Peculiar Lives Read online

  Title Page

  TIME HUNTER

  PECULIAR LIVES

  by

  Philip Purser-Hallard

  Publisher Information

  First published in England in 2005 by

  Telos Publishing Ltd

  17 Pendre Avenue, Prestatyn, Denbighshire, LL19 9SH, UK

  www.telos.co.uk

  Digital Edition converted and distributed in 2011 by

  Andrews UK Limited

  www.andrewsuk.com

  Telos Publishing Ltd values feedback. Please e-mail us with any comments you may have about this book to: [email protected]

  Peculiar Lives © 2005 Philip Purser-Hallard.

  Cover artwork by Matthew Laznicka

  Time Hunter format © 2003 Telos Publishing Ltd

  Honoré Lechasseur and Emily Blandish created by Daniel O’Mahony

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior written consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Dedication

  To B, with all my love.

  Quotes

  ‘In the stars’ view, no doubt, these creatures were mere vermin;

  yet each to itself, and sometimes one to another,

  was more real than all the stars.’

  Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker, 1937

  ‘I have looked pretty carefully into lots of minds, big and little, and it’s devastatingly clear to me that in big matters Homo sapiens is a species with very slight educable capacity. He has entirely failed to learn his lesson from the last war.’

  Olaf Stapledon, Odd John, 1935.

  ‘In fact, given sufficient biological knowledge and eugenical technique, it might be possible to breed new human types of men to people the planets [...] the work might start with experiments on some Equatorial varieties of our species.’

  Olaf Stapledon, address to the British Interplanetary Society, 1948.

  The Time Hunter

  Honoré Lechasseur and Emily Blandish... Honoré is a black American ex-GI, now living in London, 1950, working sometimes as a private detective, sometimes as a ‘fixer’, or spiv. Now life has a new purpose for him as he has discovered that he is a time sensitive. In theory, this attribute, as well as affording him a low-level perception of the fabric of time itself, gives him the ability to sense the whole timeline of any person with whom he comes into contact. He just has to learn how to master it.

  Emily is a strange young woman whom Honoré has taken under his wing. She is suffering from amnesia, and so knows little of her own background. She comes from a time in Earth’s far future, one of a small minority of people known as time channellers, who have developed the ability to make jumps through time using mental powers so highly evolved that they could almost be mistaken for magic. They cannot do this alone, however. In order to achieve a time-jump, a time channeller must connect with a time sensitive.

  When Honoré and Emily connect, the adventures begin.

  Foreword

  by the Author, Erik Clevedon

  Readers of my earlier book, The Peculiar, will recognise in the current volume the sequel and conclusion to its remarkable story. Like The Peculiar, Peculiar Lives is not fiction, but a true chronicle, in which some of the names and locations have alone been altered. In recounting incidents at which I was not myself present, I have endeavoured to stay as true as possible to the accounts given me by the real individuals involved; rarely I have permitted myself a novelist’s licence, and on all such occasions I have remained as faithful as I am able to the spirit of events, if not their letter.

  I am aware that to some readers these statements will seem outlandish. To maintain that The Peculiar and Peculiar Lives are true accounts is to claim a historical status for persons and happenings surely more suited to the lurid fantasies which come to us in magazine form from the far side of the Atlantic. After all, even the late Mr Wells, in presenting us with the scientific possibility of travelling through time, restrained himself from any pretence that his whimsical account was the truth.

  I have not Mr Wells’ advantages, however. I not only know that time-travel is possible, but have seen its effects with my own eyes; I have been in direct, if mostly unwitting, contact with a being from the distant future; I know the truth that there have walked among human beings as innocuous as myself, individuals whose abilities are so potent that our feeble species should tremble at their footsteps. I know how these creatures came to exist, and I know the lengths to which our worldly authorities will go to end their existences if they may.

  I am older now than my sixty-four years, and my novels are largely neglected; my ideas, more important to me by far than the sprawling tales in which I have presented them, almost universally ignored. When I add that the recent experiences of which I write confirm that my other stories (The Coming Times, Men of the Times, The Star Beasts) have also been, if not absolutely true, then at least inspired and guided by a mind beyond and far superior to my own, I will doubtless be spurned as a ranting madman.

  No matter. I fear I will not be required to endure the kindly scorn of my critics for much longer. I set this chronicle before you now, as a true account of the events which transpired in the summer of 1950, involving the young woman named Emily Blandish, her unique associate Honoré Lechasseur, young Percival ‘the peculiar’ and myself. Treat it as a fantasy if you will, but a fantasy which embodies, like all the best of its kind, certain truths about reality.

  In the end, that is all I am entitled to ask.

  E C

  London, 1950

  Intimations Of Crisis

  Emily And Violet

  A superior young woman, Emily Blandish exhibited a childlike frailty of frame with which her womanly independence of mind contested ceaselessly and sternly. Her large round eyes, which were sea-green, beheld the world with a weary determination, yet on occasion betrayed in her the innocent bewilderment of a child. For this there was good reason.

  For all that those who met her took away an impression of a woman who knew her own mind, Emily had mislaid most of hers some time before. You may recall the case, which was a celebrated one in London for a while. An amnesiac young woman, clad in only the flimsiest of nightwear, Emily had emerged from the fog and shadows of the East End in late 1949 only to collapse into a policeman’s arms, her mind a tablet whose contents had been wiped clean away. Her antecedents had never been established; so far as I know, her lost memories remain missing to this day.

  She had not allowed this unusual handicap to cripple her, however. For some time now she had been engaged in philanthropic work of a somewhat esoteric nature, in conjunction with a partner as unique and gifted as herself.

  When Emily Blandish entered St Pancras Station on a cool morning of June 1950, her thoughts, as often, were on this matter of her vanished past. Her light brown hair, worn long, hung loose about her shoulders, and she sported a light summer overcoat. She was bound that day for a certain office in North London, where she was to make contact with a business associate, the details of whose affairs shall not be of concern to us.

  Something in the quality of light in that morning’s chilly air had put her in mind of that white radiance which formed her earliest, uncomprehended recollection: a light which shone so brightly that it might abolish darkness forever, given only sufficient time to blaze forth unextinguished. Often she
felt that all she did towards the aid of others was directed at no other end than bringing them to that light, or it to them. Sometimes indeed (and with a lack of unwarranted humility which was typical of her) she considered herself in the light of the bodhisattva of Eastern legend, returned to Earth from that serene illumination of non-being which the Buddhists call nirvana to guide others through the murky gloom of reality. In darker moments, she feared that she was driven by the vanished memory of some guilt for which she must atone.

  It was with reluctance that Emily focused her attention back on her mundane surroundings: the pressing crowd whose warmth held back the morning’s chill, the smells of smoke and engine-oil, the ticket queue requiring her attendance. The time was shortly before nine o’clock, and the great Victorian concourse teemed with Londoners about their daily business like a droplet of blood beneath a microscope. Each individual, a corpuscle swept along the city’s bloodstream from her arterial railways into the capillaries of her streets and alleys, had his function in that greater organism’s life; yet each had too his own concerns and cares and petty vanities, of vivider significance to him than any belonging to the vaster body.

  While her senses descended to the reality of the lives surrounding her, Emily became aware of something out of place. It was, she would later tell me, ‘not anything shocking – something very subtle, hiding away in the corner of my eye, or my mind’. She compared the experience to ‘one of those pictures where something’s not quite as it should be – there’s something missing, or something there that isn’t right. It takes a moment to see what it is, but once you have it you can’t ever look at that picture again in the same way’.

  She sensed, rather than saw, that there was something moving through the crowd. Of course there were many such things, each one a human being like herself; but this one was different. She felt it as an absence, a travelling emptiness in that bustle of humanity like the ever-shifting eye of a tempest. If she looked at it hard out of the corner of her eye, she could nearly see it for what it was; and then she got the trick of it, and the out-of-place thing stood visibly before her.

  It was a young girl, as she appeared, of indeterminate age, strolling at leisure through the station’s concourse. The mob seethed unheeding past her, like a river parting on either side of a rock; while this child, with deft hands and a sly expression, relieved its every tenth or twelfth member of a wallet, purse or watch. These she crammed into a leather clutch-bag which looked to have itself been stolen. As far as Emily could make out there was no reason for the victims of these thefts not to remark her darting eyes and agile hands; nonetheless, they passed by her unheeding.

  An instant after she was observed, the pickpocket looked up in startlement. Emily was strongly impressed by the fact that, instead of casting around to see who had perceived her, the girl glanced towards Emily directly, for all the world as if Emily had cried out upon a silent hillside. At once the child turned and plunged away through the crowd. Abandoning for the moment all notion of a ticket, Emily left the queue and hurried after her.

  It was a queer pursuit. Emily kept the girl in sight as she struggled through the throng: the young thief seemed able to part the multitude ahead of her, and thus was able always to proceed without impediment, while Emily had to push between its members in the usual way. The girl’s gait was peculiar, almost bestial, putting Emily in mind of the undulation of a lemur. Still, the child was slightly lame in one leg, and her pursuer, who was in the prime of physical health, was able several times to narrow the distance between them.

  When this happened the fugitive, who was casting worried looks backward at Emily, would pause abruptly, and gaze shrewdly into her eyes. At these times Emily would find to her discomfiture that her attention wandered: she would remember her appointment with a start, and turn back towards the ticket queue; or be struck suddenly by the morning light seeping through the station’s canopy, or by the smell of hot food. The girl would use this opportunity to make up her speed, until Emily recollected herself and resumed her pursuit.

  She told me afterwards, ‘It was like a dream – one of the ones where it’s vitally important you find something, or do something, and yet you get distracted by absurd trifles. And all the while the thing you’re really after is receding further and further into the distance. Does everyone have dreams like that, Erik, or is it only me?’ I believe that this talent of Violet’s (for that was the young thief’s name) acted by establishing a resonance between her own mental vibrations and those in the region of Emily’s brain wherein these dreams were generated, producing a like mental state in waking life.

  From the glimpses she was permitted, Emily thought the pickpocket’s stature similar to her own; yet her quarry was proportioned something like an eight-year-old, with a large head and short limbs. Beneath the rather scant brown hair her cranium was very large, and protruded oddly in a dome behind. Her eyes were huge, her right bright blue, her left the startling violet for which she had been named; and her mouth, at odds with her childlike appearance, was full and sensuous. She was attired in serviceable, unpretentious clothing, which had a hand-made appearance to it.

  Emily had by now convinced herself that this strange urchin, thief or no, was of importance to her own perennial and enigmatic mission. As yet the justification for this baffled her, yet she felt it with conviction. It was with some alarm, therefore, that she saw the child, still glancing back towards her, run pell-mell into a brace of policemen standing by the station’s nearest entrance. It was plain that the constables, unlike the others in that crowd, had perceived the fugitive as well as her pursuer: perhaps, Emily thought, their professional interest or training had rendered them less susceptible to whatever influence was being exerted on those others present.

  At all events the girl’s flight was unceremoniously arrested, as moments later she was herself. Emily was surprised, and increasingly alarmed, to see the escapee tripped by one of the constables as she attempted to tear past them, whereupon his colleague drew his truncheon and smacked her smartly as she fell, at the rear of her malformed skull.

  A moment later he was hauling her to her feet and passing her limp frame over to his partner; then he directed his attention towards Emily herself, who had only now succeeded in reining in her headlong rush. ‘Could you come here a minute, please, miss?’ he asked courteously.

  ‘Why are you hurting that girl?’ she asked him in indignation, for when the young pickpocket had been lying on the floor, clearly unconscious, the man’s companion had aimed a vicious kick at the child’s lean ribs. Emily could see him now, dragging the helpless figure away with little care or gentleness.

  ‘Now now, miss, she’s only getting what’s coming to her,’ the first policeman replied. ‘The girl’s a thief.’ His tone was genial.

  ‘Yes, but –’ She wanted to protest that policemen did not beat up young girls; not even in London, and not even when they were thieves. But it was evident that the girl was no ordinary thief: perhaps her persecutors were not ordinary policemen. She said: ‘Yes, but I think she’s hurt. Her leg –’

  ‘You just leave that up to us, miss,’ the man said in what he considered to be a reassuring tone. His face was sharp and brutal, with something oddly flat about the eyes; he looked a man who would rarely take offence, but might pretend to do so with great violence if it suited him. He stood far outside the usual conception of a police constable, and even outside the expectations of Emily, whose experiences with the police had not invariably been congenial. ‘What we’re looking for,’ he said, ‘is her accomplice.’

  ‘Accomplice?’ Emily said. She wondered if the man was trying to trap her into giving evidence against the girl; but she recalled, dismayed, that she had already assented to the proposition that the child was a thief. ‘There wasn’t an accomplice,’ she insisted. ‘I saw her. She was working alone.’ Covertly she peered at the policeman’s uniform, trying to discern his number, but there was none v
isible. She saw that he wore two pieces of unfamiliar equipment over his ears. These extended up into his helmet, and she wondered if they were a new form of police radio, for communicating with the police station. (From where she might have gained such an idea I cannot say, a wireless receiver being a rather bulky piece of equipment, but such was her conjecture.)

  ‘We’ll have to take a statement from you, miss.’ The constable took her into a waiting room, for which he bullied a station porter into handing him the keys. Locked inside with him, Emily made out a summary of the events which she had witnessed, eliding the less explicable aspect of the girl’s crimes. She made the child out to be no more than a skilful pickpocket, and herself to be unusually observant. Steeling herself, she gave a false address and the name ‘Joan Barton’.

  She had intended to emphasise in her statement the brutal actions of the two police constables, but found herself cowed by the officer’s flat eyes. She omitted them, despising herself.

  This formality concluded, the man seemed keenly interested in the thief’s supposed accomplice. ‘Are you sure you didn’t see him, miss?’ he asked. ‘We’ve got some good descriptions, from witnesses who was sure they were working together. He’d be a queer one to look at, same as her – kind of foreign-like, thin and lithe with a big head. Great big green eyes, black hair in little curls like a nigger. Probably dressed same as her, too.’

  Emily had seen no such person, and insisted so. At length, and with reluctance, the policeman unlocked the waiting-room and let her go. ‘You watch yourself, miss,’ he told her, with definite but undirected menace. ‘There’s some funny people about. And if you see that young man we been speaking of, you give me a call, all right?’ He had passed her a calling-card bearing a telephone number and the name of ‘PC Grayles’, supposedly of Lancing Street Police Station. Emily was fairly certain that there was no such establishment.