CAT SPARKS
Cat Sparks runs Agog! Press. She is also a writer, graphic designer, photographer and desktop publisher. In 2004 she was a graduate of the inaugural Clarion South Writers’ Workshop in Queensland.
Cat lives in Wollongong with her partner, author Robert Hood. Highlights of her career so far include: winning a trip to Paris in a Bulletin Magazine photography competition; being appointed official photographer for two NSW Premiers; working as photographer on three archaeological expeditions to Jordan, and winning seven DITMAR awards. She was a third place winner in Writers of the Future, 2004, and was awarded the Aurealis Peter McNamara Conveners Award in 2001.
“Home by the Sea’ was inspired by a green shack glimpsed during a walk along Mollymook Reach with friends.
* * * *
First impressions are everything—all veterans of the Pontoon Wall know that. But Jade was astonished when he first caught sight of the beach: the luxury and the waste of it, a broad expanse of golden sand, empty of everything, even footprints. So the stories he’d heard about Hemingway’s were true: the hotel actually existed and he had finally found it.
Jade appraised what he could see of the rest of the island from the prow of the ship. The top storey and terracotta roof of Hemingway’s poked out from a cluster of verdant foliage. He knew there would be other buildings hidden in the greenery.
Behind him, shouts of the crew filled the air as the ship prepared to dock, creating a pleasant ambience, a backdrop to his thoughts. He closed his eyes, heard the gentle thump of rope against the deck, felt the foam spraying his face as the vessel pulled alongside the jetty.
He thrust his hands into his pockets in a well-practised, casual manner, dipped his head, seductively flicking a lock of hair from his eyes. A party of six stood waiting: five military officers and a lady in an ankle-length red silk dress. The sailors opened the boarding gate, laid the plank across the gap and began unloading burlap sacks under the watchful eye of a uniformed man with a clipboard.
Jade smiled across the water at the lady. It was her. Contessa Bonnefort. Tess. Already, he had determined many things about her from the way she stood, her weight balanced on one hip, the way she brushed stray wisps of hair from her face. Jade sized her up—what she might like and what she would not, imagining the sounds she’d make when they made love.
Before the last of the sacks were off the deck he’d evaluated that ordinarily, someone like him could expect two years maximum in her service, after which the lady would be bored, and he would walk into her living space one day to find her casually flipping through the images in Mr Orlando’s offshore catalogue in search of something fresh. But of course, there wouldn’t be time for any of that.
He was the last piece of cargo unloaded before the sailors withdrew the plank. The lady’s eyes twinkled as her hand reached out to clasp his.
“Jade. What a lovely name!”
“My lady,” he replied, bowing. It was important to appear humble at all times with land people. “It is an honour.”
“Nonsense,” she said, lowering her eyes. “Tell me, is this your first time onground?”
“Yes.”
“I just know you’ll be happy here,” she gushed, looping her arm through his. “Shall we walk along the beach and get to know each other?”
The stillness of dry land made him queasy as he walked, but he knew he’d get used to it in a couple of hours.
“I am Contessa Bonnefort.” She smiled broadly. “Everyone calls me Tess.”
They strode arm in arm across the glistening sand. Jade’s overwhelming urge was to break free of the lady’s grasp and run, but he controlled it. There would be time enough for running once he’d established himself here. Above, Hemingway’s nestled into the jungle landscape. Jade heard the sailors’ cries carrying across the water. He didn’t look back.
The contessa prattled on about things he knew nothing of. Jade listened only for the change in her tone, a marker to indicate when he would be expected to comment. Pretending to be shy would see him through the first few hours. His sharp instinct for survival would help him negotiate the rest.
She stopped walking suddenly, raised her free hand to cup the side of his face.
“You’re so beautiful,” she said. “Such perfect skin. And Jade’s such a gorgeous name, unusual for a boy.”
“It’s ancestral, handed down from grandfather to father to son,” he lied. Back home, he’d been referred to as ‘Boy’ since birth, following sixth in a line of girl-children. He’d never met his father. Old Willie had been his only real father. His mother had put him up on the Pontoon Wall on his tenth birthday. Old Willie had taken him down, rescued him before too much damage was done, taught him how to survive, prepared him for the future.
“What a beautiful tradition!” said Contessa Bonnefort. “You’re going to look so perfect in the clothes I’ve chosen for you.”
She led him further along the beach, then back along a winding jungle path right up to the old stone steps of Hemingway’s. She waved excitedly at two women giggling on an upstairs balcony.
“Yoo hoo, Marlene, Madolyn, darlings. Look what the tide brought in.”
Jade stared out across the ocean. The gulls here were different from the ones he knew from home—sleeker and fatter, as were the people on this island. He watched a bird dip and soar on an updraft as the sun set. A metallic glint on the horizon caught his eye, probably nothing more than the hull of a motorboat, but for a second he thought he could see another island close to this one—another secret place in a billion miles of ocean.
* * * *
“We do have visitors, of course, but not as many as we’d like,” said the contessa, leading him through a foyer filled with wicker chairs and potted plants. People strolled or stood about in idle groups, leaning against furniture, smoking pipes. Everyone turned a head to stare at the stranger. Jade noted their soft skin, unchapped by the ravages of salt and wind. Their decorative, impractical clothes, hands free of calluses. Was this island so bountiful that food dropped from the trees without the need for harvesting and cultivation? It was so much more than he’d imagined, more exotic than he’d pictured all these years.
“Cruise is here, although he doesn’t leave his bungalow often these days… and see that woman over there in the purple lace? That’s Nina Gallant. You’ve probably seen her movies on TV.” The Contessa paused. “You do have TV where you come from?”
Jade nodded. Every pontoon slum sported its own tangle of aerials. There’d been a faded image of Nina Gallant taped to the wall in his section’s kitchen, torn from an old glossy magazine. Beside it, a picture of the Blessed Virgin, and beside that a photograph in a chipped gilt frame. The photograph showed a valley bordered by grassy hills, carpeted with wildflowers of every imaginable colour—pretty, useless flowers that bore no fruit, as wasteful as the potted plants in this hotel foyer, each taking up the space of a man and requiring almost as much fresh water. He tuned back in to the contessa’s monologue.
“… haven’t been any new ones since The Rise. But the talent’s here in abundance —” She made a sweeping gesture of the foyer. “The equipment too, I believe, but we haven’t got a film crew. Although I suppose we could make use of the soldiers. It’d be a decent break for them, away from those wretched experiments. And then I suppose we’d need some writers, too. Should have thought of that before, only there just wasn’t the room, you see. We do have writers, of course, but they’re the literary kind, not the motion picture ones.”
Suddenly the ground trembled, and a sonic boom echoed throughout the room. Jade braced himself against the lurching floor, an empty ache of anticipation beginning in his stomach. The contessa paused mid-sentence, catching his disquiet.
“Ignore that, darling. It’s just the soldiers below, testing that silly gun of theirs. I hardly even notice it any more.”
She looped her arm through his and led him deeper through the foyer to the foot of a giant marble staircase. Jade’s mind raced at the thought of soldiers below. He could sense the military presence around him, uniforms mingled with the jewels and satins.
“But you must be exhausted from your journey. I’ll show you to your room so you can freshen up and dress for dinner.”
* * * *
He decided he would never get used to the space, to walking down a corridor without smelling the stink of close living quarters or brushing his skin against another’s, to be standing in a place where he could see no other person, and no one could see him. Old Willie had told him about the years before The Rise, but he’d never been able to imagine it. The experience was surreal, as if he had gone back in time to another age, when human beings were gracious, civilized creatures.
He descended the marble staircase step by step, a pool of bejewelled citizens gazing up at him approvingly. A waiter handed him a champagne flute and the contessa appeared by his side to clink her glass against his.
“Welcome to Hemingway’s, darling,” she said, and a hundred glasses were raised in unison. Jade sipped the liquid cautiously, noting several uniforms mingling amongst the sequins and tiaras. Surely this was far too much attention to be paying a simple rent boy, even one purchased from the exclusive House Orlando. Did they all know? Had his cover been blown already?
There were faces amongst the crowd tonight that, although he didn’t know them, were familiar in another way. Pontoon boys and girls carried themselves in a certain manner. You could spot it easily if you knew what to look for. No one of his kind had ever made it to Hemingway’s and returned home to tell of it, and yet there had to be many servants here catering to the whims of these plump, jewelled creatures. No one ever returned… Jade took another sip of wine, his mind racing with thoughts of cannibalism and other, crueller sports, but the contessa merely placed her hand in his and led him to a grand ballroom, where tasty morsels were served on silver platters and wine flowed freely like bilge water from a sluice.
“We must teach you to dance!” said Marlene, a matronly woman in pearls, as an orchestra began to play at one end of the ballroom. Jade consented to a clumsy attempt after he realized that the women found his lack of grace amusing, rather than disappointing. Soon he had mastered an oafish waltz. Although the turning made him queasy, it filled him with a sense of freedom and power. So much free space, so much of it. Soon he was punch drunk from spinning. One of the ladies cooled his face with a feathered fan.
“Shall we stroll along the beach?” said Marlene.
“Why don’t we?” said another—Madolyn, who he recognized from the balcony earlier.
* * * *
The grainy sand felt delicious between his toes.
“Bet you can’t catch me,” said the contessa, tapping him on the shoulder before tearing off along the beach, champagne flute in one hand, high-heeled shoes dangling from the other. Jade grinned and gave chase, followed by the other ladies in various stages of inebriation.
He caught up with the contessa easily, tapped her lightly on the shoulder in return and stole one of her shoes.
“Naughty boy!” she shrieked as he ran with it, gulping in great lungfuls of salty sea air. He laughed as he ran, feet sliding in the sand, ignoring the false wails of protest from the ladies behind him. Nothing had ever felt so good as the wind on his face and the strain in his calves as he ran free along the beach.
Eventually he let them catch him, the group falling playfully into a heap on the sand.
“Let’s go skinny dipping,” said Madolyn, moonlight accenting her gaunt cheekbones.
“Yes, let’s,” said Marlene, her hands reaching for the collar of Jade’s exquisitely embroidered jacket.
Jade tossed his head back and laughed, but then stopped suddenly as a glint of gold on the horizon caught his eye. “Look.” He pointed out across the water. “There’s something out there, isn’t there?”
The contessa shrugged. “Nothing special. Just the watchtower.”
Jade peered through the darkness, but the light had been extinguished.
“Watchtower?”
“Nothing you need to worry about,” said Madolyn. “Just some crazy soldier in a tower. They say he’s been in there since The Rise. Every few weeks a boatload of soldiers goes out there to check on it. They never go inside. Brody says it’s contaminated with nuclear radiation, although I can’t see how it possibly could be. Nothing for us to worry about, I’m sure.”
“But I’m curious,” said Jade.
“So are we.” The contessa giggled as she made a move to unbuckle the clasp of his trousers. Laughter started up again en masse.
“Now, Tess, you promised you were going to share him.”
“I promised nothing of the sort! And anyway, if I did, then I’ve changed my mind.”
“I say we play poker for him.”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Marlene. There’s nothing you’ve got that I could possibly want more than this boy.”
Marlene sniffed. “You always were Vormister’s little pet. What makes you so special? You’ve been holding out on us, Tess, haven’t you? Got some nifty tricks up your… sleeve?”
Jade unbuckled his belt. His trousers slid down off his slender hips, crumpled to a heap around his ankles. He stepped away, shaking his shoes free. The women fell silent, watched intently as he pulled off his socks, and then his embroidered jacket and fine silk shirt.
Illuminated by a sliver of moonlight, he turned his back on them and walked toward the ocean. A few strides later he was ankle deep in the tide. He turned back to face the shore, held out his hand to the contessa and smiled.
Marlene laughed. “Well, Tess, looks like you’re definitely getting the first go. Come on, girls, let’s leave them to it. Time for another of Brody’s excellent lime margaritas.”
“You go,” said Madolyn. “I want to watch.”
“Suit yourselves,” said Tess, unfastening her zip at the back. Tess’s eyes never left Jade as she strode into the water, stripping off items of clothing as she went. He stepped backwards as she approached, a gentle smile curling the edges of his lips. When she was knee deep he lunged suddenly, pulling her first into his arms and then down on top of him into the water. She shrieked in delight, grasping for his strong limbs below the surface. He slipped away from her, swimming further out from shore with sharp, clean strokes. Tess followed, laughing every time she tried to grab him when he twisted out of her reach.
“Can you touch the bottom?” he asked. Tess felt for the sand with her toes. She steadied herself then stood up, the waterline lapping against her nipples. Jade slipped under the surface suddenly, reappearing seconds later before her, brushing against her skin as he emerged from below. He pressed his lips against her neck, cupped her breasts in his hands. He wrapped his legs around her thighs, pulling her close against his flesh.
“Oh yes,” she whispered as he ran his fingers down her back, coming to rest on her buttocks, which he gave a playful squeeze. His tongue reached out and flicked her earlobe, licked the skin, probed.
Madolyn and Marlene watched from the shore as Jade’s head disappeared below the water and Tess began to writhe, her deep moans carrying back to shore on the breeze.
“How do you suppose she got permission to buy a new one?” said Marlene sullenly. “She’ll never share, you wait and see.”
Madolyn leaned in closer. “From what I heard, she didn’t choose him at all, Vormister did.”
Marlene’s lips formed a silent ‘O’ as Tess climaxed loudly in the near distance.
“Now, ladies, that man is valuable property.”
Marlene and Madolyn looked up at a pair of regulation army trousers.
“Oh pooh!” said Marlene, pouting. “We were only having a little fun. You boys wouldn’t know the meaning of the word.”
The soldier stood by as the women clambered to their feet, brushing sand from the luxurious folds of their gowns. Jade and Tess breaststroked closer to shore. Jade stood up, rivulets of water cascading from his naked form. He offered Tess his forearm, helped her to her feet. He waited for the soldier to say more, but the man remained silent, turning on his heels and marching back to Hemingway’s. Jade expelled his breath slowly. This was the beginning.
“I suppose we should go back,” said Madolyn, attempting to shake remaining particles free from her voluminous lace sleeves. “Damnable stuff, this sand,” she said. “I can’t think why we imported so much of it.”
Jade placed his arm protectively around Tess as they walked back onto dry sand. He picked up his embroidered jacket and wrapped it around her shoulders before pulling on his pants and shirt, the silk clinging to his wet skin. Most of her clothing lay in the water, but she didn’t seem to care. She slipped her arms into his jacket and pulled it tightly to her body. Tess snuggled close to Jade as they walked back the way they had come.
“I’m sorry, darling,” she whispered. “I was going to tell you, honest I was. Those wretched soldier boys promised I could keep you for a while, but you know how it is.”
Jade steeled himself. He knew.
“And although Major Vormister promised that I can have you back again afterwards… It’s not that I’d mind you being older. It’s just that it’s such a long time for you to wait, not to mention how dreadful I’d look by then. We don’t have all the facilities at Hemingway’s, not like what we had before The Rise. But then, the Major said I wouldn’t be older, only you. It’s all so confusing, I can hardly get my head around it.”
The ground shuddered violently, the air reverberating with a sonic boom.
“That blasted gun again,” said Marlene. “I wish they’d hurry up and get it over with, whatever they’re doing down there.”
* * * *
The soldiers gave Jade a uniform, then marched him down a series of corridors and into an elevator with steel sides and a long strip of dark metal buttons. The carriage shuddered in its descent, taking several minutes to reach its destination within the earth.
The doors slid open and Jade stepped forward into the largest enclosed space he had ever seen. Thousands of people could have fitted into it if not for the machinery. His gaze travelled giant hulking contraptions with sturdy thighs of iron, massive wheels, ligatures and other peculiar devices. Uniformed men stood on gantries, patrolled walkways, drove machines that moved across the floor like motorboats with wheels.
The soldiers led him past all these wonders and more, around the bases of the giant metal machines and to a vehicle that looked like a segmented metal centipede. They boarded it and travelled further into the heart of the cavern, descending further into another cavern, smaller than the first, this one filled with desks and tables, rather than grand machines.
“Son, do you know what a mountain is?” said Major Vormister.
“Yes, sir.” Jade remembered the stories old Willie had told him, and the framed picture on the kitchen wall of his pontoon home.
“Are you aware that you’re inside a mountain right now?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Water tight, mostly.” Major Vormister gestured upwards. “Built six decades before The Rise as a precaution against nuclear attack, with Hemingway’s on top as cover.”
Jade nodded, staring upwards at the grey cement ceiling, noticing the dark stains and fissures sealed with a white, flaky-looking substance.
“Course, things didn’t pan out exactly as people expected,” he said. “The Rise was faster than anyone had allowed for. You wouldn’t know much about all this, would you, son? Most likely you were born on the ocean.”
“Yes, sir,” said Jade. He knew all there was to know about The Rise from Willie: the scramble of panicked humanity toward higher ground, the floating communities evolving from the wreckage of low lying cities, surviving by selling services and whatever else they could scavenge to passing ships. Willie had told him that some sought refuge downwards, burrowing inside the drowned surfaces of the earth.
The major strolled as he talked, indicating that Jade should keep pace with him and listen.
“We aren’t the only surviving base, you know. There’s Gibraltar, too, and several Rocky Range tunnelling projects that we know about, but we’re probably the most important one. On account of this.”
The Major pointed upwards at a strange, silver-chrome contraption with a massive ball at its centre, which was steadied by three thick prongs.
“This is what we refer to as the Gun.”
It didn’t look like any kind of gun Jade recognized. There was no barrel or trigger.
“It generates a particle beam chromatic displacement field.”
Jade knew he should have feigned surprise at the concept, but he couldn’t bring himself to fake it. He stood still, waiting for the Major to continue.
“It’s a time machine, son. No reason to expect you’d know of such things, but that’s what it is.” The Major continued, adopting a more formal tone.
“This here base became the repository for all sorts of experimental stores and equipment: particle accelerators, long-range smart bombs, gene banks—highly classified material. Privately funded, you understand. If it weren’t for the contessa and her rich friends here, then we’d all have been sunk like the rest of ‘em.”
Jade’s concentration drifted. There was only one part of this scenario that he’d never fully understood. And because he’d never grasped the reason, he’d never explained it properly to Willie, and so Willie in turn…
“Work on the Gun was already underway by the time of The Rise, but the changes gave the program incentive. What you see before you is twenty-five years’ work from the best of the best, combining all their different sciences into the one big project that will one day save us all.”
A soldier approached and saluted Major Vormister.
“They’re ready for you in the briefing room, sir!”
The Major nodded and glanced at Jade. “You’re probably wondering why I’m telling you all this, son. Truth is, we brought you here for a reason.”
* * * *
The conference room was so large that it could have easily housed a dozen families. Jade was ushered to a seat around a large wooden table set with high-backed chairs. As he sat down the lights went out and a video projection appeared on the one blank wall not plastered with maps and charts. A few moments passed before Jade realized what he was looking at. Hemingway’s, only different. Hemingway’s without the beach, perched atop a hill with no ocean to be seen. The hill was covered in hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of trees.
“This footage was taken twenty-five years before The Rise, although global warming was in evidence way before that time - as far back as 1895, if you want to believe our historian. It wasn’t till the 1990s that people started talking about it seriously. So far, twenty years seems to be the limit of the gun’s chronological range. It seems to be the only distance we can shoot, and I emphasize seems to be, because we still don’t have any hard evidence that the darn thing works at all.”
Although neither Major Vormister, nor any of the other military personnel present, made eye contact with him, Jade considered his part in this military operation. They had built a gun, and now they needed a bullet. There were many worse ways to die than to be shot backwards in time. Despite what he’d seen and learned during his short life, part of him didn’t believe such a feat could be accomplished. Maybe none of it was real, and he wasn’t going to die after all… Jade imagined himself sailing through the air, blasted from their giant gun. A gun without a barrel. That piece had yet to be fitted.
“I’m not pretending that it won’t be dangerous, son.” Major Vormister rested his hand on Jade’s shoulder, bringing him back into the moment. “So far we’ve sent fifteen men back—not one of ‘em’s managed to contact us and confirm the success of the operation. But you’ll have God on your side, boy, just remember that. God, and all the surviving scientific know-how of the former United States of America.”
* * * *
“I thought I’d find you here,” said Contessa Bonnefort, wrapping her pashmina tightly around her shoulders against the chill of the early morning breeze. Jade sat with his back against a palm tree, staring out across the waves at a speck on the horizon that he knew to be the watchtower.
“You think badly of us, don’t you? I can tell.” She nestled into the sand beside him, the jewels around her neck reflecting the embers of sunrise.
“Once I took a little girl in, from the sea. Her people arrived on an overloaded boat that the soldiers blasted from the water. She clung on to a piece of wood, survived and swam to shore. I was sure they’d let me keep her—just one tiny little child—but Major Vormister put a bullet in her brain on the patio one evening during cocktail hour, just so that we all knew who was boss.
“Now, Jade, my darling, I know you’ve seen worse than that, probably experienced worse, but you were born and raised a savage, whereas we… we used to be civilized.”
Jade watched a seagull balance on the breeze, eyeing the waves below for tasty morsels. “How have you kept this place secret? I mean, I’d heard stories about Hemingway’s. Old folks tell them to their children, but I never thought —”
“Hemingway’s was designated for only the very wealthiest of the wealthy, and even then it wasn’t for all. Those able to buy a piece of salvation had to make choices, if you know what I mean. Our money, while it was still worth anything, paid for the developments below—the scientists, the machines, the secrecy. And the military. They’re ours too, you know.
“There were refugee boats for years. Women, children, lovely young men, their eyes all filled with hope when they saw our golden patch of sand. All of them were killed. It seems our resources had been carefully calculated. Were we to save others, the entire gun project would have been jeopardized. At least, that’s what the soldiers tell us. You know, I’m surprised they didn’t kill us anyway. It’s not as if ageing society folk are of any possible use for the future. Over time, I believe they have come to regard us like a kind of theme park, or recreation area. Anachronisms in a world gone completely to seed.”
She withdrew a white rectangular packet from her purse and offered him a smoke. “Pre-Rise,” she told him. “Genuine American cigarettes, not like the filthy weed they sell off the boats.”
Jade accepted. The aromatic smoke permeated his senses, almost making his head spin with pleasure.
“Keep it,” she said, taking one herself before tossing the packet onto the sand. “There are thousands of the damn things stored below. Fancy that.”
She dragged deeply, blew a plume of smoke at the ocean, and made a dismissive gesture with her hand. She pinched her lips together tightly. “Those of us who made it here paid heavily for the privilege, both in money and in blood. We did terrible things, Jade. Obscene things, and we’re all going to go to hell for it. I’m certain of that.”
Jade pointed to the ocean. “That man in the watchtower. Major Vormister wants me to go back in time and take his place.”
The contessa raised an eyebrow. “Does he indeed?” She smiled. “I suppose that makes sense. They shoot you back today so you can come out tomorrow and Vormister will be certain that the damn thing works.”
Jade nodded, dragged on his cigarette. “The Major says there are food supplies in there. I guess there have to be, if the man’s been in there all this time.”
Tess smoked the last of her cigarette, stubbed the butt out in the sand. “I’ve seen him,” she said. “So has Madolyn. He comes out sometimes in the early morning when he thinks no one is watching. He has a kayak.”
She pulled another cigarette from the packet in the sand and lit the tip. “Jade, if the time gun works and The Rise can be prevented, millions of people will be saved and the human race will not become… what it has sunk to.”
Jade nodded silently. And I will never have been born.
* * * *
The area around the base of the Gun had been cleared of unnecessary personnel, all except for the contessa, who had insisted on staying close to Jade.
“Why send me? Why not send a soldier back?” he said, as he knew he would be expected to ask. Two soldiers heaved open the door to the gun’s chromium chamber.
“We’ve sent soldiers, son, without success,” explained the Major. “That’s why we’re sending you this time. Maybe the fact that you’re not one of us will be the differentiating factor. My men have been protected on this island—all the training in the world can’t replace the kind of hard-honed survival skills that you’ve been acquiring out there amongst the floating ruins of civilization.”
“What if the man in the watchtower doesn’t let me in?” said Jade.
“That’s your problem, son. I don’t care what you have to do to accomplish your mission, but you have to get inside that tower and hold it for us until the present day. Once we confirm that the gun works, we can figure out how to boost its chronological range outside the twenty-year distance it’s stuck fast on. When that’s done we can prevent The Rise. You’re our guinea pig. Our lab rat. Sit it out for twenty years in the watchtower, get yourself nice and fat on army-issue corned beef and beans. When tomorrow comes, let us in, and then you’ll be a free man and have the run of this island.”
“And what if I say no?”
The Major cleared his throat. “Then I’m gonna truss you up like a squealing pig and have my boys here ship you off to one of them floating slave markets—once my boys tire of you themselves, that is. Either that, or put a bullet between your eyes. Now come on, son, what I’m offering you here is a chance to be a hero and save the world.”
Jade said nothing, silence as good as acceptance in his experience. He’d save the world all right. His world, not Major Vormister’s.
“One more thing, son. Don’t go getting any clever ideas about going AWOL when you land back there in 2020. The waters were well and truly coming up at that point. You’ll be landing in a designated military zone. There are only two places you could run to—Hemingway’s or the watchtower, or ‘storage depot’ as it would have been called then. Get within spitting distance of Hemingway’s and you’ll be a dead man, guaranteed. All intruders were shot at point blank, no exceptions. There was a guy here shot his own mother when she tried to fight her way in. No, your only real chance is the watchtower, but you’ll need your wits. Whoever that nutbag inside it is, he ain’t likely to be keen on company. We’ve shown you schematics of the entries and exits. The rest is up to you.”
Followed closely by two soldiers, Jade entered the gun chamber. They hadn’t told him he’d have to go naked, or how long the trip back would take in his subjective time.
The soldiers stripped off his clothes, sealed him inside the shiny chrome belly of the gun, and fired it.
“I’ll be waiting for you, darling,” echoed the voice of Contessa Bonnefort.
From that moment, the ‘trip’ was a blur. All he knew was that it would be safe to open the door when the walls stopped glowing, and if he touched them before then he would die.
When, eventually, the time between a moment and an eternity had passed, Jade felt stubble on his face, smelled the pool of stale urine that had accumulated at the foot of his chair. The walls appeared as cold hard steel, so he pushed the lever and stepped outside onto a carpet of fallen brown leaves - leaves as large as his outstretched hand, leaves which crackled and crushed between his fingers. The soil beneath the leaf litter smelled so rich and full of life that he longed to bend his face down to the earth and gulp great mouthfuls of the stuff.
Jade walked amongst the trees, ran his fingertips across rough bark. The air swirled with rustling and chirping; layers and layers of unfamiliar sounds. He discovered he was on the side of a hill. Upwards would lead to Hemingway’s, downwards to the rising oceans. The terrain was completely unfamiliar. He would have to wait till nightfall to find his bearings by the stars and thus locate the watchtower. But here amongst the trees and their fallen leaves he felt a freedom he had never known. Here there was no Hemingway’s, no soldiers, no House Orlando, no pontoon wall. Jade halted in a clearing. First he crouched, then he lay amongst the leaves and the moss, closed his eyes and buried his face in the forest floor. He scooped great handfuls of dirt and rubbed them against his skin, through his hair. He rolled in the leaves, making great swimming motions with his outstretched arms. Now all he had to do was wait.
* * * *
Jade awoke with a start at the sound of footsteps crunching. He heard voices too: a man and a woman arguing. There was no time to find a hiding place, so he lay as still as possible. Half buried in fallen leaves, he might be mistaken for a corpse.
“It’s up here somewhere, I’m telling you,” said the man. “We just got to keep looking till we find it.”
Jade couldn’t make out the woman’s response. Her voice was softer than the man’s, but Jade could hear the worry in it, the fear. He lay still until the couple had passed. He was surprised at himself for falling asleep in such a vulnerable situation, as if he’d forgotten every bit of survival training he’d been taught. His arms and legs felt leaden, the back of his throat parched. There was something else, too: nausea, a side-effect of his journey back through time.
Sudden screams pierced the forest stillness. It turned to shouting and was followed by rapid gunfire. Jade got to his feet, took a couple of steps in the direction of the sounds, then stopped. He needed shelter. He walked around the tree trunks, searching upwards until he found one that looked climbable and large enough to shield him.
In spite of grazed skin from the rough bark, he made it to the safety of the overhead branches. There he waited, watching the ground. Soon he heard another burst of bullets, followed by men’s laughter and other, uglier sounds.
Minutes passed, and soldiers walked beneath Jade’s tree. He smelt cigarette smoke and kept very still.
He felt the echo of his heartbeat in his ears, and imagined he could hear his blood pulsing through his veins. He wondered if his enemies could hear it too, and smell the terror on his skin. But Jade was good at keeping still and quiet, good at keeping safely out of the path of thugs and killers.
When the soldiers had passed and the forest had grown quiet, Jade jumped down and made his way through the trees to the place where he knew he would find the mutilated bodies of the man and the woman.
He smelled the blood before he saw it.
The murdered couple’s possessions had been strewn about the ground, slashed and trampled into the dirt.
For a moment Jade was frightened. What if the murdered man was Old Willie? He picked up a stick, lifted the man’s chin with it, relieved to find the corpse’s face unfamiliar.
There wasn’t much to salvage, but Jade removed the dead man’s trousers. Ripped and specked with blood, they were better than nothing. He searched for weapons, navigation instruments or food amongst the crushed leaves, but the only other useful items were the woman’s boots, which were a tight fit, but better than bare feet.
The soldiers had gone down the hill, so Jade decided to walk up it in the opposite direction. Would he find Hemingway’s at the top? The watchtower? Or something else?
By nightfall he hadn’t found anything. No soldiers, no buildings, nothing to tell him where he was or where he should be headed. His nausea worsened, and he was hungry now. As the last rays of daylight filtered down through the trees, he collected a pile of leaves and burrowed deep amongst them. A tree would have been a safer place to sleep, but he had no faith that he could sleep without falling, and weariness was rapidly overtaking him.
* * * *
“Well, lookee what we have here. Another one of them nekked soldier boys from the future. Woods seem to be crawling with ‘em lately. You managed to score some pants, I see.”
Startled, Jade rolled onto all fours, sat back on his heels, said nothing. The man, dressed in soldier fatigues, aimed a rifle at his head. Jade studied his features carefully in the half light. It was him. Definitely him. Younger than Jade remembered, but he was Old Willie, no doubt.
Stillness was the only weapon Jade possessed—calmness, patience and endurance. Make no sudden moves, no challenge to the armed man’s authority.
“You’re a dead man,” said Willie, lowering his rifle. “If you aren’t feeling it yet, it’ll kick in soon enough.” He gestured upwards with the gun. “Better come with me. These woods are full of crazy people.”
Jade followed the man through the forest, down a slope and up the other side. His calves ached from the strain of walking.
“Same as the others,” Willie said, looking back over his shoulder and noting Jade’s fatigue. “They tell me you don’t have hills in the future. All the land there’s as flat as a board.”
Jade’s ears pricked as machinegun fire rattled in the distance, followed by single shots echoing through the trees. Willie ignored it, leading him to a cylindrical cement structure in a clearing.
“Is this what y’all keep calling the watchtower?”
Jade nodded.
Willie punched a code into a control panel, unbolted the door, gestured for Jade to enter ahead of him. “Don’t know why I keep bothering to rescue you folks from the forest. Like I said before, you’re already dead.”
Jade climbed down a rung ladder set into the wall. Once Willie had closed the top, they descended in complete darkness and silence, until the rungs ended and the floor began. The man shoved Jade forward, and Jade walked ahead, blind, brushing the tips of his fingers against the walls to keep his bearings. Eventually they walked into a room lit weakly by an electric light bulb dangling from a cord.
“I’m no soldier, although no doubt I look like one. Actually, I’m a librarian. I’m guessing there won’t be much use for my profession in the future you’ve come from. I dress like a soldier when I go outside—otherwise those army psychopaths would plug me full of lead. I was working for them up until last year, if you can believe that. Some fatarsed general told me I’d have to ditch my archives, cos they were taking up valuable space in the hill. So I brought all my files down here—and my books. I guess it doesn’t look like anything much from the outside. Gonna put up some nuclear contamination signs for privacy’s sake. I think they’ve forgotten me—up there’s where all the action is, all those rich movie stars coming and going.”
Willie walked to a stack of boxes placed against the far wall and rummaged amongst them. He pulled out a wrinkled shirt, tossed it at Jade.
“Do you read? I’ve got all the classics, shelves and shelves of adventure, crime, sci-fi. Raymond Chandler. The complete works of Len Deighton, for instance.” He laughed. “Ever read The Ipcress File?”
Jade buttoned the shirt, then took the book that Willie offered. He examined its cover closely in the dim light, front and back, running his fingers over the printed type.
Willie’s shoulders sunk as he watched. “You can’t read, can you?”
“Pictoglyphs only till I was ten, then someone came along and taught me printed words.”
“Well, that was mighty kind of someone,” said the librarian.
“It was,” said Jade. “That man became a father to me. His name was Willie Deacon.”
The librarian froze.
“I don’t know how you learned my name, boy, but you’ve got it all confused. I’ve never seen you before. It wasn’t me who taught you to read.”
“No, sir,” said Jade, “but you will.”
Willie Deacon’s eyes narrowed as he studied the boy’s handsome face in the half light.
“Look, son. I’m really sorry to have to be the one to tell you, but you’re dying from…”
“… accelerated cancer. I know all about it. You warned me about the cancer when I was a child, told me that the trip back-in time would kill me.”
Willie Deacon placed his hands firmly on his hips, looked the young man squarely in the eye. “Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle.”
* * * *
As dawn washed across the horizon, a party of motorboats set out from the beach at Hemingway’s headed for the watchtower. The contessa sat quietly beside Major Vormister in the first boat. She wore a navy blue pantsuit, her long hair coiled into a neat bun, fastened in place with turquoise enamel butterfly-shaped pins. Her elegantly manicured hands gripped the side of the boat. The vessels behind them were crowded with uniformed military personnel.
Only the contessa was not surprised to see the figure of a man sitting cross-legged atop the cement cylinder, the watchtower’s highest point. He was unarmed, and waved a white handkerchief at the approaching posse of boats. There was no beach to speak of, just dark, sodden earth piled high with rotting foliage, plastic containers and other detritus deposited by the tide.
“Beautiful sunrise this morning, wasn’t it?” the man called out to the soldiers.
The man was not Jade. This fact became clear even before the boats were close enough to make out the colour of his hair and skin. He was a white man with long thin arms and legs.
“How do you do, Ma’am,” he shouted to the contessa as the boat’s motors were extinguished one by one.
“Please identify yourself,” called back one of the soldiers from the first boat.
The man took a cigar from his shirt pocket and a lighter from his pants. “I was never fully sure that this day was gonna come.” He paused to place the cigar between his teeth and light the tip. “But I saved this Havana and marked the date up on my calendar, just in case all of it was true. Can’t be too sure about many things when you’re living on your own in the middle of the ocean, but I reckon today’s the day, all right.”
He puffed on the cigar, blew a plume of blue smoke out into the morning sunlight. “My name is Willie Deacon, and the boy you’ve come looking for is dead. He stepped out of that time capsule of yours twenty years ago, his body riddled with tumours that metastasized faster than the rising tide, same as what happened to those other poor fucks you sent back ahead of him.”
Major Vormister signalled to his soldiers, who immediately restarted the motorboats. Soon they had the watchtower surrounded, weapons aimed at Willie Deacon’s heart.
Willie puffed on his cigar, unconcerned. “Amazing young fella, that boy Jade. Tough as nuts and bolts, though you’d never have known it to look at him. One of those folks who you might call a natural-born leader of men, given the right kind of guidance. And the opportunity.”
Major Vormister had ceased to listen. He pulled a walkie-talkie from his belt and barked instructions into it. “The Gun works, I repeat, the Gun works,” he shouted.
The contessa strained to hear Willie Deacon’s words over the racket. Willie smiled at her. “Jade told me all about you, Ma’am,” he said, winking. He waited until Major Vormister had finished before he continued, all the while smoking his cigar, one eye on the horizon.
“The thing is,” he said, when the major had stopped shouting, “once you fired that gun of yours, there came to be two Jades. One who died in front of me, and the other who was, at that time, about to be born out there on that pontoon slum, not far off, twenty years ago to this day. What do you think might have happened if someone took the dying knowledge of the one, and passed it on to the other—liberated a poor young boy from that floating hellhole to raise him as a leader of men?”
A tiny gasp escaped from the contessa’s lips. She covered her mouth with one hand, pointed at the horizon with the other. Major Vormister and his soldiers looked across to see the horizon darkened, dotted with tiny brown ant-like specks.
Willie Deacon laughed as Major Vormister flicked the safety catch off his handgun and aimed it at Willie’s head.
“Shoot me if it’ll make you feel better,” said Willie. “Only don’t bother searching for him out there amongst that lot. He ain’t there, cos you sent him back already—he came to Hemmingway’s knowing you’d be sending him back to die.”
“Oh my God,” whispered the contessa through her fingers as the specks drew closer, revealing themselves as a jumbled flotilla of watercraft.
“Had to be that way, I’m afraid. It’s the fact of his sacrifice that made him such a hero to those that decided to follow him - and claim Hemingway’s for the people.” He added. The walkie-talkie crackled with static as the motorboats swung round and sped back to the beach of Hemingway’s.
“Bring on the brave new world,” shouted Willie, tossing his cigar into the water, waving a cheery welcome at the horizon.