"No," I said, "it wouldn't do any good. Look, I'll drive down the village to the station and then come slowly home. There's nothing more I can do."

But Par station appeared to be closed for the night, and though I circled Par itself twice there was no sign of Magnus.

I began to pray, Oh, God, let me see him walking up Polmear hill! I knew just how he would look, my headlights picking him up at the side of the road, the tall angular figure with a loping stride, and I would hoot loudly and he would stop, and I would say to him, What the bloody hell..

He was not there, though. There was no one there. I turned down the Kilmarth drive, and walked slowly up the steps into the house. Vita was waiting for me by the porch. She looked distressed. "Something must have happened to him," she said. "I do think you ought to ring up the police."

I brushed past her and went upstairs. "I'll unpack his things," I said. "He may have left a note. I don't know…"

I took his clothes out of the suitcase and hung them in the wardrobe, and put his shaving tackle in the bathroom. I kept telling myself that any moment I should hear a car coming down the drive, a taxi, and Magnus would jump out of it, laughing, and Vita would call up the stairs to me, He's here, he's arrived!

There was no note. I felt in all the pockets. Nothing. Then I turned to the dressing-gown, which I had unpacked already. My hand closed upon something round in the lefthand pocket, and I drew it out. It was a small bottle, which I recognised at once. It bore a label: B. It was the bottle I had posted to him the week before, and it was empty.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I WENT ALONG to my dressing-room, found my own suitcase, put the bottle in one of the pockets and the documents about Bodrugan as well, locked the case and joined Vita downstairs.

"Did you find anything?" she asked.

I shook my head. She followed me into the music-room and I poured myself a whisky. "You'd better have one too," I said.

"I don't feel like it," she answered. She sat down on the sofa and lit a cigarette. "I'm quite certain we ought to ring the police."

"Because Magnus has taken it into his head to roam the countryside?" I queried. "Nonsense, he knows what he's doing. He must know every inch of the district for miles around."

The clock in the dining-room struck midnight. If Magnus had left the train at Par, he had been walking for four and a half hours…

"You go to bed," I said. You look exhausted. "I'll stay down here in case he comes. I can lie on the sofa if I feel like it. Then as soon as it's light, if I'm awake and he hasn't arrived, I'll go out in the car and have another search."

It was true, she looked all-in: I was not trying to get rid of her. She stood up uncertainly, and wandered towards the door. Then she looked back at me, over her shoulder.

"There's something odd about all this," she said slowly. "I have a feeling you know more than you say." I had no ready answer. "Well, try and get some sleep," she went on. "Something tells me you're going to need it."

I heard the bedroom door shut, and stretched myself out on the sofa with my hands behind my head, trying to think. There were only two solutions. The first, as I had originally imagined, that Magnus had decided to find the Gratten site, and had either lost his way or ricked his ankle, and so decided to wait where he was until daylight; or the second… and the second was the one I feared. Magnus had gone on a trip. He had poured the contents of bottle B into some container that could be carried in a coat pocket, and had got out of the train at Par and walked — to the Gratten, to the church, anywhere in the district, and then swallowed the drug and waited… waited for it to take effect. Once this had happened he would not be responsible for his actions. If time took him into that other world that we both knew he would not necessarily witness what I had witnessed, the scene could be different, the point in time earlier or later, but the penalty for touching anyone, as he well knew, would be the same for both of us; nausea, vertigo, confusion. Magnus had not, as far as I knew, touched the drug for at least three or four months; he, the inventor, was not prepared and might not have the stamina to endure it as I, the guinea-pig, could.

I closed my eyes and tried to picture him walking away from the station, up the hill and across the fields to the Gratten, and swallowing the drug, laughing to himself. I've stolen a march on Dick! Then the leap backwards in time, and the estuary below, the walls of the house about him, Roger close at hand — leading him where? To what strange encounter on the hills or beside the strand? To what month, what year? Would he see, as I had seen, the faltering ship, dismasted, enter the creek, the horsemen riding on the opposite hill? Would he see Bodrugan drowned? If so, his actions might not be the same as mine. Knowing his taste for the dramatic, he might have flung himself headlong into the river and struck out for that opposite shore — and there would have been no river, only the smothered valley, the scrub, the marsh, the trees. Magnus could be lying there now, in that impassable waste land, shouting for help, and none to hear. There was nothing I could do. Nothing until daylight came.

I did sleep, after a fashion, waking with a jerk from some distorted dream that instantly faded, to fall off again once more. A deeper sleep must have come with the first light, for I remember looking at my watch at half-past five and telling myself another twenty minutes would not hurt, and then when I opened my eyes again it was ten past seven. I made a cup of tea, then crept upstairs and washed and shaved. Vita was already awake. She did not even question me. She knew Magnus had not come.

"I'm going to Par station," I said. "They'll know if he handed the ticket in. Then I'll try and trace his movements from there. Somebody must have seen him."

"It would be so much simpler", she insisted, "if you went direct to the police."

"I will go to them", I said, "if no one can tell me anything at the station."

"If you don't," she called as I left the room, "I shall ring them up myself."


I drew a blank at the station: a chap wandering about told me the booking-office would not be open for half an hour. I filled in the time by walking up to the bridge that spanned the railway-line and gave a view of the valley. Once this would have been wide estuary; Bodrugan's ship, dismasted by the gale, would have drifted past this very spot, driven by wind and tide, seeking shelter up the creek and finding death instead. Today, part reedy marsh, part scrub, it was still easy enough to trace the original course of the river from the winding valley itself. A man, sick or in some way hurt, might lie beneath those stubby, close-packed trees for days, for weeks, and no one know of it. Even the marsh ground on which the station stood, the wide, flat expanse between Par and neighbouring Saint Blazey, was still waste land to a large extent; even here there were large tracts where no one wandered. Except, perhaps, a traveller in time whose mind trod a vessel's deck upon blue water while his body stumbled amongst scrub and ditch.

I returned to the station and found the booking-office open, and for the first time proof that Magnus had arrived. The clerk had not only taken his ticket but remembered the holder of it. Tall, he said, going grey, hatless, wearing a sports jacket and dark trousers, with a pleasant smile, and carrying a stick. No, the clerk had not seen which way he had gone after leaving the station.

I got into the car and drove half-way up the hill, to where a footpath went off to the left. Magnus could have taken it, and I did the same, striking across country to the Gratten. It was warm and misty, foretelling a hot day. The farmer the land belonged to must have opened a gate somewhere since the preceding night, because cows wandered on the hillside now, amongst the gorse-bushes and the mounds, following me in curiosity to the entrance of the overgrown quarry itself. I searched it thoroughly, every corner, every dip, but found nothing. I looked down into the valley below, across the intervening railway line, to the sweeping mass of trees and bushes covering the one-time river bed. They might have been woven tapestry, coloured with silken threads in every shade of golden green. If Magnus was there, nothing would ever find him but tracker dogs.

Then I knew I must do what I should have done earlier, what I should have done last night. I must go to the police. I must go, as any other man would go whose guest had failed to arrive over twelve hours earlier, though his ticket had been given up at the station at the correct time. I remembered there was a police-station at Tywardreath, and I wound my weary way back again and drove straight there. I felt inadequate, guilty, like all persons who have been lucky enough never to have found themselves involved with the police, beyond minor traffic offences, and my story, as I told it to the sergeant, sounded shamefaced, somehow, irresponsible.

"I want to report a missing person," I said, and instantly had a vision of a poster with the haunted face of a criminal staring from it, and the word WANTED in enormous letters underneath. I pulled myself together, and told the exact story of all that had happened the preceding day.

The sergeant was helpful, sympathetic and extremely kind. "I haven't had the pleasure of meeting Professor Lane personally," he said, "but we know all about him, of course. You must have had a very anxious night."

"Yes," I said.

"There's been no report to us of any accident," he said, "but of course I will check with Liskeard and Saint Austell. Would you like a cup of tea, Mr. Young?"

I accepted the offer gratefully, while he got busy on the telephone. I had the sick feeling at the pit of my stomach that people get waiting outside a hospital ward during an emergency operation performed on someone they love. It was out of my hands. There was nothing I could do. Presently he came back.

"There's been no report of any accident," he said. "They're alerting the patrol cars in the district, and the other police stations. I think the best thing you can do, sir, is to go back to Kilmarth and wait there until you hear from us. It could be that Professor Lane twisted an ankle and spent the night at one of the farms, but they're mostly on the telephone these days, and it's strange he shouldn't have rung you up to let you know. No previous history of loss of memory, I suppose?"

"No, I told him, never. And he was very fit when I dined with him in London a few weeks ago."

"Well, don't worry too much, sir," he said, "there'll probably be some simple explanation at the end of it."

I went back to the car, the sick feeling with me still, and drove down to the church. I could hear the organ — they must have been having choir practice. I went and sat on one of the graves near the wall above the orchard — Priory orchard once. Where I sat would have been the monks dormitory, looking south over the Priory creek; and close at hand was the guest-chamber where young Henry Bodrugan had died of smallpox. In that other time he could be dying still. In that other time the monk, Jean, could be mixing some hell-brew that finished off the business, then sending word to Roger that he must carry the news to the mother and the aunt, Joanna Champernoune. Ill-tidings were all about me, in the other world and in my own. Roger, the monk, young Bodrugan, Magnus; we were all links in an interwoven chain, bound one to the other through the centuries.

In such a night

Medea gather'd the enchanted herbs

That did renew old Aeson.

Magnus could have sat here and taken the drug. He could have gone to any of the places where I had been. I drove down to the farm where Julian Polpey had lived six centuries ago, and where the postman had found me a week ago, and walked down the farm-track to Lampetho. If I had traversed the marsh at night, my body in the present, my brain in the past, Magnus could have done the same. Even now, with no water and no tide filling the inlet, only meadow-marsh and reeds, the route was familiar, like some scene from a forgotten dream. The track petered out, though, into marsh, and I could see no way forward, no means of crossing the valley to the other side. How I had done it myself at night, following, in that earlier world, Otto and the other conspirators, God only knew. I retraced my footsteps past Lampetho Farm, and an old man came out of one of the buildings, calling to his dog, who ran towards me, barking. He asked if I had lost my way and I told him no, and apologised for trespassing.