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CHAPTER SEVEN – CHARLIE

  "You’d better come up!” Lieutenant Monrose shouted down the ladder from the conning tower.

  Able Seaman Charlie Hawker was standing, waist deep in water and almost completely naked, in the control room of a German U–boat. The water was coming in quickly now and the level rising fast. He started to panic: they weren’t going to make it.

  Charlie was a crewman of HMS Paladin, a P–class Fleet destroyer. Earlier in the year the ship had left Scapa Flow and had sailed the long way round Africa and up through the Suez Canal, to join the Twelfth Destroyer Flotilla based in Alexandria. During the long journey, the Paladin’s Captain and his First Officer, Clayworth, had drilled the crew for the task of capturing enemy torpedo boats and U–boats.

  On September 23rd 1942 the flotilla had received word that a U–boat was in the vicinity and they were ordered to find and sink her. The following day they located the U–boat using their ASDIC sonar equipment and closed to attack. Next there followed half a day of cat and mouse action as the destroyers picked up the U–boat on their sonars, dropped depth charges and waited to see if there was any result. Scores of depth charges were dropped by the flotilla but, so far, without any result.

  Finally, quite late at night, a searchlight illuminated the rising image of the stricken U–boat which, having blown its tanks, was surfacing. With pom–pom guns and a Lewis gun the Paladin opened fire on the crew as they emerged on deck. It ceased fire soon though, because the enemy were clearly abandoning ship.

  Hawker was on deck at this point helping to man the Lewis gun. As the U–boat surfaced, he heard the Captain order Lt. Clayworth to take a boarding party across. Clayworth ordered a boat to be prepared, but did not wait for it. He stripped off and dived overboard. Impetuous, careless of his own safety and quite overtaken by the adventure, Hawker pulled off his uniform and followed the officer into the sea.

  The two men swam across the gap to the U–boat and pulled themselves up the side and then up the conning tower, all the while watched by bemused Germans floating in the waves around the submarine. Climbing down into the control room they found it already a few inches deep in water and Clayworth immediately ordered a search for log books, orders, papers, documents and any signalling equipment. Charlie helped to pass heaps of papers to Lt. Monrose who, accompanied by several other seamen, had now arrived with a boat from the Paladin.

  Clayworth and Charlie went back into the control room to look for anything else that might be useful to Intelligence, at which point Charlie noticed the water level was now much higher. It was already up to his chest and rising quickly. Above them, Charlie heard Lt. Monrose order the other sailors to go back to their boat.

  “You’d better come up!” Monrose yelled down the conning tower a second time, before he turned away to jump into the sea. Charlie moved towards the ladder. As he did so, the U–boat gave a violent lurch and started tilting backwards.

  “Come on, sir, we must go!” he urged Clayworth, who was dragging some machinery and struggling against both the surging waters and the slope of the U–boat deck. A moment later, Clayworth gave a shout of alarm as he was swept off his feet. He hurtled through the door leading towards the engine room and vanished. With a crack and a fizz, the U–boat’s lights went out, plunging the control room into darkness. Terrified, Charlie was now alone, with water up to his neck and he was starting to panic. Desperately, he turned towards the ladder, put his hands on the lower rungs and tried to pull himself up. He never made it.

  It happened in an instant: water came rushing down from the conning tower and the U–boat sank ...

  Tom woke up choking and feeling that he could not breathe. He stared around the room, half expecting water to come surging in through the windows or the door. However, he was in his bedroom, which was dry and warm and certainly not beneath the waves.

  A few hours later, after breakfast and a fruitless search for Charlie Hawker on the internet – there were thousands, but none that had drowned at sea in 1942 – Tom decided he needed to talk to the Professor about his dreams. It seemed obvious to him that they were not just flights of fancy. He had lived those moments; they were much too vivid to be just his imagination – and besides, there had been Mary; she at least had actually existed. ‘The Professor will know what they mean,’ Tom thought.

  His mother had gone to do the Saturday morning shop; Emma was at a sleepover at a friend’s house and his father was dozing in front of the football on telly. Tom had not ‘Walked’ on his own before and he was a bit nervous, but knew he had to try. As before, he reached out in his mind and imagined that map again. He zoomed in on his house and then panned out until he could see London in his mind. Then, he allowed himself to follow his thoughts and in a moment, he felt that he was leaving his bedroom and the terrace house and moving towards the capital. Around him there was only the darkness of the void between places, the nothingness between one instant in time and the next. There were shapes in that darkness, hints of the places he was pacing through, indistinct impressions only, but his motion past them told him that he was on his way. In his mind, he zoomed in until he could see the street in London which he and Septimus had visited the day before. A moment later he was walking in the middle of a road in the centre of London.

  A huge honking blared out behind him. Spinning round, he saw a sports car screeching to a halt barely inches from his knees. He gulped and leapt out of the way. The driver gave Tom a scowl and yelled at him, “Blasted kid, jumping in front of my car!” and, with a vroom and a squeal of rubber, the car was off again.

  Tom stood panting for a while and then, having recovered his breath, jogged across to the door next to the brass plate. He knocked and was admitted.

  He came to a halt in front of Mr Phelps’ desk. “I need to see the Prof straight away – it’s urgent.”

  Mr Phelps regarded him disapprovingly and Tom thought he was about to ask if he had an appointment, but Tom’s expression must have been distressed enough to convince the man, or maybe the Professor had told him that if Tom returned he should be seen right away. In any event, he just tipped his head towards the door and sat back down to his papers.

  Entering Neoptolemas’ study, Tom hurried over to the desk and blurted out breathlessly: “Sir, I need to tell you about my dreams.”

  Across the table, the old man raised an eyebrow and then nodded his head toward the empty chair opposite. Tom sat down and without pausing for breath started talking. He spoke about the battle with the Zulus, the fire in the bakery and the sinking U–boat and of the three people he had briefly become.

  Half an hour later, he and the Professor were drinking tea. There had been silence for a long while after Tom had finished telling the old man about his dreams. The Professor had sent for Mr Phelps, along with several assistants and much activity had followed. There was a lot of scribbling of notes and checking of reference books, studying of maps and discussions with words like Euclidean geometry, invariant distances in space time, rotation of coordinates and Lorentz transformation, which Tom did not understand, but for the last few minutes everyone had left except for the Professor, who was silent, as if thinking. Then, at last, he opened his mouth.

  “I am glad you came to me with this, Thomas.”

  Tom was about to respond, when there was a knock on the door. A young and very anxious looking man entered with a sheet of paper in his hand. He handed it to the Professor and then glanced at Tom appraisingly, as if trying to confirm something.

  “Well, what is it?” The older man asked sharply, drawing the younger’s attention again.

  “I have had a reader check the details the young man has given. We believe we have located three potentials, sir.”

  “When?”

  “1666, 1879 and 1942,” was the response. “Currently the traces are strong. Within days or a few weeks they will start to fade, for the present cycle.”

  The older man nodded and smiled at Tom. Then, he leant back in his armchair, closed his eyes
and murmured, “We will have to move quickly.”

  “We have no Walkers strong enough at present,” the young man said.

  Neoptolemas did not open his eyes, but just nodded his head and answered, “Then, we must find one quickly! Is Mr Mason still staying at the Imperial?”

  “Yes, sir ? although I believe he has gone to the café down the street.”

  “Well, go and fetch him, Crosby,” ordered the Professor. Then, turning back to Tom, he continued talking.

  “As I said before, I am glad you came to see me about these dreams. I imagine you had to think hard about doing so. You perhaps felt that they were only dreams after all, and why make a fuss? Or maybe you felt, I would think, that you were going mad?”

  Tom nodded. After he had woken following this third dream he had spent a long time thinking things through. In the end he had decided the worst that could happen was that the Professor would dismiss the experiences as insignificant, just dreams. He told the old man this and saw him nod.

  “Well, that was sensible. But they were not just dreams, Thomas, and I believe you suspected as much. Some of us can not only walk in time and space but can also experience directly the lives that have gone before. We all know stories of folk claiming they had a past life. Chances are that most of these are Walkers but do not know it. In your dreams you picked up on the powerful feelings and experiences of folk who once actually lived.” He paused for a moment before asking a question. “So, do you feel you might be able to help me with a task?”

  “What sort of a task?” Tom asked, looking up at the old man suspiciously.

  “There are indications that you could be one of the most powerful Walkers I have ever met – at least for a long time – and Thomas, I need use of those powers. It’s urgent or I would not ask one as young as you. I need you to help rescue three individuals from the past,” Professor Neoptolemas said.

  “Why? Who are they?”

  “I think you know them: Edward, Mary and Charles? They too were Walkers: individuals with potential to manipulate time. These, though, never knew of it, until a moment of extreme trauma magnified their potential to the extent that we can sense it across the years, as you have done. That sometimes happens when a Walker is in mortal danger. But these three could not have helped themselves, any more than you could until Septimus told you how. The thing is, Thomas, we need all the help we can get and these three are in great danger and may die; if that happens they will be lost to us. If we can rescue them, they can help our cause. Most especially we need to prevent them from falling into enemy hands.”

  Tom wondered who the enemy were and what was the cause the Professor cared so much about, but there was an even more burning question he had to ask. “I don’t understand. You say these people are in the past. If so, aren’t they already dead? How can they be in ‘mortal danger’? They can’t die twice! So how can we help them?” Tom was already feeling utterly lost in this strange new world.

  The old man reached for a hard–bound notebook that Crosby had left on the desk. He flicked through several pages then looked up at Tom.

  “History says you are right. Edward Dyson was a Lieutenant in the British army that invaded Zululand in the 1870s. According to the regimental records, he died at the battle of Isandlwana, but his body was never identified. Charles Hawker was in the Navy in the Second World War. The records say he went down with a U–boat he was raiding at the time. Finally, there is Mary Brown. She was the first victim of the Great Fire of London. Her body was never found amongst the ashes of Pudding Lane.”

  “So, how can they be rescued? Tom’s mouth dropped as the implications of what Professor Neoptolemas was saying began to register. “But ... if ... I mean ... won’t you be changing history?”

  “Possibly, but I don’t think so. Remember, these are not ordinary people; and furthermore, their apparent demise is of the type of ideal situation we look for.”

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  The Professor linked his fingers in front of his chin and looked at Tom for a moment as though considering how best to explain. “There were no bodies, Thomas. Where no one found the bodies, no one will be surprised by their absence. You see? The trick is being able to snatch them out at the last moment before death.

  Tom nodded slowly, but before he could ask another question, the Professor took his breath away.

  “And that, Thomas, is where you come in. You are quick, learn fast and possess great power. You can save them and bring them back here.

  Tom stared at the old man, unsure what to say and how to respond.

  The Professor seemed to sense his confusion. “You are thinking perhaps, that you would rather return to normal life and lose this power for good. To be, once more, just the schoolboy called Thomas Oakley: reliable and dependable, but only an ordinary guy. Well, that is an option we can grant you. The other choice is to join us. There are adventures waiting for you: challenges and a chance to protect your world. A chance to be a hero in fact: not everyone gets that chance.”

  Tom gulped. It didn’t sound like him. So here it was: ‘The Choice’. Despite what Professor Neoptolemas said there were in fact three choices, all of which he had tried to work through last night. To recap: he could lose his powers and become again plain Tom, as he had been before he was eleven. He could take his powers and use them as and when he wanted to and become a mercenary, like Septimus – or whatever it was that Redfeld had in mind. Or, he could fill the role that the Professor envisaged.