“They didn’t die, you know.” Collum gave a cool shrug. “Only took a bit of a holiday.”
“What?”
Collum waved a hand at Lucinda. “Lu, put the poor thing out of her misery, won’t you? We’ve got work to do.”
As she approached, my aunt’s tired features looked so like my mother’s, it made my throat ache.
“I’m sure that in the course of your studies, you’ve likely read how there were some ancients who believed in lines of power that thread through the earth,” she said. “That they often erected monuments where those lines supposedly crossed. Standing stones, cave markings, and the like. This cave was one of those places. Though we believe the language is far older, the closest translation of the carvings you see here is ancient Gaelic. Slighe a’ Doillier,” she said. “The Dim Road. We just call it the Dim.”
The Dim. Soundlessly, my lips formed the words. A horrifying idea rippled just below the surface of my mind. My mother’s face, trapped within the tapestry’s weave. Costumes. Computers. Tapestries. Machines.
“Aunt Lucinda.” My voice sounded very small against the rock. “What happened to my mom?”
Lucinda spoke in a voice so bland, she might’ve been reading the weather forecast. “In rare places around the world, these ley lines intersect in huge concentrations. Here—amplified a thousandfold by Tesla’s machines—they create a passage into the past.”
“It works something like a miniature wormhole, see,” Doug started, but Moira shook her head, quieting him.
I stared at the machines, stupified, as Lucinda finished. “Yes, Hope. My sister is alive. But she is also lost. In London, as far as we know. In the year of our Lord 1154.”
Chapter 10
NO.
Logic battled with a crazy, hopeful notion that tried to rise inside me. My aunt’s words, so matter of fact, banged around inside my head like manic pinballs.
Impossible.
“I don’t . . .” I managed. “I don’t want to hear any more.”
“Carlyle, MacPherson, and Alvarez had disappeared off the face of the earth,” she went on as if I hadn’t spoken. “Julia was distraught, convinced that the machines had somehow vaporized them. Jonathan convinced her not to speak of what they’d witnessed, until he could get in touch with Tesla. The only person with whom they shared their secret was MacPherson’s son, Archie. Who would’ve believed them, after all? They would’ve been thought mad.”
Pressure built inside me at each word. Soon I’d shatter and there’d be nothing left of me but a red smear on stone.
“The men reappeared,” Lucinda continued. “Suddenly and without warning, exactly seventy-two hours later. Just popped back into existence in the exact spot from which they’d vanished. Jonathan and Archie saw it with their own eyes. Jonathan writes of it in his journals. How bedraggled and ill they were. How MacPherson had bled from the eyes and ears. Yet all three men were still very much alive.”
Taking a breath, my aunt delivered the final blow.
“When the men returned, they told their wives and children an unbelievable tale. On oath, all three swore they’d been swept along by an unfathomable force and cast back through time itself. And,” she said, “they did not return empty-handed. They were in possession of a leather bag of freshly minted, four-hundred-year-old coins. A sword. And a fine jeweled dagger. Artifacts they claimed they ‘found’ and which they eventually sold for enormous profit.”
This was so far beyond imagination, it was laughable. My mother had raised me on a foundation of hard facts, historical evidence, analytical thinking. It was absurd to think she’d actually believed this fairy tale. This science fiction.
“Despite the danger,” Lucinda was saying over the noise in my head, “they tried it again. And again. Before long, they’d amassed a great fortune with the artifacts they ‘acquired’ while on these journeys. Tesla knew, of course. For a percentage of the proceeds, he kept it to himself. He eventually modified the machines to calculate the general era in which they’d arrive. Even with that rudimentary method, they could prepare. Costumes. Money. Weapons. Of course we now use a much more sophisticated and exact system, thanks to Douglas here.”
Doug ducked his head at the praise, but when he looked over at me, his gaze was sweet and open. “See, Hope, you can’t control the Dim, really. It opens when it pleases. All you can do is monitor the patterns of the different lines. That’s what the computer program keeps track of. The device . . . amplifies the power of the lines. They are symbiotic. One won’t work without the other.”
The airport board upstairs.
Antwerp 111713.21
Istanbul 041099.12
Brighton 071817.07
Not codes. Dates.
London Dec 4, 1154.
My back went cold.