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  SAPPHIRE AND STEEL

  When a rip appears in the fabric of Time, the stability of the entire Universe is threatened.

  SAPPHIRE AND STEEL

  Two stange ‘experts’ appear out of nowhere and take control of the situation. No one knows who they are.

  SAPPHIRE AND STEEL

  A beautiful, remote woman and a terse, efficient man — real, yet with an air of unreality about them.

  SAPPHIRE AND STEEL

  Cooly combating the negative forces of Time out-of-control, endowed with incredible powers beyond human comprehension, they are unnerving but fascinating. They are

  SAPPHIRE AND STEEL

  SAPPHIRE AND STEEL

  A Star Original

  It appeared as the third and last clock stopped its ticking. Steel saw it first, then Rob. Sapphire was also aware of its presence. It was a moving, flickering shape that appeared high up, near the apex of the end wall. It seemed, as first, to be a part of the wall texture itself. As if the plaster of the wall was shifting. Then it appeared to take on a series of quick, broken images. Robe felt that it looked like pieces of old and faded moving-film, except that these images were three-dimensional. Rob also thought that he heard, under the rumbling of the skin-like fabric, the sound of voices that seemed to squeal with laughter of pain, or both.

  SAPPHIRE AND STEEL

  Peter J. Hammond

  A STAR BOOK

  published by

  the Paperback Division of

  W. H. ALLEN & Co. Ltd

  A Star Book

  Published in 1979

  by the Paperback Division of

  W. H. Allen & Co. Ltd

  A Howard & Wyndham Company

  44 Hill Street, London W1X 8LB

  Copyright © Peter J. Hammond, 1979

  Printed in Great Britain by

  Runt Barnard Printing Limited,

  Aylesbury, Bucks.

  ISBN 0 352 30514 2

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it

  shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated

  without the publisher’s prior consent in any

  form of binding or cover other than that in which

  it is published and without a similar condition

  including this condition being imposed on the

  subsequent purchaser.

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter One

  Each clock in the house seemed to tick with its own individual sound. In this room alone, the farmhouse-kitchen, there were four clocks, and, through the open doorway, in the downstairs hall, there were two more. One hung on the wall by the cellar door. The other one, its casing made of polished brass, helped to brighten up the dark corner at the foot of the stairs.

  At least, Rob imagined that it managed to brighten things. This was an old house, a very dark house, even in daylight.

  It was at exactly six-forty-five p.m. that the first clock stopped. It was one of the four in the kitchen and Rob, head down with his homework, did not immediately miss the sound.

  When the second clock in the kitchen stopped, at six-forty five and eight seconds, it might just possibly have registered in Rob’s subconscious. Just a slight thinning of sound. But homework on a Friday evening was important to him. Get that done and out of the way, then the whole week-end was his. And he had found that he could always cope with normal, everyday distractions.

  Even the sound of his sister’s voice, ten minutes earlier, had failed to interrupt his studying. Six year old Helen pleading for one more nursery-rhyme to be read to her at bedtime. And bedtime for Helen was always like part of a ritual. Mum, Dad, a rocking-chair and just one more rhyme, please, before the bedside light was turned off in the top attic bedroom.

  The third kitchen clock stopped at exactly six-forty-five and eighteen seconds. This time it did register to Rob, just slightly. Perhaps it was because the faint, familiar voices, from the attic room, stopped at exactly the same moment.

  It was still registering in Rob’s mind when the fourth clock in the kitchen stopped, three seconds later.

  Rob looked up slowly from his work. Only the faint tickings of other clocks in the house could be heard. Apart from those, there were no other indoor sounds. There was the noise of the thin, high wind that persistently blew in from the bay at Deadman’s Point and across the flat, open land that surrounded the remote farmhouse. But, inside the house, nothing now, only the quiet sounds from the remaining clocks.

  Rob listened for a moment or two. He then put down his pencil, stood up from the refectory table and moved to the open kitchen door.

  ‘Mum?’ he called, but there was no answer.

  ‘Dad?’

  Nothing.

  He had begun to move along the hallway towards the stairs when the clock by the cellar door stopped. By the time he had reached the foot of the staircase, the hands of the brass clock in the dark corner had also twitched to a standstill.

  Rob looked up at the flight of stairs. A good antique table on the first landing. Fine prints on the walls. An earthenware jar of dried flowers and pampas grass that his mother had collected last autumn.

  ‘Helen?’ He decided to call her name. After all, it might be one of her jokes, one of her baby-sister tricks. Again, no answer.

  Rob had climbed three steps of the first flight of stairs when he heard the other sound. He stopped and listened.

  It was the kind of sound that he had not heard before in the house. There was nothing too strange about it at first. It was a murmuring, a vibrant rumbling that grew slowly and steadily louder in volume. Somehow, it was like the highly amplified sound of cloth being shaken. Like the sound of clothes on a washing-line, flapping and straining in a strong wind.

  As Rob listened, the sound seemed to reach a kind of peak, like fabric that was being stretched and torn. Like the shrill shriek of ripped muslin. Then silence.

  Rob remained standing there, on the third step of the first flight of stairs.

  ‘Dad?’ he called yet again. ‘What was that noise, Dad?’

  The only kind of answer from the top attic room came from Helen. She was making small, hiccupy, sounds. The crying sounds of a frightened child.

  Rob began to run up the stairs, two steps at a time. When he reached the third landing, the very top one where the ceilings sloped, he realised that every clock in the house had stopped working.

  The door of Helen’s attic bedroom was slightly ajar. The warm glow from the bedside lamp highlighted Helen who was sitting on the bed. She wore a nightdress, and her favourite toy, a battered teddy-bear dressed in denim, was on the bed beside her.

  To Rob, as he moved carefully towards the door, it should have looked as friendly and as cosy as on any other family evening. But tonight, Helen had her small hands held to the sides of her face. She was moving slightly from side to side as she stared at a fixed point in space. The short, choked, sobbing cries that came from her throat were not unlike the sounds of a small, scared animal.

  Rob could also see, beyond the angle of the open door, the flickering of a shadow against the far wall. The shadow of something that shifted quietly and rhythmically, to and fro inside the room.

  Rob moved cautiously into the doorway of the room. He stood there for a moment and tried to attract Helen’s
attention. But his sister would not, or could not, turn her head to look at him.

  He counted to five, took a deep breath, then walked into the attic room.

  The shifting shadow upon the wall was caused by nothing more than the movement of the rocking-chair which was swinging itself slowly to a standstill.

  There was no-one sitting in the chair. In fact, apart from Helen and Rob, there was no-one else in the room at all.

  Rob looked around him. The large, illustrated book of nursery-rhymes, that his mother always read to Helen, was lying on the floor, as if it had been dropped suddenly. Whenever the book was being read, Rob’s father would also be listening and joining in. He would sit upon the very edge of Helen’s small dressing-table, as if he had no intention of staying long. Yet he would always be there, his pipe and tobacco pouch set down neatly on the dressing-table beside him, until the child’s light was switched off.

  The pipe and tobacco pouch were still there now, as if forgotten.

  Rob turned his head to look at Helen. ‘Where’s Mum?’ he asked her.

  The child said nothing. She lowered her hands slowly from her face and reached out for the teddy-bear.

  ‘And Dad? Where’s he?’ Rob waited again for a reply, but Helen continued to stare ahead, as if at nothing. She still rocked slowly from side to side, making the small sounds in her throat, as if her real child’s tears were trapped inside her.

  Rob moved across the room and knelt down to face Helen. He looked at her. But the eyes that looked back, looked past him. They stared out at nothing.

  And there was only the silence of the house and the high, pinched sound of the wind outside.

  Rob spoke to his sister quietly but urgently. ‘Helen,’ he said, ‘It’s me, Rob. Please talk to me.’

  A child’s eyes in a child’s face and an expression that did not belong in those eyes. Then, as if Rob’s words had reached her belatedly, she shifted her focus and looked at him.

  It was a moment or two before the expression left Helen’s eyes and she began to cry. But it was a child’s normal tears this time, not the disturbing animal-like whimper that was there before.

  Rob put his arms around her. ‘It’s alright, Helen. It’s alright now. I’m here.’ And he held her for a while until her crying eased a little.

  ‘So where are they?’ he asked once more. ‘Where’s Mum and Dad?’

  Helen looked at him for a moment, as if she had been asked a difficult question. She then appeared to remember.

  ‘Gone.’ She whispered quietly.

  ‘Gone? Gone where?’

  But Helen was looking at him in the same way again, as if he was asking yet another complicated question.

  ‘Out of the door?’ Rob asked her. ‘Downstairs?’

  Helen shook her head but Rob persisted with his questioning. Some kind of instinct warned him that he had to. ‘Well where, then?’

  Helen answered with another quiet whisper. ‘Just — just went away.’

  ‘Not here in the room? They couldn’t have just...’ And he stopped, because Helen was nodding her head. He knew her that much, knew that she never lied unnecessarily. Neither would she play tricks on him when she knew that he was being serious.

  Rob stood up slowly and looked around him at the room. He looked at the book on the floor, the pipe, the pouch, the rocking-chair that had rocked itself still at last.

  There were no large cupboards in the room, not even a wardrobe. Helen’s clothes were hung in a built-in unit on the landing outside. The door through which Rob had entered was the only door. The room also had only one window. This was fitted with half-length curtains which were drawn to. Rob moved across the room and snatched the curtains open. The small window was shut tight. There was also a child-guard screwed to about two thirds of the window height. Rob tested the guard. It was still fixed firmly in place.

  Rob looked out. There was complete darkness outside. Just darkness and the empty sound of the wind. From Rob’s window, at the opposite side of the house, one could see a few scattered lights from the houses at Scars Edge, some five miles away on the other side of the bay. But from this window, nothing.

  Rob closed the curtains again. He then turned slowly to face his sister.

  Still clutching her teddy tightly to her, Helen looked back at him, looked at his worried face. ‘Just went away,’ she said, quietly and earnestly. ‘Mama and Daddy, they just went away.’

  Rob walked back across the room and knelt down by his sister once more. He looked at her steadily. ‘You mean that they disappeared, Helen?’ And he watched her eyes carefully as he asked the question. ‘Disappeared, here in this room?’

  There was no hint of a lie in Helen’s eyes. No game. No tricks.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, and nodded. ‘Just went away.’

  Chapter Two

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t think there’s anything to worry about, Rob.’

  The voice at the other end of the telephone line sounded familiar but distant. Rob wished it could be closer at hand, that the Unit Beat constable could be right here with him now, making notes in a notebook, taking care of everything.

  ‘They’ll be in the house somewhere,’ the voice added and Rob pictured the policeman, snug and safe, across the bay, in the small cottage that was nine-parts home and one-part police station.

  ‘But I’ve searched,’ said Rob into the telephone. ‘Searched the whole house.’

  There was no light in the telephone-box but Rob had managed to balance a hand-torch on top of the empty directory rack.

  ‘Oh, they’re bound to be somewhere,’ said the voice that was too distant to be of any real reassurance.

  The wind was stronger down here near the shoreline. Shot with sea spray, it slashed against the dark windows of the telephone-box. But, inside, the box seemed somehow airtight, stale with the smell of tobacco smoke and salt brine from the summer that had gone.

  ‘Where are you phoning from, Rob?’

  The torch began to roll to the edge of the rack. Rob reached for it quickly with his free hand and held on to it tightly. The last thing he needed now was a broken torch and complete darkness.

  ‘The phone box,’ he said, ‘Down by the summer fishing chalets. Near Deadman’s Point.’

  ‘Oh.’ And a silence at the other end of the phone. Rob could visualise the policeman, shoes off and feet up by an open fire, considering both his comfort and his duty.

  It seemed a long time before the voice spoke again. ‘Tell you what, Rob.’

  ‘Yes?’ said Rob.

  ‘You get on back to the house and look after your sister, right?’

  ‘Yes, I will.’

  ‘And I’ll get Stan to ferry me over,’ the voice went on. ‘Be there in about an hour.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Rob.

  Feeling relieved, almost cheerful, he replaced the telephone receiver.

  It was almost a two mile trek back to the house, along a dirt- track approach road, the only approach road. Rob’s father had chosen the house because of its isolation. He liked seclusion and preferred to know, as he would put it ‘when he was being invaded’. His firm belief was that, between the time it took any visitor to first arrive on the approach road and then reach the house even by car, the inhabitants of the house could have made a cup of tea, a sandwich and settled themselves down by a window to see just who the visitor was. Even at night, the noise of any object on the rough surface of the track road provided enough warning.

  With the wind behind him, Rob managed to run back part of the way. He jogged some. Walked the rest. By the time he had reached the obsolete cattle-grid in the road, another of Dad’s early-warning system aids, he could see the lights of the farmhouse.

  Rob opened the big front door and stepped into the hallway. He closed the door against the wind and the darkness, then locked and bolted it. He switched off the torch, removed his coat, then tried, without success, to make a quick job of smoothing down his wind-blown hair.

  He found Helen sitti
ng where he had left her, in the kitchen. She had not moved from the large fireside chair and she still wore, over her nightdress, the blanket that he had wrapped around her before leaving the house. The glass of milk, that he had poured for her, remained untouched beside her.

  Rob had somehow hoped that his parents might have returned in his absence with an obvious reason for their disappearance. They might even have made a joke of it at his expense. But Helen’s calm, questioning look told him that nothing had changed during his trip to the telephone at Deadman’s Point.

  ‘Drink your milk, Helen,’ he said, with an attempt at authority. The twelve-year-old taking care of the six-year-old, taking charge of affairs now, in what seemed an otherwise empty house.

  He did not feel that convincing, and Helen must have noticed this in her own small way, because she simply stared at him with the same calm but puzzled look on her face.

  ‘Everything’s alright,’ he assured her. ‘So just drink your milk.’

  It seemed to work. Although she neither smiled nor looked less troubled, she at least reached forward for her milk and began to sip it.

  Rob moved to the kitchen windows, drew back the curtains and looked out at the darkness. ‘I’ve just been to make a telephone call,’ he informed her, drawing the curtains to once more. ‘I’ve telephoned the policeman’s cottage at Scars Edge.’

  Helen nodded over the rim of her glass.

  ‘And I told Constable Daly there... You know Constable Daly, don’t you?’ he asked the small face that was almost hidden by the glass of milk.

  Helen nodded yet again. And Rob wandered back to the centre of the room, as if it was the right and proper place to take command from. ‘Well, he’s coming out here,’ Rob announced. ‘Constable Daly’s coming here. Be here in no time.’

  Helen lowered the glass from her face. ‘Oh,’ she said, a white film of milk helping to form the shape of the word.

  Rob moved to her, tugging a crumpled handkerchief from his pocket as he took the glass from her. ‘So — so everything’s alright, then, isn’t it?’ he said, wiping her mouth with the handerchief.