Downtime - Marc Platt [31]
‘ Victoria, ’ whispered a voice.
Something moved downstairs.
‘Mmm?’ she murmured, only half awake.
‘ Victoria! ’
She was wide awake. It was nearly dark outside.
‘ I need you, Victoria. You promised you would help. You came to me... ’
She sat tightly on the settee, unsure if the voice was real or only in her head. ‘What do you want?’
‘ ...so I have come to you. ’
‘Where are you?’
‘ Here. Waiting. ’
She rose and went to the door that led down to Mrs Cywynski’s flat. It was open. She could barely see down into the hall below. A cold draught was coming up out of the darkness to meet her, carrying the smell of mustiness with it.
Everything was slow and smooth, like a dream she had dreamed a hundred times before. She turned away and walked into the kitchen. In a drawer, she found a candle and lit it from the gas cooker. Then she went back to the door and started down the stairs.
The candle flame flickered in the draught. Its glow caught on swathes of web that hung from the hall lamp and draped across the windows and walls. The candle guttered and went out.
An ashen light was seeping into the hall. It came from deeper within the house. Victoria reached the foot of the stairs.
At the end of the passage, the door to Mrs Cywynski’s ‘shrine’
was ajar. The unnatural light came from within. She advanced slowly and pushed at the door.
The room was filled with trophies for golf and bowls tournaments. On the sideboard, there were photographs of Mrs Cywynski and a man who must have been her Andrzej. His pipe was set there with the tobacco tin he had kept since the war. They were all covered in web.
Across the room, in a high-backed leather chair, his stick at his side, sat the old man from the Reading Room. His face was curiously young for someone so long dead. But it was not alive, it was animated. The head twitched up at her and he gave a strange cry, half moan, half laughter.
When she saw his watery eyes, staring blind through the cracked lenses of his spectacles, all her other thoughts and fears fell away from her. Charles Bryce, Roxana Cywynski, St John Byle, the Harrises, the cats, Jamie, the Doctor. She would not forget the past, but she must look to the future. She had made her promise to him, travelled to find him and release him. Her leap of faith was complete. She had things to do. A new world to discover. And there would be things he could teach her too.
She took his frail hand, icy against her own, and let him run his dead man’s fingers over the contours of her face.
‘Yes. Yes, you understand,’ he croaked, a smile beginning to twitch at the sides of his mouth. ‘It begins here.’
She smiled gratefully and said, ‘Welcome home, Professor Travers.’
5
Geneva.
Deadline: The Intermediate Future
oddammit, Bonderev! What the hell’s going on?’
‘G ‘I think the machines are winning, sir.’
‘What’s that?’ The face-shape on the phone-screen was in New York, but the interference scrambling the definition could be coming from anywhere between the States and Geneva via the UNIT ComSat over the Atlantic. ‘We have a Level Nine security breach, mister. There’s someone in your system. And it’s taken a whole half-hour to speak to you. I e-mailed you four times. And your fax has a communication error.’
Major Semyon Bonderev glanced across the Comms Centre. In the dimmed emergency lighting, he could see a fax machine sitting smugly in a tidal wave of spewed blank paper.
‘Sorry, sir. Nothing’s responding to us. But we’re working on it. I’ll be...’ He hit the ‘hold’ tab, hoping that New York Ops hadn’t seen, and then hung up. Then he tapped up his second line, answered its incoming call and left both phones to talk to each other. He sat back, pulled on the stub of his Turkish cigarette and tried to access the Overview System.
The terminal froze again as it checked for trojans and variants. Seconds later, the screen went green and hundreds of tiny glyphs began to can-can cheekily across the surface.
Bonderev pinched the skin at the bridge of his nose tightly.
There was a little red