He paused for a moment to check where he was. In that snowfall it would be too easy to wander off from the buried path and lose himself in the woods.
There was no one about.
No houses.
The only sound was the faint crunch of snow beneath his boots.
He switched the lamp to his right hand.
As far as he could tell he was on the right track. The ground was running downhill now. He was probably only three or four minutes from the amphitheatre. The river and Jud’s boat would only be another 30 seconds or so walking time beyond that.
He walked faster.
He pulled the brim of his cap lower over his eyes to try to prevent the snow from actually striking his eyeballs.
And more than once he remembered that in this weather he could walk into a Bluebeard before he realised he was there.
What then?
A brief scuffle before Sam Baker’s blood stained the snow?
But there was a good enough reason for him to be here. In 1865 electric cables were only available for the telegraph system that sent Morse dashes and dots pulsing from town to town. They did have a bit of electric cable at the farm, but they needed more.
Jud had said there were a couple of spools of cable on the narrow boat, and as far as he knew it hadn’t been taken when a Bluebeard had looted it the day before.
The narrow boat itself was, of course, deserted. Jud and Dot had moved into the farmhouse until the danger was over.
One way or another, Sam thought grimly.
He’d left the people at the barn still working furiously. Already a strange clutch of vehicles were arising like mutant phoenixes from the carcasses of the original bus, van and cars that had come through the tear in time with them.
Years before, Sam had been given a book called Wacky Inventions. He’d loved to sit cross-legged on his bedroom floor and slowly turn the pages, looking at each of those bizarre inventions in turn.
Of course, they weren’t real inventions, not ones that would actually work, and you couldn’t seriously think of operating them without being dragged away to the nuthouse. They were cartoon-like drawings of machines that allowed you to combine two completely separate activities, such as a bath tub on wheels with an engine and a steering wheel that enabled you to go shopping while still taking a bath. That drawing showed a cheerful man sitting in bubbles up to his chest and scrubbing his back with a long-handled brush while selecting products from a supermarket shelf. Another favourite was a device that allowed you to read a book while taking the dog for a walk. A pole extended out from a headband, something like a unicorn horn. From a clip at the end hung your book, comfortably at eye level. (Illustration: an unfeasibly happy young woman walking her poodle through the park as she avidly read her novel.)
The vehicles in the barn had taken on the appearance of those ‘wacky inventions’. Most had stubby wings made of lightweight timber torn up from the farmhouse floors. (Did Carswell in some mad flight of fancy believe those machines would actually fly?) The only seat on the bus was the driver’s seat. When Sam had left the barn, Jud and a couple of other men had been building what looked to be a large box around the seat, using the stout wooden doors from the outbuildings to form the walls.
Carswell had said he’d explain his plans fully. But that, Sam was sure, would be in his own sweet time.
Sam reached the amphitheatre car park. Falling snow still blotted out the river, but he knew he was almost there now.
He quickened his pace.
He still felt all too vulnerable and alone out here. The gateway that the barbarians had used to enter 1865 was a mile or so upstream. Even though the Bluebeards probably wouldn’t attack again for another couple of days they might send out scouting patrols.
Sam crossed the car park. The snow there was flat, pristine.
When he reached the top of the amphitheatre he paused to look down into it.
Immediately he ducked back.
A dozen figures stood at the bottom.
Bluebeards.
That was his first thought.
Turning down the wick of the lamp until the speck of flame was so small it wouldn’t betray his position, he cautiously looked over the edge.
If this was the start of another attack, he’d have to run as hard as he could back to the farmhouse to warn everyone.
What then, he didn’t know.
He cautiously lifted his head over the rim of the amphitheatre and looked down.
Snow swirled into his face in tingling flakes.
He counted 11 figures. But they were not Bluebeards. He recognised Rolle first of all, unmistakable with his red hair and orange overalls. He seemed to be lecturing the others.
But who the hell were they?
They didn’t look like people from Casterton. And why on Earth would they travel all this way out of town, anyway?
He wiped the snowflakes from his eyes and looked again. All the figures were wrapped against the snowstorm. As his eyes adjusted to the gloom he recognised one of them.
It was the long blonde hair fluttering this way and that in the wind that did it.
Nicole Wagner. It had to be. But what on Earth… Then he recalled Lee’s strange encounter with her in the wood. He knew that she was now a Liminal – Rolle’s word for those who lived in Limbo outside the normal flow of time. And that an animal had fused with her during the last time-jump.
So she’s been hiding out here all along, Sam told himself in wonder. Living like an outlaw.
And wasn’t that heavy-set man the one with a bird fused partly inside his face?
But what were they doing here?
Why were they talking to – or rather being lectured by – Rolle in the amphitheatre in this blizzard at the dead of night?
All this made as much sense to Sam as the weird and wondrous machines taking shape in the barn back at Perseverance Farm.
After Rolle wound up the meeting he stood there shaking hands with each of the Liminals as they left.
Sam left the lamp at the top of the slope and slithered down through the snow, staying well hidden behind a line of bushes.
Concealed there, he watched the heavily-clothed figures move off, following the river upstream.
He’d been right about Nicole. She walked by, her arm linked with that of a tall young man with blond hair. They leaned forward into the driving snow.
What with the darkness and the snowflakes Sam couldn’t make out much detail of the others’ faces, although strangely he heard what sounded like a hive of bees as one of the men passed him – his face was bluey-dark and Sam couldn’t be sure whether he was bearded or not.
Last of all came what Sam at first took to be a boy of around ten riding a cow or bullock.
He looked again, then turned quickly away, his stomach fluttering queasily.
The boy had become fused with the cow.
If anything, it resembled a centaur; the half-man, half-horse of Graeco-Roman myth. The top half of the human body rose up from the neck of the cow. The cow’s head was still there but turned crookedly to the left. The bones in the neck must have locked at an awkward angle, so the head always appeared to be straining back and slightly downwards, as if trying to look back at its own hind legs.
The boy, with a mass of curly hair that had itself taken on the black and white Friesian patterning of the cow, stared impassively forward.
Sam looked back as the line headed away into darkness. Soon all he could see was the swish of the cow’s tail.
A moment later that, too, was gone.
By the time Sam Baker returned with the cable to the barn at Perseverance Farm the Reverend Hather was there.
He stood in the pools of golden lamplight, his palms lightly pressed together as if in prayer, and looked around at the bustle of activity, his eyes wide.