‘See?’ said Jaws, making no attempt to hide his satisfaction. ‘You’re trapped, love, same as we are. Rats in a trap, all of us – you included.’
Ada slapped on the wall hard, first with her right hand and then with both hands.
‘Frankie!’ she shouted, at the top of her voice. ‘Frankie, I’m stuck in the priest’s hide! I can’t open the panel! Can you hear me, Frankie? Frankie – get me out of here!’
She stopped, and listened, to hear if she had any response. Jaws watched her, still smiling.
‘Go on,’ he said. ‘They can’t hear you. I told you to look at your watch, didn’t I? That’s when you were here. They can’t hear something that’s happened in the past.’
‘You’re not making any sense,’ Ada snapped at him. ‘I’m banging the wall, aren’t I, and I’m doing that now. And if you hadn’t been here at the same time that I was here, how did you manage to pull me out of here, and knock my friends over?’
She clenched her fists and started thumping the wall again and again, as hard as she could.
‘Frankie!’ she screamed. ‘Frankie, I’m stuck in the priest’s hide! Get me out of here! Frankie! Rob! Get me out of here!’
She waited almost half a minute, but there was still no answer from the other side. Ada started to knock on the wall again and call out miserably, ‘Frankie – Frankie, please!’ but then she stopped and started to cry.
Thomas came up to her, put his arm around her shoulders and gently pulled her away from the wall.
‘It’s of no avail, my dear,’ he whispered. ‘You will have to accept your destiny. All any of us can do is make the best of our lives in this room, and in this house.’
‘You shouldn’t have come looking for us, love,’ said Jaws. ‘That was your mistake. You and your mirror and your magic dust. You should have left well enough alone, do you know what I mean?’
The russet-bearded man in the long brown jacket came up to Ada, too. She smeared the tears out of her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater and looked up at him. Close up, she could see that he had a deep diagonal scar across his forehead and his left cheek, as if he had been cut by a sword, and that his left eye was milky white and blind.
‘Our lives as pilgrims have been stolen from us,’ he whispered. ‘But we have to safeguard the lives that we still have left to us, if only to outlast the rest of humankind.’
He had a strong, slurred accent that sounded more French than West Country, and every word ended in a strange airy whistle, so that Ada could barely understand what he was saying.
‘When all the other men and women who have walked on this Earth are rotting in their graves – when the sun dims and winks out for the final time – when total darkness and icy cold swallow everything – we shall still be here, we few, to greet that darkness and that cold, and beyond. We shall be here for eternity, so that we can see what God has planned for the universe after the disastrous failure of humanity.’
Ada took a deep breath to steady herself, and then she said, ‘I’m not interested in eternity, whoever you are. I just want to get out of here. Now, tell me how I can do that.’
‘You can’t,’ Jaws whispered. ‘Don’t you understand what we’ve been telling you, me and Father Thomas here? He’s stuck back in sixteen-something or other. Bartram here, he’s stuck back in seventeen thirty-five.’
‘May the ninth, seventeen thirty-five, at one minute past nine in the evening, to be precise,’ Bartram put in. ‘The clock had just finished chiming.’
‘Me… five to five on Sunday, June the tenth, nineteen- seventy-nine,’ Jaws went on. ‘The day after Derby Day. Back then I didn’t have a fucking clue what that was all about, but it didn’t take me too long to work it out, did it, not after Billy here got pulled in, too. Fucking Russell had lost a packet betting on the wrong horse. What a muggins I was. And there was me thinking I was the sharpest chisel in the box.’
Ada said, ‘I can’t stay here forever. I can’t.’
‘As I told you, my dear, none of us has a choice,’ said Thomas. ‘We cannot take our own lives. We cannot cut our wrists because our circulation stopped at the moment of our entry and we would not bleed. We cannot starve ourselves because we never need to eat, or to drink for that matter. We can breathe, yes, and we can talk, but every breath we take is the last breath we took when we were trapped, breathed over and over again, ad infinitum.’
‘Recycling, you might call it,’ grinned Jaws.
‘Wait a minute,’ Ada protested. ‘You keep saying you’re trapped in this room, but you’re not, are you? That family who’ve been staying here… they’ve heard you walking about the house. They haven’t been able to see you, but they’ve felt you… You pushed that woman when she came looking for you, and you pushed that man over, too – and kicked him.’
‘That didn’t happen.’
‘Yes, it did. I’ve even seen their bruises.’
‘No, love, that didn’t happen. That was all a dream.’
23
Rob and Vicky had been planning to go out in their car that afternoon and drive around the Tamar Valley, or even to the south as far as Plymouth – way beyond the area that was being covered by the search and rescue teams. They were hoping that by some chance Timmy had been picked up by a stranger and then abandoned miles away.
They knew that it was a remote chance, millions to one, but it would have
