I will stay, St. Ives thought suddenly. Why not? His past-time self — now nothing but a ghost — wouldn’t be any the wiser. He was already gone, flitted away, into the mists of abandoned time. Why not start anew, right now? They would take a room in the West End, make it a sort of holiday — nothing but eating and the theater and lounging about all day long. He suddenly felt like Atlas, having at last shrugged off the world, ending what had turned out to be merely a lengthy nightmare.
Alice was regarding him strangely, though. “You look awful,” she said, squinting at him as if she realized something was wrong but had no notion how to explain it. He knew what she had meant to say. She had meant to say that he looked old, worn-out, thin, but she had caught herself and had said something more temporary so as to preserve his feelings. “What’s wrong?” she asked suddenly, and his heart sank.
He looked out into the street, where his past-time self lay invisible in the water and muck of the road. You fool, he said in his mind. I earned this, but I’ve got to give it to you, when all you would have done is botch it utterly. But even as he thought this, he knew the truth — that he wasn’t the man now that he had been then. The ghost in the road was in many ways the better of the two of them. Alice didn’t deserve the declined copy; what she wanted was the genuine article.
And maybe he could become that article — but not by staying here. He had to go home again, to the future, in order to catch up with himself once more.
“I won’t be gone but a moment,” he said, glancing back toward where he had left the machine. “And when I appear again, I might be confused for a time. It’ll pass, though. When you see me next, tell me that I’m a mortal idiot, and I’ll feel better about it all.”
“What on earth are you talking about?” she asked, looking at him fearfully, as if he had lost his mind.
He almost started to explain, but it was too much for him. Now that he had made up his mind to leave, the future was calling to him, and the shortest route back to it sat in the middle of the street a block away. “Trust me,” he said. “I won’t be gone a moment.” He kissed her again, and then stepped out of the doorway, turned, and loped off, not looking back, his heart full of gladness and regret.
Epilogue
He landed on the meadow, half expecting heaven knew what. There was no telling what was what anymore. Maybe Parsons would leap out of the bushes and claim the machine. Maybe Narbondo, or Frost, or whatever he called himself now, would menace him with a revolver. Maybe anything at all — he didn’t care. They could have the machine. He didn’t want it anymore. His work was done, and he was ready to confront the results, whatever they were, and then to give up his chasing around through time. At least for the moment.
What he couldn’t do, though, was face himself. There were two present-time copies of him now, and he was determined to let the other one depart gracefully and, he hoped, privately. What sort of man had he become? A happy man, perhaps, who wouldn’t relish the idea of this copycat St. Ives popping in at the window to replace him? Or, just as easily, a miserable man, who might gladly hand over the reins and disappear forever.
Fragments of his memory were even now starting to wink out like candle flames in a breeze. His nightmares about the Seven Dials, the very fact of his returning there, his whole tiresome rigamarole life during the past three years — all of it would become vapor.
And good riddance, too. He would welcome new memories, whatever they were. He realized that this was bluff, though. He thought one last time of the child Narbondo, huddled in dirty rags in Limehouse, and of his mother and the sailor in the doorway. There were memories worse than his own. That’s partly why he was still sitting there in the machine, wasn’t it? He had no idea what he would find inside the manor — who he would discover himself to be.
He climbed through the hatch into the wind. It was sunny and fine with just the hint of a smoky autumn chill in the air. He pulled his coat straight and fiddled with his tie, realizing that he was a wet and dirty mess. But he felt fit, somehow, as if a great weight had fallen away from him, and then, in a confused shudder of memory, it occurred to him that he couldn’t bear eating eggplant again. Not once more.
His head reeled, and he nearly fell over. Eggplant? It was starting. His memories would depart like rats from a ship. Disconcerted, he hurried through the window, into the study, and there stood Hasbro, staring at him strangely.
“We’ll have to move the time machine into the silo,” St. Ives said to him. “I wasn’t sure whether it was empty or not.”
“I beg your pardon, sir?”
“The machine on the meadow,” St. Ives said. “We’ll want to get it into the silo, out of the weather.”
“I’m sorry, sir. I wasn’t aware that Dr. Frost had returned it. This comes as a surprise. I was under the impression that he had stolen it from Secretary Parsons. He’s brought it here, has he?”
“Stolen it?” St. Ives was gripped by vertigo just then. His memory shifted. He fought to hold on to it, afraid to let pieces of it go completely. “Of course,” he said. “It’s a mystery to me, too, but there it sits.” He gestured out the window, where the machine glinted in the sunlight.
Narbondo had taken it! That was funny, hilarious. Now St. Ives had reappeared with it, and that meant that Narbondo’s copy was in the process of disappearing, out from under his nose, and stranding him, St. Ives hoped, in some distant land. Either that or the villain was gone somewhere in time, and would someday perhaps return, and then St. Ives’s machine would disappear. Time and chance, he reminded himself.
And then new memories, like wraiths, drifted into his mind, shifting old memories aside. “Alice!” he cried. “Is she here then?”
“She’s still in the parlor, sir,” Hasbro said, looking skeptical again. “Where you left her moments ago. I really must advise you against that suit, by the way. The tailor is certifiable. Perhaps if I laid something else out…”
“Yes,” St. Ives said, hurrying through the door. “Lay something out.”
He was dizzy, foggy with memories, drunk on them. And as if he were literally drunk, he felt free of the depressing guilt and worry that had plagued him…for how long? And why? He couldn’t entirely remember. It seemed so long ago. His mind was a confusion of images now, stolen from the man whose ghost was where? Blowing away on the wind, across the meadow? Would he remain to haunt the manor, exercising a ghostly grudge against his other-time self for having returned to supplant him?
Mrs. Langley loomed out of the kitchen, her hands white with baking flour.
“I’ve taken your advice, Mrs. Langley,” he said.
“Beg pardon, sir? What advice?”
“I…” What advice, indeed? He didn’t know. He pulled at the collar of his shirt, which was too tight for him. “Nothing,” he said. “Never mind. I was thinking out loud.” She nodded, baffled, and he forced himself along, walking toward the parlor. Steady on, he told himself. Keep your mouth closed. There’s too much you don’t know yet, and too much of what you do know is nonsense.
And then there sat Alice, reading a book. He was astonished by the sight of her. She hasn’t aged a day, he thought joyfully, and then he wondered why on earth he thought any such thing, and a garden of memories, like someone else’s anecdotes, sprung fully bloomed in his mind. His head swam, and he sat down hard on a chair. Maybe he ought to have waited, to have grappled with the business of memory before wading in like this. But he hadn’t, and now that he got a good look at Alice, with her dark hair done up in a ribbon, he was happy that he hadn’t wasted another moment.