1

I halted at the front door to my apartment, key in the lock, as a strange smell sent red lights darting across my vision.

A rusty tang. It reminded me of rain on a tin roof, or copper. The red lights danced and flickered.

I opened the door.

My first glimpse of the interior of my apartment didn’t register. Then my cross-talking senses took in the sight.

The trail of carnage started in the lounge. The television lay smashed and upturned; the sofa pillows hacked open so their stuffing spilled out; cracks had appeared in the plaster of the walls around what looked like bullet holes; the scattered wreck of a vase of roses, a gift from my mother, covered the grey carpet. A blood trail began near the upturned coffee table and led in thick red drops to the kitchen.

That smell…

I stumbled to the kitchen door, and the red lights went wild.

A body lay slumped against the oven in my kitchen, hands turned palm upwards, legs twisted underneath.

It had no head.

Spreading from under the body, a wide pool of blood on the floor, and splashes of blood up the walls, and smears across the laminated surface of the benches. The pantry door hung open, the contents disordered. The refrigerator door gaped wide also; a jar of mustard had fallen from the middle shelf and lay smashed in the blood pool. Knives from the cutlery drawer were scattered. Above the sink full of unwashed breakfast dishes, the cabinet doors had been hit by some heavy object and now hung off their hinges.

I backed away into the lounge, hand on mouth in case I actually vomited. My laptop bag slipped from my shoulder to the floor, the dull thud rattling broken crockery on the counter.

I came up against the sofa and collapsed onto it, staring at the kitchen door. The body remained in view, grotesquely twisted, black jeans and shirt drenched in blood that had spurted from the severed neck.

I fumbled for my phone, could hardly focus on the screen. The red lights caused by the stench of blood still obscured my vision, as if my own eyes were bleeding. I pressed the speed dialling for Robert’s number.

No answer.

That could mean everything, or nothing. Robert sometimes ignored his phone altogether. The answering service came on.

“Robert! Answer your damned phone! Look, give me a call as soon as you get this message. There’s been a…just give me a call, will you?”

The phone wavered in my hand. Someone had stolen clothes and quite a bit of money from Robert’s house earlier that week. Some sort of connection, perhaps? Had whoever stole his property learned where I lived and come for more? Too scary to think about.

But who was dead in my kitchen?

I managed to rise and approached the kitchen once more, but could not go in, not with the body lying there.

Call the police.

But something held me back, some inner caution.

Check the apartment first.

A quick look at the other rooms revealed nothing in them had been disturbed. At least the death and destruction seemed limited to the lounge and kitchen. No visible signs of a break in, no broken windows, no smashed locks. The only thing missing was my cello, a good quality Bellafina that I loved desperately. The room held an old wardrobe and a few music stands and a bookcase full of books about music and piles of sheet music and a desk at which I sometimes pretended to write music.

But no cello.

I started trembling again, and wiped at a tear that had started down my cheek.

In the bathroom I splashed cold water on my face, drops falling from chin and hair, and tried to gather my thoughts. Why hadn’t the neighbours heard anything? What about Mr Horton next door? But no, he always visited his son on Fridays.

Back in the living room I hauled out my phone again and started to dial the emergency services number, but stopped when a chill ran through my body.

Someone behind me.

I spun around. No one there.

But the feeling of a presence continued, and the prick of something sharp as if someone held a knife at the base of my neck. I rubbed my hand over the spot and felt a coldness. Deep bass tones throbbed as an underscore to my addled senses.

Someone behind me…someone in my head…

“Who’s there?”

My synaesthesia kicked in again. I not only heard sound, but also saw it as patterns and tones of light; people’s voices could often flash in coloured shapes; a storm would be like looking through a kaleidoscope; music became a sublime audio-visual experience. Sometimes my other senses were affected, too: warmth, coolness, elicited themselves from auditory or visual experiences, the acidity of wine always reminded me of the scent of roses. I’d had the condition all my life, harmless, sometimes inconvenient, sometimes beautiful. Sometimes it left me alone for days or weeks and then returned, sharp as ever.

But I sensed no beauty now, just an approaching rumble as of distant thunder and flashes of orange before my eyes. Icy fingers seemed to grip the nape of my neck. I remembered experiencing these things before at the age of thirteen: the flashes of light, the growl of bass frequencies in a slow crescendo, the sharpness on my neck. They meant—

No, not them!

The Maegri had been out of my life for twelve years now. No Carissa, no anybody. But it had to be them. The sharp sensation in my neck, the bass notes, the chill: I remembered them from when Carissa had arrived twelve years ago, and from when I had screamed away with her. The sensations were unmistakable. One of the Maegri approached out of the Now, coming for me. Perhaps they had destroyed my apartment, killed the person in my kitchen and stolen my cello. Perhaps it was my turn to die.

I stood helpless, trembling, the sound growing louder and louder, the odour of drying blood filling my nostrils, the red/orange/red flash of lights…

A crash of glass in the bathroom, like the mirror had shattered. Whoever had just arrived might need help, might even right now be bleeding from the broken glass, but I didn’t go into the bathroom. The lights and sound vanished.

The bathroom door opened; footsteps down the hall. I looked around for some sort of weapon: there was nothing sufficiently heavy to hand apart from my laptop, and no time to fetch a knife from the kitchen.

A naked man appeared in the living room door, holding one of my bath towels. An old man: grey hair, worn in a tight ponytail, wrinkled skin with a lot of scar tissue, particularly across the stomach. He shivered uncontrollably, even in the warmth of the flat.

“Oh good, you’re here,” he said in a purple voice. “I’m not too late.”

I said nothing, just stared at him, breathing hard. A Maegri all right.

“Hello, April. I seem to have broken your bathroom mirror. Sorry about that.”

I stood up. “Who are you?”

He smirked. “Yes, fine. Thank you.”

He seemed to notice the destruction of the apartment for the first time, gazing open-mouthed at it. Then his legs gave way.

I helped him to sit up, cast a throw-rug off the sofa around his shoulders and fetched a couple of blankets from the linen press. He still shivered as he wrapped himself in them.

Bright green eyes looked at me, eyes that had seen too much, perhaps; the corners were shot with blood, but that could be from the effects of time travel. All part of the cost. He would recover from the cold soon enough, but needed something to eat, since even undigested food didn’t time travel when a Maegri did. That meant going into the kitchen again. I tried not to look at the headless monstrosity as I groped in the refrigerator for a container of cold pasta salad. He ate ravenously, and didn’t speak until he’d emptied the dish. When he did, he merely said, “Thank you. Any coffee?’

I wasn’t going into the kitchen again. I shook my head. He staggered to his feet and limped across to the kitchen door.

“I see.”

“Do you know who that is?”

He bent over the corpse, even reached out to trace one finger down one arm. He examined the blood pool, the smashed crockery, regarded again the devastation of the living room.

“Yes, the same.” He looked at me. “Unfortunately.”

“The same?” I backed off, planting my foot on the shards of the smashed vase. “You’ve seen this before? You did—”

“No!” He scowled, indicated the corpse with a flick of his hand. “No! Please, April, I didn’t do this. I never would.”

He drew a glass of water from the cold tap in the sink and drank it down, standing on his toes to avoid the blood pool. His towel slipped but he managed to catch it before too much of his butt came into view.

He re-filled the glass, came back to the sofa and fell onto it. I remained backed up against the wall, one hand gripping my phone. If he decided to attack I could hit him with it.

“Who are you?”

“You don’t recognise me?”

“Obviously not.”

“Griffin diAngelo.” The way his eyes bored into mine he might have been waiting for me to recognise the name. He seemed disappointed by my silence and resumed slurping his water.

He wasn’t the first Maegri to enter my life, but he was only the second. About seventy years old, perhaps. A gust of wind might have blown his skinny frame away, but nonetheless I sensed hidden strength underneath. The scars that covered his lower body looked vicious, but old, healed white and hard. It looked like he’d literally been sliced open and stitched back together with string.

“I’ve only been here once before,” he said, and his voice sank low as if talking to himself. “Long overdue for a return visit. A sacred site, almost. The twelfth of August 2017. April Tooms’ apartment. 6:45 pm. But no different from last time. Interesting. A wrong turn, maybe.”

“Last time?”

“This must be the last time.”

“What do you mean, sacred site?”

“Never mind.”

Despite a strong desire to clean up—or maybe just run into the night and never come back—I’d been about to call the police just before Griffin arrived, and in that case the evidence should be left alone. If this man knew anything, the police would no doubt want to speak to him, too. Except that being a Maegri, he’d probably tell them nothing, especially about his own presence here.

“Do you know what happened here? Is that why you’ve come?”

Griffin gazed at the carnage and nodded, as if expecting it to be there, but then shrugged. “Not…exactly. Maybe. Depends on which…no.”

If any sense lay in his answer, it escaped me. “So when are you from? And how do you know my name? And do you know who that is?” I pointed at the corpse but didn’t look.

He stared at me, then slowly smiled. “Time’s mystery. Full of cause and effect which we Maegri spend do our utmost to ignore.” He put his empty glass on the coffee table and held out one hand. Reluctantly, I took it: mere skin over bone, like a chicken leg. The contact made me shiver.

Understanding dawned at last, more time travel nonsense that should have been second nature to me. “I’m meeting you for the first time, but you’ve met me before, yes? Are we close friends?”

“Not friends as such. Well, I’ve saved your ass a few times, and you’ve…well, not supposed to say am I?” A skinny finger went to his lips and he cackled like he’d told a dirty joke.

“Look, things are dangerous right now,” he continued. “You don’t know that the Makeshift is collapsing.” He must have seen the blank expression on my face, because he continued, “I don’t know what you know. I’ve been screaming for a long while. Too long, maybe. My epoch is a long way then.”

His epoch: his proper time, the time he should be in if he’d been an ordinary human being. And then meant the past.

“What’s a makeshift?”

He frowned at that. “How many times have you screamed?”

A personal question. To answer would be like admitting how many sexual partners one had been with. Any response might produce scorn or hilarity.

“Twice. My mentor showed me how.”

Griffin didn’t seem to like that answer either. “Only twice? I thought you’d be more…experienced, and that she…How long have you been a Maegri?”

“Twelve years. I became one just after my thirteenth…Do you know my mentor?”

He nodded. “Carissa Harlow, right? Interesting woman.” He chuckled again. “Not the sort of mentor I’d have chosen, but still…” He shrugged. “There I go again. Still—you’ve only screamed twice?”

“Yeah, well, it’s not pleasant, you know?”

He just kept staring at me. “This changes things.”

“What things?”

“I made a miscalculation somewhere.” He went to pick up his glass of water, but paused, as if deciding against it. “I imagined you more travelled, more experienced. I meant to arrive in the second time, not the first, which this obviously is. So you’re not caught up in things yet. Are there any other Maegri in this moment?”

That brought back an unwelcome memory. “Perhaps Carissa Harlow. She said she came from this time. But I don’t know—she told me a lot of lies, I think.”

“Where is she?”

“I thought you knew her.”

“Where is she?”

“I don’t know.” Too many questions, and little desire on my part to answer, especially when it was a Maegri doing the asking.

He rose and stepped to the kitchen door. The blood had congealed into a thick, dark mass that gleamed in the electric light. He adjusted the blanket around his shoulders. “We need to have a long talk.”

“I don’t like being Maegri. I’ve never liked being one and I don’t want to be one now.”

For some peculiar reason that made him smile. But it quickly vanished as he squatted down and wrinkled his nose at the stink of blood.

“Staying here is dangerous. For both of us.”

“Who is that in the kitchen?”

His shoulders sagged as he clutched at the towel again.

“You’d better sit down.”

But I stayed against the wall, staring at him. His green eyes, the same bright shade as my own, as Carissa’s, flashed in the light.

“That corpse,” he said. “That…it’s you. All right? It’s you.”