what to expect. Such vague anticipations as they held were shaped by the fact that they were boarding what they had casually christened a ghost train.

There was no way in which they could have anticipated the horrific scene in which they found themselves. It defied the imagination – that is, the everyday imagination of waking life: yet it some way resembled a nightmare scene out of the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Something in some horrible way prepared for.

They had lowered themselves into a claustrophobic little den lined with numbers of iron instruments carefully stowed in cabinets behind glass doors. Separately, scarcely a one would have been recognized for what it was by an innocent eye. Ranked together, they presented a meaning it was impossible to mistake. They were torture instruments – torture instruments of a primitive and brutal kind. Saws, presses, screws and spikes bristled behind their panes of glass, which gave back a melancholy reflection of the subdued light.

Most of the compartment was filled by a heavily scarred wooden table. Pressed against the top of the table by a complex system of bars was a naked man. Instinctively, the two men backed away from this terrifying prisoner.

His limbs were distorted by the pressure of the bars cutting into his flesh. The gag in his mouth was kept in place by a metal rod, against which his yellowed and fanglike teeth had closed.

His whole body colour was that of a drowned man. The limbs – where not flattened or swollen – were pallid, almost green, his cheeks and lips a livid white. Beyond the imprisoned wrists curled broken and bloody fingers.

His head had been shaved and was scarred, as by a carelessly wielded open razor. A purple line had been drawn round the equator of his head, above his eyebrows.

Bodenland and Clift took a moment to realize that the prisoner was living still. Dull though his eyes were, he made a stir, the fangs in the flattened mouth clicked as if ravenous against their containing bar, the limbs trembled, one oedematous foot twitched.

Clift started to retch.

‘Let’s get out of here,’ he said. ‘We should never have come.’

Bodenland would say nothing. They edged round the table. The fish gaze of the victim on the table followed them, eyeballs palely bulging.

Twisting an unfamiliar type of latch on the door, they moved out into a corridor. Bodenland covered his eyes and face with a broad hand.

‘I’m sorry I got you into this, Bernie.’

The corridor was even darker than the torture compartment. No sense of movement reached them, though every now and again the corridor swerved, challenging their balance, as if it was rounding a bend at speed.

No windows gave to the outside world. At intervals, glass doors led to compartments set on the left of the corridor as they progressed.

Inside these compartments, dark and dreary, sat immobile figures, their bodies half embedded in moulded seating. The whole ambience was of something antique and underground, such as a long forgotten Egyptian tomb, in which the spirits of the dead were confined. The mouldings of the heavy wooden doors, the elaborate panelling, all suggested another age: yet the tenebrous scene was interspersed by tiny glitters at every doorway, where a panel of indicators kept up a code of information.

The men moved down the corridor, and came to an unoccupied compartment, into which they hastened with some relief. They shut themselves in, but could find no lock for the door.

‘We didn’t come armed,’ Bodenland said, with regret.

When their eyes had adjusted to the dimness, they saw plush mummy-shaped recesses in which to sit. Once seated, they had in front of them a control touch-panel – electronic but clearly of another age, and made from a material fatty in appearance. Bodenland started to fiddle with the controls.

‘Joe – suppose you summon someone …’

‘We can’t just sit around like passengers.’

He began to stab systematically with his middle finger.

A lid shot up like an eyelid on the wall facing them, and a VDU lit. Colours flowed hectically, then a male face snapped into view, a heavy aquiline face that looked as if it had been kept in deep freeze. Seeming to press its nose against the glass screen, it opened its mouth and said, ‘Agents of Group 16, prepare to leave for —— Agents of Group 16.’

‘Where did he say?’ asked Clift.

‘Never heard of the place. How come we can’t see through this window?’ Bodenland ran his hand over a series of pressure plates. The window on his left hand turned transparent. It was barred, but permitted a distorted view of the outside world in tones of grey. With this view, a sense of movement returned; they could see what looked like uncultivated prairie flashing by.

And at the same time, phantasmal figures, looking much attenuated, drifted from the train, to land on a grass mound they were passing.

‘There go the agents of Group 16,’ commented Bodenland. ‘Whoever the hell they are.’

The train then appeared to gather speed again.

More investigation of the control panel brought forth from its socket a small terrestrial globe. A thread-thin trace light revealed what they could only believe was their course, heading north-west. But the continents were subtly changed. Florida had extended itself to enclose the Caribbean. Hudson Bay did not exist. Indications were that the train was now crossing what should have been the waters of Hudson Bay; all that could be seen were forests and undulating savannah lands.

Numerals flashed across the VDU. Clift pointed to them with some excitement. He seemed to have recovered from his shock of fear.

‘Read those figures, Joe. They could be calibrated in millions of years. They certainly aren’t speeds or latitudes.’

‘You think that’s where we are – or when we are? Not simply moving through distance, but some time before Hudson Bay was formed …’

‘Before Hudson Bay … and when the climate was milder … In a forgotten epoch of some early inter-glacial … Is it possible?’

Bodenland said, ‘So we’re travelling on – a time train! Bernard, what wonderful luck!’

Clift looked at him in surprise. ‘Luck? Who knows where we’re heading? More to the point, who controls the train?’

‘We’ll have to control the train, Bernie, old sport, that’s who.’

As he rose, a last group of zombie figures could be seen to leave the train, drifting like gossamer with outspread arms, to land safely among tall grasses and fade into night.

At which point, the train swerved suddenly eastwards, throwing Bodenland back into his seat. The thread indicator also turned eastwards, maintaining latitude. The electronic numbers on the screen diminished rapidly.

‘Well, that’s something,’ Clift said. ‘We’re coming nearer to the present instead of disappearing into the far past. If our theory’s right.’

‘Let’s move. There must be a cab or similar up front.’

As they rose, the aquiline face returned to their VDU.

‘Enemy agents boarded the train at Point 656. They must be terminated. Believed only two in number. They must be terminated. Group 3 also organize death-strikes against their nearest and dearest.’

‘Hell,’ said Clift. ‘You heard that. We have to get off this thing.’

‘You want to jump? I don’t like this either, but our best hope is to try and hijack the train, if that’s possible.’

‘And get ourselves killed?’

‘Let’s hope that won’t be necessary. Come on.’

He opened the door. The corridor appeared empty. After only a moment’s hesitation, he eased himself through the door. Clift followed.

Larry had bought himself a big white cowboy hat in Enterprise, after taking a few drinks in a bar. He drove in his hired car back to the Old John site.

The change in three days, since the news of the strange grave had been given to the world, was dramatic. There was no way in which the Bodenland security force could keep everyone away. As Bodenland had predicted, the world had descended on this quiet south-west corner of Utah. The media were there in force, not only from all over the States but from Europe, Japan, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere. Hustlers, hucksters, and plain sightseers rubbed shoulders. Big mobile diners had rolled in from St George and Cedar City, bars had been set up. It was like a gold rush. Chunks of plain rock were selling fast.

Temporary TV studios had been established, comfort stations, mobile chapels, all kinds of refreshment stalls and marquees. The actual digs were barricaded off and protected by state police.

Larry made his way through the thick traffic, yelling cheerfully to other drivers out of the window as he went. Once he had parked, he fought his way through to the trailer he had hired.

There Kylie was awaiting him, her fair hair capturing the sun.

She threw her arms round him. ‘I’ve been here all day. Where’ve you been?’

‘I was drowning my sorrows in Enterprise.’

‘You got a girl there?’

‘I ain’t that enterprising. Listen, Kylie, forgive me, sweet. I shouldn’t have walked out on you as I did, and I’ve felt bad ever since.’

She was happy to hear him say it.

‘We were both too hasty.’ She stuck her tongue in his mouth.

‘Come on the bed,’ he said. ‘I’ll show you how I feel about you. I’ve had three days here, kicking my heels and feeling bad.’

‘Bed later. I got in this morning with Mina. I flew to Dallas and she flew me here in her plane.’

‘That old Bandierante? It’ll fall to pieces in the air one day.’

‘Come and see her. She’s worried crazy about Joe. You’ll have to tell her – and me – exactly where he is and what happened.’

He made a face, but was in no mood to argue.

The Bandierante was the plane from which Mina Legrand liked to sky-dive. She had left it on an improvised landing field on the edge of the desert, five miles away. She had paid over the odds for a rusty old Chevvy in order to be mobile. They caught up with her in a mess of traffic on what had become Old John’s main street. Mina had climbed out of the car to argue more effectively with a cop trying to control the flow of automobiles, one of which had, perhaps inevitably, broken down.

She turned an angry face to her son.

‘And where have you been? What have you done with your father?’

He explained how Joe and Clift had disappeared in the inertial beam. There was every reason to believe that by that means they had managed to get aboard the train.

‘And where are they now?’ she snapped.

‘Look, lady,’ said the cop, ‘now it’s you holding up the traffic flow.’

‘Oh, shut up!’ she snapped.

‘I been here three days, Mom. Three days and three nights I waited in the desert by our flags,’ Larry said. ‘No sign of anything.’

‘You’re as big an idiot as your father.’

‘Gee, thanks, Mom. I’m not responsible. You’re responsible – you made the news announcement.’

‘When have you ever been responsible! What you think, Kylie?’

Ever tactful, Kylie advised her mother-in-law to take things easy, shower, and maybe do a little sky-diving, since she had her plane. Joe could surely look after himself.

‘Well, I’m just worried crazy,’ Mina said. ‘You’ll find me in the Moonlite Motel in Enterprise if you want me. I can’t face going back to Dallas.’

‘Dallas, anywhere, lady,’ said the cop. ‘Just get moving, will you, please?’

Mina jumped into the driving seat and accelerated sharply, bashing another automobile as she left.

The cop glared at Larry as if he was responsible.

‘Thanks for your help, officer,’ Larry said.

5

The institution stood in parkland, remote from the town. It was four storeys tall, all its windows were barred, and many whitewashed in addition. With its acres of slate roof, it presented a flinty and unyielding appearance.

If its front facade had a Piranesi-like grandeur, the rear of the building was meagre, cluttered with laundries, boiler-rooms, stores for coal and clinker, and a concrete exercise yard, like a prison. In contrast was the ruin of an old abbey standing some way behind the asylum. Only the ivy-clad tower, the greater part of a chapel, with apse and nave open to the winds, remained. The once grand structure had been destroyed by cannon-fire at the time of Cromwell. Nowadays, its crypt was occasionally used by the institution as a mortuary, particularly when – as not infrequently happened – an epidemic swept through the wards and cells.

At this time of year, in late summer, the ivy on the ruin was in flower, to be visited by bees, wasps and flies in great profusion. Inside the institution, where the prevailing colour was not green but white and grey, there was but one visitor, a ginger man stylishly dressed, with hat and cane.

This visitor followed Doctor Kindness down a long corridor, the chilly atmosphere and echoing flagstones of which had been expressly designed to emphasize the unyielding nature of the visible world. Dr Kindness smoked, and his visitor followed the smoke trail humbly.

‘It’s good of you to pay us a second visit,’ said Dr Kindness, in a way that suggested he meant the opposite of what he said. ‘Have you a special medical interest in the subject of venereal disease?’

‘Er – faith, no, sir. It’s just that I happen to be in the theatrical profession and am at present engaged in writing a novel, for which I need a little first-hand information. On the unhappy subject of … venereal disease …’

‘You’ve come to the right place.’

‘I hope so indeed.’ He shivered.

The doctor wore his habitual blood-stained coat. His visitor wore hairy green tweeds with a cloak flung over them, and tugged nervously at his beard as they proceeded.

During their progress, a lanky woman in a torn nightshirt rushed out from a door on their right hand. Her grey staring eyes were almost as wide as her open mouth, and she uttered a faint stuttering bird cry as she made what appeared to be a bid for freedom.

Freedom was as strictly forbidden as alcohol or fornication in this institution. Two husky young attendants ran after her, seized hold of her by her arms and emaciated body, and dragged her backwards, still stuttering, into the ward from which she had escaped. The door slammed.

By way of comment, Dr Kindness waved his meerschaum in the general direction of the ceiling, then thrust it back into his mouth and gripped it firmly between his teeth, as if minded to give a bite or two elsewhere.

They came to the end of the corridor. Dr Kindness halted in a military way.

‘You’re sure you want to go through with this?’

‘If it’s not a trouble. “Some put their trust in chariots …” I’ll put my trust in my luck.’ He gave as pleasant a smile as could be. ‘The luck of the Irish.’

‘Please yourself, certainly.’

He stood to one side, and gestured to the ginger man to approach the cell door at which they had arrived.

A foggy glass spyhole the size of a saucer punctuated the heavy panels of the door. The ginger man applied his eye to it and stared inside. ‘For now we see through a glass darkly,’ he muttered.

The cell was bare and of some dimension, perhaps because it occupied the corner of the building. Such light as it enjoyed came from a small window high in an outer wall. The only furnishing of the cell was a mattress rumpled in a corner like a discarded sack.

A madman sat on the mattress, combing his hair thoughtfully with his nails. He was dressed in a calico shirt, trousers, and braces.

‘This fellow is Renfield by name. He has been with us a while. Murdered his baby son and was caught trying to eat its head. Quite a pleasant fellow in some moods. Some education, I suppose. Came down in the world.’

The ginger man removed his eye from the glass to observe the doctor.

‘Syphilitic?’

‘Tertiary stage. Dangerous if roused.’

The ginger man looked down at his shiny boots.

‘Forgive me if I ask you this, doctor, but I was wondering if you felt pity for your patients?’

‘Pity?’ asked the doctor with some surprise, turning the word over in his mind. ‘Pity? No. None. They have brought their punishment on themselves. That’s obvious enough, isn’t it?’

‘Well, now, you say “punishment”.’ A tug at the beard. ‘But suppose a man was genuinely fond of a woman and did not know she had any disease. And suppose he was in error just once, giving in to his passions …’

‘Ah, that’s the crux of the matter,’ said the doctor, removing his pipe to give a ferocious smile. ‘It’s giving in to the passions that’s at the root of the trouble, isn’t it? Let me in turn pose you a question, sir. Do you not believe in Hellfire?’

The ginger man looked down at his boots again, and shook his head.

‘I don’t know. That’s the truth. I don’t know. I certainly fear Hellfire.’

‘Ah. Most of the inhabitants of this mental institution know the answer well enough. Now, if you’re ready to go in —’

The doctor produced a key, turned it in the lock, slid back two large bolts and gestured to the ginger man to enter.

The madman, Renfield, sat motionless on his mattress, giving no sign. A fly, buzzing aimlessly about like a troubled thought, made the only noise. It spiralled down and landed on a stain on the mattress.

The ginger man took up a position with his back against the wall by the door. After the door closed behind him, he sank slowly down, to balance on his heels. He smiled and nodded at Renfield, but said nothing. The madman said nothing and rolled his eyes. The fly rose up and buzzed against the square of window, through which clear sky could be glimpsed.

‘It’s a lovely day outside,’ said the ginger man. ‘How would you like a walk? I could come with you. We’d talk.’

After a long silence, Renfield spoke in a husky voice. ‘Nobody asked you, kind sir, she said. I’m all alone. There once was ten of us. Now no one knows the where or when of us.’

‘It must be very lonely.’

The madman roused himself, though still without observing his visitor direct.

‘I’m not alone. Don’t think it. There’s someone always watching.’ He raised a finger to the level of his head, pointing to the ceiling. Then, as if catching sight of an alien piece of food, he reached forward quickly and bit the finger till it bled.

The ginger man continued to squat and observe.

‘Do you realize what you’re suffering from?’ he asked softly. ‘The name of the ailment, I mean.’

Renfield did not reply. He began to hum. ‘Ummm. Ummm.’

The bluebottle spiralled down again. He had his eye on it all the way. Directly it landed on his shirt, he grabbed it and thrust it into his mouth.

Only then did he turn and smile at his visitor.

‘Life,’ he said conversationally. ‘You can never get enough of it, don’t you find that, kind sir? It’s eat or be eaten, ain’t it?’

As they advanced along the corridor, it became darker and smokier. Both Bodenland and Clift decided that their chances of survival were thin.

The dimensions of the corridor altered in an alarming fashion. The way ahead twisted like a serpent. It appeared as if infinity stretched before them – grand and in some way elevating, but nevertheless formidable.

And then suddenly at infinity the air curdled, like milk in a thunderstorm, and an atmospheric whirlpool formed. From that whirlpool emerged a terrifying figure, beating its way towards them.

‘Joe!’ yelled Clift. The sound echoed in their ears.

A great leathery winged thing, its vulpine head plumed like something from a Grünewald painting, thrashed towards them. It had an infinite distance to go, yet it moved infinitely fast, despite the wounded slow-motion flap of its pinions. Its eyes were dead. Its mouth blazed. It had scaly claws, like the feet of a giant bird. In those claws it carried a brutal blunt gun of matt metal. It raised this weapon and began firing at the two men as it progressed.

Phantasm though it seemed, the monster’s bullets were real enough. They came in a hail, screaming as they came. Bodenland dived into a shallow guard’s blister to one side of the passage. Clift fell, kicking, with a bullet in his shoulder.

Hardly conscious of what he was doing, Bodenland scrambled halfway to his feet. The blister contained a wheel, perhaps a brake-wheel, and little else – except an emergency glass panel with something inside he could not see for shadow. A hatchet? Swinging his fist, he shattered the glass. Inside the case was nothing more formidable than a torch.

In those few seconds when death was coming upon him, Bodenland’s brain seized on its final chance to function. From its remotest recesses, from below a conscious level, it threw out a picture – clear and chill as if forged of stained glass in some ancient chapel.

The picture was of a great artery stretching through the body of planetary time. And up that artery to the throat of it where Bodenland crouched swam terrible creatures from the very bowels of existence, ravenous, desperate for a new chance at life, stinking from the oblivion that had shrouded them.

This avenging thing on its pterodactyl wings – so the picture depicted it – was no less mythological than real. Alien, yet immediately recognizable. One of its talons screeched against wood as it slowed in the corridor to turn on him. So monstrous was it, it seemed the train could never contain the wooden beat of its wings. They burned with dark flame.

And it keened on a shrill note, cornering its prey.

Clouds of murk rolled with it as it swerved upon the blister. Bodenland had dropped to one knee. With his left arm raised protectively above his head, he held the torch in his right hand and shone it at the predator.

The beam of light pierced through murk to the red eyes of it. Abruptly, its singing note hit a higher pitch, out of control. It began to smoulder inside wreaths of biscuit wrack. It recoiled. The leather wings, fluttering, banged woodenly against imprisoning walls. The immense veined claws opened convulsively, letting drop its weapon, as faster went the beat of the wings.

Just for a moment, in place of horror, a vision of a fair and beautiful woman appeared – dancing naked, shrieking and writhing as if in sexual abandon – couched on gaudy bolsters. Then – dissolved, faded, gone, leaving only the monster again, to sink smoking to the floor.

A great wing came up, fluttered, then broke, to join the crumble of ashes which strewed themselves like a shawl along the train corridor.

Bodenland switched off the torch. He remained for a moment where he was.

Another moment and he forced himself to rise. He placed a hand over his heart as if to still its beating. Then he went to see his friend.

Clift had dragged himself into a sitting position. Blood oozed from under his shirt.

‘You know what it was?’ he gasped.

‘I know it was most ancient and most foul. Are you okay, Bernard? It seemed to dissolve into a – well, into a woman. An illusion. The perspective and everything. Terrifying.’

‘It was a lamia, a female monster. There’s a literature about it.’

‘Fuck the literature. We’ve got to get out of this corridor. Brace yourself, buddy.’

As he dragged Clift to his feet, the latter gasped with pain. But he stood, clutching his shoulder and managing a grin.

‘God knows where we’ve got ourselves, Joe. Maybe I shouldn’t take the name of the Lord in vain …’

‘We’ve got ourselves into more than we bargained for,’ Bodenland said. Half-supporting his friend, he started down the corridor, which had now regained normal dimensions.

Moving steadily, they made it to the cab in the front of the train.

Bodenland propped Clift in the corridor, and made a sudden rush in, where a man in overalls worked in the greyness.

He sat on a swing stool, handling controls. He was shadowy, his age impossible to tell. And when Bodenland jumped in on him, he swivelled round to exclaim in astonishment, ‘No, no – you’re the man with the bomb!’

This stopped Bodenland in his tracks.

But the driver raised his hands, saying, ‘I’m still afraid – don’t attack me.’ He made no attempt to escape.

‘You know who I am?’ Bodenland asked. But even as he spoke, he heard the sound of someone approaching down the corridor. Dreading another monstrous apparition, he snatched the driver’s gun, which the man made no attempt to draw.

As he did so, Clift looked into the cab.

‘Joe, dozens of them. Second line of defence. The gun, quick!’

He grabbed the gun from Bodenland and at once began firing down the corridor. Bullets from the enemy spanged by. There were cries in the corridor, then silence.

Bodenland went out to see. Whoever the assailants were, they had disappeared. Two dead lay a few yards away. Clift lifted himself on one elbow.

Kneeling down by him, Bodenland asked him gently how it was.

‘The grave —’ Clift said, then could speak no more. Bodenland caught him as his head fell, and hauled him up into a more comfortable position. Blood welled from the palaeontologist’s chest. He looked up into Bodenland’s face, smiled, and then his face contorted into a rictus of pain. He struggled furiously as if about to get up, and then dropped back, lifeless. Bodenland looked down at him, speechless. Tears burst from his eyes and splattered Clift’s cheeks.

He dragged his dead friend into the driver’s cabin.

‘I’ll get you bastards if it’s the last thing I do,’ he said.

6

The little Brazilian-made plane, a vintage Bandierante, winged high above the eroded Utah landscape, and released its passenger from a rear door, like some hypothetical bird of prey launching an embryo into the wind.

Mina floated away from the plane, arms outstretched, knees bent, riding the invisible steed of air, controlling it with her pubic bone, steering it with the muscles of her thighs. This was her element, here was her power, to soar above the mist-stricken earth.

No sell-by dates existed up here. It was neutral territory. Even her snug green cover-all she chose to regard as her skin, making her an alien visitor to the planet.

And if there were aliens on other planets in the galaxy, let them stride their own skies. Let them not discover Earth; let them not, she thought, disclose themselves to the peoples of Earth. It was difficult enough to find meaning to life in a non-religious age; how much more difficult if you knew that there were a myriad other planets choked with living creatures like humans, facing the same day-to-day struggles to survive – to what end?

The image came back to her, as it often did when she steered her way through the atmosphere by her pubis, of herself as a small straggly girl, oldest daughter of a poor family in Montana, when she had gone out at her mother’s behest to hang freshly washed sheets on a clothes line. The wind blew, the sheets tugged, she struggled. At a sudden freak gust, a still wet sheet curled itself round her thin body and carried her, half-sailing, down the hill. Was that when she had first yearned for an accidental freedom?

For her, the zing of high altitude could wash away even memories, including more recent ones. The hollowness she felt encroaching on her life could not reach her here. Nor could thoughts of how things were with Joe.

Now the sheets of the wind were snug about her again. She knew no harm. But Utah was coming closer, tan, intricate, neat. There was no putting off for long the demands of gravity, the human condition.

As he laid Clift’s body down in the cab, Bodenland felt utterly detached from his own body. The conscious part of him floated, as a goldfish might watch from its bowl the activities in the room to which it was confined, while his body went about setting his dead friend out straight, pretending that comfort was a matter of reverent attention to a corpse. The death, the apparition which had attacked him, not to mention the horrific novelty of the vehicle in which he was trapped, had brought about the detachment. The shock of fear had temporarily disembodied him.

He straightened in slow motion and turned towards the driver. The driver stood tense against a wall, hands by his side. His riven face, grey and dusty, trained itself watchfully on Bodenland. He made no attempt to attack or escape. Only his eyes were other than passive. Molten zinc, thought Bodenland, a part of his mind reverting to laboratory experiments.

‘You know me? You recognize me?’

‘No, no.’ The man spoke without moving his head. His jaw hung open after uttering the two syllables, revealing long canines in his upper jaw and a white-coated tongue.

‘You said I was the man with the bomb. What did you mean by that?’

‘No, nothing. Please …’

Bodenland saw his right hand come up and grab the man by his throat. When the hand began to shake him, the driver almost rattled. He put his hands up feebly to protect himself. His skin appeared made of some frowsty old material, as if he were a cunningly stitched rag doll.

‘Tell me what this train is we’re on. Where are we? Who are you?’

When he let go of the creature, the driver sank to his knees. Bodenland had done him more damage than he intended.

‘The Undead – the Undead, sir. I won’t harm you …’

‘You sure won’t.’ He bent over the driver, catching a whiff of his carrion breath as the man panted. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I was an airline pilot in life,’ said the driver faintly. ‘You will become like us. You are travelling on the train of the Undead and our Lord will get you sure enough.’

‘We’ll see about that. Get up and stop this train.’ He wrenched the man to his feet, thrusting him towards the controls. The driver merely stood wretchedly, head bowed.

‘Stop the train. Move, you rat. Where are we? When are we?’

The driver moved. He pulled open his tunic, ripped his shirt in two with sudden strength and turned to face Bodenland.

He pointed to his naked chest. So extreme was its emaciation that rib bones stuck out white as if frosted from their cyanotic covering of skin.

‘Look,’ he said. ‘Get an eyeful of this, you fool. Do you see any heartbeat here?’

In disgust, Bodenland stared at the dead barrel of chest. He caught the man a blow across the side of his face, sending him reeling.

‘You can still feel pain? Fear? You’re human in that, at least. I will break open your chest and wrench out that dead heart unless you stop this train.’

Holding his face, the driver said, ‘The next programmed stop is in what you call 2599 AD, the Silent Empire. I’m unable to alter the programming.’

‘You slowed in Utah.’

‘Utah? Oh, Point 656, yes … That’s a sacred site to the Undead. We had to let agents off the train.’

‘Okay, you can let me off there. That’s where I need to be. How many time trains are there?’

‘One, sir, just this one.’

‘Don’t lie to me.’

‘There’s just one.’ He spoke without emphasis, leaning lightly against the control panels, holding his face, letting the faint illumination turn his body into a seemingly abandoned carcass. ‘This train shuttles back and forth on scheduled time routes. All programmed. I’m not much more than a supervisor. It’s not like piloting an airliner.’

‘There must be other trains.’

‘There’s just the one. To ride time quanta you gobble vast amounts of energy. Solar energy. Very extravagant. Reverse relativism. Trains can’t be seen by the outside world – not unless we’re slowing to let agents off.’

The driver smiled, showing the canines more fully. No humour warmed the smile. The lips simply peeled back in memory of something that might once have amused.

‘The sheep asks the wolf what it does …’

The detached part of Bodenland watched as he attacked the driver and fell to the floor with him. In their struggle, they kicked Clift’s body, making it roll on to its face.

And Bodenland was demanding who had invented this cursed train. The answer was that, as far as the driver knew, the train was the invention of the Fleet Ones.

‘The Fleet Ones, sir, are the Undead – the vampires – who rule the world in its last days. This is their train, sir, you’ve ventured on.’

‘I’m borrowing it, and it’s going to get me back home to 1999. You’re going to show me how.’

The detached viewpoint saw how the creature made to bite Bodenland in the upper arm. But Bodenland took a firm grip of his throat and dragged him to the controls.

‘Start explaining,’ he said.

‘Ummmm ummmm ummmmmmmm. Moon and Mercury, Moon and Mercury, Romance and Remedy … Ummmm.’

The madman Renfield rocked himself in a tight bundle and hummed as if he were full of bluebottles.

The ginger man squatted stolidly in his corner by the cell door, watching, nodding in time with the humming, alert to the fact that Renfield was rocking himself closer. Above them, against the square of window showing blue sky, a spider hung by a thread, well out of the madman’s way.

‘Ummmm, you’re one of us, kind sir, she said, one of the fallen. May I ask, do you believe in God?’

Having uttered the Almighty’s name, he fell into fits of laughter, as if the hallowed syllable contained all the world’s mirth.

‘Yes, I do believe,’ said the ginger man. ‘I think.’

‘Then you believe in Hell and Hellfire.’

‘That I certainly do believe in.’ He smiled wanly, and again the madman laughed.

‘I’m God. I’m God and I’m Hellfire. And where are these items contained? Why – in blood!’ He pronounced the word in savage relish, striking his skull violently as he did so. ‘In blood, in the head, the head, kind sir, the napper. The napper’s full of blood. There are things that peer in here of a night … things which cry and mew for the blood. You see, it’s scientific, kind sir, she said, because … because you need the blood to drown out the thought. You don’t need thought when you’re dead, or silver bells or cock-hole smells or pretty maids all in a row, because when you’re dead you can do anything. You can do anything, kind sir, I assure you. The dead travel fast. Ummmm.’

The ginger man sighed, as if in at least partial agreement with these crazed sentiments.

‘Can you tell me what these things look like which peer in at you at night?’

Renfield had rocked himself very close now.

He put a dirty finger against the wall, as if pointing to something unseen by others.

‘There, you see? They come from dead planets, kind sir. From the Moon and Mercury.’ He ground his teeth so violently that his intention might have been to eat his own face. ‘Ummmm, they’re a disease, wrapped in a plague, masquerading as life. Life – yes, that’s it, life ummmm. And we shall all become like them, us, by and by, if God so wills.’

On the last word, he sprang at the ginger man, screaming, ‘Give me a kiss of life, kind sir, she said!’

But the ginger man was alert, leaped to his feet in time, fended off the madman with his silver-headed cane.

‘Down, dog. Back to your kennel, beast, Caliban, or I’ll call in the warden and have you beaten black and blue.’

The madman retreated only a step and stood there raging or pretending rage, showing teeth, brandishing claws. When the ginger man caught him lightly over the shoulders with his cane, he desisted and crawled on hands and knees back to the far corner, by his mattress. There he sat, looking upward, innocent as a child, one finger stuck deep into his ear.

A rhombus of sunlight crept down the wall, making for the floor as noon approached, slow as time and as steady. The ginger man remained by the door, unmoving, in a less threatening attitude, though he still had his stick ready.

Almost as stealthily as the sunbeam, the madman began to roll on the stone floor. His movements became more exaggerated as he tried to tie himself into knots, groaning at the same time.

The normally genial face of Renfield’s visitor was grave with compassion.

‘Can I help in any way?’ he asked.

‘Why do you seek my company in this fortress?’

‘It’s a fair question, but I cannot deliver you the answer. Tell me if I can help you.’

Renfield stared at him from an upside-down viewpoint.

‘Bring me boxes of spiders to eat. Spiders and sparrows. I need the blood. It’s life, kind sir. Life’s paper. Seven old newspapers make a week in Fleet Street. The Fleet Ones can eat up a week with their little fingers, this little finger on the right.’

He started to scratch a figure with sharp teeth on the wall as he spoke.

‘Talk sense, man,’ said the ginger man, sternly.

‘There soon will come a scientist who will say even stranger things about space and time. We can’t comprehend infinity, yet it’s in our heads.’

‘Together with the blood?’ He laughed impatiently, turning to the door to be released.

As he rapped on the panel, the madman said, ‘Yes, yes, with the blood, with a whole stream of blood. You’ll see. It’s in your eyes, kind sir, she said. A stream of blood stretching beyond the grave, beyond the gravy.’

He made a jump for the distant spider as the door slammed, leaving him alone.

The ginger man walked with the doctor in the bloodstained coat. The doctor accompanied him gravely to the door of the asylum, where a carriage waited. As the ginger man passed over a guinea, he said, with an attempt at casual small talk, ‘So I suppose there’s no cure for dementia praecox, is that so?’

The doctor pulled a serious face, tilted his head to one side, gazed up into the air, and uttered an epigram.

‘I fear a night-time on Venus means a lifetime on Mercury.’

‘You wretches live in the dark,’ Joe Bodenland said. ‘Don’t you hate your own sickness?’

He expected no answer, speaking abstractedly as he finger-tipped the keyboard in the train’s chief control panel. The driver stood by, silent, offering no reply. The information had been squeezed out of him, like paste from a half-empty tube.

‘If you’ve told me right, we should be back in 1999 any minute.’

Bodenland watched the scattering figures in a globe-screen, peering through the half-dark.

As the time train slowed, the grey light lifted to something brighter. The driver screamed with fear, in his first real display of emotion.

‘Save me – I’m photophobic. We’re all photophobic. It would be the end —’

‘Wouldn’t that be a relief? Get under that tarpaulin.’

Even as he indicated the tarpaulin stacked on a rack with fire-fighting equipment, the driver pulled it out and crawled under it, to lie quaking on the floor near Clift’s body.

The light flickered, strengthened. The train jerked to a halt. Generators died. Silence closed in.

Rain pattered softly against the train body. It fell slowly, vertically, filtering down from the canopy of foliage overhead. All round the train stood mighty boles of trees, strong as stone columns.

‘What …’ Pulling down a handle, Bodenland opened the sliding door and stared out.

They had materialized in a swamp. Dark water lay ahead, bubbles rising slowly to its surface. Everywhere was green. The air hummed with winged life like sequins. He stared out in amazement, admiration mingling with his puzzlement.

The rain was no more than a drip, steady, confidential. The moist warm air comforted him. He stood looking out, breathing slowly, returning to his old self.

As he remained there, taking in the mighty forest, he became aware of the breath going in and out at his nostrils. The barrel of his chest was not unmoving; it worked at its own regular speed, drawing the air down into his lungs. This reflex action, which would continue all his days, was a part of the biological pleasure of being alive.

A snake that might have been an anaconda unwound itself from a branch and slid away into the ferns. Still he stared. It looked like the Louisiana swamps, and yet – a dragonfly with a five foot wingspan came dashing at him, its body armoured in iridiscent green. He dashed it away from his face. No, this wasn’t Louisiana.

Gathering his wits, he turned back into the cab. The train gave a lurch sideways.

The LCD co-ordinates had ceased to spin. Bodenland stared at them incredulously, and then checked other readings. They had materialized some 270 million years before his present, in the Carboniferous Age.

The cab rocked under his feet and tilted a few more degrees to one side. Black water lapped over the lip of the door up to his feet. Staring out, he saw that the weight of the train was bearing it rapidly down into the swamp.

‘You,’ he said, shaking the supine driver under his cover. ‘I’m going to pitch you out into that swamp unless you tell me fast how we get out of here.’

‘It’s the secret over-ride. I forgot to tell you about it – I’ll help you all I can, since you were merciful to me …’

‘Okay, you remember now. What do we do?’

The dark water came washing in as the driver said, ‘The override is designed to stop unauthorized persons meddling with the time-controls. Only the space controls responded to your instructions, the rest went into reverse.’

While he was speaking, the train tilted again and Clift’s body slid towards the door.

‘What do we do, apart from drown?’

‘The train is programmed for its next stop and I can’t change that. Best thing is to complete that journey, after which the programme’s finished and the over-ride cuts out. So you just switch on, cancelling the previous co-ordinates you punched in.’

The water was pouring in now, splashing the men. A bejewelled fly swung in and orbited Bodenland’s head.

‘Where’s this pre-programmed journey taking us?’

With an extra surge of water, a warty shape rose from the swamp, steadying itself with a clumsy foot at the doorway. A flat amphibian head looked at them. Two toad eyes stared, as if without sight. A wide mouth cracked open. A goitre in the yellow throat throbbed. The head darted forward as Bodenland instinctively jumped back, clinging to a support.

The lipless frog mouth fastened on Clift’s body. With a leisurely movement, the amphibian withdrew, bearing its meal with it down into the waters of the swamp. It disappeared from view and the black surface closed over it.

Bodenland slammed the sliding door shut and staggered to the keyboard. He punched on the Start pressure-pads, heard the roar of generators, which died as the engine seemed to lift.

The outer world with its majestic colonnades of trees blurred, whited out, faded to grey and down the colour spectrum, until zero-light of time quanta came in. The driver sat up in the dirty water swilling about him and peered haggard-faced from his tarpaulin.

Drained by the excitements of the last few hours, appalled by the loss of his friend, Bodenland watched the numerals juggling with themselves in the oily wells of the display panel. He came to with a start, realizing he might fall asleep.

Making an effort, he got down a length of thin cable and secured the driver with it, before locking the door to the corridor.

He stood over his captive, who began to plead for mercy.

‘You don’t have a great store of courage.’

‘I don’t need courage. You need the courage. I know you have ten thousand adversaries against you.’

Bodenland looked down, contemplating kicking the creature, before overcoming the impulse.

‘Where are we programmed for?’ he asked, thinking that almost anywhere was preferable to the Carboniferous.

‘We have to visit Transylvania,’ said the driver. ‘But the programme is set only as far as London, in year 1896, where we let off a powerful female agent.’

‘Oh yes? And what’s she up to?’

‘She has business at the home of a man living near London, a man by the name of Bram Stoker.’

7

She went over to look at the little glass panel of the air-conditioning unit. It was functioning perfectly. Nevertheless, the motel suite felt arid to her, lifeless, airless, after her flight through the sky.

Mina Legrand’s rooms were on the second floor. Her years in Europe prompted her to open a window and let in a breeze, sanitized by the nearby desert. Enterprise sprawled out there, the park and sign of the Moonlite Motel, and, beyond them, the highway, on which were strung one-storey buildings, a store or two, and a used car lot, with a Mexican food joint marking the edge of town. Pick-ups drove by, their occupants preparing to squeeze what they could from the evening. Already dusk was settling in.

Turning from the window, she shucked off her green cover-alls and her underwear and stepped into the shower.

Despite the pleasure of the hot water coursing over her body, gloom settled on her. She hated to be alone. She hated solitude more of late. And perhaps Joe had been absent more of late. Now she would be seeing less of Larry, too. And there were the deaths in the back of her mind, never to disappear. Sky-diving was different; paradoxically, it took her away from loneliness.

She was at that age when wretchedness seeped very easily through the cracks in existence. A friend had suggested she should consult a psychoanalyst. That was not what she wanted. What she wanted was more from Joe, to whom she felt she had given so much.

She discovered she was singing in the shower.

‘Well, what did I do wrong

To make you stay away so long?’

The song had selected itself. To hell with it. She cut it off. Joe had let her down. What she really needed was a passionate affair. Fairly passionate. Men were so tiresome in so many ways. In her experience, they all complained. Except Joe, and that showed his lack of communication …

With similar non-productive thoughts, she climbed from the shower and stood under the infra-red lamp.

Later, in a towelling robe, she made herself a margarita out of the mini-bar, sat down, and began to write a letter to Joe on the Moonlite Motel notepaper. ‘Joe you bastard —’ she began. She sat there, thinking back down the years.

Finishing the drink, she got a second and began to ring around.

She phoned home, got her own voice on the answerphone, slammed off. Rang through to Bodenland Enterprises, spoke to Waldgrave. No one had heard from Joe. Rang Larry’s number. No answer. In boredom, she rang her sister Carrie in Paris, France.

‘We’re in bed, for God’s sake. What do you want?’ came Carrie’s shrill voice, a voice remembered from childhood.

Mina explained.

‘Joe always was crazy,’ Carrie said. ‘Junk him like I told you, Minnie. Take my advice. He’s worth his weight in alimony. This is one more suicidal episode you can do without.’

Hearing from her sister the very words she had just been formulating herself, Mina fell into a rage.

‘I guess I know Joe light years better than you, Carrie, and suicidal he is not. Brave, yes, suicidal, no. He just believes he leads an enchanted life and nothing can harm him.’

‘Try divorce and see what that does.’

‘He was unwanted and rejected as a small kid. He needs me and I’m not prepared to do the dirty on him now. His whole career is dedicated to the pursuit of power and adventure and notoriety – well, it’s an antidote to the early misery he went through. I understand that.’

The distant voice said, ‘Sounds like you have been talking to his shrink.’

Mina looked up, momentarily distracted by something fluttering at the window. It was late for a bird. The dark was closing swiftly in.

‘His new shrink is real good. Joe is basically a depressive, like many famous men in history, Goethe, Luther, Tolstoy, Winston Churchill – I forget who else. He has enormous vitality, and he fends off a basic melancholia with constant activity. I have to live with it, he classifies out as a depressive.’

‘Sounds like you should chuck Joe and marry the shrink. A real smart talker.’

Mina thought of Carrie’s empty-headed woman-chasing husband, Adolphe. She decided to make no comment on that score.

‘One thing Joe has which I have, and I like. A little fantasy-world of mixed omnipotence and powerlessness which is very hard to crack, even for a smart shrink. I have the same component, God help me.’

‘For Pete’s sake, Mina, Adolphe says all American woman are the same. They believe —’

‘Oh, God, sorry, Carrie, I’ve got a bat in my room. I can’t take bats.’

She put the phone down and stood up, suddenly aware of how dark it was in the room. The Moonlite sign flashed outside in puce neon. And the bat hovered inside the window.

Something unnatural in its movements transfixed her. She stood there unmoving as the pallid outline of a man formed in the dusky air. The bat was gone and, in its place, a suave-looking man with black hair brushed back from his forehead, standing immaculate in evening dress.

Fear brushed her, to be followed by a kind of puzzlement. ‘Did I live this moment before? Didn’t I see it in a movie? A dream … ?’

She inhaled deeply, irrationally feeling a wave of kinship with this man, although he breathed no word.

Unconsciously, she had allowed her robe to fall open, revealing her nudity. The stranger’s eyes were fixed upon her – not upon her body, her breasts, the dark bush of hair on her sexual regions, but on her throat.

Could there really be some new thrill, something unheard of and incredible, such as Joe seeks? If so … if so, lead me to it.

This was a different hedonism from the aerial plunge from the womb of the speeding plane.

‘Hi,’ she said.

He smiled, revealing good strong white teeth with emphatic canines.

‘Like a drink?’ she asked. ‘I was just getting stewed all on my ownsome.’

‘Thanks, no,’ he said, advancing. ‘Not alcohol. You have something more precious than alcohol.’

‘I always knew it,’ Mina said.

Lack of motion. Stillness. Silence.

‘More goddamned trees,’ Bodenland exclaimed.

At least there was no swamp this time.

He stepped over the driver, tied and cowering under his tarpaulin,and slid open the door. After a moment, he stepped down on solid earth. Somewhere a bird sang and fell silent.

These were not the trees of the Carboniferous. They were small, hazel and birch and elder, graceful, widely spaced, with the occasional oak and sycamore towering above them. Light filtered through to him almost horizontally, despite heavy green foliage on every side. He guessed it was late summer. 1896, near London, England, according to the driver and the co-ordinates. What was going on in England, 1896? Then he thought, Oh yes, Queen Victoria …

Well, the old Queen had a pretty little wood here. It seemed to represent all the normal things the time train, with its hideous freight, was not. He savoured the clear air with its scent of living things. He listened to the buzz of a bee and was pleased.

Seen from outside, the train when stationary was small, almost inconsiderable, no longer than a railroad boxcar. Its outside was studded and patterned with metal reinforcers; nothing was to be seen of the windows he knew existed inside. Somehow, the whole thing expanded in the relativism of the time quanta and contracted when stationary. He stared at it with admiration and curiosity, saying to himself, ‘I’m going to get this box of tricks back to my own time and figure it all out. There’s power beyond the dreams of avarice here.’

As he stood there in a reverie, it seemed to him that a shrouded female figure drifted like a leaf from the train and disappeared. Immediately, the wood seemed a less friendly place, darker too.

He shivered. Strange anxieties passed through his mind. The isolation in which, through his own reckless actions, he found himself, closed in about him. Although he had always believed himself to have a firm grip on sanity – was not the world of science sanity’s loftiest bastion? – the nightmare events on the train caused him to wonder. Had that creature pinned to the torture-bench been merely a disordered phase of sadistic imagining?

He forced himself to get back into the train and to search it.

It had contracted like a concertina. In no way was it possible to enter any of the compartments, now squeezed shut like closed eyes. He listened for crying but heard nothing. The very stillness was a substance, lowering to the spirits.

‘Shit,’ he said, and stared out into the wood. They had come millions of years to be in this place and he strained his ears as if to listen to the sound of centuries. ‘We’d better find out where the hell we are,’ he said aloud. ‘And I need to eat. Not one bite did I have through the whole Cretaceous …’

He shook himself into action.

Hoisting the driver up by his armpit, he said, ‘You’re coming too, buddy, I may need you.’

The smothered voice said, ‘You will be damned forever for this.’

‘Damned? You mean like doomed to eternal punishment? I don’t believe that crap. I don’t really believe in you either, so move your arse along.’

He helped the creature out of the train.

A path wound uphill, fringed with fern. Beyond, on either side, grew rhododendrons, their dark foliage hastening the approach of night. He peered ahead, alert, full of wonder and excitement. The trees were thinning. A moth fluttered by on a powdery wing and lost itself on the trunk of a birch. A brick-built house showed some way ahead. As he looked a dim light lit in one of its windows, like an eye opening.

Tugging his captive, he emerged from the copse on to the lawn. The lawn was sprinkled with daisies already closing. It led steeply up to the house, which crowned a ridge of higher ground. A row of pines towered behind the roofs and chimneys of the house, which lay at ease on its eminence, overlooking a large ornamental pool, a gazebo and pleasant flowerbeds past which Bodenland now made his way.

A young gardener in waistcoat and shirtsleeves saw him coming, dropped his hoe in astonishment, and ran round the other side of the house. Bodenland halted to give his reluctant captive a pull.

On a terrace which ran the length of the house stood classical statues. The sun was setting, casting long fingers of shadow which reached towards Bodenland. As he paused, another light was lit inside the house.

Uncertain for once, he made towards the back door and took hold of the knocker.

The ginger man was watching and listening again, an opera glass in his right hand. With his left hand, he stroked his short red beard appreciatively, as if it had been a cat.

He stood in the wings of the Lyceum Theatre with the delectable Ellen Terry in costume by his side, gazing on to the lighted stage.

On the stage, before a packed auditorium, Henry Irving was playing the role of Mephistopheles in a performance of Faust. Dressed in black, with a black goatee beard and whitened face, the celebrated actor spread out his cloak like a giant bat’s wings. Back and forth he stalked, menacing a somewhat aghast Faust, and chanting his lines:

So great’s his Christian faith, I cannot grasp

His soul – but I’ll afflict his body with

Lament, and strew him with diverse diseases …

Thunderous applause from the audience, all of whom believed in one way or another that they were in some danger of damnation themselves.

When the play was finished, Irving took his bows before the curtain.

As he made his exit into the wings, he passed the ginger man with a triumphant smirk and headed for his dressing room.

Both Irving and the ginger man were smartly attired in evening dress when they finally left the theatre. The ginger man adjusted his top hat at a rakish angle, careful that some curls sizzled over the brim to the left of his head.

The stagedoor keeper fawned on them as they passed his nook.

‘’Night, Mr Irving. ’Night, Mr Stoker.’

The ginger man pressed a tip into his hand as they passed. Out in the night, haloed by a gas lamp, Irving’s carriage awaited.

‘The club?’ Irving asked.

‘I’ll join you later,’ said the ginger man, on impulse. He turned abruptly down the side alley to the main thoroughfare.

Irving swung himself up into his carriage. ‘The Garrick Club,’ he told his driver.

In the thoroughfare, bustle was still the order of the day, despite the lateness of the hour. Hansoms and other carriages plied back and forth in the street, while the elegant and the shabby formed a press on the pavements. And in doorways and the entrances to dim side-courts were propped those beings who had no advantages in a hard-hearted world, who had failed or been born in failure, men, women, small children. These shadowy persons, keeping their pasty faces in shadow, begged, or proffered for sale tawdry goods – matches, separate cigarettes, flowers stolen from graves – or simply lounged in their niches, awaiting a change of fortune or perhaps a nob to relieve of his wallet.

The ginger man was alert to all these lost creatures of the shadows, eyeing them with interest as he passed. A thin young woman in an old bonnet came forth from a stairway and said something to him. He tilted her head to the light to study her face. She was no more than fourteen.

‘Where are you from, child?’

‘Chiswick, sir. Have a feel, sir, for a penny, bless you, just a feel.’

He laughed, contemptuous of the pleasure offered. Nevertheless, he retreated with her into the shadow of the stairs with only a brief backward look. Ignoring the two children who crouched wordless on the lower steps, the girl hitched up her dress and let him get one hand firm behind her back while with the other he rifled her, feeling powerfully into her body.

‘You like it, sir? Sixpence a quick knee-trembler?’

‘Pah, get back to Chiswick with you, child.’

‘My little brothers, sir – they’re half dead of starvation.’

‘And you’ve the pox.’ He wiped his fingers on her dress, thrust a sixpenny piece into her hand, and marched off, head down in case he was recognized.

Newsboys were shouting. ‘Standard. Three Day Massacre. Read all abart it.’ The ginger man pressed on, taking large strides. He shook off a transvestite who accosted him outside a penny gaff.

Only when he turned off down Glasshouse Street did he pause again, outside the Alhambra music hall, from which sounds of revelry issued. Here several better dressed whores stood, chatting together. They broke off when they saw a toff coming, to assume a businesslike pleasantness.

One of them, recognizing the ginger man, came up and took his arm familiarly. Her face was thickly painted, as if for the stage.

‘Ooh, where are you off to so fast, this early? Haven’t seen you for ages.’ She fluttered her eyelashes and breathed cachou at him.

This was a fleshy woman in her late twenties – no frail thing like the girl Stoker had felt earlier. She was confident and brazen, with large breasts, and tall for a street walker. Her clothes, though cheap, were colourful, and bright earrings hung from the fleshy folds of her ears. She faced him head on, grinning impudently, aware with a whore’s instinct that she looked common and that he liked it that way.

‘What have you been up to, Violet? Behaving yourself?’

‘Course. You know me. I’m set up better now. Got myself a billet round the corner. How about a bit? What you say? We could send out for a plate of mutton or summat.’

‘Are you having your period?’ His voice was low and urgent.

She looked at him and winked. ‘I ain’t forgotten you likes the sight of blood. Come on, you’re in luck. It’s a quid, mind you.’

He pressed up against her. ‘You’re a mercenary bitch, Violet, that you are,’ he said jocularly, allowing the lilt of brogue into his speech. ‘And here’s me thinking you loved me.’

As she led him down the nearest back street, she said, saucily, ‘I’ll love what you got, guv.’ She slid a hand over the front of his trousers.

He knew she would perform better for the promise of a plate of mutton. London whores were always hungry. Hungry or not, he’d have her first. The beef first, then the mutton.

‘Hurry,’ he said, snappishly. ‘Where’s this bleeding billet of yours?’

The knocker was a heavy iron affair with a fox head on it. It descended thunderously on the back door.

‘Eighteen ninety-six,’ said Bodenland aloud, to keep his spirits up. ‘Queen Victoria on the throne … I’m in a dream. Well now – food and rest with any luck, and then it’s back to poor Mina. Can’t even phone her from here.’ He laughed at the thought.

The house loomed over him, unwelcoming at close quarters to a stranger’s approach.

In the sturdy door was set a panel of bull’s eye glass. He became aware that someone was studying him through it. Despite the gathering dusk, he saw it was a woman. Came the sound of bolts being drawn back. A lighted candle appeared, with a hand holding the candlestick and, somewhere above it, a plump and unfriendly woman’s face.

‘Who are you, pray?’ He was surprised to see that as she spoke she held a small crucifix in front of her. Giving her a guarded explanation, he asked for Mr Stoker and inquired if it would be possible to beg a night’s lodging.

‘Where are you from? Who’s that you have with you?’

‘Madam, I am from the United States of America. This is a criminal in my charge. I hope to return him to the USA. Perhaps we might lock him in one of your outhouses for the night.’

‘You actors – all the same! You will not learn to leave poor Mr Stoker alone. He’s not well. He has the doctor to him. Still, I know he would not turn you away. He has a kind heart, like all Irish people. Come in.’

They entered the rear hall, going through into a scullery which contained a large stone sink and a pump with a long curving iron handle. A maid in a mob cap was inefficiently stringing flowers up at the window. The woman, evidently Mrs Stoker, ordered her to get the key to the tool shed.

A male servant was summoned. He and the maid accompanied Bodenland out to a tool shed standing at the end of the terrace to the rear of the house. The male servant had lit a storm lantern. It was already very dark.

The driver was whimpering, and refused food and drink.

‘I shall be gone from here by morning,’ he said. ‘And you’ll have departed from human life.’

‘Sleep well,’ Bodenland said, and slammed the door.

When the back door was closed and the bolts drawn across, the little raw-handed maid picked up her flowers again.

‘What are you doing?’ Bodenland asked curiously.

‘It’s the garlic, sir. Against the critters of the night.’

‘Is that an English custom?’

‘It’s Mr Stoker’s custom, sir. You can ask the cook, Maria.’

Mrs Stoker returned. She was a solid middle-aged lady, impressively dressed in a gown of grey taffeta which reached to the floor. She had over it a small white frilled apron, which she now removed. Her hair was brown, streaked with grey, neatly parcelled into a bun at the back of her head. She was now smiling, all defensiveness gone from her manner.

‘You’ll have to excuse me, Mr Borderland.’

‘It’s Bodenland, ma’am. Originally of German extraction. German and English on my mother’s side.’

‘Mr Bodenland, pardon my hesitation in letting you in. Life is a little difficult at present. Do please come through and meet my husband. We should be happy if you would consent to stay overnight.’

As he uttered his thanks, she led him along a corridor to the front of the house. In a low voice she said, ‘My poor Bram works so hard for Mr Henry Irving – he’s his stage manager, you know, and much else besides. At present he’s also writing a novel, which seems to depress his health. Not a happy subject. I’m not at all sure gloomy novels should be encouraged. My dear father would never allow us girls – I have four sisters, sir – to read novels, except for those of Mrs Craik. Poor Bram is quite low, and believes strange forces beseige the house.’

‘How unfortunate.’

‘Indeed. Happily, I inherited my father’s strong nerves, bless him. He was a hero of the Crimea, don’t you know.’

She showed Bodenland into a large drawing room. His first impression was of a room in a museum, greatly over-furnished with pictures – mainly of a theatrical nature – on the walls, plants in pots on precarious stands, ornate mahogany furniture, antimacassars on over-stuffed chair-backs, books in rows, and heavy drapes at windows. Numerous trophies lay about on side tables. It seemed impossible to find a way through to a thick-set man busy adjusting garlic flowers over the far window.

Better acquaintance with the room enabled Bodenland to appreciate its graceful proportions, its ample space, and its general air of being a comfortable if over-loaded place in which to spend leisure hours.

The man at the window turned, observed that it was almost dark, and came forward smiling, plucking at his ginger beard as if to hide a certain shyness, and put out his hand.

‘Welcome, sir, welcome indeed. I’m Abraham Stoker, known to friend and foe alike as Bram, as in bramble bush. And this is my wife, Florence Stoker, whom you have already met, I see.’

‘I’ve had that pleasure, thank you. My name is Joseph Bodenland, known as Joe, as in jovial.’

‘Ah, then you’re a son of Jupiter – an auspicious star. Are you a military man, Mr Bodenland?’

‘No, by no means.’

‘Both Florence and I are of military stock. That’s why I ask. My grandfather was Thomas Thorley of the 43rd Regiment. Fought against Bonaparte, later took part in the conquest of Burma, 1824. Florence’s father, Lt Colonel James Balcombe, served in India and the Crimea, with great distinction.’

‘I see. Came through all right?’

Florence Stoker asked, to cover her guest’s awkwardness, ‘Is your family prosperous? You Americans are so expert at business, so I hear.’

‘I know your compatriot, Mark Twain,’ Stoker said, turning to give an anxious tug at the curtains. ‘Most amusing chap, I thought. I tried to get him to write us a play.’

Genially taking Bodenland’s elbow, he led him through a maze of tables on which various keepsake albums and other mementoes lay, towards a cheerful log fire.

Over the fireplace hung a large oil, its eroticism not entirely out of keeping with the luxury of the rest of the room. A naked pink woman sat fondling or being fondled by a cupid. Another figure was offering her a honeycomb in one hand and holding a scorpion’s sting in the other. The figure of Time in the background was preparing to draw a curtain over the amorous scene. Bodenland regarded it with some amazement.

‘Like it?’ Stoker asked, catching his glance. ‘Nice piece of classical art. Bronzino’s celebrated “Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time”. An all-embracing title.’ He laughed and shot a glance at his wife. ‘It’s a copy, of course, but a good one.’

When they had settled down in armchairs, and Mrs Stoker had rung the bell and summoned the maidservant, and the maidservant had adjusted the curtains to everyone’s satisfaction – ‘That girl has no feeling for the symmetry of folds,’ said Mrs Stoker, severely – they lapsed into general conversation over a glass of sherry.

At length Bodenland said, ‘Of course, I know your name best as author of Dracula.’

‘Is that a play you would be speaking of?’

‘A book, Mr Stoker, a novel. It’s world-famous where I come from.’ After a long pause, he added, ‘All about vampires.’

‘What do you know about vampires, may I ask?’ Looking suspicious.

‘A fair deal, I guess. I’m given to believe I have locked one in your garden shed.’

At this news, Stoker pulled again at his beard. He went further and pulled at his lip. Then he got up rapidly up from his chair, wended his way across the room, and peered through the curtains, muttering.

He came back, still muttering, frowning, his broad and rugged face all a-twitch.

‘I shall have to see about that later. Anyhow, you’re mistaken, allow me to say. It does so happen that I am writing a novel at present all about vampires, which I intend to entitle “The Undead” … Hm, all the same, I like the starkness of that as a title: “Dracula” … Hm.’

‘He works too hard, Mr Bodenland,’ said Mrs Stoker. ‘He’s never home till after midnight. He’s back today only because tomorrow is a special day for Mr Irving.’

She rose. ‘Excuse me, sir. I must confer with Maria, our cook. Dinner, at which we hope you will join us, will be ready at eight o’clock prompt.’

When the two men were alone, Stoker leaned forward to poke the fire, saying as he stared into the flames, ‘Tell me, do you have any theories regarding vampires?’

‘I assume they are products of the imagination. As I rather assume you are too.’

Stoker then gave him a hard look, holding out a glowing poker.

‘Is that some sort of joke? I don’t find it funny.’

‘I’m sorry, I apologize. I meant that to be sitting here with you, a famous man, seems to me like wild fantasy.’

‘Wilde? Oscar Wilde? He was once engaged to my Florence. Well, he’s got himself into a real pickle now, to be sure … Let me ask you this. Men are made to feel guilty about the sexual side of their natures. Do you believe that sex and guilt and disease and vampires are all related?’

‘I never thought of it.’

‘I have reason to think of it, good reason.’ These words, spoken with a morbid emphasis, were accompanied by equally emphatic wags of the poker, as though the ginger man was conducting the last bars of a symphony. ‘Let me ask you a riddle. What does the following refer to, if not to planets: “A night on Venus means a lifetime on Mercury”?’

Despite the obvious good nature of his host, Bodenland was beginning to wish he had looked for a simple inn for the night.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘Syphilis, Mr Bodenland, that’s what I’m talking about. VD – the soldier’s term for it. Syphilis, the vampire of our amorous natures, that’s what. “Thou hast proven and visited mine heart in the night season.” That’s what the psalm says, and a ghastly saying it is … Now, perhaps you’d care to have a wash before we go in to dinner.’

This was a moment to be grasped, Bodenland saw, in which to explain how he had arrived, and how his country was more distant than even the imaginative Stoker might guess.

Stoker listened with many a tug of the beard, many a dubious shake of the head, many a ‘Well, I’ll be jiggered!’ many a ‘Saints in heaven!’ At the end, he remained stubbornly unbelieving, saying he had endured many a far-fetched thing acted out on the stage, but nothing like this. He knew of occupants of the wards of the nearby lunatic asylum who believed themselves to be Napoleon, but even there none imagined they came from a future when their mothers were as yet unborn.

‘I come from an age where anything can be believed,’ Bodenland said, half-way between amusement and irritation. ‘You evidently live in an age where nothing can be. Even when you have proof.’

‘What proof do you offer?’

‘Tomorrow, you shall see the vehicle by which I arrived here.’

Nodding rather grimly, Stoker rose from his armchair. ‘Very well then, until that time I shall be forced to play the mistrustful host, who doubts the veracity of his guest, and regards his account as merely a tall story told before dinner.’

‘I hope, sir, that over the soup you may reflect that my sincerity in this matter is some token of my honesty.’

‘… And by the cheese course I’ll have swallowed your every word!’ With an explosion of laughter, Stoker led his guest from the room. His good humour went some way towards smoothing Bodenland’s ruffled feelings. It was only later that he came to realize how human beings came equipped with a defence mechanism which saved them accepting immediately anything which lay beyond their everyday experience; for so it was to prove in his own case.

The dining room was decorated in scarlet, and less elaborately furnished than the drawing room. They sat down to a laden table under a large chandelier, the heat from which Bodenland found uncomfortable. Round the walls of the room, mahogany dressers, sideboards and carving tables gleamed, reflecting the light muzzily.

Everything looked prosperous, safe, snug, repressive. Stoker looked through the curtains and muttered in Bodenland’s ear, ‘I’m worried about that hostage you put in my shed.’ In other respects, he played the role of genial host.

Clutching a decanter of red wine, he ushered his doctor in to the proceedings. Dr Abraham van Helsing was a fussy little man with a sharp bright face and cold bony hands. He wore a velvet suit and smelt of cologne. He laughed and smiled rather much when introduced to Bodenland.

‘And you should be resting, Bram, my friend,’ he said, wagging a finger at Stoker. ‘You should not be embarking on a heavy meal, you understand?’

Bodenland thought there might be some truth in this observation, reluctantly though it was received by his host. Before them were laid a huge cold home-cured ham, a leg of mutton, ptarmigan, and a grand brawn jelly, which trembled slightly in its eagerness to be eaten. A little tablemaid circulated with a tureen of chicken and celery soup.

‘It’s the full moon tonight,’ announced Stoker, tucking his linen napkin under his chin. ‘The lunatics will be restless.’ Turning to Bodenland, he added by way of explanation, ‘The lunatic asylum is next door to us – quite a way through the trees, I’m happy to say. Used to be a priory, in the days before Oliver Cromwell. It’s quite a pretty place, as such places go. I thought I saw someone or something out on the terrace, by the way, but we won’t go into that. Mustn’t spoil our appetites.’

‘You’re like my father – nothing spoils your appetite,’ said Florence Stoker, affectionately, smiling at her husband.

‘I’m big and tough and Irish – and can’t help it.’

‘Nor can you ever take a holiday,’ added van Helsing. ‘You’re too dedicated to work.’

‘And to Henry Irving,’ said Mrs Stoker.

Stoker winked good humouredly over his soup spoon at Bodenland.

‘Well, it was Henry’s Mephistopheles gave me the notion for my Count Dracula. I’m sure I shall have a hit, if I can ever get the damned book finished.’

‘When do you hope to finish?’

Ignoring the question and lowering his voice, Stoker said, ‘It may be because I’m writing this novel that the house is surrounded by eerie forces. Van Helsing doesn’t seem to understand – in fact only the loonies next door seem to understand. Must be going loony myself, shouldn’t be surprised.’

‘You’re sane, we live in a nice scientific world and the soup’s delicious,’ said van Helsing, soothingly. ‘Every single problem in the world will soon be capable of a scientific resolution. Just as the savage populations of the world are being brought into the arms of civilization, so the already civilized world will soon be turned into a utopian meritocracy.’

The conversation became more general. Mrs Stoker spoke of the happily married state of each of her sisters. Servants brought in more food. More wine was poured.

As Bodenland was confronted by huge green blancmanges, plum pies with ornamental pastry crusts, bowls of cream, jellies, and trifles decorated with angelica, Stoker reverted to the subject of asylums, which seemed to prey upon his mind.

‘Many of the poor fellows in the asylum suffer great pain. Dementia and its sores are treated with mercury. It’s agonizing, I hear. It’s a matter of wonder why such suffering should be visited on humanity, Mr Bodenland. Would you care to visit the asylum with me?’

Bodenland shook his head.

‘I’m afraid all that interests me is getting home.’

Stoker leaped from his chair with a sudden impulse and went to peer through the window again.

‘It’s a still night,’ he declared, in the voice of one announcing the worst. ‘It would be ideal for cricket now, if only it was day.’ He laughed.

‘Come and eat your trifle, Bram,’ his wife said, sharply.

Certainly, the night was still. The full moon shone across the woods that choked the valley, to glitter on the massed slate roofs of the asylum. A bell in the small clock tower crowing the institution chimed midnight, spinning out its notes as if about to run down. The cool light glittered on rows of window panes, some of them barred. It sent a dagger of light plunging down through the narrow orifice of Renfield’s skylight to carve a square on the stones close by where he lay on his pallet of straw. During the day he had attacked a male nurse, and was in consequence secured in a strait-jacket, with his arms confined.

He amused himself by alternately grinding his teeth and humming like a fly trapped in a jar.

‘Ummmm. Ummmm. Ummmmmmmm.’

His eyes bulged in their sockets. He stared unblinkingly at the white square on the floor nearby. As minute by minute it slid nearer to him, it changed from rancid milk to pale pink, and then to a heartier colour until it appeared to him as a square pan of blood.

He stretched his neck to drink from it. At that moment, the whole cell was flooded with moonlight, and a great joyous humming sounded as if a thousand hornets were loose.

Crying in triumph, Renfield sprang upward, arms above his head in the attitude of a diver. He was naked as the day he was born. He burst through the skylight and landed gracefully on the icy slopes of the asylum roof, which stretched away into the distance like ski slopes.

As he danced there, a great winged thing circled overhead. He called and whistled to it with a flutelike noise, playing imagined pan pipes. Lower it came, red eyes fixed upon the naked dancer.

‘I know your secrets, little lord, I know. Come down, come down. I know how human blood makes you sick – it makes you sick, yet on it you have to depend, depend, deep end. Jump in the deep end, little lord …’

It circled still, the beat of its wings vibrating in the air, scattering moonlight.

‘Yes, you come from a time when all blood was cool and thick and slow and lizard-flavoured. That time of the great things, I know. They’ve gone and you have only us, little lord. So take my blood at last, slopping in its jug of flesh just for you – and I shall poison you. Ummmm. Ummmm.’

He pirouetted on the rooftree and the great winged thing swooped and took him. It enfolded him lasciviously, biting into him, into the creamy flesh like toffee-apple, as it wrapped him about with the great dry wings, biting, drinking deep with a love more terrible than fury – and then with disgust, as it flew off, vomiting back the blood into his empty face.

Renfield sniggered in his sleep. His eyes remained open and staring like glass buttons on a child’s toy, but he dreamed his terrible dream.

Red curtains closed over the eye of the moon as van Helsing pulled them together after a brief scrutiny of the terrace. The Stokers were leaving the dining room as they had entered, arm-in-arm. Bodenland was following when the doctor tugged at his sleeve and drew him back.

‘Permit me to ask – is there a pretty little Mrs Bodenland back home where you come from?’ He looked down at his nervous hands as he spoke, as if ashamed to pry.

‘I’m married, yes, doctor. That’s one good reason why I am bent on getting home just as soon as I can.’

He made to move on, but the doctor still detained him.

‘You understand why I enquire. I am in charge of Mr Stoker’s health. The conjugal arrangements are not good in this household. As a result – as a direct result —’ He paused, and then went on in a whisper. ‘Mr Stoker has unfortunately contracted a vile disease from what the French call a fille de joie, a woman of the night. You understand?’

Not being fond of the doctor’s fussy little ways, Bodenland made no reply, but stood solid to hear him out.

Van Helsing tapped his temple.

‘His brain’s affected. Or he believes it affected. Which, in the case of brains, amounts to much the same thing. He believes – well, he believes that mankind has become the host for a species of parasite beings, vampires, who come from somewhere distant. I speak scientifically, you understand. From one of the planets, let’s say. He regards this as the secret of the universe, which of course he is about to reveal. You can never trust a man who thinks he knows the secret of the universe.’

‘I’m not so certain about that, doctor. The secret of the universe – provided there is such a thing – is open to enquiry by anyone, by any interested party, just like the secrets of the personality.’

‘What secrets of the personality?’

‘Like why you rub one index finger against the other when you talk … No, wait, doctor, I’m sorry. That was impertinent.’

The doctor had turned on his heel in vexation, but Bodenland charmed him back, to ask what treatment he was giving Stoker for his disease.

‘I treat his sores with mercury ointment. It is painful but efficacious.’

Bodenland scratched his chin.

‘You won’t have heard of penicillin yet awhile, but I could get a hold of some. And in a very few years Salvarsan will become available.’

‘You’re making no sense to me, sir.’

‘You know, Salvarsan? Let’s see, would you have heard of Dr Ehrlich’s “magic bullets” at this date?’

‘Oh.’ The doctor gave a chuckle and nodded. ‘I begin to get your drift. Bram Stoker makes his own magic bullets – to kill off his imaginary vampires, you understand.’

At that juncture, Stoker himself put his head round the dining-room door.

‘There you are. I thought you must have gone into the study. Mr Bodenland, perhaps you’d care to inspect my workshop? I generally spend an hour pottering in there after dinner.’

As they went down a side-passage, Stoker put an arm round Bodenland’s shoulders.

‘You don’t want to pay too much attention to what van Helsing says. He’s a good doctor but —’ He put a finger to his temple, in unconscious imitation of van Helsing’s gesture of a few minutes past. ‘In some respects he has a screw loose.’

On the door before them was a notice saying, Workshop, Keep Out.

‘My private den,’ said Stoker, proudly. As they entered, he drew from an inner pocket a leather case containing large cigars, and proffered it to Bodenland. The latter shook his head vigorously.

He studied Stoker as the ginger man went through the rigmarole of lighting his cigar. The head was large and well-shaped, the ginger hair without grey in it, though a bald patch showed to the rear of the skull. The features were good, although the skin, particularly where it showed above the collar, was coarse and mottled.

Feeling the eyes of his visitor on him, Stoker looked sideways through the smoke.

‘Here’s my den. I must be always doing. I can’t abide nothing to do.’

‘I too.’

‘Life’s too short.’

‘Agreed. I am always ambitious to make something of myself.’

‘That’s it – cut a dash at the least, I say. Needs courage.’

‘Courage, yes, I suppose so. Do you reckon yourself courageous?’

Stoker thought, squeezing his eyes closed. ‘Let’s put it this way. I’m a terrible coward who’s done a lot of brave things. I like cricket. You Yanks don’t play cricket?’

‘No. Business and invention – that’s my line. And a lot of other things. There are so many possibilities in the world.’

‘Do you long to be a hero?’

The question was unexpected. ‘It’s a strange thing to ask. My shrink certainly thinks I long to be a hero … One thing, I have a need for desolate places.’

Giving him a sceptical look, Stoker said, ‘Mm, there’s nothing more desolate than the stage of the Lyceum on a slow Monday night … What does your family think of you?’

The interrogation would have been irritating on other lips. But there was something in Stoker’s manner, sly, teasing, yet sympathetic, to which Bodenland responded warmly, so that he answered with frankness.

‘If they can’t love me they have got to respect me.’

‘I wish to be a hero to others, since I’ll never be one to myself.’ He clapped Bodenland on the shoulder. ‘We have temperamental affinities. I knew it the moment I set eyes on you, even if you come from the end of next century, as you claim. Now have a butcher’s hook at this, as the Cockneys say.’

The workshop was crammed with objects – a man’s version of the ladies’ drawing room. Curved cricket bats, old smooth-bore fowling-pieces, a mounted skeleton of a rat, stuffed animals, model steam engines, masks, theatrical prints, framed items of women’s underwear, a chart of the planets, and a neat array of tools, disposed on shelves above a small lathe. These Bodenland took in slowly as Stoker, full of enthusiasm, began to talk again, lighting a gas mantle as he did so.

‘My Christian belief is that there are dark forces ranged against civilization. As the story of the past unfolds, we see there were millions of years when the Earth was – shall I say unpoliced? Anything could roam at large, the most monstrous things. It’s only in these last two thousand years, since Jesus Christ, that mankind has been able to take over in an active role, keeping the monsters at bay.’ Foreseeing an interruption, he added, ‘They may be actual monsters, or they may materialize from the human brain. Only piety can confront them. We have to war with them continuously. If Jesus were alive today, do you know what I believe he would be?’

‘Er – the Pope?’

‘No, no, nothing like that. A Bengal Lancer.’

After a moment’s silence, Bodenland indicated the work-bench. ‘What are you making here?’

‘Ah, I wanted to show you this. This is part of my fight against the forces of night. Sometimes I wish I could turn the gun on myself. I know there’s evil in me – I’m aware of it. I must ask you about your relationships with the fair sex, so called, some time.’

He held out for examination a cigar-box full of carefully wrought silver bullets, each decorated with a Celtic motif running about the sign of the Cross. He exhibited them with evident pride in their workmanship. An ill feeling overcame Bodenland. The sickly light of the gas mantle seemed to flare yellow and mauve as the room swayed.

‘These are my own manufacture,’ said Stoker and then, catching sight of Bodenland’s face, ‘What’s the matter, old boy? Cigar smoke getting to you?’

Recovering his voice, Bodenland spoke. ‘Mr Stoker, you may be right about dark forces ranged against civilization, and I may have proof of it. What do you make of this?’

He brought forth from his jacket pocket the article he had retrieved from Clift’s ancient grave in the Escalante Desert. In his palm lay a silver bullet, its nose dented, but otherwise identical to the ones in Stoker’s cigar-box.

‘This was found,’ he said, unsteadily, ‘in a grave certified scientifically to be sixty-five point five million years old.’

Stoker was less impressed than Bodenland had expected. He stroked his beard and puffed at his cigar before saying, ‘There’s not that much time in the universe, my friend. Sixty-five point five million years? I have to say I think you’re talking nonsense. Lord Kelvin’s calculations have shown that, according to rigid mathematics, the entire limit of the time the sun is able to emit heat is not greater than twenty-five million years. Admittedly the computations are not exact.’

‘You speak of rigid mathematics. More flexible mathematical systems have been developed, giving us much new understanding of the universe. What once seemed certain has become less certain, more open to subjective interpretation.’

‘That doesn’t sound like progress to me.’

Bodenland considered deeply before speaking again. He then summoned tact to his argument. ‘The remarkable progress of science in your lifetime will be built on by succeeding generations, sir. I should remind you of what you undoubtedly know, that only three generations before yours, at the end of the eighteenth century, claims that the solar system was more than a mere six thousand years old were met with scorn.

‘Time has been expanding ever since. In light of later perspectives, sixty-five million years is no great length of time. We understand better than Lord Kelvin the source of the energies that power the sun.’

‘Possibly you Americans might be mistaken? Do you allow that?’

With a short laugh, Bodenland said, ‘Well, to some extent, certainly. This bullet, for instance, proves how little we have really been able to piece together the evolution of various forms of life in the distant past.’

Turning the bullet over in his palm, Stoker said, ‘I would swear it is one of my manufacture, of course. You’d better tell me about this extraordinary grave, and I’ll strive to take you at your word.’

‘It’s pretty astonishing – though no more so than that I should be here talking to you.’

He ran through the details of Clift’s discovery, explaining how the dating of the skeleton was arrived at.

During this account, Stoker remained impassive, listening and smoking. Only when Bodenland began to describe the coffin in which the skeleton was buried did he become excited. He demanded to know what the sign on the coffin looked like, and thrust a carpenter’s pencil and paper into Bodenland’s hand. Bodenland drew the two fangs with the wings above them.

‘That’s it! That’s it, sure enough – Lord Dracula’s sign,’ said Stoker in triumph. He seized Bodenland’s hand and shook it. ‘You’re a man after my own heart, so you are. At last someone who believes, who has proof! Listen, this house has drawn evil to it, and you brought more evil with this feller in my tool shed, but we can fight it together. We must fight it together. We’ll be heroes, the heroes we dreamed of —’

‘You’re a great man, Mr Stoker, but this battle’s not for me. I don’t belong here. I have to get back home. Though I certainly invite you to see the vehicle I use, parked down in your woodlands.’

‘Listen, stay another day.’ He grabbed Bodenland’s arm lest he escape at that very minute, and breathed smoke like an Irish dragon. ‘Just one more day, because tomorrow’s a special one. Come on, we’ll join that old fool van Helsing and have a glass or two of port and talk filth – if the wife’s not about. Tomorrow, that great actor whom I serve as manager, Henry Irving, bless his cotton socks, is to receive a knighthood from Her Majesty Queen Victoria at Windsor Palace. It’s the first time any actor has been so honoured. Now what do you think of that? Come along too – it’ll do your republican Yankee heart good to witness such a deed. After that you can high-tail it back to Utah or wherever you want. What do you say?’

Bodenland could not help being affected by the enthusiasm of the man.

‘Very well. It’s a deal.’

‘Excellent, excellent. Let’s go and toast ourselves in some port. And I want to hear more about your adventures.’

8

Lethargy was a deep snow drift, chill yet at the same time warm, comforting, inviting you down into even more luxurious depths of helplessness, down, to a place before birth, after death.

Mina saw her own death like the snow drift. When she opened her eyes, there were long muslin curtains billowing in the draught from the window. She was too weak to rise. She saw the curtains as her life – the gauzy life that was to be, after the consummation of death.

Dreamily, she recalled remote times, remembered the name of Joe, her Joe. But now there was another lover, the dream lover of legend. He was come again, he was in the chamber, advancing towards the bed.

She tried to rouse herself, to lift her head from the pillow. Her hair spilled about her but there was no strength in her neck. He was bending over her, elegant, powerful, distilling an aroma she drew in through her nostrils like a narcotic. When he opened his red mouth, she found strength enough to open her legs, but his attention was on the flesh of her throat. She felt the lechery of it, breathed deeper, swooned, fidgeted with desire to experience again the bite of those fangs, that sweet evacuation of life.

He in his black garb was something different. The insanity of his fantasy spilled over through their linked alleyways of blood. She saw, felt, lived the secret world of the Undead to which she would soon belong.

It was being transferred, his bridal gift to her —

The great sweltering herbivorous beast dashed from the river bank, sounding alarm to other hadrosaurs grazing nearby. It was a mottled green in coloration, yellow and white on the tender belly, with an elaborate headcomb. It balanced its ponderous body on graceful legs, and gave its melancholy call as it ran. Mina heard herself scream, saw her companions scatter, and white birds sail up in alarm from the Cretaceous marshes.

She took evasive action, running from side to side, yet still hearing the hot breath of pursuit.

‘What’s your name, and where’s Joe gone?’

‘You must forget Joe. You now have an immortal lover.’

Indeed, she heard his footsteps close. Thud thud thud. Screaming, she ran into a gingko grove, thinking to evade the heavier predator that way. Behind her, too near her tail, the wretched sound of branches being snapped like teeth breaking from a bottom jaw.

‘Where did you come from? Tell me who you are, so I can know you.’

‘Beyond your imagining lies the ancient burial site in a once-green land. It was destroyed. Remote ancestors there have been disturbed in their rest.’

‘What’s this to me? Why can I not breathe?’

‘The Living have desecrated those graves, causing a crisis among us, the Undead. You might say a religious crisis.’

She heard the ghost of something too desiccated to call a laugh. It came again, from the sky. It brought a new alarm. For she had left the carnivore behind. She had been driven from the family. Now there was a new threat. As a shadow fell over her, she looked up, craning her neck, her throat. A pteranodon was swooping down upon her, wings closed to speed its dive.

‘Why don’t you take me? Why delay so long? Will I be immortal in your embrace?’

‘You will be immortal in my embrace.’

‘It’s all I ever dream of …’

And as she looked up at those fangs, she fell and sprawled among ferns and it unfolded its spectacular wings —

And with the last of her strength she threw back the bedclothes to expose herself utterly —

And it closed its jaws about her neck —

And as his mouth tasted her flesh and the current flowed —

And as she fought with death —

And Mina began to writhe and moan and come at last —

Through —

‘Yes, Mr Bodenland, that was when we were staying with the duke. And later we were so proud, because the Prince of Wales came backstage and shook Bram’s hand.’

‘It was during the run of The Corsican Brothers.’

‘Edward. HRH. He’s such a dear – and rather a one for the ladies, I’m given to understand.’ Florence Stoker fanned her cheeks with her hand at the thought of it.

‘HRH works hard, and so I suppose he feels entitled to play hard. Do you work hard when you’re – at home?’

‘Some would say, too hard. But a man’s work is one way in which he establishes his identity.’

She sighed. ‘Perhaps that is why we poor ladies have no identity to speak of.’ And she shot a glance at her husband.

Bodenland would have preferred to be alone to think over the implications of the day’s events. He listened with only half an ear to Mrs Stoker’s chatter. They were at the port and cigars stage, sitting about the log fire, under the Bronzino painting, with van Helsing saying little.

Stoker jumped up suddenly, to give his impression of Henry Irving as Mephistopheles.

‘Oh, this is so wicked! Bram, desist!’ cried his wife.

‘Please, sir – your heart,’ said van Helsing. ‘Resume your seat.’

But Stoker would have his way, limping about the hearthrug, at once sinister and comical, reciting in a high chant unlike his own voice:

His faith is great – I cannot touch his soul –

But what I may afflict his body with

That will I do, and stew him in disease …

He interrupted himself with a fit of coughing.

‘What would Henry say? – And him about to be made a knight!’ exclaimed Mrs Stoker.

‘I beg you, to bed at once, sir,’ said van Helsing. ‘It grows late.’

‘No, no, I must continue work on my novel. Must, must. More chapters. Lucy Westenra is in mortal peril –’ And he dashed from the room.

A gloomy silence followed. Van Helsing sat at an escritoire, rather ostentatiously writing something, muttering to himself as he did so. Florence Stoker sat tight-lipped, stabbing at her embroidery until, with a sigh, she abandoned it and rose, to stand by the fire staring at the mantelpiece abstractedly.

‘It’s a fine painting, Mrs Stoker,’ Bodenland said, referring to the Bronzino, to break the silence.

‘It was originally called “An Allegory”,’ she said. ‘Though an allegory of what I fail to see. Something unpleasant to do with … disease, we may suppose.’

The flatness of her tone did not invite response, leaving Bodenland leisure to ponder on the delights and difficulties of family life before, restlessly, she returned to her chair.

Something sought release. She looked at the ceiling to announce, ‘Sometimes he’s shut in his study for hours.’

‘That must make you feel very lonely, Mrs Stoker,’ said Bodenland.

She rose, preparing to retreat for the night, and said, grandly, ‘I can survive anything, Mr Bodenland, except bad taste.’

A few minutes later, van Helsing put away his writing materials. He picked up a candle in a silver candlestick and offered to show Bodenland up to his room.

‘You seem to be rather a romancer, sir,’ he remarked, as he led the way upstairs. ‘Your presence clearly disturbs Mr Stoker.’

‘What if the man’s soul is being destroyed?’

‘Ha ha, I think I may claim to be a man of science. This is 1896, after all, and the “soul” has been pretty well disproved. Men get on famously without souls. We turn left at the top of the stairs.’

‘Well, suppose it was possible to travel through time, to the years ahead, to obtain medicine for Stoker’s condition?’

Another dry laugh. ‘You are a romancer, indeed. Just along here. Most facts of science are known by this date. Winged flight may become possible in a couple of centuries, but travel through space or time – quite impossible. Quite impossible. I’ll stake my reputation on it. Here we are. I’ll leave you the candle. Let’s just see all’s well, and the windows properly fastened.’

Bodenland entered the dark bedroom first, conscious of the fatigue brought on by the events of the last many hours.

The bedroom was warm. A small gas fire burned in the grate. He lit the gas mantle over the mantelpiece from his candle, thinking incredulously as he did so, I’m lighting a real gas mantle …

A woman’s taste was in evidence. There were frills round the curtains and round the wash-stand. Over the bed was a pokerwork text in a wooden Oxford frame: Thou Shalt Not be Afraid for Any Terror by Night. Psalm XCI.

While he was taking in these details, the doctor was checking the window catches and adjusting the chain of garlic across the panes.

On the wall by the door hung a map of the world in Mercator’s projection, framed by the flags of the nations, enlivened by pictures of battleships. The British Empire was coloured in red, and encompassed a quarter of the globe.

Pointing to the map, in the glass of which the gas light was reflected, Bodenland asked, ‘Would you suppose there was once a time when Hudson Bay didn’t exist, doctor?’

Van Helsing looked askance, as if he suspected a trick question.

‘Hudson’s Bay didn’t exist – until it was discovered by an Englishman in the seventeenth century.’

Bidding Bodenland a good night, he left the room, and closed the door quietly behind him.

Slowly removing his jacket, Bodenland tried to take in his present situation. He found the room, large though it was, oppressive. Oil paintings of Highland cattle in ornate gilt frames occupied much of the wall space. On the bedside table stood a carafe of drinking water and a black-bound New Testament. He sat on the bed to remove his shoes, and then lay back, hands linked under his head. He began to think of Mina and of his pretty new daughter-in-law, Kylie. But would he ever be able to control the time train and get back to them?

His eyes closed.

Without any seeming discontinuity, the processes in his mind continued, leading him to leave the house he was in and descend some steps. The steps were outside, leading down a rank hillside fringed by tall cypresses; then they curved, broken and dangerous, into a crypt. The air became moist and heavy. He searched for somewhere to put down a burdensome parcel he was carrying. The underground room seemed enormous. A stained glass window let in a pattern of moonlight which hung like a curtain in the waxy atmosphere.

‘No problem so far,’ he or someone else said, as he seated himself in a chair.

Three maidens in diaphanous robes stood in the moonlight. They beckoned. All were beautiful. The middle one was the most beautiful. The coloured glass threw warm gules on her fair breast.

It was this middle creature who advanced on Bodenland, drawing aside her white robe as she came. Her smile was remote, her gaze unfixed.

He knew her and called her name, ‘Kylie! Come to me.’

He saw – with shut eyes but acute mental vision – the pale and loving woman who had so recently become his daughter-in-law. For those beautiful features, those soft limbs, that sensuous body with its delectable secrets, lust filled Joe’s body.

As he opened his arms to her, she bent eagerly towards him, letting the long dress fall away. He caught her scent, like a forgotten dream.

Now her arms were almost round his neck. He felt them intensely, was filled with rapture, when a pistol shot rang out.

Kylie was gone. The stony structure of the crypt faded.

He was back on the bed, his arms tingling with cramp behind his head. The long-horned cattle stared at him from the walls of the room.

He sat up, sick, cold. Had he heard a real shot?

Rising, he padded over to the window and drew aside a curtain a little way.

Two moons shone over the haunting nineteenth-century landscape, one in a clear night sky, the other its sister, its reflection, in the ornamental pool. The gazebo was a ghostly thing, its Chinese chimes not stirring. On the terrace, the statues stood in their dramatic attitudes, casting their shadows towards the facade of the old house.

Among the statues was a human figure. It was Stoker, his ginger coloration made snowy by the moon.

Breaking the chain of garlic flowers, Bodenland opened the window and leaned out.

‘What’s the matter? I thought I heard a shot.’

Stoker looked up, his features made brutal in the diffused glow.

‘Keep your voice down. You aren’t going to be too bucked with this, Bodenland. I’ve had to perform a soldierly duty. As I was turning in I heard a bit of thumping, armed myself, and came out here to see what the devil was going on.’

‘The driver …’

‘That’s it – your driver. He emerged through the door. Like a ghost. One of the Undead, my boy! I put a silver bullet through him in self-defence. It’s the only thing that stops his kind.’

‘I’ll come down.’

The window next to Bodenland’s was thrown open and van Helsing thrust his head out into the night air. He was wearing a night cap.

‘Now we’re in trouble – real trouble, you understand? What are you going to do with the body? You’ll be charged with murder.’

‘I’ll come down, Bram,’ said Bodenland. It was the first time he had used his host’s Christian name.

‘Better stay where you are. There’s another presence out here.’

‘What?’

Stoker paused before answering, and glanced about.

‘A woman’s presence. I’ll be in soonest, don’t worry. I’ll heave this damned corpse back into the shed. We’ll worry about it in the morning.’

‘Are you frightened?’

‘Heroism, Bodenland, what we were talking about. Get to bed, and sweet dreams. And you, doctor.’

Bodenland withdrew his head and closed the window, but stood looking at the silent terrace. When Stoker disappeared, dragging the corpse, he returned to bed. But hope of sleep had been shattered.

Although he admired Stoker’s courage, he still could not persuade himself to believe in vampires. His experience told him they existed, his intellect denied it. Of course, that paradox played to the advantage of vampires, if they existed. But they did exist – and somehow below the level of human intellect.

He paced about the room, trying to work it out. The human intellect originated in the neocortex, the grey matter of the brain. Below lay deeper layers, much older on an evolutionary scale than the neocortex – layers of brain common to other mammals, the limbic brain, primed by instincts such as aggression and submission and sexual response: the very instincts which propelled the processes of life on the planet.

Suppose there was a type of creature which was subject to different processes. A creature like a vampire, without intellect, and therefore almost safe from human molestation. The human species would undoubtedly kill off all vampires, as they had almost killed off wolves, if they only could believe wholeheartedly in the idea. Once you got the idea, vampires were not particularly hard to kill – to exterminate. Were they? The silver bullet. The shaft of light. The religious symbol. The stake through the heart.

He stood and stared abstractedly at the pokerwork legend: Thou Shalt Not be Afraid for Any Terror by Night … Nevertheless, the human race was afraid, always had been …

Always had been …

Vampires – if they existed – he could not resist adding the saving clause – were older than mankind.

How much older? Really millions and millions of years older, as Clift’s discovery seemed to prove?

Why were they so feared?

They were a disease.

They brought death. Worse than death, the existence of the Undead. If legend was to be believed.

And they preyed on humankind by activating one of the strongest instincts below the neocortical level, the great archetype of sex.

As a flower attracts by its scent.

His dream … The incestuous dream of union with Kylie, dead or alive. Repugnant to his consciousness, evidently delightful to some more primitive layer of sensation …

Of a sudden, he connected the dream with the female presence which, if Stoker was to be believed, walked on the terrace below.

As he thought of it, of that shadowy thing he was wise to dread, a wave of desire came over him.

He fought it back. ‘The pestilence that walketh in darkness …’ Was that how the rest of the psalm went?

To calm himself, he measured his strides about the bedroom, trying again to think of the problem scientifically.

Why else were vampires so feared?

Because they were parasitical. Parasites were always feared.

If they long preceded humans on the scale of existence, then they had once preyed on other living things.

What had they been – he caught himself avoiding the word – what had vampires been before they became parasitical? Before that dreadful need for blood arose?

Many arthropod bloodsuckers existed – bed bugs, fleas, mosquitoes, ticks, all parasitical on man. As the fossil record proved, those creatures were about in the busy world long before mankind. Even before birds and mammals.

All those little plagues to human life were originally innocent suckers of fruit juice and plant juices. But the taste of blood proved addictive and they had become enslaved by parasitism.

Blood was a dangerous beverage. An addiction like any other drug.

And vampire bats …

So what had vampires been, many millions of years ago, before they became enslaved?

It was a short distance from gnawing on a wound to drinking its substance … From swooping down through the air to being called to swoop … From inciting the dread to inciting the lust …

Almost in a fever, he thought he had glimpsed what turned an aerial predator into the pestilence that walketh in darkness. Sick with the sound and smell of the gas jet, Bodenland went to the window and flung back the curtains, letting moonlight enter the fuggy room. Brushing away the strings of white flowers, he threw open the window and took some lungfuls of air.

The moon still floated upside down in the pool.

Of Stoker there was no sign.

The woman stood there on the terrace, tall against the figure of a putti. She looked up at him, eyes agleam with a cold green fire.

His heart turned over. But his intellect remained cool.

Distantly, the clock in the asylum tower chimed one in the morning.

She lifted her arms and flew up to him.

She was in the bedroom, among the domestic things with her dead eyes, walking, gliding, rather. Close to him – and he staring with his hair standing on end.

‘This is no dream, Joe,’ she said. Her voice was deep and masculine.

She brought a chill to the room. In her whiteness, with something sparkling like frost in her hair, and the wan white robe, all shadowy yet bright – why, he thought, it’s more like a fever than a person, frightening, yes, yet no more dangerous than a ghost … Yet he was in a prickle of lust to be touched by her, to enjoy an intimacy no one knew this side of the grave.

His intellect had no part in this encounter.

Her name was Bella, the name spoken like a bell.

‘What do you want of me?’

‘I know what you want of me, Joe.’ Still the voice was thick, as if there was blood just below the throat. And her lips were red.

She began to talk, and he to listen, entranced.

Her people were ancient and had survived much. When oak trees die, they still stand against the storm. Her exact words never came back to him after; he only recalled – trying to recall more – that she gave an impression of the Undead as being nothing outside nature, as being of nature. Of humans as being the exiled things, cut off from the ancient world, unable to throw themselves into the streams of continuity pouring from the distant past into distant futures. She spoke, and it was in images.

For these reasons humanity was doomed. Men had to be slain for the survival of the ancient planet. Yet she, Bella, had it in her power to save him, Joe. To more than save him: to crown him with eternal life, the great stream of life from which his humanity exiled him. She spoke, and he received a picture of glaciers from which pure rivers flowed, down to teeming future oceans, unpolluted by man.

‘What do I have to do?’ His whisper was like the rustle of leaves.

Bella turned the full beam of her regard upon him. The eyes were red like a dog’s or yellow like a cat’s or green like a polar bear’s – after, he could not remember. They pierced into him, confident, without conscience or consciousness.

‘All Fleet Ones need to attend a great conference which our Lord has called. We are summoned, every one. We must go to the region you call Hudson Bay. There we will finally decide mankind’s fate.’

‘You cannot exist without us.’

‘As we existed once, so we shall again. You’re – but a moment.’

Again a kind of telepathic picture of the highest mountains brimming over with glaciers, slow-growing glaciers crowned with snow. And, by their striped flanks, thorn bushes growing, stiff against the wind.

Oh, it was beautiful. He longed for it. Ached.

‘The great Lord Dracula will guide our decisions. All of us will have a voice. Possibly extermination, possibly total enslavement. All of you penned within …’

She named a place. Had she said ‘green land’ or ‘Greenland’?

‘Understand this, Joe. We are much stronger than you can imagine. As we possessed the past, so we are in possession of the far future.’

‘The present? You’re nothing, Bella.’

‘We must have back the time train. You have to surrender it. That is what you have to do, and only that, in order that we become immortal lovers, borne on the storm of ages, like Paolo and Francesca.’

While she said these things and uttered these inhuman promises, she lightly roamed the room, as a tiger might pace.

He watched. She gave no reflection as she passed the mirror on the dressing-table or the glazed map of the British Empire, or any of the pictures which lay behind glass.

He sat on the side of the bed, unable to control his trembling.

‘What does this mean – you possess the future?’

‘No more talk, Joe. Talk’s the human skill. Forget the future when we can together savour the present.’

The dark voice ceased. She unfolded great wings and moved towards him.

Something in her movements woke in Bodenland the promptings of a forgotten dream. All that came back to him was a picture of the thing that had rushed towards him down the corridor of the time train, covering infinite distance with infinite speed. He had time to appreciate the gloomy chamber in which, it seemed, every vertical was ashily outlined by the glare of the gas, caging him into this block of past existence, until the very scent of her, the frisson of her garments, drowned out all other impressions.

She stood by him, over him, as he remained sitting on the side of the bed, arms behind him to prop his torso as he gazed up at her face. The red lips moved and she spoke again.

‘I know of your strength. Eternal life is here if you wish it. Eternal life and eternal love.’

His mouth was almost too dry to speak. He could force no derision into his voice. ‘Forbidden love.’

‘Forbidden by your kind, Joe, not mine.’

And with a great rustle of wings, she embraced him, pressing him into folds of the eiderdown.

Even as his body’s blood flowed thick and heavy with delight, he was also living out a vision. It was antique yet imperishable, like something engraved on stone. It flowed from Bella to him.

Bella’s memory was of what would one day be called Hudson Bay, and a chill part of Canada. Now the clouds rolled back like peeling skin and heat roared like breath. In the fairer climate of seventy million years past, what would be water and ice and drifting floes was all land, bush-speckled savannah or forest. The kneedeep grasses were rich to the teeth of great blundering herbivores – hadrosaurs that grazed by slow-winding rivers, brontosaurs that blundered into the marsh by the rivers.

These and other ornithischians were herded into pens and thorncages by the Fleet Ones, who arrived on wing and foot. They drove their captives, fat with blood and blubber, into the makeshift fields, from which they would be culled.

The savannah fills with their numbers. The beasts lumber and cry. The ground heaves.

The bed heaves. Bodenland cries aloud.

Larry was in an absolute rage. He shook with it. The mortician had said, ‘I don’t think you should take your mother’s death like that, sir. We must show respect for the dead,’ and Larry had brushed the little man aside.

He ran out of the parlour to the sidewalk, cursing and gesticulating. Kylie followed reluctantly, her pretty face pale and drawn.

In the cheerful morning sunlight, the main street of Enterprise was choked with traffic, mainly rubberneckers come to see what was going on at Old John, lured by the news that mankind’s history had been overturned. The cars moved so slowly that both drivers and passengers had plenty of time to watch this man performing on the sidewalk, under the mortician’s sign. Many called insults, thinking they knew a drunk when they saw one.

‘Stop it, Larry, will you?’ Kylie seized his arm. ‘Come on, I’ll drive you back to the motel.’

‘What have I done, Kylie? What have I done? I’m going to hang one on in the nearest bar, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.’

‘No, please … It would be better to pray. Prayer gives you more strength than whisky.’

He appeared not to have heard her.

‘That was my momma lying in there, all white and withered. Stuck in that freezer …’ Tears rolled down his face. ‘Like some little pressed flower she was, her colour all faded …’

‘Larry, darling, I know, I know. It’s terrible. Poor Mina. But getting drunk won’t help it one bit …’

Cajoling, crying herself, Kylie managed to persuade her husband back to the convertible. Wiping her tears, she managed the slow drive to the Moonlite Motel. The management had been insensitive enough to offer them Mina’s old room. No other was available, owing to the unexpected influx of sightseers. They took it. In the hastily cleared room, Kylie found in the waste can a crumpled sheet of notepaper. On it her late mother-in-law had begun a letter. ‘Joe you bastard —’

‘What I fail to understand,’ said Larry, heading straight for the mini-bar, ‘is what this “Premature Ageing” bit means. I don’t trust the Utah doctors – probably bribed by the motel. Hon, go down the corridor and get some ice, will you?’

She stood before him. ‘I love you, Larry, and I need your support. Don’t you see I’m still trembling? But you are like a greedy child. Your parents neglected you, yes, I know, I’ve heard it a million times. So you keep on grabbing, grabbing, just like a baby. You grabbed. Okay, so you want to keep me, so you must stop being a baby and grabbing for these other things.’

‘You ever hear of a baby drinking the old Wild Turkey, hon? I’m never going to get over the death of my mom, because I should have taken better care of her. She loved me. She loved me, Kylie. Something my father never did.’

‘Larry!’ She screamed his name. ‘Please forget about yourself! Worry about what happened to Mina. What the hell are we going to do? All human love has its failings, okay, but Joe does love you, best he knows how. But he’s missing —’

‘I’ll go and get the ice myself, don’t you worry.’ He stood up. ‘You always take Joe’s side. I’m used to that by now, and I’m going to get a drink while you yack, if you must.’

She went over to her suitcase, which lay on the bed. She had opened it without unpacking it. They had checked in only an hour ago and gone straight from the motel to the funeral parlour.

‘I’m yacking no more, husband of mine. I just can’t get through to you. I’ve had enough. I’m off. You quit on me in Hawaii. Now I’m quitting on you in Enterprise, Utah.’

She snapped the suitcase shut. As she made for the door, Larry ran in front of her. Kylie swung the suitcase hard and hit him in the stomach.

Gasping, he made way for her.

When she had gone, Larry walked doubled up to the sofa, making what he could of the pain. After sufficient gasping, he picked up the quart bottle of Wild Turkey he had brought with him in his case. Lifting it high until it gleamed in the light from the window Kylie had opened, he saluted it.

‘Only you and me now, old friend,’ he said.

Later, he staggered out and got himself a hamburger from the Chock Full O’ Nuts next to the Moonlite. Later still, he pulled down the blind at the window to keep out the glare of the sun. Later still, he placed the empty whisky bottle on the window sill and fell into a heavy slumber, snoring with practised ease.

Evening set in. The neon sign blinked outside, registering the minutes. Cars came and went in the parking lot. Larry slept on, uneasy in dream.

It seemed his mother visited him, to stand before him bloodlessly, with red eyes. She cried to him for comfort. She bent over him, her movements, gradual, so as not to startle.

Oh, she whispered, Larry was her dear son – so dear. Now she needed him more than ever.

The evening breeze blew the blind. It flapped inward, striking the empty whisky bottle. It tapped intermittently. The bottle fell to the floor, clattering.

Larry woke in a fright. He sat up, groaning, clutching his head, and looked round the darkened room. ‘Mother?’

He was alone.

The glorious summer’s day bathed the facade of Bram Stoker’s residence. A row of newly planted copper beeches shielding the house from the lane gleamed in the early morning sunshine as if they were copper indeed, newly polished by the housemaid.

The carriage, with its two chestnut horses, stood in the drive before the front door. Stoker emerged, resplendent in top hat, chatting happily. He was followed by Joe Bodenland, walking slowly and saying nothing. His face was lifeless and ashen. Stoker helped him into the carriage.

Mrs Stoker was standing by the herbaceous border, talking to Spinks, the young gardener. She too was dressed in all her finery and, after a minute, came over to the carriage and was assisted aboard by James, the driver.

‘Spinks is worried about the blackspot on the roses,’ she said. ‘And so am I.’

The wheels of the carriage crackled over the gravel as they drove off.

‘The blue flowers in the border are pretty, dear. What are they?’

‘Yes, they’re doing better this year. Lobelia syphilitica. Such a funny name.’

When they turned out of the drive and headed down the hill, the spires and towers of London became visible. The great occasion made both Stoker and his wife nervous. They spent the journey primping each other, brushing away imaginary dust from one another’s clothes, and adjusting their hair. They worried about what they would do while the investiture was taking place. Bodenland sat in his place, somewhat shrunken, speaking only when addressed.

The carriage took them to the splendid rail terminal of Paddington Station, built by one of the Queen’s more ingenious subjects, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. The station master came forward and installed Stoker’s party in a first class carriage.

Stoker sat back, tilted his topper at a rakish angle, and lit a large cigar.

At Windsor, bunting decorated the station and a silver band played. They were met by an equerry of the Queen and escorted in style to the palace, over which the Union Jack flew lazily in the sun.

When their brougham rolled into the yard of the Castle, a clock was chiming a quarter hour after eleven. They were in good time for the investiture at twelve noon. A platoon of household guards was on parade, and a band played lively airs. Mrs Stoker clapped her gloved hands in pleasure.

‘Capital chaps,’ agreed Stoker, nodding towards the uniformed bandsmen. ‘Pity your pater isn’t here to see them, Flo.’

Crowds stared in at the gates, while children waved small paper Union Jacks.

They were assisted ceremoniously from the carriage. Their company was escorted to a reception room, where other celebrated names lounged about in nonchalant attitudes and medals, smoking if possible. Irving himself joined them in a few minutes, and Bodenland was introduced.

Henry Irving walked with a long stride, perhaps to make himself look taller than he was. He had the appearance of a great famished wolf. The hair on his magnificent head was liberally streaked with white, long, and raggedly cut, lending something bohemian to his person. He swung his famous brow towards the assembled company to make sure he was recognized, then turned all his attention to Stoker and his companions.

‘I’m friendly with your compatriot, Mark Twain,’ Irving said. ‘I met him when we were doing our recent tour of America. Very amusing man.’

He sat down next to them and drummed his fingers on his top hat.

‘No chance of a drink here, Henry,’ Stoker said.

But coffee was served in porcelain cups which Mrs Stoker greatly admired. She persevered in admiring everything in sight.

In due time, they were shown into a splendid scarlet reception room. The furnishings consisted of stiff-backed chairs at one end and a plain throne on a dais at the other. Apart from this, a few lavishly framed oils of battle scenes hanging on the walls were the only decoration. In an adjoining room, light music was being played by a quartet.

Queen Victoria was escorted into the room at the far end. She seated herself on the throne without ostentation. She was a small dumpy woman, dressed in black with a blue sash running over one shoulder. She dispensed half-a-dozen knighthoods with a ceremonial sword, displaying nothing that could be interpreted as intense interest in the proceedings. As etiquette decreed, she made no conversation with her newly honoured subjects as they rose from their knees.

It was Irving’s turn. He ascended the three shallow steps and knelt before his Queen. She tapped him on both shoulders with the sword.

‘We were much amused, Sir Henry,’ she said, and smiled.

‘Ooh, she smiled,’ Mrs Stoker whispered in her husband’s ear.

He nodded vigorously.

The playing of the national anthem concluded the ceremony.

Afterwards, as they left the Castle with Irving, the talk was all of the Queen’s smile. There was general agreement that it was wonderful, and that she looked extremely well for her age.

Mrs Stoker turned to Bodenland.

‘You’ve had little to say on this truly memorable occasion, sir. What did you make of it all? A fine tale you’ll have to take back to Mrs Borderland. I warrant you have nothing so impressive in America.’

‘That may be so, madam. We have no royalty in our country, being a republic. All this display you see, this great castle – is it not paid for out of the pockets of the average Britisher? And your Queen – I mean no offence, but is it not the English poor who keep her in luxury?’

‘That’s plain silly, Joe,’ said Stoker. ‘The Queen’s a very spartan lady. Eats almost nothing since the Prince Consort died.’

‘Are you telling us America has no poor?’ said Florence.

‘I didn’t say that, Mrs Stoker. Of course we have poor, but the poor have hope. They may – I use an old-fashioned phrase – raise themselves from log cabin to White House. Whereas I doubt if any of the English poor have ever raised themselves to the throne from Whitechapel.’

‘You look unwell, Mr Borderland,’ said Florence, stiffly.

The ceremony was followed by a grand luncheon, held in the banqueting rooms off Whitehall, and attended by no less a figure than the Prime Minister, Lord Rosebery.

As usual, Bram Stoker had to stay close to Irving, but he came over to his new friend’s side once, to introduce him to Irving’s leading lady, Ellen Terry. Ellen Terry’s brother Fred, also an actor, was with her, but Bodenland was able to spare no glance for him.

Ellen Terry was simply the most beautiful woman he had ever set eyes on. She wore a saffron silk dress, with hand-woven designs consisting of many-coloured threads and little jewels. The dress went with her striking colouring and eyes that – he could only feel it – looked at him and understood him. Bodenland was so overwhelmed by this sensation, entirely new to him, that he was unable to say anything sensible. He remembered afterwards only a certain manner in which she held her head, as if at once proud and modest. He remembered the way her mouth – that delightful mouth – moved, but not what it said.

Then she turned to speak to someone else. In a phrase Bram Stoker used later, Ellen Terry was like embodied sunshine.

But her amiable brother Fred stayed a moment and pointed out some notables to Bodenland as they assembled round the table.

‘That feller with the green lapels to his jacket is a compatriot of yours, Edwin Abbey. Good artist but, being American, won’t end up in the Abbey.’ He laughed at his own joke, treating the whole affair like a kind of horse-race. ‘See whom he’s shaking hands with? That’s the old war horse, Alma Tadema – he’s pipped Henry at the post, he’s already a knight. Wonderful painter, he entirely redesigned the Roman toga for Henry’s Coriolanus … Ah, now, coming up on the straight – see that lady with the turban and the slightly too grand osprey feathers? That’s none other than Mrs Perugini, daughter of the late lamented Charles Dickens, novelist. The serious-looking gent embracing Bram … that’s one of his best friends, Hall Caine – another novelist, happily still with us.

‘Oh, here’s a treat!’ Fred Terry exclaimed, as a wild-looking man with a great streaming head of hair burst into the room and flung his arms about Irving. ‘It’s the Polish musical genius of the age. Paderewski. They’re chums, as you can tell. Quite a romantic chappie, by all accounts.’ Indeed, when the guests were all seated, and before the commencement of the meal, Paderewski was prevailed upon to position himself at the grand piano and play a minuet of his own composition, attacking the keys with as much spirit as if he did so on behalf of the whole Polish people.

After wild applause, the new knight rose and made a speech, also wildly applauded, after which he gave his famous rendering of ‘The Bells’, the dramatic story of a man haunted by the undetected murder he had committed. Tumultuous applause. Ellen Terry sat between Irving and Lord Rosebery, and smiled like an angel.

Then the banquet began.

Enormous amounts of food were supplied by bustling waiters, bearing with aplomb the loaded dishes in and the emptied dishes out. Wine rose in such a tide in cut-glass goblets that men in their dinner jackets grew apoplectic, with cheeks as scarlet as the Bordeaux.

Slightly awed by the gargantuan consumption, Bodenland picked at his food and sipped at his claret. Florence Stoker, seated next to him, regaled him with tales of the Balcombe family.

Evidently she found him unresponsive.

‘Are you one of those men who regards a woman’s conversation as inconsequential?’ she asked, as a towering confection resembling a Mont Blanc built of sponge, brandy, and icing sugar was set before them.

‘On the contrary, ma’am. I wish it were otherwise.’

He could not stop glancing at Ellen Terry; she altered his whole feeling towards the nineteenth century.

When finally they staggered out into the light of a London day, with dim sunlight slanting through the plane trees, it was to be met by a throng of beggars, importuning for food or money.

Taking Bodenland’s elbow, Stoker steered him through the outstretched hands. Bodenland looked with pity on the cadaverous faces, pale but lit with burning eyes, the rags they wore like cerements. He wondered if Stoker had drawn his picture of the Undead from this melancholy company, which swarmed in its thousands through the underworld of London.

Seeing his interest, Stoker stopped and accosted one small lad, bare of legs and feet, who held out a bony hand to them. Picking a coin from his pocket, Stoker asked the boy what he did for a living.

‘I was a pure-finder, guv, following me father’s trade. But times is hard, owing to competition from over the other side. Spare a copper, guv, bless you.’

He got the copper, and made off fast down a side street.

‘What’s a pure-finder?’ Bodenland asked, as they climbed into their carriage.

‘Pure’s dog shit,’ said Stoker, shielding the word from his wife with his topper. ‘The urchin probably works for the tanners over Bermondsey way. They use the shit for tanning leather. I hear it’s a profitable occupation.’

‘The boy was starving.’

‘You can’t go by looks.’

They returned home in the evening. Lights were already on in the house as James led the horses away to the stable.

A great to-do went on in the hall with the removal of outer garments and the fussing of van Helsing, who was anxious to see that the outing had inflicted no harm on his charge. He managed to circumnavigate Stoker twice by the time the latter entered the drawing room and flung himself down in an armchair under the Bronzino.

Stoker tugged vigorously at the bellrope for wine.

‘What a day, to be sure,’ he said. ‘It’s a day of great honour to the whole of the acting profession, no less. Wouldn’t you agree, Joe?’

Joe had gone over to the window to look at the daylight lingering in the garden.

‘How beautiful Ellen Terry is,’ he said, dreamily.

While the manservant was pouring wine, van Helsing ran over to Stoker’s chair and sank down beside it on one knee, somewhat in the attitude Irving had assumed a few hours previously. He rolled up Stoker’s sleeve and administered an injection from a large silver syringe.

Stoker made a face.

‘It’s my friend here who needs your ministry, Van,’ said Stoker. Getting up, he went over to where Bodenland was standing, looking out towards the woods. As Bodenland turned, Stoker saw the two tell-tale marks at his throat, and understood.

‘Better get some iodine, Van. Mr Bodenland cut himself shaving.’ He led Bodenland over to a comfortable chair and made him sit down. After standing looking compassionately down at him, he snapped his fingers. ‘I know what you need.’

In a minute, after probing in the wine cabinet, he brought forth a wine glass full of a red liquid and gave it to Joe.

‘What’s this? Wine?’

‘Laudanum. Do you a power of good and all.’

‘My god … Well, it is 1896 …’ He sipped it slowly and felt some of the lassitude leave him.

‘You should get out of here at once, Joe. You’re a marked man. I know I’ve helped to delay you, but I see now you should make for home on the morrow, sure as eggs are eggs.’

Bodenland stood up, a little shakily. He took a deep breath.

‘I’m okay, or near enough. Allow me to make you a small speech, since you’ve both been so kind and hospitable. Despite my experiences on the way to England – and I’ve hardly dared tell you of the full strangeness of that journey – I have fought with myself to deny the reality of … of vampires. To be honest, I thought they were a fiction invented for the novel you are about to finish. Even when you talked about them, I kind of reckoned you mad. Now I know you’re not mad.’

‘Heaven be praised! It’s myself that’s always thinking I’m mad, or going that way.’

‘And I’m glad of your reassurance, Mr Bodenland,’ said Florence, getting his name right in gratitude.

‘Thanks. Let me finish my speech. Of course I still worry about my wife, Mina, and my family. I can’t resist the intuition that some dreadful thing may have happened to her. But – hell, Bram, after my experience last night I know it would be cowardice to just up and quit now, and go home as if nothing had happened. I let down my old buddy Bernard Clift. Well, I’m not about to let down my new buddy as well. I’m staying, and we’ll fight this foul thing together.’

To his surprise, Stoker flung his arms about him.

‘You’re a dear feller, sure you are.’ He shook Bodenland’s hand warmly. ‘It’s a brave decision you’ve made.’

Mrs Stoker ran up, casting her embroidery hoop on the carpet, and kissed him on the cheek.

‘I don’t want you getting my husband into trouble, now, but you spoke up like a man – like a soldier. We shall drink a sherry now, to toast you.’

‘And we’ll have a cigar,’ said Stoker. ‘At least, I will.’

This response excited Joe into a less lethargic state.

‘We won’t delay. I may be no Christian, but this is a kind of Christian quest.’ As he spoke, he took a New Testament from a side table and waved it aloft as if in proof. ‘We start tomorrow.’

‘And we prepare tonight,’ said Stoker, through his cigar.

When Stoker was out of the room, his wife came to Bodenland’s side.

‘My dear father was full of wisdom – as befitted a man who was a Lieutenant Colonel and served in the Crimea. One thing he told me was that many impossible things happen. The important thing is to decide which impossible things to believe and which not to.’

‘Sound advice, ma’am.’

‘My father’s advice was always sound. I’m undecided as yet about your impossibilities, but I’d like to ask you, if I may – supposing it were somehow possible to venture into the future, as one ventures into London – would I be able to establish if dear Bram’s latest novel will be a success?’ She laughed, as if thinking it was a silly question for a colonel’s daughter to ask.

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