Emerald Green

“It’s only that he has a sense of—er—responsibility,” Lesley consoled me.

“You could call it that,” said Xemerius, who had finished flying the slalom. Breathing hard, he came down on the floor beside me. “Or you could call him a bore, slow off the mark, a scaredy-cat”—he stopped to get his breath back—“a shirker, a guy with no guts, just plain chickening out.…”

Lesley looked at her watch. She had to shout to be heard above the noise of an incoming Central Line train. “And he’s apparently not particularly punctual. It’s already twenty past.” She looked at the few passengers getting out of the train. Then, all of a sudden, her eyes lit up. “Oh, there they are.”

“That morning, the two eagerly awaited fairy-tale princes had left their white horses in the stable for once and traveled by Tube,” declaimed Xemerius unctuously. “At the sight of them, the eyes of the two princesses shone, and when the two concentrated sets of young hormones collided, expressing themselves in the form of embarrassed kisses and silly grins, the clever and incomparably handsome demon unfortunately had to throw up in a garbage bin.”

He was exaggerating outrageously—we none of us had silly grins on our faces. At the most, we were smiling blissfully. And no one was embarrassed, except perhaps me, because I remembered how Gideon had unwound my arms from around his neck last night, saying, “I’d better call you a taxi now. We’re going to have a strenuous day tomorrow.” I felt a bit like a burr that had to be picked off a pullover. And the worst of it was that at that very moment, I’d been getting ready to say “I love you.” Not that he hadn’t known that for ages, but … well, I hadn’t actually said it yet. And now I wasn’t quite sure whether he really wanted to hear it.

Gideon briefly caressed my cheek. “Gwenny, I can do this on my own, you know. I only have to intercept the Guardian on duty while he’s on his way to the Lodge and get the letter away from him again.”

“Only is good,” said Lesley. Although we were still far from having any really brilliant ideas up our sleeves, the four of us had worked out what Lesley called “a rough plan of action.” In any event, we had to see Lucy and Paul again, and we had to do it before we met the count this afternoon. We also had to do something about the letter that Gideon had taken last week to the year 1912, saying where Lucy and Paul were hiding. On no account must it fall into the hands of the Grand Master of the time and the de Villiers twins. As the time we could spare for secret travel by private chronograph was, we calculated, an hour and a half, maximum, if we didn’t want to risk doing ourselves physical damage (for instance imitating Xemerius and throwing up), how to make good use of every minute was going to be a problem.

At first Raphael had seriously suggested that we could smuggle the chronograph into the Guardians’ headquarters and travel straight back from there, but even his big brother didn’t have nerves strong enough for that.

As an alternative suggestion, Gideon had taken some rolled-up papers out of one of his bookshelves, and from between The Anatomy of Man in 3-D and Structural System of the Human Hand, he conjured up a map of the underground passages running through the Temple district. That map was why we were now meeting at the Tube station.

“You want to do it without us?” I frowned. “But we agreed that in future we’d do everything together.”

“Exactly,” said Raphael. “Otherwise you’ll end up saying you saved the world all by yourself.” He and Lesley were to stand guard over the chronograph, and although Xemerius, slightly offended, had said he could do the job just as well, it was comforting to know that they could pick it up and take it away with them if we were forced to travel back to somewhere else.

“Anyway, you’re sure to be in deep trouble without us!” Lesley snapped at Gideon.

Gideon raised his hands in the air. “Okay, okay, I get the idea.” He picked up my traveling bag and looked at the time. “Right, pay attention. The next train arrives at seven thirty-three. After that, we have exactly four minutes to reach the first passage before another train comes through. Don’t switch your flashlights on until I say so.”

“You’re right,” Lesley whispered to me. “He’s addicted to ordering people about.”

* * *

“MERDE!” Raphael’s curse was heartfelt. “That was close.”

I could only agree. The beams of our flashlights passed over the tiled walls and lit up our pale faces. The carriages of the train were rattling through the tunnel behind us.

Four minutes, we now knew, was a very small window of time to climb over the barrier at the end of the platform, jump down, and run along the tunnel, keeping well away from the electrified track. Not forgetting the time spent as we caught up with Gideon after the last fifty yards and stood gasping for breath and helpless in front of the iron door that let into the right-hand wall of the tunnel, while he took a kind of skeleton key out of his pocket and set about picking the lock. That was the moment when Lesley, Xemerius, and I had begun screeching in chorus, “Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up!” to the accompaniment of the noise of the approaching train.

“It looked closer on the map,” said Gideon, glancing at us apologetically.

Lesley was the first to pull herself together. She shone the beam of her flashlight into the darkness ahead, lighting up the wall where the passage came to a sudden end four yards farther on. “Okay, this is the right place.” She checked the map. “That wall hadn’t been built yet in 1912. The passage goes on beyond it.”

As Gideon knelt down, unwrapped the chronograph, and entered the settings, I took our 1912 clothes out of the bag and prepared to take my jeans off.

“What’s the idea?” Gideon looked up at me, obviously preoccupied. “Are you planning to run along these passages in a long dress?”

“I just thought … I mean, on account of authenticity—”

“The hell with authenticity,” said Gideon.

Xemerius clapped his claws. “Too right, the hell with it!” he said enthusiastically. Then he turned to me. “Keeping bad company rubs off on you. And about time too.”

“You first, Gwenny.” Gideon nodded at me.

I knelt in front of the chronograph. It was a little odd to be disappearing before the fascinated gaze of Lesley and Raphael, but by this time, I realized, the whole thing followed a familiar routine. (Any time now, I’d probably be popping off to the last century to get fresh rolls for breakfast.)

Gideon landed beside me and shone his flashlight ahead. Sure enough, there was no wall there in 1912; the beam of light went on until it was lost in a long, low passage.

“Ready?” I asked with a grin.

“Ready when you are,” he replied, grinning back.

I didn’t know that I was really ready. The Tube tunnel had been scary enough, and if I stuck around here long, I might need psychiatric treatment for acute claustrophobia.

The farther we went, the lower the ceilings of the passages, and the more they kept branching. Here and there, flights of steps went on down, and once we found ourselves facing a passage where the roof had fallen in, and we had to turn back. There wasn’t a sound except for our breathing and the faint tap-tap of our footsteps, plus now and then the rustle of paper when Gideon stopped to consult the map. I imagined I also heard rustling, tripping sounds from somewhere else. There were probably whole armies of rats living in this labyrinth, and—still imagining things—I thought that if I were a giant spider, this would be an ideal place to live and go hunting.

“Okay, there ought to be a right turn here,” muttered Gideon, concentrating.

We took what felt like the fortieth turn. The passages were all as like as two peas. There was nothing to give you any sense of direction. And who knew if that map was accurate? Suppose it had been drawn by some total idiot like Marley? In that case, Gideon and I would probably be dug out in the year 2250, two skeletons holding hands. Oh, no, I was forgetting. If that happened, only Gideon would be a skeleton, while I, alive and well, would be clinging to his bones, which didn’t exactly make the idea any better.

Gideon stopped, folded up the map, and put it in his jeans pocket.

“Are we lost?” I tried to keep calm. “Maybe that map is useless. Suppose we never—”

“Gwyneth,” he interrupted me impatiently. “From here on, I know the way. It’s not far now. Come along.”

“Oh. I see.” I felt ashamed of myself. I really was being rather, well, girlie this morning. We hurried on in single file. It was a mystery to me how Gideon thought he knew his way around this labyrinth.

“Damn!” I’d trodden in a puddle. And right beside the puddle sat a dark brown rat, blinking its red eyes in the beam of my flashlight. I squealed out loud. Probably my squeal meant “You’re so cute!” in rat language, because the rat sat up on its hind legs and put its head on one side.

“You’re not a bit cute!” I squealed. “Go away!”

“Where are you?” Gideon had already disappeared around the next corner.

I swallowed, and plucked up all my courage to run past the rat. Rats weren’t like dogs, were they? A dog would have run after me to bite my calves. To be on the safe side, I kept the flashlight pointing back at the rat’s eyes, to dazzle it, until I had almost reached the corner where Gideon was waiting for me. Then I turned the beam forward and squealed again. The outline of a man had come into sight at the end of the passage.

“Oh, shit!” Quick as a flash, Gideon grabbed me and pulled me back into the shadows. But it was already too late. Even if I hadn’t squealed, the beam of my flashlight would have given me away.

“I think he saw me,” I whispered back.

“You bet he did!” said Gideon grimly. “He’s me! What an idiot I was! Go on, you go first. Be nice to me!” And with these words, he gave me a little nudge so that I staggered back into the passage.

“What on earth…?” I whispered, as I was caught in the beam of another flashlight.

“Gwyneth?” I heard Gideon’s incredulous voice. But this time, it came from ahead of me. It took me half a second to understand. Then I realized that we had crossed the path of Gideon’s earlier self, after he’d gone to hand that letter over to the Grand Master in 1912. I shone my flashlight on him. Oh, God, yes, that was Gideon all right! And he stopped a few yards from me, looking at me in total amazement. For two seconds, we went on dazzling each other with our flashlights, and then he said, “How did you get here?”

I couldn’t help smiling at him. “Well, it’s a bit complicated to explain,” I said, although I’d have liked to say, “Hey, you haven’t changed a bit!” Behind the projecting part of the wall where we’d taken cover, the other Gideon was gesticulating in the air.

“Go on, explain!” his younger self demanded, coming closer.

Once again, the other Gideon gesticulated frantically. I didn’t understand what signal he was trying to give me.