No.
Laura trembled. Jesus Christ, no! The imager never went wrong! It had never happened, not in over one thousand experiments! Tears stung Laura’s eyes as she blinked. The image around her seemed perfectly solid, except for the one anomaly. Two identical doors.
Then Laura looked again, and her breath caught in her throat.
They were not identical. Not quite. The door on the right was closed, but the door on the left was partially open. Laura’s heart beat furiously. She knew the door had not been open before.
Abort. I have to abort this now!
She stepped forward. The image of the open door remained solid. She stepped forward again. Now she could see through into the room. The curtains in here were also open. A double bed was against the wall on Laura’s right. A figure lay asleep in the bed. Because of the moonlight, and the visibility aid in her helmet, Laura could see the figure’s face very clearly. A youngish to middle-aged man with a thick moustache. Laura had spent countless hours studying the photographs of her ancestors, and she knew the man in the bed was not her father, or her grandfather. It was Captain Rideon Ashcroft, who had fought in the First World War.
Laura stood for at least a minute, her blood turning cold as she watched the peacefully sleeping man. It was supposed to be two thousand and twenty-six, but this man had died in nineteen thirty-six. With a gasp of fear, Laura stepped back into the hallway.
How could this be?
Now she saw other anomalies around her. Another doorway had divided in two, one version partly superimposed upon the other. There were now two images of the stair banisters, standing a meter or so apart. Laura moved again, and a section of the dark landing was suddenly flooded by sunlight. She saw a woman walking along with two little blond-haired children holding each of her hands. The woman was fairly young and wore a long dress in the fashion of the early twenty-first century. Laura gasped as she realised the woman was Madeleine Ashcroft, her great-aunt.
No.
The entire landing suddenly split into two, then divided again into four, then into six. The time echo was disintegrating, fragmenting into a kaleidoscope of different moments in time, all superimposed over each other. Laura screamed. In one echo, she saw a door opening and a portly, red-faced man stepping out onto the landing. She recognised Roger Ashcroft, the man who had taken control of the family business in the nineteen fifties. In an image below her, she saw two thin young men, one of whom was Michael Ashcroft, whose son had nearly been killed in a car accident in nineteen eighty-five.
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.