if you like,” he said. “Here in this very Palace.”
This is what we’ve come back here for! Vivian thought. “Then you’d better show me,” she said. “Now you’ve dragged me all this way for them.”
“Along here then,” Jonathan said, and strode off, pigtail bouncing, the opposite way to the way he had taken her that morning. Sam went after him at a rolling trot. It’s the way we came last night, Vivian thought, walking behind across the coloured marble patterns of the floor. They went round a corner and, sure enough, Vivian remembered the long space with showcases against both walls. It had reminded her of a museum. Now she saw that it was indeed a sort of museum. And since she was rather sick of Jonathan hurrying her about, she purposely loitered, looking at the things in the cases.
Each exhibit had a card written in neat, easy-to-read writing. Seventy-three Century American Golf Club, said the first. Forty-five Century Indian Wedding Chalice, said another. But some of the exhibits were decidedly odd, like the Hundred-and-five Century Gas Iron and the Thirty-three Century Icelandic Decorators’ Paint, while in the next showcase – Vivian found herself looking at her own luggage, labelled in the same neat writing: Twenty Century Refugee Equipment (Cases open to show Clothing and Protective Mask).
They were open too. Her suitcase was artfully propped ajar, with that wretched liberty bodice arranged to show on top, and her gas mask was half out of its box. And there was her precious string bag spread open to show sandwich paper, magazine, gloves and socks. Vivian stared at them in outrage. “The cheek!” she said. She was also rather scared, for how was she to get at her things when she went home? But it was worse than that somehow. It was as if someone had taken away the person she really was, so that she was forced to turn into somebody else. “But I won’t!” Vivian said angrily. “I’m me!”
Sam and Jonathan came anxiously galloping back. Sam tugged at her arm. “You’ve got to come now!”
Vivian was too dismayed to care. She pointed to the showcase. “Look! Look at that! All my things.”
“Yes. Good old Elio’s been busy as usual,” Jonathan said. “Androids are like that. But the ghosts are due to walk any second now. Do come and look at them. Please!”
Vivian looked from him to Sam. Sam was staring at her anxiously. Jonathan was so urgent that he had gone white. He is highly strung! Vivian thought. She knew Mum would call Jonathan that. But it was plain to her that it meant a lot to both Jonathan and Sam that she should see these ghosts. “Oh, very well then,” she said, and let Sam pull her down to the far end of the museum.
There was a dark old door there. It was the one Vivian remembered as creaking horribly the night before, but, to her surprise, it was as locked as a door could be. A big shiny chain, made of transparent stuff with wires embedded in it, was fastened across it from one metal box fixed to the door-frame by the hinges, to another fixed to the door-frame by the handle. Cables led from both boxes into the floor. It looked as if anyone trying to open that door would get some kind of nasty shock.
Sam reached out a chubby hand, somewhat coloured with butter-pie and mud from Faber John’s cave, and deftly slid the metal box across from the door-frame on to the door just beneath the big iron handle. The cable stayed where it was, but the door still looked locked to anyone who did not look too closely. “I shorted it,” Sam said proudly. “The first day of half-term.”
“And I asked him to,” Jonathan said, checking his clock again. “It was my idea. When I was little, everyone had heard of these ghosts. They’d walked here every day for hundreds of years. So when my father was elected Sempitern six years ago, I wanted to see them. But my mother went and looked at them first, and when she had, she screamed and had the door chained up. I’ve been wanting to see them ever since, but I had to wait until Sam turned out to be a genius with energe functions.” Sam beamed proudly. Jonathan checked his clock again. “About now,” he said.
He turned the handle and the door creaked slowly open. Beyond it was the dark stone passage which Vivian remembered walking up last night from the church-place called the Chronologue. The open door let in enough light to show that the passage was quite empty.
“Wait,” said Jonathan, in a gasp, as if he was holding his breath.
Almost as he spoke, there were suddenly two people walking down the passage towards them. At first, they were hard to see in the dark. All Vivian could tell was that they were wearing modern Time City pyjamas and walking in the way people do when they are very excited about something. Then she saw that the taller one had dark diamonds down the sides of its suit. There was a flicker over its eyes and its hair was in a pigtail that trailed over one shoulder. The shorter one was a girl with light brown curly hair.
“Jiminy Cricket!” said Vivian. “It’s me! And you!”
It was the oddest and most upsetting sight, to see herself as a ghost, looking almost but not quite like somebody else, with her face back-to-front from the face she knew in a mirror, breathlessly chattering without a sound to a boy she had only met the night before. It was worse still when the two ghosts swept unseeingly up to her. Vivian felt a jolt of sheer panic, such as she had never felt in her life before. They vanished almost where she was standing.
She stood wobbling for a moment and her eyes felt queer and misty. Then her legs folded up and she sat with a bump on the marble floor. “Hundreds of years, did you say?” she asked croakily.
Jonathan held out a hand to haul her up. “My legs did that too when I first saw them,” he said. “Sam ran away.”
“Only six metres!” Sam protested. “I came back when they’d gone.”
“I don’t wonder your mum screamed and had that passage locked!” Vivian said as she struggled to her feet. She hung on to the door until she felt steady. “She must have known it was you, even if you were only six!”
“She won’t talk about it,” said Jonathan. He was looking lordly and jubilant now. “Now do you see how I recognised you, V.S.? That was us last night. I wore that suit and I took you that way on purpose.”
Vivian still felt wobbly, but there was nothing wrong with her brain. “It was not last night!” she said. “Apart from the fact that I never said one word to you until we got to your room, I was not in those clothes. I was wearing this same skirt I have on now last night. That ghost had Time City clothes.”
This made no difference to Jonathan at all. “Then it’s some time soon,” he said airily. “And what we were doing is important. It has to be, or we wouldn’t have made once-ghosts. So what do you think we were doing, V.S.?”
He was back to being the Interrogator again. Bless me! Vivian thought. He still thinks I’m the Time Lady! He just decided to make me admit it in a different way after he got that fright with those guards. Talk about bees in your bonnet! “If you call me V.S. once again,” she said, “I shall scream – I warn you!”
Sam patted her arm. “You need a butter-pie,” he said kindly.
Oddly enough, this nearly did make Vivian scream. She gave a strange squawking laugh. “I’m going barmy!” she cried out. “Why can’t I get back to the War and have some peace for once? Everything’s mad here! None of this is true!”
Her voice was getting louder and louder. They stared at her. Vivian opened her mouth to laugh at how foolish they looked and decided that she would scream instead. She had her head back to give a really loud,
