She shook her head. ‘Uhhh, no, not really. I’d probably run if a stranger reached out for me like that.’
‘One minute left until extraction,’ said Bob.
Liam suddenly snapped his fingers. ‘We’re probably going to have to come back here again, once we’re sure history’s been corrected.’
Sal looked at him. ‘Really? Why?’
‘Liam is correct,’ said Bob. ‘The distillery wagon represents altered history —’
‘And we’ll need to trace it back and find just who caused them horses to bolt.’ Liam looked at Bob. ‘We should’ve followed it up last night, straight after saving Lincoln.’ Liam cursed, frustrated with himself for having been so dense. ‘Why didn’t you suggest that, Bob?’
‘It was not a stated mission priority.’
Liam cursed again. ‘We’ll need to come back once more and trace back the way that wagon came. See where it came from, find out what spooked them horses.’ He fumed in silence for a moment. ‘Jay-zus, that was stupid of me.’
They waited for the window, listening to the bustling activity outside. Bob counted down the last ten seconds and then with a puff of air that sent Sal’s bonnet fluttering the shimmering orb of displaced time hovered darkly in front of them. Sal took a final look around the storage shed, savouring one last time the smells of woodsmoke, leather and horse manure.
‘I enjoyed my trip,’ she said, a little wistfully. ‘I wish …’ she started to say, but didn’t finish. She didn’t need to — Liam knew exactly what she was going to say.
I wish we could stay.
He nodded just to let her know he felt the same. ‘Best get going,’ he said finally.
‘Goodbye, 1831,’ she uttered, then reluctantly stepped through.
Liam looked up at Bob. ‘Well, better get back home, then.’
Bob nodded. ‘Correct.’
They stepped into the displacement window one after the other.
2001, New York
A moment later Liam emerged from the milky void into the archway to see the three girls standing beside the computer desk, awaiting his arrival.
‘Hey-ho!’ he chirped as he strode towards them. ‘World saved … yet again!’
Bob emerged from the portal behind him with a heavy grunt as his feet found the firm concrete.
‘Stand clear!’ said Maddy as she turned round to the desk to instruct computer-Bob to close the portal.
Liam stepped towards Maddy. ‘Me an’ Bob need to go back again, Maddy. We didn’t manage to …’ He stopped. Saw Sal’s eyes suddenly wide, a white-gloved hand raised to her mouth.
‘What’s up?’
Behind him the crackling burr of energy around the portal suddenly ceased as it snapped out of existence and the archway was its normal quiet hum of computers and the fizz of tube lights flickering a cool clinical glow down from above.
‘GOOD GOD! … WHAT IS THIS … DEVILRY?’
Liam spun round on his heel to see a tall young man crouched and cowering in panic and confusion in the middle of the floor, eyes as wide, terrified and startled as a bull in an abattoir.
‘Oh great,’ sighed Liam.
CHAPTER 14. 2001, New York
The man recoiled fearfully at the sight of Bob, taking several quick steps away from him. ‘WHAT IS THIS P-PLACE?’ he bellowed anxiously. His eyes darting from one of them to the next.
It was Maddy who reacted first. She took several steps forward. ‘Liam? Is that …? Oh crud, that’s not …?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid it is, Mads. It’s Lincoln.’
Her jaw hung slack. ‘Oh my God!’ She advanced slowly. ‘Mr Lincoln? Abraham Lincoln?’
Lincoln’s manic eyes settled on her. His shaggy eyebrows scowled, covering his fear with suspicion. ‘You … you know me, ma’am?’
Maddy nodded. She even offered him something that looked like a polite curtsey. ‘Yes, Mr Lincoln. Yes we do.’
Lincoln’s voice softened from an outraged courthouse bellow to something quieter and altogether more agreeable. ‘Then … please, ma’am, tell me where in tarnation I have suddenly ended up.’ He looked around the brick archway. ‘Just a moment ago I was in the Jenkins storehouse.’ His eyes fell on Liam. ‘Listening to you, sir, and your two friends talking about things incomprehensible to me.’
Liam cursed his carelessness. ‘Jay-zus, he must have been following us!’
Lincoln carried on. ‘And then I saw that … that round … doorway appear out of —’ Lincoln’s deep growl of a voice became a breathless whisper and his mouth snapped open and shut like a fish caught on a hook and landed on a riverbank. ‘It arrived out of nothing! Like smoke, like … like a vision of angels. Like …’
Sal chuckled at that.
‘Fool that I am, I dared to step through.’ He glanced at Liam. ‘To follow you through, sir, through the … that … that doorway, and find myself in a … an unearthly whiteness!’ He scratched anxiously at the thick bristles of his beard. ‘Then I find myself here … in this strange place!’
Maddy took another step forward, now only a yard from him. ‘You can relax, Mr Lincoln. Please … it’s all right, it’s OK. You’re perfectly safe here.’
Lincoln studied her in suspicious silence for a moment. ‘You, ma’am. You sound less foreign to me than the others.’ He nodded at Bob. ‘Particularly that ugly ox of a man there. Good God! If I had a dog as ugly, I’d shave its posterior and teach it to walk backwards!’
Lincoln chortled drunkenly at his own joke.
Maddy shook her head. He’s been drinking.
‘Now you, ma’am,’ he said, eyeing Maddy warily, ‘you have the sound of New England in your voice.’
‘Boston,’ she replied. ‘I’m from Boston.’
Lincoln nodded slowly. ‘And I trust you have a name?’
‘Maddy. Maddy Carter.’ She offered her hand to him. ‘We mean you no harm … In fact, we came back in time to save you.’
For several moments he regarded her hand as if it was a snarling dog ready to snap at his fingers. ‘Save me?’
She nodded. ‘You nearly stepped right in front of a speeding wagon.’
‘Aye. It was Bob here,’ said Liam, slapping his meaty shoulder, ‘that yanked you back out of the way. Do you not remember?’
Lincoln remembered that. Remembered being winded and lying on his back. But then it was all a confusing mixture of things he might or might not have seen or heard. The only thing he’d been sure of was the whispered conversation in the dark of the dockside. The mention of his name. The mention of a destiny. The mention of the Jenkins storehouse and the specific time of some mysterious rendezvous.
‘Yes, perhaps I do remember something of that,’ uttered Lincoln. He cocked a bushy eyebrow, narrowed his eyes as he struggled to make some sense of his whisky-soaked recollection. ‘A big … fast wagon? Barrels on it … was it?’
Liam nodded. ‘Aye. A distillery wagon. The horses were running wild, so they were.’
‘There, you see?’ said Maddy. ‘Liam and the others went back to save you.’
‘Back?’ Lincoln nodded. ‘That’s some of what I heard these three say to each other. Back … they came back in time?’
Maddy shot a look of irritation at Liam and Sal. Careless talk. They should’ve been much more cautious in what they were saying and where they were saying it.
‘Yes, Mr Lincoln,’ she admitted. ‘Yes … they actually came back in time.’
Lincoln’s scowl vanished and was replaced in an instant with a smile that looked horrifically out of place beneath his dark brooding eyes. ‘INCREDIBLE!’ He suddenly grasped her hand firmly and shook it. ‘Most incredible!’ He let her hand go and advanced towards the others.