Only it wasn’t epilepsy. It was the pillars. It was the future rearranging itself. McCullough had forgotten the presence of a tortoise that was now impossible. Joe must have had a whole life that had become impossible.
He felt himself losing the strength in his knees. If there had been anywhere to sit down, he would have. As it was, he slumped a little. It must have looked strange, as though someone had smacked him too hard in the middle of his spine. Mrs Castlereagh noticed and smiled a tiny, regretful fraction. She must have suspected already. No wonder she hadn’t been surprised to find he’d forgotten meeting Kite.
‘Yes,’ Kite said. He sounded curious now. ‘I just shot it in front of you. You didn’t see?’
‘I …’
Kite pointed with the muzzle of his gun to the blasted little corpse on the ground. ‘About ten seconds ago.’
McCullough looked worried. ‘Well, that’s something, isn’t it.’
‘So,’ Mrs Castlereagh said, ‘let’s have young tortoise number two on the future side, beside old tortoise number two.’
Joe watched the old one hard, because he didn’t want to see the little one die. The gunshot was loud when it came. But nothing happened to the old tortoise, which only hid inside its shell from the noise.
‘I don’t like this,’ McCullough said unsteadily.
Joe couldn’t have agreed more.
‘If you could bring the third one over here to the past side,’ Kite said, polite, although everything else about him said, I’m the one shooting them, you prick.
McCullough looked unhappy and tugged the sleigh across. His shadow swung in the hellish red light. Mrs Castlereagh and Joe had to help him lift down the third crate. The third tortoise was more awake under its blanket. It was eating some lettuce and it looked at them all interestedly. Once it was on their side, the past side, McCullough went back to his own side. Kite put their own third little tortoise on the ground and Joe looked at Mrs Castlereagh, wanting hard for her to say, no, let me, because there was something frighteningly disengaged about the way Kite was doing it. He didn’t look away. He even watched the tortoise while he reloaded the gun, which was only made to take one bullet at a time and whose handle was like a club in case the one shot didn’t hit anyone. But she didn’t, and Joe felt the gunshot crackle outward through his ribs a long time after the sound was over. Because of the red light, the blood on the ice looked black.
The old tortoise didn’t go anywhere. It snapped its slow way through a piece of apple and blinked at them. Mrs Castlereagh glanced towards McCullough.
‘Can you still see him?’
‘Clear as day.’
‘Let’s … take him back across then.’
They lifted the crate back onto the sleigh and moved it to the future side. Joe waited, his stomach tight, expecting it to vanish. It didn’t. The third tortoise stayed exactly where they had left it, chewing.
‘Is that it?’ McCullough said anxiously.
‘Yes,’ said Mrs Castlereagh. ‘It’s what we hoped. Cause and effect only works when there’s a time difference. Stick two chronologically related things in the same time, and they exist independently of each other.’ She smiled at Joe. ‘So you won’t disappear, even if something happens to your grandparents while you’re here.’
‘Um – good,’ said McCullough, looking like he had no idea what was going on.
Kite was loading the gun again.
Joe realised what he was doing too late. ‘McCullough – run, for fuck’s sake!’
McCullough only stared at him. Joe tried to run too, to push him, but Kite’s free hand clamped over his arm. McCullough finally started to run, but the bullet caught him in the back of the head and he splayed forward over the ice.
‘Why did you do that?’ Joe demanded. ‘He didn’t know anything!’
‘He knew what the gate does,’ Kite said blandly.
‘Good eating on a tortoise,’ the previously silent Scottish sailor observed, pleased. He picked up the rope of the sleigh.
Joe couldn’t talk. He had to stare at the pillars in the bloody light, throwing black shadows onto the ice. Both pillars were carved with names, mostly women’s: Lizzie, Mhairi, Honour, Anne, Jem, right up and down the length from the sea to as far as the lamplight reached. Some were wind-worn to nothing. A few were much newer. One of those was Madeline. Seeing it at exactly eye level made prickles sweep up the back of his neck.
The masons must have known that crossing to and fro could mean forgetting, or changing the future. They had carved – and maybe this was wrong, but it felt like the kind of thing people would do – their wives’ names, in case their wives were gone by the time they crossed back.
Joe drilled down into himself and tried to find a memory of a chisel, stone, ice, even the tiny faint snatch of a dream, but there was nothing.
Not epilepsy. It never had been. The hallucinations, Madeline, the man who waited; he was remembering scraps of the life he’d had before something here changed it all. He closed his hand over the folded postcard in his pocket. Come home, if you remember, M.
‘Back to the ship then,’ Kite said, as if they were coming away from an indifferent picnic.
Joe shut his eyes and wanted to refuse to move, but Kite felt it and pushed him, strong enough to drag him whether he cooperated or not, and in the end, he did cooperate.
One of the Agamemnon’s cannons had been run out so
