Cautiously, Rowan and Indigo approached the larger of the three swimming pool buildings. They felt as if they were being drawn to the building and both Rowan and Indigo had a strange feeling that something sinister lay within the pool house.
‘I don’t like it,’ whispered Indigo. ‘The atmosphere is icy. Something has happened here. I can feel the hairs rising on the back of my neck. I think we are about to walk onto a murder scene. I can feel so much sadness in the air.’
Rowan looked at Indigo anxiously. ‘We don’t have to go in there. The machine you’re after might be in the house. Let’s go and look somewhere else.’
‘No,’ said Indigo with an air of determination. ‘I know it’s here. This pool house is mostly made of glass. I’ve got to try and go back and see my family again ... and Robin! He’ll be lost without me.’
‘Is Robin your mentor?’ asked Rowan, thinking of Dale and Sarah again.
‘Sort of,’ said Indigo sadly.
‘You don’t have to go with me, Rowan,’ said Indigo. ‘Go back to your family, go to the police, get zapped and carry on with your life. You can’t run for ever.’
Rowan looked behind him. He was surprised that the authorities had not yet caught up with him and dragged him off to the Decontamination Centre. He guessed that they probably had bigger fish to fry.
‘No,’ said Rowan. ‘I’ve messed things up. Cornwall would have told the police that I came across the Channel with David. The authorities probably think I’m a spy. They’re bound to cast me back into the wilderness as a waster too. I don’t know what I want. Maybe I could go back to your time and start a new life.’
‘It’s up to you,’ said Indigo kindly.
Slowly Rowan and Indigo walked up to the main pool house and looked in through one of the sliding doors. There were three pools within the building and the water was covered with algae and lily pads with white flowers.
‘I wouldn’t want to swim in there,’ said Indigo. ‘The water looks disgusting.’
Rowan looked past the pools and noticed a lounge area at the far end of the building.
‘Shall we go in?’ Rowan asked Indigo, sliding the door open. The door slid along its rollers effortlessly.
The air in the pool house smelt stale and mouldy.
‘This place is so humid. It looks like Kew Gardens in here; the plants have taken over!’ exclaimed Indigo, looking at the creeping plants that clung to the walls.
Rowan and Indigo worked their way to the far end of the pool house. The plants had grown across the other doors and visibility was poor.
‘Oh my God!’ whispered Indigo. ‘There’s a body in the pool!’
‘Where?’ asked Rowan. He scanned the pool they were standing by, searching among the thick algae, the water irises and the lily pads, and then he noticed a woman’s body floating in the water.
She was wearing a white dress. Her fair hair was drawn up and held up with an ornate clip. Her hands were tied together and a white lily grew in front of her hands and looked as if she was holding it. Her eyes were wide open and she stared up at the ceiling lifelessly. Rowan tried not to look again. He kept telling himself that she was sleeping. ‘Do you think that is Apple?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Indigo. ‘It’s a crying shame. She was a beautiful woman. Drugs probably had something to do with her death.’
‘Yes,’ said Rowan, ‘the stars are known for having drug problems.
Drugs are so easy to get hold of. Stars have hard lives. If you have musical or acting talent, then you are removed from society with your partner and put into isolation, and then you have to sing songs created by the authorities. The isolation drives them mad. They’re not even allowed to become mentors. Even if I had everything I wanted, I wouldn’t want to lose my freedom.’
‘You come from strange times,’ said Indigo. ‘I really love music ... Look, there’s a man over there,’ he said, pointing into the lounge area. ‘I think he’s dead too. Poor Ledbetter! David was right: we’re too late to save him.’
Rowan looked across the room and saw a man with spiky hair seated on a chair and slumped across a desk, with his head on a control panel.
‘This is it!’ said Indigo triumphantly. ‘That control panel must be for the time machine. Come and help me move the body.’
‘No way!’ said Rowan. ‘I’m not touching a corpse! You can smell his body from here.’
Slowly Rowan and Indigo walked into the lounge and turned on the light.
‘He won’t bite you. He’s obviously died of a drug overdose.
There’s white powder everywhere’ said Indigo, grabbing the back of the chair. The smell was indescribable. ‘We’ll just pull the chair back and drag him out of the way.’
Reluctantly, with his head turned away from the stench of the body, Rowan helped Indigo pull the chair away from the desk.
For a moment, the corpse stayed frozen like a statue, leaning forward as if the desk was still there. Finally, the body crumpled to the floor and as his head hit the ground maggots spewed out from his mouth.
‘Oh! That’s gross. Yuck! This is vile! Can’t we cover him up with something?’ gasped Rowan
Indigo looked around the lounge and found a towel on a shelf. He opened it out and covered the top half of the body with it. ‘Is that better, Rowan?’ Indigo asked. ‘Now where’s the power button for the control panel?’
Indigo looked along the control panel for a power switch but couldn’t find one.
‘I thought you were technical. It’s already on. The screen is out of its slot so it must be on, just on power-save,’ said Rowan, trying not to look at the body and the maggots creeping out from beneath the towel. ‘We need a voice command to reactivate it.
We need to train the command centre.’
‘What do I have to say then?’ asked Indigo. He was beginning to sound worried.
‘Just, START,’ said Rowan. The screen lit up as he said the word. ‘That wasn’t too bad. First time as well!’
‘Where’s the keyboard then,’ asked Indigo, looking along the desk, cleaning away the white powder with his hand.
‘What’s a keyboard? I told you, you just have to command the computer to cooperate. Give it a go,’ Rowan continued, trying to encourage Indigo.
Indigo moved towards the screen. ‘Hello ... What’s your name?’
Rowan laughed. ‘That won’t work. Try STATUS,’ Rowan called out to the computer.
‘Fujitsara CB3004. Y Drive. Time program. Coordinates,’ the computer replied in a male voice.
‘I’ve got it,’ announced Indigo. ‘OPEN!’
The computer screen sprang into life, creating a stark contrast to the decaying bodies and stagnating water nearby.
‘Look at this list in this folder I’ve opened. There are so many files! It will take me a while to sort this out. Rowan, could you look around and see if there is some sort of pod or Trexy-style platform that could be used to transfer a person?’ Indigo asked Rowan, his eyes fixed on the computer screen.
Rowan nodded. ‘OK.’ He was deep in thought and really believed that Indigo was talking a load of silage. Rowan had nothing better to do and decided to see if he could find a human-sized pod. As for a Trexy platform, he hadn’t a clue what that was. He needed to distance himself from the bodies. The smell was clawing at his throat.
The lounge area had comfortable sofas, coffee tables, all in perfect condition; not like everyone else’s furniture, which was disfigured and patched up. At the back of the lounge Rowan saw what he thought was a table made of metal but when he examined it at close quarters, he discovered that it was a casket, the type used to carry bodies to the Ashes Centre. Rowan looked at the coffin and thought that it was a strange item for someone to have in their lounge but then stars tended to be pretty odd people.
As Rowan walked up to the coffin, a worrying thought came to Rowan. He remembered David had said that he had dreamed that he had seen a woman lying in a coffin, holding a white flower. He looked back at Ledbetter’s charge and wondered if he was a mass murderer and thought that there might be another body in the coffin. Rowan’s heart began to pound. He felt his hand going towards the lid ready to open it. He knew he was going to look inside and was unable to stop himself. Warily, Rowan opened the lid and was thankful to find the coffin empty.
His heart slowed. Rowan laughed at himself. There was no way the dead man could have murdered anyone else, shut up here in this creepy old house.
Rowan looked into the coffin. At the head end was a black cap, and within the cap were wires with small pads attached to their ends. The top of the cap was attached to a thick cable that fed out of a socket at the end of the coffin and this cable went from the coffin and carried on along the lounge wall. Rowan pulled the lid back down and followed the electric cable along the wall and finally traced it back to the computer Indigo was furiously working on.
‘Did you find anything?’ asked Indigo.
‘Yes, a coffin with a wire that leads back to this computer.
There’s a cap in the coffin with wires sticking out of it,’ said Rowan casually. ‘It’s probably what you are looking for. I wouldn’t get into it and try the hat on. You’ll probably end up frying your brains or something.’
Indigo looked at Rowan with excitement. ‘No, I’ll be fine. Neo Williams was a genius ... that’s Ledbetter’s boy’s name ... I’ve seen it on a log entry. He had a brilliant mind and he is my ticket home. Neo has found a way to utilise brainwaves as a transmitter and translates them into quantum time travel language. It’s not just a theory ... I was right. Neo and I both have brilliant minds.
The time-travel program he has written here is perfect. I just can’t understand why he couldn’t time-travel.’
‘It was probably the pod he used,’ replied Rowan. ‘It’s just a coffin. There’s not many building materials left to build things properly these days. Everything is recycled or patched up ... Neo Williams, he was really popular once.’
Rowan looked at Indigo. He looked euphoric and determination was written all over his face. ‘Show me the coffin,’ Indigo requested. ‘I managed to time-travel using an adapted bath; I’m sure a 3004 coffin is not going to stop me,’ he said, walking over into the seating area. Rowan watched as Indigo climbed into the coffin and tried on the black cap. ‘It’s a good fit. These sensors in the cap hit all the right spots. What’s wrong with this time capsule? I wonder what the problem is?’
It’s got a nutter lying in it!’ said Rowan. He was beginning to tire of Indigo going on about time travel; it was all a load of crap.’
‘What did you say?’ asked Indigo.
‘Nothing,’ said Rowan. He felt weary and his future looked bleak. How could he change things? How could a sixteen-year-old hope to create a new life all by himself in a world that crushed outsiders. Rowan walked towards the door eager to escape the stench of death and decay. He wanted to breathe clean air and see the last of the sunlight.
‘Where are you going?’ Indigo called. He was now sitting up in the coffin, his blond curls protruding from the black hat like clown’s hair.
‘I ... don’t know yet, just outside. I can’t go home,’ Rowan said sadly. ‘I really don’t know what to do. I wish I could do my task again. I would have done things so differently. I would have been prepared and would have done it all by myself and just got straight back to London without being involved with anybody.’
‘I’ll send you back to the day before you started your task then,’ said Indigo. ‘It’s got to be the wire connections that need looking at. This coffin is the perfect vessel for time travel and hopefully resilient to outside radio signals.’
‘Do you think it would work?’ Rowan asked hesitantly. He had no option but to try, despite being a sceptic.
‘Look, when I’ve mended the connection, I’ll set the coordinates for myself to send me back to 2010 and then I’ll set it for you. If it works for me then it will work for you. When did you start your task?’ Indigo asked Rowan.
‘On my tubeyday,’ replied Rowan. ‘So the day before would be 20 March 3004.’
‘The twentieth of March 3004 it is then,’ said Indigo. ‘You’ve got nothing to lose.’
Rowan shrugged his shoulders. Indigo was right he had nothing to lose. He had to try something to get himself out of his situation but he didn’t hold out much hope. Rowan helped Indigo check all the wires and sockets for any loose connections. A few wires looked a bit frayed or loose and after a while, as evening set in, Indigo decided that it was time to try out the time machine.
Indigo set a time delay for Rowan and set all the coordinates verbally, which seemed to appear on the screen without any errors showing. Eagerly Indigo climbed back into the coffin and placed the black cap firmly onto his head.
‘Now,’ said Indigo, ‘I’ve set a two-minute time delay between us. You have to get into the pod, put on the cap and make sure all the sensors fit snugly to your head and then close the lid. There’s a handle inside the lid. Lie back and fold your arms across your chest, keep your feet together and close your eyes, so that you are compact and wait. You will probably feel like you have a headache and your head may feel a bit hot but it will pass and when you open your eyes you will be back to 20 March 3004, exactly where you were at that time and in whatever you were wearing, but you will remember everything.’
‘OK, this is it,’ said Indigo, getting into the coffin. ‘I can’t wait. Robin is going to be so pleased to see me and I will be able to watch Coronation Street, eat chocolate, drive my car and see the Queen again. Wish me luck, Rowan, and for God’s sake, lighten up a bit; you are always so serious.’
Indigo put on the black cap and laid down in the coffin. ‘This is it! COUNTDOWN,’ Indigo called out to the computer. The computer beeped and began to musically countdown. ‘Bye, Rowan,’ called Indigo and he pulled down the lid.
‘Bye, Indigo, good luck,’ called Rowan, though he felt silly saying that because he was sure that nothing was going to happen.
Rowan watched the computer as it continued to count down and finally it beeped. He looked anxiously at the computer. It had started its countdown again. Slowly Rowan lifted the lid of the coffin ready to help Indigo out and was amazed and stunned to see that Indigo had gone. Rowan stood there just staring into the coffin and then realised by the sound of the descending scale he was probably within the last minute of his own countdown.
Rowan scrabbled into the coffin and securely placed the empty cap onto his head. He lay down and quickly pulled the lid down over him. The computer was on its final few beeps. Rowan felt a current flow through his body and he could feel tingling throughout his limbs. He quickly crossed his arms across his chest and closed his eyes just as the final bleep rang out. In the darkness Rowan held his breath ready to be transported.
‘Trying to hide?’
Rowan opened his eyes slowly. The coffin lid was open again and an angry-looking man wearing blue combat clothes stood over him.
‘You weren’t trying to hide from us, were you?’ asked the man again. ‘You must have known that we would catch up with you eventually.’
Wretchedly, Rowan, looked up at the police officer. ‘Nooo ...’ he yelled. Freedom had been only half a second away.