Downtime - Marc Platt [30]
She was just dozing off when there was a disturbance.
From somewhere in the room, she could hear a droning sound, like someone chanting. There was a chorus of indignant shushing. Various researchers were staring across the library in the direction of the droning.
Victoria stood up to see better.
A dishevelled old man was sitting at one of the central tables, a heavy book open in front of him. He had unkempt white hair and a dirty white beard. He was staring blankly ahead as he ran his fingers lightly across the pages of the book. He looked like a blind man reading braille. His chanting was becoming more pronounced, like a hell-fire preacher damning all sinners to the flames.
It was years since she had seen the old man, but she knew him immediately. She went cold as she recognized Professor Edward Travers, late of the Yeti invasion in the London Underground, and further back on her original visit to Det-sen.
And somewhere more recently than that, she was sure...
She intended to wend her way through the academics, but suddenly felt very faint and forced herself to sit down again.
Two attendants were already descending on Professor Travers.
As they tried to remove him, the frail old man picked up a white stick and lashed out wildly with an extraordinary fury.
The weapon caught one attendant on the head with a resounding crack. The second was caught across the stomach and keeled over in agony.
The white stick seemed to lurch to the left, pulling Travers after it. The occupants of the Reading Room fell back to let him pass.
Victoria hauled herself up from her chair and called,
‘Professor Travers’ after him. He faltered, his back to her.
Then he threw back his head in wild unnatural laughter and vanished through the doors.
There were general looks of astonishment. Several people stood round debating what to do and one very hasty person began to help the two attendants.
‘Extraordinary,’ observed a professor with a green bow-tie, who was next to Victoria. ‘I’d say you were absolutely correct.’
‘I’m sorry,’ she said weakly.
‘Travers. Yes, absolutely incredible. Definitely Travers.’
Victoria was feeling faintly nauseous by now.
‘Of course, you’re wrong,’ continued the professor.
‘Couldn’t possibly be him. Ted Travers died...ooh, at least a couple of years ago.’
‘Four years,’ added another professor. ‘Went to the funeral.
Same week that my paper on Etruscan viticulture came out.’
‘Must have been some sort of double then,’ suggested the first. ‘Extraordinary. I wonder what the odds are on that?’
‘Excuse me,’ said Victoria and made her way slowly across to the table where Travers had been sitting.
‘Ah, fascinating stuff,’ commented another academic who was leafing through the yellowing pages of the volume Travers had been reading.
‘What is it?’ asked Victoria.
The script was in symbols resembling Sanskrit. ‘All about the Bardo,’ said the academic. ‘The astral plane. Out-of-body experiences. It’s The Tibetan Book of the Dead. In the original, of course. Do you know it?’
Victoria excused herself from work and went home. When she reached the house, she saw that the hole in the pavement had been filled in. There was now an uneven mound of earth bigger than the hole it had once filled. Someone had stolen the paving stones.
The house was unnaturally quiet with no sign of cats anywhere. All she wanted was to lie down and sleep, but she was frightened of where her uncontrollable dreams might take her. There was something lying on the stairs inside her front door. It glinted in the late afternoon sunlight – a shred of web.
She was too tired to pick it up. She shut the door, only too glad to shut out the world. Once upstairs, she lay down on the ancient settee and tried to sleep.
She could hear the grandfather clock ticking downstairs and the familiar gurgle of the central-heating pipes. Nothing else seemed real. A sudden gust of wind tore copper-coloured leaves from the chestnut tree outside and threw them at the window. Then the wind