No True Echo Read online

  ‘Too bright,’ said Ruby.

  I cleaned up the glass, then carefully tipped it into the bin and sat down at the kitchen table with the photograph. All my life, this picture had been my only window into the past. I knew every detail of it, from the watchstrap on my mother’s wrist to the missing button on her dungarees. I stared at that closed green door – not of some far-flung holiday cottage but of an old farmhouse right here in the valley. Finally, I had stepped into this picture, so why was I even more confused than before?

  Ruby joined me in the kitchen and looked at the photograph in my hand. ‘Sorry, lad. I had one of my moments.’

  ‘You always said you didn’t know where it was taken,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. Maybe she was on holiday.’

  ‘Who with?’

  ‘Oh, Eddie, I can’t remember.’ Ruby held her hand to her temple to show that I was giving her a headache.

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘Please … ’

  ‘You have one photo of your daughter. Just one. And you don’t know where it was taken or who took it.’

  ‘Photographs aren’t real. They only show —’

  ‘What things look like on the outside,’ I interrupted. ‘Except that’s not true. This shows more. I’m on the inside in this picture. You can’t see me but you know I’m there. You also know that there must be someone holding the camera. Who is she smiling at? Who took it?’

  ‘I’m sorry, Eddie. I can’t do this now. Not today.’ She turned to leave.

  ‘I’ve been there. I’ve seen this door.’ I could feel the anger simmering inside of me.

  She stopped but avoided my gaze. ‘Was he there?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. Don’t go back, please.’

  ‘Why? Who lives there?’

  ‘There’s nothing for you there. I imagine he’s moved now, anyway.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘No one important.’

  ‘Who?’

  Tense music played from the living room as a contestant reached the final sudden-death round.

  ‘Please stay away from there,’ said Ruby. ‘Please. For me.’

  ‘Who lives there?’

  ‘I can’t … ’

  ‘What was his name?’

  I had lived through enough of Ruby’s down days to know how to make her answer. Once my insistent nagging had worked its way inside her head and become a part of the pain that was already there, she would do anything to make it stop.

  ‘His name is David Maguire. He was your mother’s lecturer at university, but that was a long time ago. Can we drop this now? It’s history.’

  ‘You say that like history doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Of course it matters, but there’s nothing we can do about it.’ Ruby sighed. ‘I understand that you want to find something else. I know ours is not much of a life. Maybe we’ll do better next time, eh, lad? But you won’t find any solutions buried in the past.’

  She walked back to watch the end of the quiz show, leaving me alone with my thoughts.

  The Time Particle

  I unplugged the phone before leaving the house because, although I was wearing my uniform and carrying my bag, I had no intention of catching the bus that morning and I didn’t want Ruby to worry when the school called home.

  It felt good to take matters into my own hands. If I had to relive this day, I would do it on my own terms. I had slept badly the previous night, having been kept awake by my endlessly spiralling thoughts. I cycled up the hill, losing myself to the turn of the wheels, the coldness of the rain, and the burning of my leg muscles. I took the same route to the farmhouse that I had taken with Scarlett. As I wheeled my bike along the muddy path, it struck me that Scarlett had said there was probably a better way to get there, but it was too late to turn back.

  At the end of the field I found a safer way down. I was in no rush this time. My head was filled with the dark, bloodstained memory of the last time I had been there, but how could you remember something that was yet to happen?

  I stopped outside the door. The rain was still coming down hard so I had to be careful taking out the photograph from the book. I held it up but I didn’t need proof. I knew it was the same one. The photographer had stood on the other side of the stream, while my mother squinted in the sunlight. It was such a stark contrast to the dark skies above me that it felt like another world entirely.

  I knocked on the door.

  ‘Who is it?’ shouted a voice.

  It was a simple enough question, but what was my answer?

  ‘My name’s Eddie,’ I said.

  ‘If you are here to sell something, I’m not interested.’

  ‘I think you knew my mother, Melody Dane.’

  There was a pause, followed by the voice saying, ‘Hold on.’

  I heard locks being unlocked and bolts sliding to the side. When the door opened, it caught on the uneven floorboard.

  ‘Give it a push, will you?’

  I pushed and the door swung open to reveal a messy-haired man wearing a white lab coat. I had seen him before, only the last time he had been lying on the floor, dead. Very much alive now, his keen eyes narrowed with interest as he inspected me.

  ‘You’re Melody’s son?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I replied.

  There was something unnerving about the way he looked at me. In spite of the rain, he didn’t ask me in.

  ‘Are you David Maguire?’ I asked.

  ‘Er, yes … ’

  I showed him the photograph. ‘Did you take this?’

  He stared at it for a couple of seconds, then nodded, although I had to wonder if he was responding to me, or to some other unheard question. ‘Why are you here?’ he asked.

  ‘Can I come in?’ I said.

  He moved out of the way and I stepped into the room full of books. I placed the photograph back between the pages of Frankenstein and dropped it into my bag.

  ‘You taught Melody at university,’ I said.

  ‘Yes, your mother was very bright. The brightest. Her death was, well, it was unfortunate.’ He bent down to pick up one of the clear plastic mousetraps and check whether it had caught anything. Finding it empty, he placed it back on the floor.

  ‘Can I ask what you do here?’ I said.

  ‘Nothing you could possibly understand,’ he replied. ‘Sorry, why are you here?’

  ‘I’ve been here before,’ I said.

  ‘I know. She brought you here as a child.’

  ‘I don’t mean that,’ I began. ‘Hold on, I thought Melody dropped out of university after she had me. Why would she come here?’

  ‘She came here to help out with my project, but this is all a very long time ago. I fail to see what it has to do with anything.’

  ‘The last time I came here was next Saturday,’ I said.

  Maguire looked at me with curiosity. ‘Next Saturday?’

  ‘I can’t explain it, but I’ve lived through this day.’

  ‘Oh I see,’ said Maguire. ‘This is a joke, is it?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’m afraid you have got the wrong end of the stick, young man. I may tick all the boxes required for a crazy rogue scientist inventing a time machine but you have obviously failed to grasp the complexity of my work here.’

  ‘Your work?’

  I followed Maguire into the lab, careful this time to avoid the stacks of books as I entered the brightly lit room filled with computer screens and scientific equipment.

  ‘What is all this stuff?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s a particle accelerator,’ he replied. ‘It isolates subatomic particles and enables me to manipulate them. It has been built with the specific purpose of studying the time particle, which is presumably the reason for your time-travel joke.’

  ‘What’s a time particle?’

  ‘To answer that, you must first ask what is time.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Of cours
e you don’t. Physicists have wrestled with this question for many years. The general belief is that time is a dimension that we travel through, but this is incorrect. Time is a force that acts upon us, like gravity. It is a physical law that we must obey and the things that govern that relationship are known as time particles. They exist within us and all around us. They regulate our relationship with time, ensuring that we move forward at a constant rate.’

  I was trying to keep up but Maguire didn’t seem especially interested in whether I was following or not.

  ‘Seconds, minutes, hours, days, months and years are the measurements we use for time, created in accordance with the specific movements of our planet and sun. The time particle, however, is not unique to our position in the galaxy. It is a universal necessity. It is a requirement for existence, just as water is a prerequisite for life.’

  ‘So what’s it look like?’

  ‘It doesn’t look like anything. We are talking about something so small it couldn’t be seen even with the most powerful magnification. This equipment enables me to monitor these particles, not see them. It stands to reason, you see, that if the time particle can be isolated, it can be manipulated, and thus our relationship with time can be altered.’

  ‘But aren’t you talking about time travel?’

  ‘No, I am not,’ he snapped.

  ‘But —’

  ‘Let me explain it.’ Maguire grabbed a clipboard and blank piece of paper. He drew a line. ‘Look. We know that time moves in one direction, which is why we remember the past but we do not remember the future. In that sense, we are all travelling through time, because we are travelling forward at a constant rate governed by the time particle. To travel backwards, however, would involve moving to an earlier point.’ He drew a loop to indicate this.

  ‘Yes, exactly —’

  ‘But the very act of making this jump would necessarily cause a split in the timeline.’ He drew a second line coming off the first that connected with the loop. ‘However, the first line would also have to remain for the jump to be possible. This would involve the duplication of every molecule in the universe, creating at least two separate strands of existence. There is no evidence to suggest that this is possible.’

  He hastily scribbled over the lines, tore the paper off the clipboard, screwed it up and threw it away.

  ‘So what is all this stuff for, then?’

  ‘The isolation of the time particle will enable an alteration of our relationship with time.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Imagine if you could slow down time so that a second lasted an hour or speed it up so that a day vanished in the blink of eye. Time particle acceleration will change how we experience time, much in the same way that the invention of the steam train or air travel altered our relationship with distance. The development of faster transportation made the world a smaller place. My invention will do the same for time. We will be able to control time.’

  ‘But what’s all this got to do with my mother?’

  ‘Melody was instrumental in the formation of this idea. She believed in me when others did not. If she had lived, I have no doubt she would have remained involved with this project. I owe her a great debt, and finally, after many years, I am almost at the point of completion.’

  ‘You mean you can now slow down time?’ I said.

  ‘Any day now. What a coincidence that you should show up now at the final stages of the project your mother helped start, but I suppose it was inevitable that you would turn up at some point.’

  ‘Inevitable how?’

  He didn’t answer the question, instead finding a computer screen that required his urgent attention.

  ‘Look, I’m not very good at this sort of thing. Feelings and … you know … emotions.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ I asked.

  ‘What has Ruby told you?’ he said.

  ‘Very little except to stay away.’

  ‘She said the same to me. She made it very clear after your mother’s death that I was not welcome. I suppose she blamed me.’

  ‘Blamed you? For what?’

  ‘For Melody’s death. It was my car she was driving, you see, and if we hadn’t argued, she would never have been out on such a stormy night. Perhaps Ruby was right to hold me responsible.’

  ‘I thought her argument was with Ruby.’

  ‘Your mother was capable of arguing with more than one person at a time. She was very intelligent but she was not the easiest of people.’

  ‘What were you arguing about?’ I asked.

  ‘I told her that she should go back and finish her degree, that she shouldn’t let a child get in the way of her career. She thought I was … ’ Maguire looked at me and his words faded away. ‘Anyway, she shouldn’t have been driving that night. Especially not with a child in the back. It was typically irresponsible of her.’

  ‘What child?’

  ‘You, of course,’ he said plainly. ‘Oh, you didn’t know? I’m sorry. I did tell you that I’m not much good at this sort of thing.’

  Temporal Coma

  I didn’t understand why Ruby had lied to me, but Maguire was not especially interested in the subject. He busied himself in the lab, apparently unaware of the impact of his words on me. There was something strangely detached about the man. Hearing a noise in the other room, he dashed out, only to return with a mouse trapped inside one of the clear plastic boxes. He placed it on a wooden chair and pointed a huge telescope-like thing at it. He then adjusted a few dials, checked all of the monitors and made several notes on his clipboard, all the time muttering to himself.

  ‘What are you going to do to the mouse?’ I asked.

  ‘You’re not one of those animal rights people, are you?’ he said.

  ‘No, but —’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Are you going to hurt it?’

  ‘I have no reason to believe that the process will have any effect on its nerve endings. I’ll be altering its time perception, so no, it shouldn’t experience any pain. I will be isolating its governing time particles in order to alter its time perception.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Rodent testing is necessary for me to ensure that all aspects are taken into account before I move on to the first human experiment.’

  ‘But why mess about with time, anyway? What’s the point?’

  He paused to consider this as though it was a strange question. ‘The furtherance of science, primarily,’ he said, ‘but one can perceive of practical applications. Imagine if you could, I don’t know, dodge a bullet, or have more time to stop the spread of a disease before it became an epidemic. Millions of lives could be saved. Oh, the camera. I almost forgot the camera.’ He darted back out and returned with a small video camera, which he attached to a wobbly tripod. He aimed the camera at the mouse and fiddled to get it into focus.

  It was the same camera and chair that I had seen on my previous visit. The mouse desperately and hopelessly searched for a way out of the trap, while Maguire made a few final adjustments.

  ‘The accelerator will first isolate our subject’s governing time particles,’ he said.

  He flicked various switches. I was half expecting a flash of lightning or a huge laser beam to shoot from the end but, instead, the machine made a slightly louder buzzing noise and the mouse quivered in fear.

  ‘Look here.’ Maguire pointed at a computer screen full of white dots. Every few seconds the screen refreshed, showing the dots had moved. ‘Each one of those dots represents a time particle,’ he said. ‘I will now establish which of these control the rodent’s temporal movement.’

  The machine beeped and Maguire spent several minutes scribbling down things on his piece of paper. ‘Yes. Got them.’

  He went back to the main machine and typed a few numbers. ‘Having isolated them, we now accelerate the time particles.’

  ‘You mean, you make them go faster?’

  He looked annoyed by the question. ‘No. We are essentially c
opying particles, then firing them back at themselves. Without a PhD in particle physics you stand very little chance of understanding this. Even with one, you’d struggle. Now, please be quiet.’

  The telescope-like thing moved closer to the petrified mouse.

  ‘Isn’t the plastic in the way?’ I asked.

  Maguire shook his head. ‘I am dealing with things a million times smaller than an atom. Now, watch what happens to the rodent when its time particles are accelerated.’

  One of the machines made a kind of ticking noise, and the mouse went rigid and keeled over.

  ‘You’ve killed it!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘No,’ said Maguire. ‘He’s not dead. This monitor is measuring the mouse’s heartbeat. Normally that would be around six hundred and seventy beats per minute, but this little rodent’s rate has slowed down to the speed of a blue whale’s.’

  Peering closely, I could see that the mouse’s eyes were wide open.

  ‘What’s happening to him?’

  ‘His perception of time is being altered. He’s in what I’ve been calling a temporal coma. The problem, of course, is that I can’t ask him what he is experiencing, which is why I need to move on and test it on myself.’

  The rigid mouse was a horrific sight. ‘You’re going to do that to yourself?’

  ‘Once all the teething problems have been eradicated, yes.’

  ‘What problems?’

  A machine beeped. ‘Watch. He’s about to come out of the coma. This bit is fascinating.’

  The mouse twitched, and very suddenly began to move. It ran around the inside of the trap, making a terrible high-pitched squealing noise, then suddenly scrunched up into a ball.

  ‘Has it gone back into the coma?’ I asked.

  ‘No. It’s dead now,’ said Maguire.

  ‘I thought you said you weren’t going to hurt it.’

  ‘I didn’t hurt it, but the process is not properly refined yet. The mice are still experiencing some kind of brain overload which kills them the moment they return to their originating point in time.’

  ‘So you’ve killed lots of mice’

  He sighed. ‘These rodents are dying in the name of science. We all should hope for such a noble death.’