cowering in panic and confusion in the middle of the floor, eyes as wide, terrified and startled as a bull in an abattoir.
‘Oh great,’ sighed Liam.
CHAPTER 14
2001, New York
The man recoiled fearfully at the sight of Bob, taking several quick steps away from him. ‘WHAT IS THIS P-PLACE?’ he bellowed anxiously. His eyes darting from one of them to the next.
It was Maddy who reacted first. She took several steps forward. ‘Liam? Is that …? Oh crud, that’s not …?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid it is, Mads. It’s Lincoln.’
Her jaw hung slack. ‘Oh my God!’ She advanced slowly. ‘Mr Lincoln? Abraham Lincoln?’
Lincoln’s manic eyes settled on her. His shaggy eyebrows scowled, covering his fear with suspicion. ‘You … you know me, ma’am?’
Maddy nodded. She even offered him something that looked like a polite curtsey. ‘Yes, Mr Lincoln. Yes we do.’
Lincoln’s voice softened from an outraged courthouse bellow to something quieter and altogether more agreeable. ‘Then … please, ma’am, tell me where in tarnation I have suddenly ended up.’ He looked around the brick archway. ‘Just a moment ago I was in the Jenkins storehouse.’ His eyes fell on Liam. ‘Listening to you, sir, and your two friends talking about things incomprehensible to me.’
Liam cursed his carelessness. ‘Jay-zus, he must have been following us!’
Lincoln carried on. ‘And then I saw that … that round … doorway appear out of –’ Lincoln’s deep growl of a voice became a breathless whisper and his mouth snapped open and shut like a fish caught on a hook and landed on a riverbank. ‘It arrived out of nothing! Like smoke, like … like a vision of angels. Like …’
Sal chuckled at that.
‘Fool that I am, I dared to step through.’ He glanced at Liam. ‘To follow you through, sir, through the … that … that doorway, and find myself in a … an unearthly whiteness!’ He scratched anxiously at the thick bristles of his beard. ‘Then I find myself here … in this strange place!’
Maddy took another step forward, now only a yard from him. ‘You can relax, Mr Lincoln. Please … it’s all right, it’s OK. You’re perfectly safe here.’
Lincoln studied her in suspicious silence for a moment. ‘You, ma’am. You sound less foreign to me than the others.’ He nodded at Bob. ‘Particularly that ugly ox of a man there. Good God! If I had a dog as ugly, I’d shave its posterior and teach it to walk backwards!’
Lincoln chortled drunkenly at his own joke.
Maddy shook her head. He’s been drinking.
‘Now you, ma’am,’ he said, eyeing Maddy warily, ‘you have the sound of New England in your voice.’
‘Boston,’ she replied. ‘I’m from Boston.’
Lincoln nodded slowly. ‘And I trust you have a name?’
‘Maddy. Maddy Carter.’ She offered her hand to him. ‘We mean you no harm … In fact, we came back in time to save you.’
For several moments he regarded her hand as if it was a snarling dog ready to snap at his fingers. ‘Save me?’
She nodded. ‘You nearly stepped right in front of a speeding wagon.’
‘Aye. It was Bob here,’ said Liam, slapping his meaty shoulder, ‘that yanked you back out of the way. Do you not remember?’
Lincoln remembered that. Remembered being winded and lying on his back. But then it was all a confusing mixture of things he might or might not have seen or heard. The only thing he’d been sure of was the whispered conversation in the dark of the dockside. The mention of his name. The mention of a destiny. The mention of the Jenkins storehouse and the specific time of some mysterious rendezvous.
‘Yes, perhaps I do remember something of that,’ uttered Lincoln. He cocked a bushy eyebrow, narrowed his eyes as he struggled to make some sense of his whisky-soaked recollection. ‘A big … fast wagon? Barrels on it … was it?’
Liam nodded. ‘Aye. A distillery wagon. The horses were running wild, so they were.’
‘There, you see?’ said Maddy. ‘Liam and the others went back to save you.’
‘Back?’ Lincoln nodded. ‘That’s some of what I heard these three say to each other. Back … they came back in time?’
Maddy shot a look of irritation at Liam and Sal. Careless talk. They should’ve been much more cautious in what they were saying and where they were saying it.
‘Yes, Mr Lincoln,’ she admitted. ‘Yes … they actually came back in time.’
Lincoln’s scowl vanished and was replaced in an instant with a smile that looked horrifically out of place beneath his dark brooding eyes. ‘INCREDIBLE!’ He suddenly grasped her hand firmly