Tangled Web of Time by Brian Stableford

Author:Brian Stableford [Betancourt, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Published: 2019-03-20T22:22:57+00:00

CHAPTER VII

When Jimmy and Christiane set off back to the Premier Inn—again traveling by taxi, although the distance was easily walkable, it was after eleven, and Claire and I both had to work the next day, but simply going to bed and getting a good night’ sleep was apparently not on the agenda—except for Melody, of course, who was still not quite old enough not to be packed off to bed on parental command. Ours was a well-organized household, where we didn’t have rows—not, at any rate, over silly things like that.

“We shouldn’t leave it too late,” I reminded Claire. “We’ve both got heavy days tomorrow.” Actually I didn’t, but I knew that she did, and felt that I ought to show solidarity.

“Contractually,” she said, “neither of us has to be in before nine; it’s just our conscientious habits that make us go in early. I’ll probably have to be at work until six or seven anyhow, and going in at the crack of dawn would be overdoing it, so we have an hour to spare, at least, and we still have to do the washing up.”

It was odd arithmetic, but Claire had a way with numbers that came with being in hospital admin, where bare-faced lying with the aid of spurious calculations was and essential component of the art.

“Why didn’t you tell me that you’d helped Jim McKinnon with occult experiments before?” Claire asked me, once Melody had been dismissed and I had my hands deep in the washing-up bowl. She had a tea towel in her hand, ready to dry the dishes as soon as I had rinsed them and put them in the rack, and obviously had no intention of leaving me to do the job on my own.

“I told you about the scar I got at uni,” I reminded her.

“Yes you did,” she conceded, “but you never told me what happened ten years ago, or about the other time he referred to, before we got married. Why not?”

“Because nothing came of it,” I told her, although I felt uncomfortable about the partial dishonesty. “It was just a series of wild goose chases. This one will be no different. He might have talked that poor girl into believing that she’s a reincarnation of some ancient seeress, and got her to feed their mutual delusion while supposedly under hypnosis and the effect of some exotic drug, but it’s all just imagination, the stuff of dreams.”

Naturally, she plucked out the key phrase effortlessly. “Poor girl?” she queried. “She’s thirty-five if she’s a day, and she struck me as being thoroughly compos mentis. You can’t do a job like hers without a great deal of discipline—believe me, I know. I’ve never been to Jaywacker, or wherever they were, and I don’t have a smattering of half a dozen tribal languages, so I have no idea what conditions she was working under or exactly what problems she faced day in and day out, but that only increases my respect for her. She’s nobody’s fool.

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