Excerpt from THROUGH THE GATES
If, after reading this extract, you'd like to have a look at the whole book, here it is:
http://www.amazon.com/Through-Gates-A...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Through-Gates...
Then Mark heard it. A faint drone, like of a fly or wasp. Wavering and irritating. Then increasing in volume and steadiness. He half-heard a medley of warning voices emanating from the house. He made as if to move away. Tomlinson laughed, and blocked him.
"Are you afraid, Mark?"
"It's...it's a doodlebug..."
Tomlinson laughed again.
The drone was all-pervading now, seeming to fill the whole garden and his head, as if it were about to burst. Then it stopped. Silence. Stillness. The calm before the storm. It would take fifteen seconds. Mark started to count. One. Two. Three. For the first time Tomlinson's face twitched, and his eyes darkened. He turned round, spying out the land. He was looking for a place of shelter. A hole. A ditch. A tree. The baluster. He moved as if to get behind it. To put himself between it and the vegetation and fence. Like an animal instinctively searching out a little cave. A cubby-hole. Seven. Eight. Mark grabbed him and for two seconds Tomlinson's startled body shoved back at him. Ten. Eleven. Mark pushed him away, out in front of the baluster. Thirteen. Fourteen. Mark dived behind it. He felt his heart would burst. His ears detonated. The heavens caved in. The whole world. Its hardness disintegrated. The soil gave way. Solid objects, whether of stone or land, whether man-made or organic, shrivelled away to nothing or buckled. Dirt rained upon him. Hotness and hardness in a succession of smallish shapes hit against him. His face felt scolded. His body on fire. He twisted and turned as the world was rearranged. Thrown up in the air and allowed to fall back and spread out into a new lay-out. With himself included. And all his bits and pieces.
Like watching himself from above, slightly to the right, he found himself scrambling up and about, tentatively stepping forwards, arms outstretched, like a befuddled, barely mobile old git. A blind old git. In a daze, he rubbed his head and eyes. He stared at the world as through a filmy gauze, a vicious distancing ache filling his head. He sniffed, and felt his body was seizing up. All his cavities were blocked. He vaguely sensed a rearranged terrain about him, mounds and flat spaces where they hadn't been, and, straight ahead, a big hole where the V1 had landed.
He tripped up against a flabby heaviness, and stooped down. He turned away in revulsion, retching, with saliva dripping from his mouth and leaking from his nostrils. A tug of wind caught the slimy mess and led it to rest against his cheek, like a hot, dirty kiss.
As his senses returned, he gazed at the smashed fragments of stone around him. Large and small pieces of the baluster lying haphazardly around. And Tomlinson. Or, rather, bits of him. Bloodied sections of limb and torso. A pulped mass of bone and flesh which could have been his head. Scorched flesh. Barbecue smell. A smouldering hotness. No semblance of uniform, or boots. Just here, and further afield as he lifted his head, little piles of him scattered about like dog-shit.
Mark heard voices. Noises from afar. He looked at the house. Leaded windows had been shattered. People would be rushing out soon, once they had checked their own limbs and ear-drums. Mark, still robotic and traumatized, instinctively reached into his pocket and drew out the identity card. He flung it on the ground, right next to a hole that had been ripped out of the paved ground by a piece of careering metal. More or less where he had found it all those years later.
He looked down at his feet. A broken fragment of red tile lay there. He picked it up and tossed it to one side, to nestle amidst dirt and mangled vegetation. He would find that later too. He quickly looked towards the steps. Just below them a paving-stone had been torn from the ground, nowhere to be seen.
He saw himself ambling down the driveway to the gates. He avoided bits of earth and stone and what seemed to him a piece of blackened finger. He got to the gates. He stared at them, stupefied. They were closed. The force of the blast had pushed them back. He didn't know what to do. How could he shut out the past if they were already shut? How could he return to the present? He found himself slowly, unsurely opening them. His head hurt. He felt numb. Unable to register anything. He felt he was being watched. He spun round. He had the feeling she was there. His black-haired young lady. The lady perched on the classroom-desk. A flash of sinewy body and flapping black hair took possession of his mind. The figure moved out of the orb of his vision, like moving out of his garden, beyond the boundaries of his sight and imagination. She vanished. Maybe she had slipped off towards the wood behind the house. Anyway, he had lost her. He felt he had shrunk in size, he was seeing the world from a lower level, he was a boy again in infant school. Bemused, full of wonder and very afraid.
"Is it you?" he cried, or thought he did. "Is it you, Mary? Mary, is it you?"
He was gaping at the opened gates. A gust of air had hit him. He was pushed back slightly, stumbling. The universe closed in on him again. He was enveloped by a dull fuzziness. Wrapped up in a misty whiteness. He sensed strange noises, clattering and shouts, and cracks as of whips, and a whoosh of new smells and indistinct shapes passing before him. He tried to move forward, but couldn't. He found himself turning round and walking up the pathway.
"Good Lord! Is that you, sir?"
He squinted at the short, plumpish lady stood before him. She was dressed in black-and-white garb, her shaped skirt reaching down to near the ground. He rubbed his eyes.
"Oh, it is yourself, Mr Templeton! What a state you are in! You have been in the wars, sir."
She curtseyed in front of him.
"Lordy, we never do know when you are turning up, sir. But, as you have ordered, your room is prepared. And I'll make the hot water ready, sir, so you can have your ablutions."
She curtseyed again, waiting.
"OK," mumbled Mark.
"Sir?"
"Very well," Mark whispered. "Prepare everything."
"Sir," she answered with another curtsey, and turned round to waddle up the pathway.
Mark followed her, feeling extremely tense. As if a hollow had been carved out inside him. He vaguely glimpsed the baluster to his right. Undemolished again. In his peripheral vision, trees and bushes seemed misplaced, overgrown and undergrown in the wrong places. He looked up at the house bobbing up and down before his faltering steps. It looked pristine. New-born. As he had always imagined it had looked at its birth. Not a brick or tile out of place. Gaily-coloured in its constituent stone and brick, a powerful, proud edifice of red, black, orange and brown.
"Just a minute," he called out. "What's your name?"
"But whatever is the matter, sir? It's Mabel...your housekeeper, sir..."
She stood still, slightly lowering her body, deferential and expectant, accustomed to the inexplicable oddities of her betters.
"Who is Prime Minister?" asked Mark.
"Prime Minister, sir?"
"I mean, First Lord of the Treasury, or whatever it is...or was then..."
"Lord...of the...Treasure…" mumbled Mabel, totally bewildered.
"Who is the leader of our government?"
"Why, it's His Lordship, sir."
"His Lordship?"
"Lord Salisbury."
"What year is it?"
"Why, it's 1899, sir...You do love your little games, sir..."
"Move on..." commanded Mark, slowly traipsing after her.
He followed her round into the house, and into its dimness, nodding awkwardly at a young chambermaid who curtseyed hurriedly and self-consciously at him.
"How many servants do I have, Mabel?"
"Just the three, sir. As always. The three what stayed on after you bought the house off Mr Manning. And of course John."
"John?"
"John what helps out with the garden."
"Of course."
He waited for Mabel to prepare his room. He glanced round. The house was totally recognizable, just bits and pieces of furniture were different. Arranged as he had seen in old films or TV series set in that era. Umbrella-stands. Small circular table-stands with metal boxes on them. That sort of thing. A musty smell about the place. He wandered off into the room that would become his study. It already was. The same desk at the far side. Fountain-pens and bottles of ink. Blotting-paper. Other bits of furniture he didn't recognize. A different, plusher carpet. He opened up a few drawers. The deeds of the property. The ones he still had, only newer-looking. He had bought the property from Mr Manning on 15th November 1898. Signed and sealed. Witnessed. He would have to make a note to come back on that day.
One drawer was locked. He rummaged around. He couldn't find a key. Then he realized where it was. He sat there, drumming his fingers and waiting for Mabel to knock on the door. There were some papers detailing the terms of her employment. Not much else.
Once up in his room, as threadbare as it was to remain, with an ancient-looking wardrobe, a table with the wash-basin Mabel had prepared, and a rug or two, Mark waited for her footsteps to die out. He lifted up one of the rugs and prized open the floorboard. There were two keys.
He went to the toilet, and then came back to freshen up. His face had been blackened, his clothes dirtied and rumpled. He wondered what Mabel had made of his strange uniform. There were clothes in the wardrobe. He fingered them for a moment.
Back in his study he opened the drawer. He took out a large metal box. The other key opened it. He gasped. There were notes and coins there. But it was the Kruger ponds and half-ponds, and guineas and sovereigns which really caught his attention. So that was where he had hidden them. There must be a fortune here. He chuckled. Emma and Mr Gorman would never be able to guess.
He quizzed Mabel a bit more. He found out a few things. It seemed he only made sporadic visits, often being absent for months. She ordered clothes for him out of money he provided. She asked him if he was happy with her purchases. He said he was. He handed her over a certain piffling amount there and then to cover expenses and wages. It seemed she often deposited smallish amounts of money for him in his bank account. She giggled at the strange questions he asked her, questions he must have already known the answer to. Although she seemed shorter and squatter, her face reminded him of the bicyclist he had once bumped into and subsequently seemed unable to forget and always be coming across.
He wandered out of the house. The wood was as he remembered. The quadrangle and the driveway sloping down in a curve to Watling Street was a dirty white cement with masses of pebbles and flint-stones embedded in it.
He was exhausted. He had been there a couple of hours at least. He needed to get back to his own time. He needed rest. Time for contemplation. To try to work things out. To make lists.
He gave a start. He'd glimpsed a willowy figure flitting about on the driveway, disappearing round its bend. Or thought he had. He ran forward. It could be her. He pictured her black hair flowing behind her as she sped along, and the suppleness of her young limbs as she moved effortlessly. It must be her. Mary came into his head. He remembered her as she had been when he had met her, still young and nubile, and as she was, still attractive, but greyer and more worn. Beaten down by life. And he felt disturbed.
He was being held back. There was a force he couldn't penetrate. It was like an unseen hand, or a blanket of air pressuring him back. He pushed forward, the breath sucked out of him and his legs weakening and seeming to crumple. He sensed vague shapes again, rearing up at him or passing along his vision, with weird clattering and cries, as before. A tightness gripped his chest, squeezing him more and more like a fist closing round his lungs, ending his life, and any hope there might have been in it. Then there was blackness, and a hard thump on his head.
http://www.amazon.com/Through-Gates-A...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Through-Gates...
http://www.amazon.com/Through-Gates-A...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Through-Gates...
Then Mark heard it. A faint drone, like of a fly or wasp. Wavering and irritating. Then increasing in volume and steadiness. He half-heard a medley of warning voices emanating from the house. He made as if to move away. Tomlinson laughed, and blocked him.
"Are you afraid, Mark?"
"It's...it's a doodlebug..."
Tomlinson laughed again.
The drone was all-pervading now, seeming to fill the whole garden and his head, as if it were about to burst. Then it stopped. Silence. Stillness. The calm before the storm. It would take fifteen seconds. Mark started to count. One. Two. Three. For the first time Tomlinson's face twitched, and his eyes darkened. He turned round, spying out the land. He was looking for a place of shelter. A hole. A ditch. A tree. The baluster. He moved as if to get behind it. To put himself between it and the vegetation and fence. Like an animal instinctively searching out a little cave. A cubby-hole. Seven. Eight. Mark grabbed him and for two seconds Tomlinson's startled body shoved back at him. Ten. Eleven. Mark pushed him away, out in front of the baluster. Thirteen. Fourteen. Mark dived behind it. He felt his heart would burst. His ears detonated. The heavens caved in. The whole world. Its hardness disintegrated. The soil gave way. Solid objects, whether of stone or land, whether man-made or organic, shrivelled away to nothing or buckled. Dirt rained upon him. Hotness and hardness in a succession of smallish shapes hit against him. His face felt scolded. His body on fire. He twisted and turned as the world was rearranged. Thrown up in the air and allowed to fall back and spread out into a new lay-out. With himself included. And all his bits and pieces.
Like watching himself from above, slightly to the right, he found himself scrambling up and about, tentatively stepping forwards, arms outstretched, like a befuddled, barely mobile old git. A blind old git. In a daze, he rubbed his head and eyes. He stared at the world as through a filmy gauze, a vicious distancing ache filling his head. He sniffed, and felt his body was seizing up. All his cavities were blocked. He vaguely sensed a rearranged terrain about him, mounds and flat spaces where they hadn't been, and, straight ahead, a big hole where the V1 had landed.
He tripped up against a flabby heaviness, and stooped down. He turned away in revulsion, retching, with saliva dripping from his mouth and leaking from his nostrils. A tug of wind caught the slimy mess and led it to rest against his cheek, like a hot, dirty kiss.
As his senses returned, he gazed at the smashed fragments of stone around him. Large and small pieces of the baluster lying haphazardly around. And Tomlinson. Or, rather, bits of him. Bloodied sections of limb and torso. A pulped mass of bone and flesh which could have been his head. Scorched flesh. Barbecue smell. A smouldering hotness. No semblance of uniform, or boots. Just here, and further afield as he lifted his head, little piles of him scattered about like dog-shit.
Mark heard voices. Noises from afar. He looked at the house. Leaded windows had been shattered. People would be rushing out soon, once they had checked their own limbs and ear-drums. Mark, still robotic and traumatized, instinctively reached into his pocket and drew out the identity card. He flung it on the ground, right next to a hole that had been ripped out of the paved ground by a piece of careering metal. More or less where he had found it all those years later.
He looked down at his feet. A broken fragment of red tile lay there. He picked it up and tossed it to one side, to nestle amidst dirt and mangled vegetation. He would find that later too. He quickly looked towards the steps. Just below them a paving-stone had been torn from the ground, nowhere to be seen.
He saw himself ambling down the driveway to the gates. He avoided bits of earth and stone and what seemed to him a piece of blackened finger. He got to the gates. He stared at them, stupefied. They were closed. The force of the blast had pushed them back. He didn't know what to do. How could he shut out the past if they were already shut? How could he return to the present? He found himself slowly, unsurely opening them. His head hurt. He felt numb. Unable to register anything. He felt he was being watched. He spun round. He had the feeling she was there. His black-haired young lady. The lady perched on the classroom-desk. A flash of sinewy body and flapping black hair took possession of his mind. The figure moved out of the orb of his vision, like moving out of his garden, beyond the boundaries of his sight and imagination. She vanished. Maybe she had slipped off towards the wood behind the house. Anyway, he had lost her. He felt he had shrunk in size, he was seeing the world from a lower level, he was a boy again in infant school. Bemused, full of wonder and very afraid.
"Is it you?" he cried, or thought he did. "Is it you, Mary? Mary, is it you?"
He was gaping at the opened gates. A gust of air had hit him. He was pushed back slightly, stumbling. The universe closed in on him again. He was enveloped by a dull fuzziness. Wrapped up in a misty whiteness. He sensed strange noises, clattering and shouts, and cracks as of whips, and a whoosh of new smells and indistinct shapes passing before him. He tried to move forward, but couldn't. He found himself turning round and walking up the pathway.
"Good Lord! Is that you, sir?"
He squinted at the short, plumpish lady stood before him. She was dressed in black-and-white garb, her shaped skirt reaching down to near the ground. He rubbed his eyes.
"Oh, it is yourself, Mr Templeton! What a state you are in! You have been in the wars, sir."
She curtseyed in front of him.
"Lordy, we never do know when you are turning up, sir. But, as you have ordered, your room is prepared. And I'll make the hot water ready, sir, so you can have your ablutions."
She curtseyed again, waiting.
"OK," mumbled Mark.
"Sir?"
"Very well," Mark whispered. "Prepare everything."
"Sir," she answered with another curtsey, and turned round to waddle up the pathway.
Mark followed her, feeling extremely tense. As if a hollow had been carved out inside him. He vaguely glimpsed the baluster to his right. Undemolished again. In his peripheral vision, trees and bushes seemed misplaced, overgrown and undergrown in the wrong places. He looked up at the house bobbing up and down before his faltering steps. It looked pristine. New-born. As he had always imagined it had looked at its birth. Not a brick or tile out of place. Gaily-coloured in its constituent stone and brick, a powerful, proud edifice of red, black, orange and brown.
"Just a minute," he called out. "What's your name?"
"But whatever is the matter, sir? It's Mabel...your housekeeper, sir..."
She stood still, slightly lowering her body, deferential and expectant, accustomed to the inexplicable oddities of her betters.
"Who is Prime Minister?" asked Mark.
"Prime Minister, sir?"
"I mean, First Lord of the Treasury, or whatever it is...or was then..."
"Lord...of the...Treasure…" mumbled Mabel, totally bewildered.
"Who is the leader of our government?"
"Why, it's His Lordship, sir."
"His Lordship?"
"Lord Salisbury."
"What year is it?"
"Why, it's 1899, sir...You do love your little games, sir..."
"Move on..." commanded Mark, slowly traipsing after her.
He followed her round into the house, and into its dimness, nodding awkwardly at a young chambermaid who curtseyed hurriedly and self-consciously at him.
"How many servants do I have, Mabel?"
"Just the three, sir. As always. The three what stayed on after you bought the house off Mr Manning. And of course John."
"John?"
"John what helps out with the garden."
"Of course."
He waited for Mabel to prepare his room. He glanced round. The house was totally recognizable, just bits and pieces of furniture were different. Arranged as he had seen in old films or TV series set in that era. Umbrella-stands. Small circular table-stands with metal boxes on them. That sort of thing. A musty smell about the place. He wandered off into the room that would become his study. It already was. The same desk at the far side. Fountain-pens and bottles of ink. Blotting-paper. Other bits of furniture he didn't recognize. A different, plusher carpet. He opened up a few drawers. The deeds of the property. The ones he still had, only newer-looking. He had bought the property from Mr Manning on 15th November 1898. Signed and sealed. Witnessed. He would have to make a note to come back on that day.
One drawer was locked. He rummaged around. He couldn't find a key. Then he realized where it was. He sat there, drumming his fingers and waiting for Mabel to knock on the door. There were some papers detailing the terms of her employment. Not much else.
Once up in his room, as threadbare as it was to remain, with an ancient-looking wardrobe, a table with the wash-basin Mabel had prepared, and a rug or two, Mark waited for her footsteps to die out. He lifted up one of the rugs and prized open the floorboard. There were two keys.
He went to the toilet, and then came back to freshen up. His face had been blackened, his clothes dirtied and rumpled. He wondered what Mabel had made of his strange uniform. There were clothes in the wardrobe. He fingered them for a moment.
Back in his study he opened the drawer. He took out a large metal box. The other key opened it. He gasped. There were notes and coins there. But it was the Kruger ponds and half-ponds, and guineas and sovereigns which really caught his attention. So that was where he had hidden them. There must be a fortune here. He chuckled. Emma and Mr Gorman would never be able to guess.
He quizzed Mabel a bit more. He found out a few things. It seemed he only made sporadic visits, often being absent for months. She ordered clothes for him out of money he provided. She asked him if he was happy with her purchases. He said he was. He handed her over a certain piffling amount there and then to cover expenses and wages. It seemed she often deposited smallish amounts of money for him in his bank account. She giggled at the strange questions he asked her, questions he must have already known the answer to. Although she seemed shorter and squatter, her face reminded him of the bicyclist he had once bumped into and subsequently seemed unable to forget and always be coming across.
He wandered out of the house. The wood was as he remembered. The quadrangle and the driveway sloping down in a curve to Watling Street was a dirty white cement with masses of pebbles and flint-stones embedded in it.
He was exhausted. He had been there a couple of hours at least. He needed to get back to his own time. He needed rest. Time for contemplation. To try to work things out. To make lists.
He gave a start. He'd glimpsed a willowy figure flitting about on the driveway, disappearing round its bend. Or thought he had. He ran forward. It could be her. He pictured her black hair flowing behind her as she sped along, and the suppleness of her young limbs as she moved effortlessly. It must be her. Mary came into his head. He remembered her as she had been when he had met her, still young and nubile, and as she was, still attractive, but greyer and more worn. Beaten down by life. And he felt disturbed.
He was being held back. There was a force he couldn't penetrate. It was like an unseen hand, or a blanket of air pressuring him back. He pushed forward, the breath sucked out of him and his legs weakening and seeming to crumple. He sensed vague shapes again, rearing up at him or passing along his vision, with weird clattering and cries, as before. A tightness gripped his chest, squeezing him more and more like a fist closing round his lungs, ending his life, and any hope there might have been in it. Then there was blackness, and a hard thump on his head.
http://www.amazon.com/Through-Gates-A...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Through-Gates...
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