morning before dawn—and before the traffic virtually consumed the road—Douglas, armed with a diagram he had copied from Watkins’ book, walked out onto the High Street. A few false tries, a lot of pacing, retracing, and sidestepping, but he eventually sensed the tingle on his skin that told him he had located a ley. After another attempt or two, he achieved a successful crossing—a fact not completely realised until he reached the crossroads and saw torches burning outside Saint Martin’s church.
Douglas hurried to the crossroads he knew as Carfax and paused to search for any clue that might establish the date of this particular iteration of Oxford. The buildings were mostly the same ones he recognised, but of more recent age; the streets were not paved with tarmac, but with cobblestones; heaps of dung mouldered at the street corner. There was no one else around, so he could not derive a guess from clothing. He might have been able to delve a little deeper into this mystery, but the sun was just rising and he knew that he must either depart again at once or spend at least one day and maybe more in this place. He was not prepared for that, so he ran back to the ley and made the jump back to the home world—albeit, three days later by the calendar.
Over the next few weeks Douglas made many more excursions, calibrating by trial and error the distance coordinates along the ley that corresponded with what he thought of as the Otherworld timescale. In the end, he succeeded in locating the era that formed the centre of his search, as confirmed by the Roll of Vicars plaque on the wall of Saint Mary the Virgin church.
Satisfied that he had done all he could to prepare, Douglas pulled the hood over his robe, settled it on his shoulders, and stepped to the mirror. The image reflected there was of a healthy and well-nourished man of middle height and weight dressed in a good, serviceable robe of a country priest. The newly shaved tonsure on his head completed the effect. He smiled at his reflection.
“Come along, Snipe,” he said, stepping quickly to the door. “It is time to go.”
They walked out from the town house and proceeded towards the centre of Oxford. It was just before daybreak, but being a busy modern city, there were already a few people about. They passed a milkman and his mule and some black-gowned students asleep in doorways. At Broad Street, a rag and bone man with his pushcart trundled along, and on Turl Street the lamplighter with his pole was putting out the last lights. If anyone marked the strange apparition of a pair of medieval monks flapping towards city centre, they did not show it. In a place like Oxford, where students still wore the vestiges of medieval robes to tutorials and their professors still addressed formal assemblies in Latin, things that might have been considered an oddity to be remarked upon anywhere else were merely too common to be afforded attention.
They followed Turl Street to the end and turned onto the High, joining the ley line as it ran towards Carfax. Here Douglas paused. “Ready, Snipe?” he asked. “Do not be afraid, and do not make a fuss. You have done this before. Remember?” When this brought no response, Douglas gave him a light slap on the cheek. “Remember?”
The surly youth shook his head.
“Good. Then hold on.” He extended his hand to the lad, who gripped it tight. “Here we go!”
They began walking very quickly along the street, and Douglas counted off the steps. As he fell into the optimum stride, he looked for the marker he had chalked on the base of Gill the Ironmonger’s shop a few meters from the corner. As they approached the crossroads, a gaggle of students—either hastening to their studies or returning from the night’s revels—straggled by. Douglas’ first instinct was to turn and flee—to have his sudden and inexplicable dematerialisation publicly witnessed seemed far too risky. He wavered on the brink of abandoning the attempt.
That impulse was swiftly jostled aside by another: What did he care if a passel of bleary-eyed scholastics got an eyeful? What did it matter if they talked? What difference would it make?
He saw the chalk mark and stepped up his pace. A sound like a banshee howl reached them, falling through the upper atmosphere. In the same instant, a stiff wind gusted out of nowhere, driving a sudden rain