‘You’re a ghost too, aren’t you?’
Kite knelt down next to him. ‘Yes and no,’ he said. ‘Can I tell you in the morning?’
Joe agreed and sank back to sleep, thinking unhappily that whatever kind of ghost he was, he was at least a polite one.
12
Someone shook his shoulder. Joe opened his eyes.
‘What’s wrong?’ he said softly. It was still dark and at first he thought it must be the middle of the night before he remembered that it was almost always night here. There was a lamp close to him, and dense shadows among the living-room furniture, warped strangely on the curving walls.
‘It’s morning. The ice is solid. We can go.’
‘What?’
‘It’s six o’clock,’ Kite tried again.
‘You’re joking.’
‘No?’
Joe laughed, high with shock. ‘I haven’t slept properly for years. I’m taking you home with me, you’re medicinal. All right, let’s find some gear. There’s a cupboard by the front door.’ He paused halfway to the door, because he had a half-memory of waking in the night and feeling sad, but it was so brief that he was sure it must have been a dream.
After the wind in the night, the dark morning felt unnaturally still. There was no noise except the ice creaking. Sea spray had frozen on the stone jetty and on the steps, so getting down onto the ice took a fraught ten minutes.
Because the tower was so high above them on its rock, the light from the arc lamp cast the ice immediately on the shore into deep shade in a black hem all around the island. They had to walk through it for a good hundred feet before they reached the edge, where the light began to wink on the ice. Emerging from the island’s shadow, their own shadows were distorted and mutant, like those gigantic carnival puppets at Mardi Gras.
Joe looked up when Kite pointed him more to the left.
‘We have to take you back through the pillars.’ He spoke quietly, as though there were someone close by, listening for them.
Confused, Joe looked round. The deep red strip from the lighthouse’s stained lens traced an eerie, bloody road. A long way out of their way. ‘What? I know they’re interesting but I don’t want to be out here for any longer than—’
‘You sailed through them on the way here?’
‘Yes?’
Kite nodded. ‘If you don’t go back through them, the harbour won’t be the one you left.’
Joe slowed down. ‘What?’
Kite’s green eyes ticked over him and again they put Joe in mind of a hesitant wolf. ‘I can’t explain, I have to show you.’
It hadn’t been a dream, in the night. He had woken up and Kite had said he was a ghost. He could remember now.
He had been walking all this way with a ghost.
A kind ghost, though. He swallowed and nodded, and followed him towards the pillars.
‘Look at the land through them,’ Kite said, ‘and then look to either side of them.’
The ice was the same, the cold the same, the snow moving on the wind, but the harbour lights were different. There were fewer.
Lights that were there to the left and right of the pillars disappeared if he looked between them instead. It was like closing one eye and then the other and watching your finger move without moving. He did it standing exactly behind one, looking left and then right.
‘You see it?’ Kite asked.
‘I don’t – understand.’
‘Go to the other side and look at the lighthouse. Through the pillars, then not.’
Joe hesitated, then went round to the other side, the land side, looking west. On the right, not through the pillars, the lighthouse was dark and ruined, and nobody waited for him three feet away. On the left, in the space between them, it was whole and new, the lamp lit, and Kite was leaning against the stone. Joe had to do it three times before he could convince himself that what he was seeing was real.
Joe realised he hadn’t been seeing Kite properly either, or listening. Sand on the deck; ships weren’t so fragile any more that shot tore them to bits and the gunners behind them, or not so that there would always be so much blood underfoot that you had to set down sand. Not even in Scotland. ‘Where did you say you’d fought?’
‘Trafalgar. London. Newcastle.’
Joe’s stomach dropped until it bumped into the cradle of his pelvis. ‘Is this … am I seeing through time?’
Kite nodded. ‘Yes. Your time is back through the pillars. This side is eighteen hundred and seven.’
Eighteen hundred and seven: ninety-three years ago. It was one thing to reason out a time difference, another to hear it from someone else, quite factually.
‘But the lighthouse is brand new, how can …’ Joe began, and then finally understood. ‘We built the lighthouse on the wrong side.’
‘Yes. Your builders sailed straight through here without knowing what they were doing. We noticed on our side because the locals contacted the Admiralty. They thought the French were doing something strange on the island.’
‘I see.’
Kite tilted his head down, and managed to communicate that it was still all right not to see. ‘The ghosts in your attic are men of mine, they’re just on the future side. The riptide must have pulled them off course after I fell.’
Joe found himself linking his hands behind his neck. The new ideas were making his head too heavy. ‘And the fast winter, on my side. It’s colder on this side, but the pillars are like a pressure valve, so …’
‘Right. It does seem to be warmer in the future, I don’t know why.’
‘And my – oh, my postcard.’ His own voice sounded distant. It was amazing how fast you could accept something impossible. Or, maybe it was just Joe; everything in the world seemed pretty extraordinary to him, with no baseline memories about normal. ‘Someone sent it to me from … your side. Maybe I’m from your side, really? That would explain a lot.’
‘Maybe,’ Kite said softly.
Something inside Joe woke up again. ‘Can you take me with you? I’m going crazy, not knowing what happened to me. If I’m really from—’
‘No,’ said Kite. ‘No, I can’t.’ He looked like he was in pain. ‘We came here, me and my crew, under orders to take you. To take whoever came to repair the lighthouse, I mean. There is a war, in our time, against France. You’ve … heard about that?’
‘The Napoleonic Wars, yes.’
‘We’re losing. The French have blockaded Edinburgh, and they’re moving troops from inland; there’ll be a full siege soon. The Admiralty, the English Admiralty, wants future inventions, to help. Guns, machines, anything—’
‘Fine!’
Joe was shocked with himself. He didn’t feel like he was talking. One part of his brain, the part that wondered unceasingly about Madeline and the postcard and the man who waited by that black shore, had raced ahead of all the rest. The rest of him trailed after. What about Alice, and work, and what about Lily waiting for him with that duck on her tiny nightshirt, not understanding – but the racing part didn’t care.
‘No, not fine!’ Kite was holding Joe’s shoulders now, hard. ‘I’d be taking you into a disgusting war. The death rate among sailors is one in three after a year. Even if you survive, there’s damn all chance I could get you back here. So unless you want to abandon your life here and go, forever, towards a thing that will probably kill you, then – no. You just saved my life.’ His voice broke. ‘Please don’t make me take you into a place that will kill you.’