Peculiar Lives Read online

  The two women had met at the railway station. It seemed that, during their transient encounter, Emily had made as enduring an impression on the young thief as the latter on her. To me it looked as if Violet had decided arbitrarily to take Emily into her confidence as Percival had once taken me; regarding her as part adult protector, part agent among mundane human society, and perhaps (I did not flatter myself, and so I should not flatter Emily) part pet.

  All this I learned from Emily and Violet. For my part I gave an account of my dialogue with Spears, who Violet considered was very likely in collusion with her persecutors. ‘He wanted the location of the Retreat,’ I confirmed, ‘just like your policemen. At present, he still thinks it’s in the South Seas.’

  ‘Percival said you never should have written that bloody book,’ said Violet calmly. ‘It’s too late now, though.’ Her most pressing concern was that she could no longer make contact with Percival. ‘I can’t get hold of him,’ she complained, as if irked by a faulty telephone connection. ‘He’s usually there – all of them are – in the background of my thoughts. It’s like – well, you’ll understand it best if I say it’s like a roomful of people, all talking at once. If you listen out carefully, you can hear one particular voice, even if you can’t make out just what it’s saying, you know? Since last night I can’t “hear” Percival, however hard I try. Nor can the others.’

  ‘He isn’t dead,’ I reassured her. ‘At least, I don’t believe so. He may have... gone... somewhere else, though.’ I explained, as best I could, the scene which I had witnessed the previous night, after the struggle between Percival and the black man. ‘I had wondered if this was a new ability Percival had developed – to move from one place to another instantaneously, in extremis. There are accounts of saints and mystics performing similar feats... but I suppose, if you don’t recognise the phenomenon, it mustn’t have been.’

  ‘I think I know what must have happened,’ Emily said. ‘Certainly, if Percival’s as unusual as you say, it has to be a possibility.’ She went on to explain something of the astounding talent of her friend, my second unexpected visitor of the previous night. It is of this man, and of his remarkable qualities, that I must now tell.

  The Story Of Lechasseur

  Honoré Lechasseur was by birth a New Orleanian, fetched up in London by that indefatigable tide of men and munitions which broke against the western shores of Europe in the later stages of the war. When afterward I had the opportunity to question him, he proved strangely reticent on the subject, but I have no doubt that, of his race, his family must have been a remarkable one. Very likely, as with so many inhabitants of that colourful city, his ancestors’ African strain had become partially mixed with those of the European and American Indian. What is certain is that, although he displayed both that physical toughness and that lassitude which commingle so paradoxically yet so uncompromisingly in the character of the American Negro, he was in other respects atypical of the type, possessing both an astute intellect and a much heightened sensitivity to the minutest details of his surroundings.

  Lechasseur had had, as people say, ‘a bad war’. During a tour of duty in France and Belgium a violent explosion, of which he was the only survivor from his platoon, threatened to cripple him, and for a long time his doctors were adamant that he would never recover the power of walking. The psychic trauma which he suffered was quite as severe, and Lechasseur spent a period of several years in a state of sullen despondency, troubled by strange and savage dreams. At length the use of his limbs returned to him, and with it an altogether rarer faculty, one which he now believes had been lying latent within him since his boyhood.

  To his gradual astonishment, Lechasseur found that he was sometimes able to perceive time: not merely the passage of it, but the shapes and patterns that it makes in present, past and future. At first such perceptions took the form of shapeless premonitions and forebodings, or memories of places and events at which he had not himself been present. By stages it became apparent to him that these visions were related to the persons with whom, or more rarely the objects with which, he came into contact. Sometimes they acquired a startling clarity, in which Lechasseur seemed to see the individual before him as a cross-section of a larger being, consisting of that man in his chronological entirety, the sum of all that he had been and would be across the span of his life. These ‘flesh-worms’ were a disturbing ‘sight’ (for, although the perceptual process involved was certainly not vision in its strictest sense, sight remained for Lechasseur the closest available analogy), tapering as they did towards twin tails at birth and death.

  (Occasionally he would encounter stranger manifestations still. When first he glimpsed Percival, Lechasseur perceived what he called ‘red threads’ woven throughout the young man’s body, stretching away from him through days and years toward a very distant future. It was as if the supernormal youth had been a puppet stitched from cloth, but one whose controlling strings were those very seams which held its body together. But here I anticipate myself.)

  Shortly after Emily and Lechasseur first made one another’s acquaintance, they discovered that Emily had an equally exceptional gift, one which was complementary to Lechasseur’s own and which could take effect only within the context of it. For whereas Lechasseur was sensitive to time, Emily was able incredibly to move about within it, stepping out along the line of someone else’s life and following their ‘time-line’ like a spoor. For this she was required to be in physical contact with Lechasseur, or someone like him: without his special senses she would have been travelling blind, and would likely have vanished never to return.

  Over the course of their association, the diverse pair had come to realise that these abilities on which they could call, while rare, were not unique. A small proportion of the human race fell into one or another (yet seemingly never both) of these categories of ‘time-sensitive’ and ‘time-channeller’. (It was evident to me, when I was told of this, that such abilities were not themselves indications of ‘peculiar’ status: rather, they were a rare but natural talent both of Homo peculiar and of Homo sapiens, which had remained latent until recent generations.)

  Most such individuals, never coming into contact with a member of the complementary type, remained ignorant of their extraordinary faculty. When I related to Emily the events which I had witnessed, or rather which I had failed to witness, through my french windows that night, it was her immediate supposition that Percival was a time-channeller in addition to his other attributes. It seemed that my momentary queer perception of him and Lechasseur as a symbiotic double-entity had had an element of truth about it.

  This much Violet and I learned from Emily, that afternoon. To address the sequel to that scene, in what time and what place it was that Lechasseur and Percival found themselves, after the latter had unwittingly pitched them away through time from that June evening of 1950, and whose personal path through history it was that they followed on that journey, I must turn to the account of Lechasseur himself, as he related it to me some time later.

  In the telephone call which she had made to him from her home, Emily had conveyed to Lechasseur both the general area in which she had seen Violet, and the description both of the young woman and of her accomplice, which she had received from the supposed PC Grayles. Given these individuals’ unusual appearances, it had been for Lechasseur a matter of a few hours’ work to discover the building in which they had been staying. Since his recovery he had made for himself a somewhat dubious living by working as a combination of black-market trader and private detective, and consequently he was a man of many contacts, placed both high and low among the assorted citizenry of the capital.

  The premises in question, whose precise location is immaterial for our purposes, were the surviving half of a partly collapsed terrace of houses which had been bombed during the war, and which had as yet been neither rebuilt nor demolished. Many such remain in London, and they tend to attract those who have re
ason, good or (more usually) bad, to avoid the city’s more reputable sources of accommodation.

  Lechasseur had this fact clearly in mind as he bicycled towards this address, and upon his arrival at the half-fallen row of houses he essayed a cautious approach. Emily had warned him that the young man whom he was to find might have abilities beyond the ordinary, and after the veritable bestiary of such talents which their work together had uncovered Lechasseur had no inclination to be sceptical. Although such a thing would have been contrary to his usual habit, he wondered as he approached the building whether he ought not to have brought with him a gun, and this image was to the forefront of his mind, together with a clear mental picture of the person he was seeking, as he entered the building. To Percival, with his acute telepathic awareness and his worry that he and his friends were presently being sought by armed men, Lechasseur’s approach could scarcely have been more obvious.

  Finding each of the terrace’s front doors boarded across, Lechasseur gained entry by climbing through the frame of a long-absent window. He found the interior of the house heaped with rubble, which a succession of the transitory inhabitants had made attempts to clear, with partial success. He shouted, ‘Hey! Is anyone at home?’, but was rebuffed by silence. His nervous agitation brought with it an uncannily precise sense of his surroundings, which in turn pricked at his temporal perceptions. These latter stirred and awakened as he began to climb the steps towards the upper storey of the first house of the terrace: shadows compromised the clarity of his vision, and ghosts of furniture and decorations long since rotten dogged his senses. Huddled heaps of mortar and masonry appeared to stir and get to their feet, only to fall back when he turned his direct gaze upon them.

  Upstairs Lechasseur found that a hole had been knocked through into the next-door house, using some heavy implement such as a sledgehammer. He climbed across into the next property before confirming that this upper room was also empty. Echoes of past and future inhabitants flickered across his sensibility, and he screwed his eyelids close together in a vain attempt to filter out this onslaught of lost time. In this way he proceeded, checking first the ground floor and then the upper storey of each house, while images streamed past him of the families and individuals who once had lived there. Before his eyes children grew older and left home, while their grandparents regressed from dotage into youthful vigour.

  Presently Lechasseur came to a stairway which had crumpled into beams and splinters, leaving a precarious banister which he gingerly scaled to reach the upper-storey landing. As in each of the houses, a bedroom adjoined it, and this he checked for signs of life. For a moment as he entered he caught sight of Percival crouched in the far corner, and in that instant gained his strange impression that the young man’s body was shot through with red threads of futurity. Then, in an instant, he was confounded by a premonition of what that place will be, decades from now: a dark, low-ceilinged space delirious with noise and flashing light, where young people, half-nude, writhed and gyrated in an arrhythmic frenzy. Pounding, outlandish music pressed against his ears, and pyrotechnic colours flashed at him from all directions.

  Confused and disorientated, Lechasseur cried out and fell to his knees. As the oppressive vision span away from him, he saw again the dim and dingy room, and the lithe and ape-like figure of Percival leaping at him, arms outstretched. As the boy barrelled into him Lechasseur shouted, ‘I’m not here to hurt you! I just want to talk!’, and then, toppled by his attacker’s momentum, he tumbled down the erstwhile stairwell into the debris below. For several moments he believed the building was falling along with him, masonry crashing down about his shoulders and chest. Whether this was a memory of the bomb’s arrival several years before, or a premonition of the terrace’s eventual demolition, he could not tell. Then Percival was upon him once more, belabouring him about the face and arms.

  Feebly Lechasseur tried to ward off his assailant’s blows, before finding his confusion abruptly intensified a thousandfold, as in his mind’s eye centuries of past and future fires and plagues, wars and disasters ravaged that minute portion of London. One moment he felt himself underwater in some forgotten inundation; then above him, clearly somehow through the house’s roof, he saw a vast circular vessel spinning through the sky like a leisurely top, its hatches pouring fire onto the streets below. Then awareness itself vanished, and Lechasseur succumbed to a darkness which was beset by evil dreams.

  The Pursuit Of Percival

  At length he was awakened by one of the building’s other temporary occupants. The elderly female vagrant objected to his presence, and made her complaints known with a hail of blows which sufficed to recall the black man to the here and now. Aching and dazed, but realising at once that this poor frightened creature deserved no harm from him, Lechasseur made an embarrassed apology and left, emerging into the early evening of a London street and to the realisation that his bicycle was missing.

  Exhausted, sore, frustrated and angry, Lechasseur sat down on a crumbling wall and pondered his position. It was now obvious to him that the hypersensitivity which his extra-temporal percipience had suffered inside the building had been effected by none other than Percival himself, in what can only be described as a form of telepathic attack. Lechasseur’s visions had increased in intensity as he approached the room which held the boy, and they had swiftly swelled to overcome him once he was in the young man’s presence. Emily had been perfectly correct to suggest that he might find their quarry in possession of some special defences. (It did not occur to Lechasseur at this point that Percival might have been a time-channeller. Indeed I believe that the specific mode of this assault was accidental, the unhappy result of Percival’s instinctively identifying a ‘weak spot’ in Lechasseur’s psychic defences.)

  The Negro shortly came to realise, however, that the boy’s attack had had one lingering and probably unlooked-for side-effect. An echo of the enhanced sensitivity imposed upon his time-senses still remained, like a fading of the sky following the sunset, and as it proved would endure for several hours more before it finally quiesced. To his inner eye a faint but distinct form was visible in front of the house, a long shadow not itself a flesh-worm so much as a worm-cast or a snake’s sloughed skin, stretching from the spot where Lechasseur had left his bicycle to the nearest street-corner, where it vanished from view behind a row of intact houses.

  Lechasseur realised that, if he was to recover his property, he would be in for a very long walk. Painfully he stood, and began following in the vehicle’s wake and that of its rider.

  Over the course of the next five or six hours, Lechasseur trailed Percival to a variety of locations, in each of which the latter had apparently conducted a hasty search for Violet. One of these places was St Pancras, where as far as the Negro could ascertain from the lad’s fading traces, he had caught one glimpse of the policeman on duty and fled.

  It was near midnight by the time that Lechasseur eventually reached the rear garden of my house, by which time all but the faintest glimmer of Percival’s passage had vanished from his waning perceptions. He found his bicycle where Percival had discarded it in a flower-bed, near the patch of light cast on the lawn from my french windows. Fatigued though he was, the black man understood that he would have to be alert and well-prepared if he was to face Percival again. Silently, as far as possible, he manoeuvred himself into a position whence he might spy upon my study’s warm and welcoming interior. It was, as things would turn out, the last glimpse of familiarity he would be granted for some time.

  At once, Percival emerged from the house like a Dervish, colliding with him, pummelling and pounding, and followed (at a distance and diffidently, as you will recall) by myself. As he was grappled to the ground, Lechasseur felt the probing of the young man’s mind at the borders of his own; this time, however, he was able to turn it aside. Despite this, his awareness of the shapes of time began to open like a flower, and once again those bloody strands of future life were visible,
pulling this way and that at Percival’s body and limbs. It was at this point that Lechasseur glimpsed me standing in the doorway, and was so startled by what he perceived that Percival was able to gain his momentary advantage.

  It was Lechasseur’s perception (and you must believe me when I tell you that, had I been made aware then of the apparition, I would have been at an absolute loss to account for it) that my face was not my face: rather, it seemed a wax mask, flimsy and hollow, behind which an entirely other face observed the two men’s struggle. You must remember that this semblance presented itself to Lechasseur’s time-senses, not to his ocular vision; still, that visage ‘appeared’ to him warped and bestial, and it was staring, with an icy detachment blending in equal parts amusement and contempt, directly at Percival and himself.

  When presently he had successfully pinioned Lechasseur’s arms against the ground, Percival also turned to face me. Whether as a result of his bodily contact with the Negro, which as I have learned facilitates the interplay of the time-channelling and time-sensitive faculties, or thanks to that tenuous mental connection he had succeeded in establishing between them, he saw me, his friend, for a moment through Lechasseur’s eyes. At once he asked, ‘Who’s that behind your face?’ The astonishment which at that moment was shared by the two men, the focus of their joint attention on those hideous features lurking behind my own, abruptly flung them into the abyss of time, along the trajectory which that mystifying question had defined.

  As Lechasseur would tell me later, sounding somewhat aggrieved, ‘The travelling doesn’t usually take time. What time is there for it to happen in? The farthest Emily and I had been before was something like a hundred and fifty years. That seemed like nothing – one blink, then we were there, like falling asleep in one place and waking up some place else. That’s not how it felt this time round.’ Their course being apparently pre-determined, it felt to Lechasseur as if he and Percival were falling, unable to direct their flight, clinging together now not out of antagonism but in the sheer need for human contact in the crackling electric void through which it seemed they hurtled. After a long duration, as it felt to Lechasseur, they found themselves beached against solidity, and fell apart to lie gasping on pitiless ground.