Майкл Салливан - Deep Magic. Fourth Collection

What the hell was happening?

It’s because I’ve gone back so far. Two years, and the echo is just an echo that can’t be touched. Ten years, and the echo can be touched and felt. Thirty years, and the echo can’t hold itself together. It’s too far back in time.

Crying out again, Laura gripped the edge of the doorway. She gasped, realising how solid the wood felt under her gloved hands. Despite the accordion-like effect of time opening out around her, somehow the moment of time she was standing in was still solid. She had to abort now! One second before she was about to yell the word into her helmet, she caught a glimpse of movement inside the doorway. She looked and saw the figure of Captain Rideon Ashcroft struggling with his bedclothes. His hands were stretched out towards her. His eyes were huge in his face, his mouth gaping silently.

He can see me!

Her screams had awoken him. He had opened his eyes to see a phantom black figure standing in the doorway, and now he was clutching at his chest, his eyes bulging.

Heart condition! He was discharged from the army because he developed a heart condition!

Something rippled across Laura’s vision. A shadow was reaching across the kaleidoscope of time, making it bulge and distort. Suddenly she couldn’t focus on the images, the time echoes had become blurred. Or at least parts of them had.

The figures of the Ashcroft family.

He’s dying! Laura understood with absolute horror. He’s going to die now, before he marries, before his children even exist.

Oh god!

Laura stumbled towards the dying man. She could feel him! He was solid flesh and blood under her hands. She leapt onto the bed, then threw Rideon back and hammered her fist on his chest. Again. Again. The man’s breath hitched several times, then he began to breathe. Laura watched him, her heart in her mouth, as the colour slowly returned to the man’s face.

He’s all right! He’s going to live!

“What are you?” Rideon screamed at her. “Oh my god , what are you? ”

Laura backed away from him. She turned to look beyond him, to the spiraling echoes of time. The shadowy distortion was fading away, dissolving, yet even as it disappeared she saw that some of the figures it had been hanging over had already faded beyond recognition.

“No!” Laura screamed.

The portly figure of Roger Ashcroft had become a ghost, no longer a human being, as if he had been partly erased from reality. What remained of him was standing on the landing, his hand clutched to his chest.

“ No! ” Laura ran towards him. “ Don’t die! Don’t die! ” She leapt through time, into the echo that Roger occupied, her hands reaching for him just as he collapsed, dead, onto the floor. Screaming, Laura looked around her at the madly spinning carousel of time. She saw the young Michael Ashcroft clutching at his throat, lurching into the banisters at the edge of the landing.

“Michael!”

Laura sprinted at him, her hands outstretched. He was falling . . . falling over the top . . . she wasn’t close enough to stop him. Her hands seized on empty air as Michael fell headlong over the banisters, a hideous scream floating up from his tumbling body before it snapped like a twig over the banisters at the foot of the staircase.

Laura screamed with terror. In another echo, she saw the fresh young figure of Madeleine Ashcroft walk to the top of the staircase, bending down to pick up a tiny blond-haired little boy. The fading remains of a wobbling distortion was still eating into the air above them. As Laura watched, the figures of both the woman and the child began to blur.

“Madeleine!” Laura charged towards the echo. “Get away from it! Get away!” Laura ran, crying and screaming, knowing that this time she had to get there in time, this time she had to save them, because the beautiful blond-haired little boy that Madeleine held in her arms was Laura’s father.

“Go on, Madeleine. Tell the story.”

Madeleine Ashcroft put down her glass of wine. She looked across the dining table at her brother, Alfred, holding his gaze for several seconds.

“Are you sure Mary really wants to hear it?”

“Is this the story of the Ashcroft curse?” Mary Ashcroft’s long eyelashes fluttered as she touched her husband’s arm. “I’ve heard people say things about it, but . . . it isn’t true, surely.”

“Go on, Mad,” said Alfred. “You tell it so much better than I do.”

Madeleine sighed.

“They say that Rideon Ashcroft, our great-grandfather, was stationed in India during the First World War. They say that he and his friends invented dares to try each other’s courage, and Rideon was dared to go into a graveyard at night and dig up the most recent grave. The grave was supposed to be that of a very wealthy Indian man, who had been buried with all his jewels. Rideon had to come back with one of the jewels, to prove that he’d completed the dare.

“Rideon was halfway through digging up the grave when something came out of the darkness and attacked him. He was found in the morning, almost dead. He was sent back home and was never truly well again. One night, when he was lying in his bed, he had a heart attack and almost died. He always claimed that, on that night, he had awoken to see the creature from the Indian graveyard standing in his bedroom, and that it had tried to kill him again.”

Madeleine took a sip of her wine. “That’s the old family legend. I imagine that part’s totally made up. Graveyards.”

“But there’s more to it than that?” said Mary.

“Yes,” said Alfred. “They say that the creature, whatever it is, has haunted this house ever since. They say that in every generation, one of the Ashcroft family just drops dead in the prime of life, for no apparent reason. And the doctors can never say what killed them.”

Madeleine laughed. “And if you really believe the stories, every time one of these mysterious deaths occurs, the victim sees a shadowy, supernatural figure rushing towards them just before they die.”

Mary looked from Madeleine to her husband. “But there have been a lot of mysterious deaths, haven’t there?”

“There are always deaths in any family,” said Madeleine.

“Roger Ashcroft,” said Alfred. “They say he just dropped dead one day when he was on the landing. He’d never been ill a day in his life before. The doctor swore he could find no reason for his death.”

“So they say,” said Madeleine.

“And Michael,” said Mary. “The one who fell over the banister. You two must have been here when that happened.”

Madeleine pulled her cardigan around herself, shivering at a sudden chill in the room. “I was just tiny then,” she said. “I remember . . . it was horrible.”

“Why did he fall?” said Mary.

“No one knows,” said Alfred.

Madeleine decided she’d had enough of this. “I’m going to see where dessert is.”

At the bottom of the staircase, she heard a voice calling down to her.

“Aunt Mad. Aunt Mad.”

Madeleine trotted up the stairs, her heart rising at the sound of her nephew’s voice. The little boy was rushing along the landing. As she reached the top step, Madeleine bent and gathered him into her arms.

“You’re supposed to be in bed, young man.”

“I had a nightmare, Aunt Mad.”

Madeleine shivered again. That strange chill was even worse up here.

Madeleine . . .

What was that? Just now, it had almost sounded as if someone had called her name.

Get away from it . . . Get away . . .

Madeleine looked up, squinting as she saw the shimmering black shape break out from the semidarkness on the landing and come running towards her.