Chapter 3

I was quickly back inside the glass box, but after a quick glance at the timepiece on the wall, confirming it was about the same as before, I took hold of the lever handle and opened the door of the glass box. As it opened, it did not have the glassy sheen I expected, and felt the glass. It was not glass, but something similar to perspex, I thought. I would have thought perspex was more expensive than glass, but the man who built it may have had his own requirements.

I stepped out of the box and into the well-lit lab and looked around. I saw there was an outer door for exiting the lab, but it was closed and looked to have a lock of some kind, but with small buttons instead of a keyhole; very unusual. I swivelled around to have a look at the glass box and its base. Nothing unusual struck me, but there was a nearby machine that seemed to be active. It had a few small lights, and one was showing green. I took green to mean on or active; something of that nature. That may mean there was power for the glass box’s transfer operation. So why would it need power here as well as power in the Gourock house? Unless this was a case of two ends of an electrical circuit or whatever was required for the transfer mechanism. That might be it.

Oh, now that was interesting: there was a timepiece, a small but obscure panel on the machine, illuminated symbols showing my own time back at Gourock. Interesting, yes, but it did not tell me the full date in this place. I searched around, checking the other machines, but none had a clock face of any kind.

I walked over take a better look at the timepiece panel on the wall. It had a tiny button offering a choice in small type: 1. t/d/m 2. d/m/y. I deduced that the one was time/day/month, and the other was day/month/year, so I pressed the button and the display flickered over to the day, month and year. The year was 2026!

Astonished, I pressed the button again and it reverted to the initial setting; pressed it once more, and it again told me it was 2026. I had to accept this as true. I had a thought: did I have to be back in the box when I was due to go home? If so, I had best hurry and finish my examination of the room then get back in. Nowhere could I see an indication or name of the place I was inside. Why should there be? If you are in it, you already know where you are, normally. The name would be on the outside of the door, but with those buttons, I had no idea how to work the door opener.

I had another glance around the room. The walls were all smooth and painted, much superior to the kind of walls in houses. They were like panels, held together by what seemed to be metal strips. Must be a new method of panelling a room, I thought. It certainly should be quick to construct, I surmised.

A moment later, I was back in the house vestibule, and now noticed how my nose told me it smelled musty in comparison to the fresh smell of the laboratory air. Most odd, that an indoor laboratory room should smell fresher than the vestibule which was getting some of the garden air in where the door was pushed open. Perhaps there was some way of constantly changing the air in the laboratory to prevent fumes building up, not that I saw anything that might produce fumes.

I got myself out of the vestibule and resumed work on the grassy sward outside, armed with my trusty scythe. I got into a simplistic mind, concentrating on making good cuts for a while, then transferring the cut grass to the compost bin. This lasted until the sky darkened and rain began to fall. Rain is not conducive to good scything, so I gave up and moved back indoors to the vestibule.

Finding myself with many more minutes to spare, I elected to explore another target. I decided on a location far to the north: Aberdeen, for that city was devoted to sea fishing, and rural agriculture to the hinterland. I wondered what had interested the traveller to go there.

Once I had allotted a short three minutes, I engaged the mechanism and found myself on the steps of what proved to be Aberdeen Art Gallery. Having previously been in the Mitchell Library in Glasgow, I was starting to worry that the traveller was some kind of kleptomaniac, aiming to steal books and artworks from major repositories. Of course, removing a large painting was not a simple task at any time, so I revised my thoughts to smaller items like jewellery or coins, if Aberdeen Gallery had a coin collection.

I later ascertained that indeed they had a large collection of coins, including the 1883 Upperkirkgate Hoard of over 12,000 silver pennies of the 14^th century that had been minted all over what is now the United Kingdom. That fact is not directly relevant to my tale for now, but offered a suggestion for the traveler’s intentions. Removing a small number of coins from such a huge number might not be noticed for years, if at all. All that would be needed would be to relocate the arrival site to wherever they were stored, take some out and put them in a pocket, then leave and adjust the arrival site to a new position, never calling at the store again.

It was not rocket science to manage that, I decided, if the mode of operation of the transportation machine was as I had surmised.

On the other hand, if the arrival site was merely a starting point, he (or she) might have in mind some other place in the centre of Aberdeen, and I might be completely wrong about my potential thief.

At the appointed minutes, I found myself back in the vestibule of the house, foiled again in working out what was going on with this device, or what had been going on in the past, for there was no indication that the spacetime traveller was still around. I did not even know what I might do about it. I certainly was not going to inform the authorities, local or national, as there was nothing definite to notify them of, just my suppositions based on amateur explorations.

In addition, the powers that be might regard me with suspicion, despite my relative youth. Wartime was not that long ago, and more recently there had been political trouble with Russia. Russian spies might be suspected of being involved, so our government people might see me as some sort of collaborator.

Conclusion: stay low, out of sight.

I looked outside and the rain had stopped, but the grass was damp, and instead of standing up for me to cut it, it was weighted down with the rain and was almost flat. There would be no more grasscutting today. About all I could do would be to add cut grass to the compost bin, so I stepped out and went about doing that. It took me another ten to fifteen minutes, then I was at a loose end.

Did I want to do anything more with the transportation device, or head back home? I wanted to do some serious thinking, so home seemed a better bet.

I wedged the door as closed as I dared; enough that I could get back in but shut enough that to any casual visitor it would appear properly secured. Scythe in hand, I walked along the road to where I might catch a bus. At one point I looked back at the house, and in the slanting sunshine the glass on the vestibule roof glinted at me as if telling me something.

I had no idea what this might mean, except that I determined I would have a closer look on my next visit, if I could see up that high. I happened to note that there was glass on the roof on the side facing me, and that was surprising, having so much window glass on a roof. The only building that needed that much overhead light was an artist’s studio. There was absolutely no evidence that the house was used by an artist, and the only clue in that direction was the Aberdeen target being outside the Aberdeen Art Gallery. If the user was an artist, that did not fit well with the laboratory being identified as ‘work’.

I got home in time to return the scythe to its shed at the bowling green, and report this to the club manager. He thanked me for being so prompt.

The next couple of days became horrendous as the post piled up to be delivered be Christmas day. We temps had no sooner got back from our scheduled day’s work, then we were sent out as a team to cover one long street that had not had its second delivery, each of us having a bag to cover a section of the street. We did the lot in an hour and got back in time to sign out and catch our transport home.

I was exhausted that day. It had been a long one and once I had filled my stomach with my mother’s nourishing fare, I headed to bed and slept like a log. With the stampede to finish the Christmas deliveries I had no chance of visiting the empty house and its weird travel device, so my job finished and I was left with no further opportunity to visit it or use it. I could only think about it.

Then an idea came to me over the Christmas break. If something had happened to the device operator/builder, surely there would be some kind of record. If found dead, he/she would be an unknown person and create a mystery of sorts. Might there have been a story in the local paper?

The trouble was that I had no idea if such an event had happened, and if it had, when? It could have occurred at any time over a long period, for that pile of junk mail in the vestibule of the empty house had to have lain there for several years; it was a substantial heap as I recalled. In fact, why did the house not have a notice on the door saying, ‘deliveries to back door please’, for the back door had a better space behind it to accommodate mail going back that far. Of course the operator would not be thinking in such terms at the time.

Best source for information would be the back files of The Greenock Telegraph (or to give it its full title, The Greenock Telegraph and Clyde Shipping Gazette). The first daily halfpenny newspaper in Britain, it had an extensive archive all the way back to 1857, but my interest was only in the last few years.

Even so, that meant over 200 issues per year, so a massive amount of searching for what might only be a short paragraph about a mystery death. I needed some way of shortening the search.

As soon as I was able, I paid a visit to the Tele offices in the town centre, in Charles Street. I had been told their street had been hit by a bomb during the 1941 blitz, but despite minor injuries from flying glass the staff had carried on working on printing the newspaper. What I expected, I did not know, but I would take anything I could get.

Arriving at the office, I asked to speak to someone about a mystery death a few years back. The girl at the desk, not much older than myself, gave this a few moments’ thought, then offered, “Jack might know.”

Looking back at me, she expanded her idea.

“Jack Barton; he is one of our longest-established reporters, and he has a phenomenal memory for past stories. I’ll see if he is in the building; he might be out on a story.”

She called another girl to come and keep an eye on me, obviously in case I did something stupid, then vanished in back.

She was back a few minutes later while I was chatting with the younger trainee who had taken my fancy, for I had no girlfriend yet and this girl was entertaining as we spoke about our work lives.

The counter girl reappeared, accompanied by a middle-aged man. His eyebrows went up at my my youth, but he made no comment on that, just said, “Shirley says you are looking into a mystery death, son.”

I did not take offence at this reflection on my youth, but clarified the quest.

“Not quite, sir. I was told that there was some story about a man dying somewhere local; Kilmacolm I think it was, but I was not told when it was. The woman who told me about it made out that it was a ghostly tale, but that was probably because he was not identified. That’s it. Can you help at all?”

Jack Barton ran his hand over his chin as he cogitated.

“Kilmacolm, you think? Might it be near a school?”

“I have no idea, sir. Why do you think that?”

“Nothing much, except that there was a recent story of a girl seeing a ghost in the shower room, and someone tried to link that to a dead man who was found near the school about five years back. That was indeed a mystery, as he had nothing on his person to identify him, but probably his body was robbed and that is why there was no wallet or cash. People make mysteries out of nothing, young man.”

“I see,” I commented wisely, or that was the idea I was trying to convey. “Nothing in the way of description? There was a notion in the story I was given that he was a scientist or something.”

“Let me think,” Barton said. “As I remember, the body was described as about 30 years of age, about your height, with dark hair; either dark brown or black, I am not sure. I do recall that he was said to be well-dressed, or at least the clothing was reported to be made of modern materials and well cut; that is all. What his occupation might be, there was nothing to say. As a story, it lasted about a week and then was dropped. A one-week wonder, as we call these.”

“From what you say, it was not a murder.”

“No, nothing so dramatic; no signs of injury. The medical evidence was that he must have had either a heart attack or a stroke, and that killed him. What he was doing there, nobody knew, and no-one in the village was able to put a name to him; no-one recognised his face either. We were given a photo-fit drawing for the paper. They were also stuck up around the village, including the library and post office. He looked like anyone; nothing special about him at all. Do you think this is what your looking for?”

“Sounds like it, Mr. Barton. Nothing since then?”

“Nothing, a complete dead end. It was as if he had just dropped in and died.”

“I agree, sir. So he came to visit the village, had a heart or head attack, and dropped dead. Some passerby searched him and removed his wallet, leaving him as a nobody. Sounds like a story you can go back to, sometime, and ask if anyone has any new clues, like an empty wallet found in a bush. I presume if it had been handed to the police, they would have connected it to the body.”

“We checked with the police. No wallet handed in, empty or otherwise. And we asked at the railway station, before you ask that. We and the police did our best to trace him. No-one came looking for him either.”

“And nothing since? Just that ghost in the shower room?”

“That’s it. The girl was very vague about what she had seen; just what appeared to be a man looking at her, couldn’t even say what age he was, due to the shock. She didn’t want to make anything of it, so we made it a humorous story in the paper about an unnamed girl seeing a ghost in the showers. That is how I was able to remember that mystery death not far from the school. Now, if there is nothing more, I have to get back to my current story...”