The Tourist

The Tourist (The Portsmouth Stories)

by Matt Wingett

The Tourist (The Portsmouth Stories)

by Matt Wingett Smashwords Edition Copyright 2012 Matt Wingett * Thank you for taking advantage of this free download! * This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please come back to www.lifeisamazing.co.uk and get an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not sign in to get it, then please return to www.lifeisamazing.co.uk and sign in for a copy using Tweet And Get It. One tweet I is a fair deal for a half hour's entertainment, after all!

Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author. * Please note, the characters in this book are fictional. Any resemblance to any persons living or dead is purely coincidental. * This book is a part of The Portsmouth Stories series. *

The Tourist by Matt Wingett * The moment he disembarked from the St Malo schooner, Hylas, Charles de Tilby began looking for an opportunity to break free from his guardian.

His chance came while Bartholomew was arranging matters at the Fountain Hotel on Portsmouth's bustling High Street. As the efficient old Quaker set about engaging a suite of rooms and a mutton dinner, Charles slipped down to the stables, took a fine-looking, freshly-saddled stallion and gave it the crop. He galloped up the crowded High Street, scattering ladies on shopping trips, street urchins looking for scraps of food, shop-boys carrying brown paper parcels and sailors who shouted blood-curdling curses after him.

He exploded from the town through the Landport Gate, clattered past the artisan quarters squeezed along the London Road and finally thundered out on to the wide fields of Stamshaw. What sport! he thought to himself as he brought the panting horse to a trot and took stock of his surroundings, loosening his cravat and fashionable green greatcoat as he did so.

What sport, indeed! By now, Bartholomew is probably pulling his white beard out, the old fool! - he thought, as a smile of self-congratulation spread displeasingly across his twenty-year-old face. Either that, or he's searching for me in Portsmouth's back alleys... as if I'd dally in that stinking cesspit for one second longer than ill-fortune should demand!

It was then, as he inhaled a deep lungful of sea air, that he looked across the blue calm water to the west, and saw the old castle so imposingly situated on the harbour's far side. It's large, it's grand and it's edifying to the senses yes - that will suit me very well! he thought, and leant forward to push his sleek chestnut mount to a canter.

In two hours of steady riding, he cantered through the fortifications known as the Hilsea Lines, crossed Portsbridge on to the mainland and then turned west at Cosham village. From here, he passed by the pretty manor of Wimmering and the wooded shoreline past Paulsgrove. Then, after skirting the north harbour for a while, he found himself heading south through a tidy village that stretched along a single lane by the water - a mix of fine Georgian buildings and smaller, more humble thatched cottages that Charles sniffed at in a superior sort of way.

The castle itself reared up at the road's far end, a little way off from the last house in the village, on a promontory overlooking the harbour, separated from the rest of the land by a tidal moat. He took a good, long look at the edifice, and crossed the bridge to make a circuit of the old high walls. They delineated a great square, inside of which a massive mediaeval keep towered moodily. The castle was abandoned he noticed, but only recently, judging by the signs of life there - discarded barrels stacked by the wall slightly grown over, and the ruts where carriages had rattled in through the gatehouse.

Upon enquiry, a shepherd sitting under a tree told him that it had recently "housed Frenchie prisoners from them Wars with Old Boney". To Charles's impolite questioning, the man was patiently forthcoming in giving a potted history of the Castle, telling Charles that an Antiquary had once told him that: "Bits of it is a few 'undred years old - but see them walls? They was builded by them Romans what yon fellow Shakespeare done wrote on."

Under the walls of the old castle, he kicked around for much of the afternoon, relaxing and enjoying his taste of freedom, and looking out over the water, with the sun sparkling on it, and the wind lifting the heavy yellowed heads of coarse reeds and sedges growing at the water's edge.

He thought of Bartholomew. He was such an old dullard when it came to any question of having fun. He will be at his wit's end, at this very moment! he thought, and chuckled again in a malicious way.

Charles wondered whether he might leave it a few weeks before he surfaced again. In fact, judging from the weight of the large bag of sovereigns that he had appropriated from the old man's luggage before he'd "borrowed" the horse, he might leave it a few months. By then, the old Quaker would have reported back to his father, Sir Augustus de Tilby, that his son had unaccountably gone missing. Oh, to be a fly on the wall when that conversation takes place! He nearly burst out laughing, right there and then.

Charles congratulated himself again. You know, this really is a coup!

Bartholemew may have "saved" me from cardsharps in Vienna and dragged me from the fleshpots of Venice - but he lost sight of me here, at home in dear old Albion! It is truly comical!

Less comical of course would be how devastated Old Man de Tilby would feel in the weeks after the news of Charles's disappearance. In fairness to the Old Man, Charles planned to send him a communication by mail coach in a few weeks' time, letting him know that he was hale and hearty. It would come as such a relief to him, and would make his father that much more eager to pay the small matter of a few hundred pounds that Charles was already planning to ask from him - to pay off the debts he was sure to incur before he finally trudged his way with leaden foot back to the paterfamilias and his damp old mansion in the north of England.

The relief my father will experience on receiving my letter promising to return will surely be enough to dissolve all his disapprobation... he mused, and then began to hatch more of the plan. ...And why stop there? I might even send another letter, in six months or so, saying I am kidnapped by notorious felons who are holding me against my will in a location unknown - and that another prompt financial consideration will surely act to secure my release..! His feeling of newfound freedom swelled his heart with excitement.

He recognised that these little deceits would, in the fullness of time, come to light, but, he reasoned, he was a young man with a young man's spirit.

Hence, he was eminently worthy of a kindly old man's forgiveness. And besides, against his father he had one major weapon. He was his only child, and his mother was long gone. Sir Augustus doted on his son and heir, Charles Franklin de Tilby, even if Charles undoubtedly had, as the old man was heard to remark from time to time, something of the radical in him - nay, perhaps even the revolutionary.

Charles smirked to himself. The supposedly benevolent moral effects of beauty which my old father had hoped the Grand Tour would instil in me have certainly not tamed me, he grinned to himself. Quite the contrary. It has put lead in my pencil.

Standing now by the old Roman walls of Portchester Castle was a little trip back to the high times in Europe from which he had that very day returned.

His Grand Tour through France, Switzerland, Italy and the Austrian Empire had at first seen him wandering at a loss around the Forum and gazing

uncomprehendingly at the great works of Renaissance art in Florence. But all that had changed when he had reached Venice. Or, more accurately, when he had finally started to spend some time with the cosmopolitan gentlemen and ladies of Venice.

What gentlemen they were, with their knowledgeable ways and their silks and fine clothes, with their stories of fights and duels, and the secret trysts they had contrived with young ladies during masked balls. And what ladies!

They had cavorted and gambled and debauched with Lord Byron himself, so they told him. Under their influence, although he didn't really understand poetry, he had finally come to a decision that it was good to like it, and to think that Classical ruins were sublime - a word he had taken to using whenever he could in an effort to fit in, and denote his sensibility to such things.

Looking out across the waters, he was seized by a whim as a gesture to his friends in Venice, and decided that this very spot would make a most apposite place to bathe. I will do so this very night, by moonlight, he decided, for full sublime effect.

Charles soon found lodgings at the Woolpack Inn, an old thatched eminence in the village that had tumbledown stables at the back. When he took his horse through, he was amused to see the young ostler look with some surprise at the quality of the mount he brought in. The boy was clearly about to comment to that effect when Charles shot him a most imperious look, which caused the lad to bite his lip. And rightly so! thought Charles. His firm rule was to disillusion the lower classes at the first opportunity that any familiarity whatsoever would be countenanced between unequal ranks.

Such a rule, however, did not apply to the sweet little maiden of 15 or so who brought him his plate of roast beef that evening. She was pretty enough for purpose, he decided, and he would find a way to get some access to her in the next few days. But after dinner, he was going once again to take in the glory of that romantic site, as he had promised himself. When he wrote his memoirs, as important gentlemen were wont to do, they put in this sort of colour. This was exactly the sort of impetuous thing he wanted to be admired for.

The ostler doubled as a general hand about the Inn, and Charles informed him that he intended to go straight back to the Castle with the equipment needed to overnight. He wanted some blankets, a fresh linen shirt and a towel. It was his intention, he announced, that he would enjoy a moonlight swim under the flint walls of the old castle, and sleep there, this fine summer night - "allowing the sublime prospect of this splendid scene to act upon my soul," he added airily.

To his annoyance, in response to this grand-sounding plan, the ostler was forthcoming with an opinion that this course of action might not be the wisest thing a man might do.

"Not wise? Not wise?!" Charles exploded when he heard this. "And who are you, to advise me! I am a gentleman so far above your rank - how do you know what is wise for me, and what is not?" he asked, with a fire in his eyes.

The boy shrugged his shoulders and said nothing for a while as if in some form of internal debate. Then a look came over his face that implied he knew something that Charles did not, and said: "All I be saying, Sir, with due respect, is the current be strong. The sea all drains out through the 'arbour

mouth down in Portsmouth, and that water be a might treacherous. That's all Sir." Charles went red with rage: "I ask you again, who are you to criticise my decisions? " "No-one, Sir. No-one at all," came the reply.

"Then, No-one, you'll be no doubt impressed to know that you have today met the best swimmer in this whole benighted county! Now got me those blankets and towels, and a means to light a fire!" he shouted and turned on his heel.

But as he turned, he caught again a look of some sort of secret knowledge in the boy's expression - a look which so annoyed Charles, that without a second's thought, he turned back and struck him across his coarse face.

Charles's father might call his son a "revolutionary", but he would be blasted to hell if such rebellious urges should be allowed to cascade down through the lower classes. In such primitive vessels, high sentiments could become very ugly indeed!

He looked the stung boy in the face with hard, bullying eyes.

"If you imagine I'm going to drown, I assure you, I can swim like a porpoise," he said coldly before he left. This might have been a mistake, he reflected as he went, because the boy's face broke into a broad, mocking grin as soon as the words left his mouth, and after he had left the room, he was sure he could hear the impertinent lad's sniggers at his colourful assertion following him into the evening air.

When the blankets, towel and shirt duly arrived, Charles ordered that someone carry them for him down to the sea. But by then the landlord was run off his feet, with farmhands fresh in from the fields gathered around a bearded fiddler striking up a lively chorus, and when he called to the boy, no reply was forthcoming. A brief search revealed that the ostler had slipped away from the Inn, while the serving girl had gone back home to her mother's house. With no-one else available, Charles realised to his disgust that he would actually have to carry the blankets himself! Duly, he picked up his burden and hung it over one arm, while hefting a lantern the landlord gave him in the other hand.

No wonder the Romans thought of Britain as a barbarian land, he fumed as he walked down the street to the vast edifice of the castle by the shore.

Soon, he was standing by the waters, near the old gatehouse, looking out over the harbour at the few lights flaming on the low island of Portsmouth in the distance, beyond the dark shapes of the prison hulks in the half distance.

Under the castle's flint walls he suspected that he felt the elevation of the spirit he had read about - that sublime emotion of which the Romantic poets spoke in their writing, and which his Venetian friends so adored.

It's all rather pretty, he thought, briefly aware of his lack of ability when it came to encapsulating a scene with impromptu poetic outpourings.

Nevertheless, the night was there to be enjoyed. The sun was an hour and a half below the horizon, and the night was spread with diamonds. Charles admired the effect with pleasure, and thought about what an interesting figure he must strike in this half-lit world, if only someone were watching, he thought, with a pang, before shrugging the thought off.

How utterly sublime! he told himself, changing the focus of his attention to his planned nocturnal swim.

I'll show that lazy ostler a thing or two, he thought. But first, a fire. He threw his blankets on the ground and arranged them into a comfortable bed, before he quickly gathered dried wood from the trees and hedges on the shoreline.

Then he pushed open the door of the castle's gatehouse, and to his delight found inside a pile of tinder that was used by the shepherds on cold days to bring themselves a little bit of warmth. He took it without a thought, returned to the shore and quickly used the lantern's flame to bring a great campfire to blazing life, which he piled with two larger logs, sending sparks and flames spiralling upwards like little fleeting suns in the starlight.

Satisfied with his work, he unbuttoned his tailed, high-collared greatcoat, undid his cravat and pulled his linen shirt over his head. Then he dragged off his knee-high boots, moleskin breeches and cotton undergarments and stood there, thrilling with the joy of his own nakedness.

Thinking back over the events and people of the day, he resolved that though he would warm himself by the fire tonight, tomorrow night he would warm himself against the hot body of that pretty little maid in The Woolpack.

I'll win her affections, he announced to himself. Or I'll get her submission at least, he added as an afterthought.

With this amorous consideration, Charles took three steps and dived into the dark watery world before him, noting, as he jumped, the pair of cold eyes formed by the full moon and her silent twin on the breathing waters below.

The mirror surface shattered at his body's impact with a shock of cold. He tasted the salt tang in his mouth and felt the cool water embrace him. Then he noticed a strange oppressiveness in the air and in the water, and felt an unexpected sensation of lethargy drop through his body.

He looked around him as ever-widening arcs of ethereal light scattered across the lapping surface towards the dark silent trees on the adjacent shore of Horsea Island. A dazzling display dappled the uprights of a derelict pier which jutted into this part of the bay, lapping around them with soft movements. As he moved through the cool water, the submarine moon fractured into a hundred silver coins. Sunken treasure.

It was most ethereal and he felt a magical joy at what he was seeing and feeling. Churning the water, he watched mesmeric water-moonbeams play about him. Soothing. Calming. And it was strange, because as that water and that sublime scene worked upon him, he began to experience some of that moral effect that his old tutor, Bartholomew had tried so hard over the preceding two years to instil in him. The benign effect of Nature, which, as Mr Wordsworth put it: "...Fostered alike, by beauty and by fear..."

And with that sudden realisation, he began to sink into a kind of timeless daydream...

Floating away. Drifting on the tide...

It was a fantastical moment, which felt, he realised, like an awakening. An awakening that he had not experienced in all that time he had been on tour.

He drifted a little more... and then a little more. It was curious, and addictive, and the more he felt of this strange and alien calm, the more he wanted to know of it. Nature. It was Nature as he had never experienced Her. And then "What?"

His foot brushed against the silt.

Time to get out, he decided, his foot sinking once more into the bay's soft sediment. Strike for shore.

But his leg was held fast. Immediately: the bitter shock of salt water poured into his open mouth and nostrils, while the grip crept inexplicably up his leg. !!Lost co-ordination!! His head went under a second time, and still his leg would not come free. Panic. A graceful arc of milky water was illumined by the moonlight as he spat brine and spluttered to the surface.

Calm, he thought. A vision of his body slowly swallowed by silt. You're a good swimmer - the best at Eton. Take a deep breath and pull, man, pull.

His gasp echoed against the shadowed walls: "Now!" A final convulsive effort. The leg rose, weighted by a heavy mass of clinging mud. Dark sediment diffused across the bay, clouding the watery moon.

Twin realisations struck him: Excellently done - but I'm far from safe yet.

The whole harbour's floor was deep with silt. In swimming back to his entry point, the ebbing tide would deliver him once more into the mud's smothering embrace. But the place where he was treading water now would also drain soon. Adrenalin started to flow and he cursed himself for letting this unforeseen complication remind him - I am mortal!

As this final thought sent a cold shock through his mind, something stirred in the water nearby. A chill voice bubbled through the dark stain obscuring the deathly white bay: "Swim for the pier, boy."

"Who the devil -?"

A head bobbed in the water at his side. Fleetingly: the impression that no torso was attached. This dispelled by a mysteriously shaped fish jumping briefly from the water: An arm.

The man spoke again "This has happened to me before, young man. There is a deeper channel which the tide has scooped around the pier. And there is a little set of wooden steps. Swim along to it, then climb up. You'll see, my lad."

Charles stared in mute surprise, his eyes goggling in the moonlight.

The other said: "Come, now," and started a slow crawl towards the rotting woodwork. After a few seconds of wordless confusion, Charles followed.

The mystery bather climbed the pier's slippery uprights with a deliberateness suggesting many long years of unhealthy under-employment.

He was obviously unused to strenuous activity. He must be deranged swimming in this trap!

When he accepted the man's hand to climb up, Charles was surprised at its cold, leathery feel. "Thank you," he said, wiping his palm of the thick silt deposited there.

They climbed in concentrated silence along the slippery pier and around the bay to the place where his fire still flamed a living challenge to the lunar light. Charles wiped himself down and sat on a blanket, dragging others around his naked body, shivering with shock. Cross-legged, he shook out the water from his hair before the fire and squinted at his saviour.

Disconcerting. Even startling. He silently registered the man's appearance in the animated flicker of the fire. His matted hair was slimy: Frond-like. His features: unattractive - the nose nearly flat - the mouth distorted. The skin: strangely dirty. Overall? Dishevelled. Filthy. Strange tatters of clothing hung from his body.

"Blanket?" Charles offered a spare, reluctantly.

"Thank you." The cold voice spoke again, like water in a leather bag.

"May I say, Sir, that I recognise something of the North of England in your voice. Yet you seem to know this place well enough. Have you been here long?"

"Yes, my boy. More than ten years now."

He fixed Charles with a glassy eye, strangely impersonal, almost unseeing as it reflected the flickering firelight. Again his movements appeared mechanical, unusually uncoordinated as he dried himself.

Shivering, Charles moved closer to the fire. A wave of nausea washed over him. The man stinks! he thought. The same smell which lay heavy in the streets of Portsmouth earlier today - or the reek one smells when one disturbs with a stick the mud in a stagnant pool.

Charles fought to control a sudden irrational fear of the swimmer.

Dismissing the instinct with a shrug, he forced himself to speak through the stench.

"Do you live around here?"

"Live?" He repeated meaninglessly. "That way."

He gestured across the harbour. Only stunted trees brooded darkly beyond the expanding mudflats. Then the arm lowered and he was still again.

He sat unmoving, like a grotesque automaton. The uneasy pause stirred Charles to try to take control once more: "I thought - it would be a sublime night to swim, but -" "Sublime." The word cut him off and was followed by a sentence that for some reason was strangely chilling: "The harbour is special to me."

Charles felt as if he was a boy again talking with his father, or one of the Old Man's stuffy associates from the provincial Philosophical and Debating Society. Forced politeness made his words sound insincere and meaningless.

"I see. It's... er... enchanting." He was not even sure at which childhood gathering he'd heard one of the old buffers use that particular word.

A strange smile played across the man's face.

"Enchanting." He mimicked. Then: "But you were nearly caught out today, as I was when I first came here. The sea lowered me towards the silt, just like you..." He leaned forward as if to confide. "You mustn't panic when you sink in it." Glassy eyes glared - as if across a great void into vast distance, or a dimly recollected past. "You mustn't panic. No, you mustn't do that. Not panic.

No! No! No!" Charles shifted awkwardly on the grass, cautioning himself: The man should be in Bethlam hospital. I have heard these lunatics can be dangerous... Nevertheless, I shall engage him awhile in conversation. Such a strange and interesting study might go well in my memoirs!

"And tell me, Sir, what brought you to this sublime spot in the first place?"

Again, the awful blank stare, the features suddenly lifeless, then movement once more. It really is like talking to an animated machine, Charles thought. One winds the spring and one can watch it talk.

The man's eyes clouded and the voice grew more distant - as if dim recollections were bubbling to the surface of his memory. When he spoke again he was hesitant: "I... am... a university Professor. Have you had the privilege of a good education?"

"Privilege?! I have just come back from the Grand Tour, Sir! Hah! But I have no intention of taking on academic studies, if that is what you are asking. I am more interested in the lessons from the University that Life has to offer!"

"The University that Life has to offer!" The Professor echoed excitedly, putting a strange emphasis on the word Life, and then trailing into profound silence. Once more the features set hideously. His expression was the fixed stare of madness. Charles was glad the fire was dying. I shall head back to the Woolpack, I think. But I want him to go before I start to gather my things. I don't trust him.

The watery voice spoke again: "My long studies have taught me many things. When I first came here, I was searching for lost treasure. This was a Roman settlement, you see, and I wondered if antiquities might have been dropped and covered in the intervening years. I was not disappointed. The silt, you see, has a preservative effect on materials thrown in." Doll-like, he gestured across the bay.

"All manner of victims from centuries gone by lie preserved in there. A farmer's horse drowned in 1697, a Scotch terrier in 1564. Year after year of personal tragedy fills the harbour. And the bodies go back in to the mists of time. This was a place the Ancient Britons thought was sacred. They initiated ceremonies that involved the ritual drowning of young people. It was supposed to bring eternal life to the land. So it goes on. There are so many people and animals who flailed hopelessly against the forces of life and death that dominate all existence."

"Forces?" asked Charles, derisively.

"Forces beyond our control. Unseen hands directing the winds and the tides; deciding the movements of fish through the sea - and how you live your life."

"No," said Charles, prickling, "I get to choose exactly what I do."

"You think you do," the Professor answered, "But what if I hadn't helped you? Without my intervention, you would surely have died."

"I would have found a way out."

"Is that so? Some would call that answer ungrateful. Some would say you owe me your life." The dark air filled with an intenser shadow which seemed to exude from the Professor like a dark halo.

"Some would say you're speaking above yourself and do not know your rank," Charles shot back.

The Professor sat motionless for a half second longer than Charles was comfortable. Finally the Professor said: "You have much to learn."

"Do I? And what would you have to teach me? There's a new spirit sweeping across Europe, you know, my fellow. We don't have to pretend we are beholden to creatures of the imagination - to Gods and Forces, as you call them. I chose to go in, and I would have found a way out. I decide what I do, and when I do it, and there's an end on't."

"Is that how it is?" The Professor laughed to himself. A shadow seemed to pass over the moon, but when Charles looked up, the star-filled sky was cloudless. He refocused his wary attention, on the Professor, whose presence made him uneasy. Dash it all, I'll get dressed and be gone from here, he decided, reaching in the half-light for his clothes.

But as he did so, a subtle movement near the man's mouth caught Charles's attention. At first he thought the Professor was licking his lips at his favourite subject, but in the deepening shadow he couldn't be sure. Perhaps the flickering embers were casting those strangely animated shapes...

Apparently oblivious to Charles's thoughts, the man continued, speaking on and on and on. It felt like it were no time as he spoke, and it felt as if it were hours. His voice continued in a subtle rhythmic tone, mentioning ever and again the preservative qualities of the silt. He mentioned the date on which a Centurion travelling with the Romano-British Fleet, the Classis Britannica, fell into the water in his leather and metal armour and couldn't be saved; how Richard the Second lost a hunting dog and had the serf who'd released it flogged by the water's edge... All manner of detail. How could he possibly make such extravagant claims of such precise knowledge? Yet, Charles had to admit, it was a fascinating subject...

The Professor lectured on. For long moments Charles felt a drowsiness sink through him, pressing on his legs and arms like a great stifling weight as if the weight of time the old man mentioned in his talk had settled on him, or the weight of the silt which had accumulated century after century a few feet from them was closing in. He fought the sensation with increasing difficulty, but still the interludes of dreamy languor increased. He seemed to be falling into a mire made from the Professor's words.

And as the man spoke, there moved across his ugly face that continuous licking movement. Peering harder, Charles had the impression that physical objects were dropping from his mouth. As if the words he spoke had taken on a solidity and fell from his lips as he uttered them. He shivered.

A trick of this flickering light. Strange how they seem to move on the ground...

In morbid absorption, Charles let the conversation drift, realising that a single theme underpinned it all, and that the speaker was gradually edging towards it. The more the Professor spoke, the more convinced he became that a reason would surface. The constant talk of history and preservation - it must lead somewhere.

Quite suddenly, the revelation came - spat from his lips in those illusory solid lumps: "...And people have often spoken of the longevity which may be induced by the healing actions of the silt, but I assure you," and here the steel-edged gaze stabbed clean through Charles's soul. "I have found far more." He nodded his wet, frond-covered head in confirmation of what he was about to say: "For I have not only found longevity, but immortality."

"Immortality?" Charles uttered it before it could be stifled.

"Yes! I see you are intrigued. There is a power of goodness in the very mud which gives eternal life. I was like you once - until I was exposed to the mud. As long as I keep it on my skin and in my body I cannot age or wither.

The process cannot be reversed - but not being able to stray too far from the harbour is a small price to pay for incorruptibility!"

Charles looked at the man's revolting form and wondered if it was worth preserving. But for some strange reason he could not voice his opinion. The Professor seemed to have bound him to his own will with his words.

"Do you want to know more?"

"...Yes!" With shocked realization, Charles realised he hadn't wanted to say that at all. Somehow The Professor's thoughts had wormed their way deep into his mind.

"You would be an eager student?"

"I would."

"But you must trust me. It is important that you trust me and do as I say."

Suddenly the Professor lowered his head and muttered abstractedly to himself: "He is a strong swimmer. And he is stubborn, even now. A rope perhaps?" He raised his ugly head in the dying light. Another shiver ran the full length of Charles's spine.

"For years I have dreamed of having a student. I have so much to share... and you will have so much to learn. You will be able to join me in my research."

"Yes!" Charles responded - his hollow tone mimicking the other's voice.

The Professor grinned triumphantly, and glanced back at the glistening mud.

"Quickly," he said. "Take my hand."

Charles couldn't refuse the same cold hand that had hauled him from the water. Immediately he touched it, the warmth drained from his body, while The Professor looked far stronger than when they had first met. With an eager grip he pulled Charles towards the silt.

"Are you ready to learn? Ready, my boy?" The Professor grinned.

"Yes, I am," Charles replied, while thinking exactly the opposite.

They were standing at the water's edge. Quickly, the Professor bent and thrust a hand deep into the silt.

"It would be better if you are secured. For your own good, you understand?"

Charles nodded involuntarily, as he watched the Professor pull a long dank rope from the fetid mud. It crawled with all manner of bristling, manylegged sea-dwellers, glistening in the moonlight.

"Then let me help you."

To his own amazement, Charles saw himself offer his wrists for the Professor to wind the dripping cord around. Then the fibre was trailed around Charles's body and knotted in some ingenious way that left him unable to resist. "Is that better?" The Professor asked intensely.

Charles eyed the rope and then the mudflats. The moon's reflection was visible in one small puddle on the silt's dark surface, and further off a gash of water oozed down a deeper channel towards the lights of Old Portsmouth away in the far distance. Thoughts crowded in his mind: An image of the serene bay earlier that night: As I dived in, the moonbeams scattered like a shoal of ghostly fish...

With sudden shock he noted movement on the stinking surface of the mud. Like the rope that bound him, it crawled with strange seacreatures. A steady, inhuman animation which reminded him of the Professor's movements. He felt a vague sense of having awakened these things from deep slumber - or that they were controlled by something far distant. - They are The Dead...

The Professor's leatherbag voice reiterated the question: "Is that better?"

Charles wanted to cry out and beg for release. He struggled against a great, immobilising weight, dragging on his limbs. But it was hopeless. In

place of the movements he desired, he was aware of his head jerking forward in a compliant nod of assent.

"Then I will show you." The Professor said, a foul grin spreading across the bloated white face, the flesh blotched in shadowy patches.

He stepped ahead of Charles, sinking in the silt, and tugged gently on the rope. Puppet-like, Charles edged towards the grasping silt, until he stood at the very point from where he had earlier dived. Stinking mud. The bay was steeped in blackness. The stars above were gone. The sky reflected the dark hue of the deadly silt before him. He gasped, trembled and stepped forward again.

Mud oozed between his toes.

No! I don't want this! It can't be happening!

Unable to resist his saviour's tug, Charles took another step forward, watched by the Professor's white face on a background of glistening blackness. The cold light in his eyes! A silence. Half rotten creatures watched from the mud as his foot brushed silt: Stench! Death! The tarry surface heaved a soft sigh at the foot's impact. A ripple moved through the assembled beasts. Somewhere a dog wailed, as if calling from a distant time.

"My friends," the Professor delivered an incongruous speech to the deathly night, "I should like you to meet the student we have so long wanted."

A murmur animated the assembled dead. A jerk on the rope and the fetid mire absorbed Charles up to his knees.

"He is a proud and ungrateful creature, but that will change as he becomes one of us. As he sinks himself into his new studies, there will be much for him to learn. Many names and faces for him to keep close to his heart..." He turned to Charles with a threatening glare. "In a few years we shall examine him. To see how deep he goes." Another tug. The black coldness swallowed Charles further. Before him, the Professor's lower half had already disappeared beneath the silt; and around him the dead pressed closer in the squirming mud. The surrounding beast-corpses grew louder and more excited. A welcoming party!

Panting watery breath, a cadaverous Scotch terrier licked Charles's face with a wormy tongue. Strangely misshapen seabeasts approached - crabs on spindly legs somehow fallen under the spell of whatever controlled the harbour.

The mud crept up to his chest. Fear: a rising panic a hundred times stronger than the one that had shocked him when his foot first brushed the silt. Through terrified eyes he saw the Professor's head, eerily decapitated by the sludge. Grinning, enticing, drawing the hapless Charles further into the pool. Then Charles made a desperate struggle in the closing mud, and the Professor let go of the rope that bound him. It loosened around him as the knot undid of its own accord. Charles felt his will come flooding back as he took control of his body once more.

"Help! Help! Please! Somebody please help me!"

At last! Some control again.

Charles started to thrash as he screamed and shouted to the darkened night around him. The air was only distinguishable from the mud in that it gave a minimally slighter resistance to his struggles...

The thrashing served only to draw him deeper, whilst his screams went unanswered. Charles's head became a solitary island. "Swallow," the Professor said before he sank out of sight. "Swallow and be like me. You will

be linked with the harbour, though you may fight it now. Let its agents cure your mortality..."

"Help! Help!"

He could feel the weight of the dead writhing against him. The same terrible weight he had felt when he had earlier pulled his leg free of the silt.

Subterranean creatures swarming in a silty underworld. Dragging. Dragging me down, towards...

"Hel-" Splutter. A guttural sound replacing his voice. A trail of wriggling mud dripping from his mouth as he spat black droplets into the black night before the mud gagged him. His nose stayed briefly unblocked before it, too, was sealed by the silt...

From the bank near the tent, a lantern flashed.

"In the name of Jesus Christ - what is going on?"

Charles could see an old man's dim outline on the shore. With his rope now loose, Charles raised his hands for help. He heard a voice cry: "Charles, I'll throw a line. I'll throw a line!"

Then Charles's head slipped under the mud. * Silence. Oh God! Oh God! Stifling cold mud. I'm going to die! Oh please, if you really were the man I thought you were, then save me. Oh God! I'm going deeper, I can feel myself sliding down. Can't hold it - can't hold my breath. Ahh! Must breathe - don't breathe - must breathe - no - don't breathe.

Oh.... Mouth open. Wriggling mud. Flooding in - flooding in - crawling in inside - ! * ...a long corridor of darkness...nothing real at all... * Charles was not sure how long this terrible dream went on for. But finally he woke from it to see filtered daylight flooding in through the gatehouse window.

Alive! He basked in warm relief that the night's evils had run from the morning sun. Outside, a light wind ruffled the trees. The gentle lap of the harbour water came delicately to his ears.

The wind stirred the branches again. Last night..? Was it real? "But no!"

Charles sighed, "it can't have happened."

Beyond the gatehouse's safe confines he heard the clink of a pan shifted by an unknown hand. Who -? As he sat up in alarm, dried mud pinched his skin. What? He felt a flush of disorientation run through him.

With a grimy hand he opened the gatehouse door. His heart pounded What to expect-? Emerging into stabbing sunlight he shielded his dazzled sight with a dirty, raised arm.

"Do you want some breakfast?" Kindly blue eyes assessed him from a lined and bearded face.

"Bartholomew..! How did you find me?"

Bartholomew looked at him long and hard, with two emotions warring inside of him.

"You are the most irritating, troublesome young man ever a guardian had the misfortune of trying to herd," said Bartholomew, with a grimace. "And if you hadn't had such a shock last night, I would break the rule of a life time and thrash you with a horsewhip!" He saw the look of shame on Charles's

face and his customary benevolence of spirit won out. There would be plenty of time to chastise him later, after all.

"Word came to the Fountain Hotel that a young man of your description had sought lodgings at the Woolpack, here in Portchester. That horse you took belongs to Squire Thistlethwayte, who owns this estate and is currently in Portsmouth on business. The stableboy Tom recognised it straight off, and sent word to the hotel. I set out from Portsmouth as soon as word arrived and just in the nick of time, I would guess. Whatever got into you last night?

Did you lose hold of your reason?" he asked. "I believed for a moment I had lost you in that mud for good."

He gestured the bay with a sweep of his raised arm. An involuntary shudder prickled Charles's back at the sight of the familiar movement. "You were caught in the silt. It was a close thing."

The old Quaker tipped bacon from the pan on to a plate. "You were raving last night, and I didn't want to move you, till you had regained your wits. I got you into the gatehouse, and sat by you the whole night. You were muttering and crying out, in the throes of delirium. Only this morning when a shepherdboy came by did I send for some food and cooking gear from the village. I was afraid to wake you lest I distress you further." He eyed the young man as if he were a massive burden on his soul, and then said kindly: "I wiped off the worst of the mud, but you really need to get the rest off you.

What a picture you are! But here, let's get you fed first. - How's this?"

Charles took the proffered plate with a mechanical movement. A wave of nausea filled him. He dropped the plate and buried his head in his hands.

"I feel sick."

"I've sent for a physician. I wouldn't be surprised if you had a brain fever, the way you've been acting these last few months! It's like the Devil himself has got into you - and I don't speak lightly of such matters," he added, gravely, before a look of concern creased his brow. "Last night... You were shouting many fantastical things about a night-time swimmer. This can't be right. There's been no sign of another living soul the whole night."

"You saw no one?" Charles gazed apprehensively across the water.

"Not a living soul..." Bartholomew suddenly grew serious, as a shadow seemed to cross his face. "It is strange, though. When I said I was coming down to the water's edge in the night, the Landlord told me that his stableboy Tom is convinced there's a bewitchment upon it - that there are unaccountable things that go on here. And others fancy they see and hear the strangest things. Did no-one tell you this?"

Charles shook his head, with his eyes cast down.

"I suppose No-one thought he owed me," Charles said, avoiding Bartholomew's gaze out of a newly discovered sense of shame. Then he looked up with an intense expression.

"So, I got caught in the mud? Nothing else happened?"

"Except that I hauled you out again."

"Oh, thank you. Thank you, Bartholomew!"

"You know, all these years of worry and anguish about your wayward nature are almost worth those few words," the old man said, earnestly, and then looked closely at Charles. "But, Charles, pray, tell me, what else do you think might have happened here?" He asked the question, with a deep expression of concern on his face. The truth was, he sensed something malefic here. It made him deeply uneasy and he had spent the night reciting

prayers and reading from his pocket bible by lantern light. His eyes were tired because of it.

"This place is very strange," Charles said, abstractedly.

Bartholomew eyed Charles thoughtfully and then looked at something in the grass nearby. The wave of nausea wriggled again in Charles's guts.

"You're right - this place is strange," he agreed. "I was speaking briefly with an old soldier who took an interest when he heard that you had come this way. He was an uncommon sort of man - outlandish you might call him...

He told me that local superstitions go back a long way. Some say the harbour here houses a malign spirit - others - that it is less malign and more capricious..." He paused as he noticed the worry in Charles's eyes. "Of course, it's all the muddled thinking of folklore."

"I am sure it is."

"But occasionally things coincide with the legends and start the locals talking again. The soldier told me that thirteen years ago a man went swimming here. He never came out." "...Never?"

"No. He said he was a History Professor from Oxford, with an interest in preserved artefacts. You were lucky. Very lucky."

Charles's blood ran cold and he stood up and staggered to the water's edge. The sea was high - the flat inscrutable surface a deep blue iris. With a defiant breath, he knelt and plunged his arm in the water. As he watched the lumps of silt disintegrate in the water's obscure profundity, a sudden image of a cold hand reaching out to his own flashed through his mind...

He jerked his arm out. The flesh was puffed and white, like that of a corpse washed up on the strand. Rocked by dizziness, he staggered to his saviour's side. His clean skin burned in the light.

"Get me to a physician!" His voice quaked with fear.

"Have you picked something up from the water?"

"Maybe."

"I'll get the horses. They're down the way." As his saviour stood, he looked again at the patch of grass by his feet. Turning to go he said, half to himself: "That pile of sea worms... So many. They must have been dragged up, somehow." Shrugging, he disappeared along a narrow track by the side of the Castle wall.

Charles looked at the spot on the ground. Could these rotten creatures really be the objects that had writhed and fallen from the Professor's mouth?

Surely, it was impossible?

Yes. It was impossible. He was thinking crazy thoughts. Even as he told himself this, the pile of sea worms started to break down before his eyes - as if the sunlight and fresh air had accelerated their decomposition.

This is utterly nonsensical... Charles told himself.

A tide of nausea rose through him and he vomited. More patches of white flesh, exposed by the flaking mud, burned in the light. He straightened and blinked at the hated sun. He seemed to shrink under its light.

Shaking his burning head, he looked with renewed horror at his own small puddle of vomit in the grass, writhing with No! - those worms..!

An image rose before his eyes of the moonlight swimmer. His words rang in Charles's ears:

Swallow and be like me. Link your fate with that of the silt. Let its agents cure you of your mortal condition...

The burning sensation intensified on his skin until it became unbearable.

Instinctively, he dipped his feet in the water. The silt beneath the surface slipped over his legs - Ah! Such a relief to feel that healing touch, he thought.

Perhaps I should entirely cover myself in it. I just have to slip a little deeper...

The sound of the horses approaching along the narrow track awakened Charles to the stupidity of his actions: I must be insane - risking the grip of this mud again! As he made this realisation, a movement in the water arrested his attention. A ghastly shape bubbled up from below: "You cannot leave." The Professor's face briefly poked above the surface.

"You are my student."

"No!" Charles shied away in fear. "I'm... going back to my father! From now on, he will be the only one who tells me what to do."

An inhuman laugh rose from the dark depths as Charles made a move to climb free of the water. But his bare skin was stinging so much and as soon as he went to move back, he felt that he was burning all over with a terrible fire. After a few paralysing seconds, Charles began to reconsider: Wait! I mean, I could go in. Just for a while. A period of study, it might do me good... Ahh! His body was again racked with pain. I could just slip in a little more - to see what I can learn...

The sound of the horses' hooves came nearer and a shout reached his ears as Bartholomew caught sight of him: "Charles! Are you mad? You'll drown. Quickly, take my hand..."

Bartholomew grabbed hold of Charles's arm and began to pull him back to the shore. With a shock Charles felt himself being tugged back into the burning sunlight.

"Professor!"

The moonlight swimmer reappeared beneath the water. His white bloated face mouthing reassuring words: "Take my hand. It's all right. Take my hand."

Desperately, Charles reached towards it, while Bartholomew froze with supernatural horror at the ghoul beneath the water. The old Quaker felt his grip failing as this hellish creature came closer to taking charge of Charles's body, but he fought on against his fear.

"In the name of Jesus Christ...!"

It was not just the Professor who had come to pull Charles back in to the sea. Bartholomew became aware that the water was crawling with a great mass of distorted harbour-dwellers rallying to claim the young man's body and soul...

Charles felt the power coming from those strange creatures who had risked the burning heat of the daylight to free him from his guardian's hold, and felt an immense sense of gratitude. With renewed strength he fought to free himself from the bearded man's grip.

If I can just reach the Professor's hand... He stretched again, struggling against his guardian's determined tug. Gradually, he inched closer. And then, finally "Yes!" He screamed in delight. He felt the Professor's solid grip begin to pull him beneath the enchanting waters and the sucking silt. As Bartholomew suddenly relinquished his hold, a final triumphant thought flashed through Charles's mind: Freed at last! How sublime!

### * A Personal Message From The Author Thank you for reading this book about my home town of Portsmouth. I hope you liked reading it as much as I liked exploring the streets of Britain's only Island City and letting my imagination roam. * And of course, if you liked it, please recommend it to others! Below you will also find extracts from my other books available online, all based in this little island home. * I have written other stories based in Portsmouth, and am intending more for the future.

Please look out for the following titles, which are currently available: Turn The Tides Gently (extract below) Heaven's Light Our Guide (extract below) The Three Belles Star In We'll Meet Again (extract below) Heaven's Light Our Guide (extract below) The Tube Healer (extract below) * Connect With Me Online Twitter: TurnTheTidesGen Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/matt.wingett My blog, Life Is Amazing: http://www.lifeisamazing.co.uk/ * A Final Thank You Finally, I'd like to say thankyou to Paul McKenna. Yes, the hypnotist and personal development expert. In April 2008 I was attending a training course in Neuro-Linguistic Programming with him. At the time I was suffering a loss of belief in my writing ability that was so pronounced that I just couldn't write any more.

Paul demonstrated a hypnotic technique on me, and it unlocked my writing after years of stagnation. The first things I wrote after this were admittedly enthusiastic but crude - but Paul certainly did something to me that I have worked on ever since.

So, Paul, thanks for that. You gave me the ability to get back in touch with my creativity, and for that I am grateful.

You can find out more about learning the skills of NLP at http://www.nlplifetraining.com/ * Book Extract: The Opening to Turn The Tides Gently At first the hallucinations come to him in silence, as they always do.

Carriages from a different era moving beneath starlight, then the sound of wheels clattering along the cobbles, and finally the pungent smell of horses, their dung on the floor, the acrid reek of piss - a rich, rancid perfume, overloading the senses.

It's as if he's looking through the surface of a soap bubble: figures walking the nightbound streets – uniforms of old soldiers not old any more, the police officer on the corner in a cape and high helmet. From across the Common, where the Royal Marines sleep in rows of tents before

embarkation, a long-dead trumpet call from the older city briefly drowning the newly-wakened birds of the present.

Through the Pompey night, he heads along the island's streets to the shore. The spring sky is mottled with occasional clouds, and in the cold air he smells the smoke of a coal fire lit by a maid to warm a copper in a scullery.

He even imagines he can hear the sleepy voices of her children, waking to a lightless pre-dawn.

As he steps onto the shingle beach, all shimmered upon and sparkling in the moonlight, a deep silence breaks out, as if an unseen attendant has closed a door behind him. The stillness holds for a few seconds, until he hears the sea again, and confirms the presence of the modern world: shimmering across the Solent, a ferry with its stacked decks lit up and looking like a wedding cake, all sparkling and iced.

I have visions, he says to himself. They always seem so real – realer than the world I really live in. He looks down at his hands, as if they might help him grasp things more tightly. Doctor Cassell tells me to ignore them.

But I always know I'll get another one.

Sure enough, a new vision comes. But what he is seeing now is not like any previous hallucination. This is not a phantasm of buckets and spades – look daddy, see how the water splashes on the castle – not little constructions of remembrance that come from peering over the edge of the spiral of time, or half-memories drawn from tv costume dramas. This is different. He squints across the sea towards A woman. There's a woman in the sea! - with lank, long wet hair – there, in the moonlight!

Her breasts catch moonbeams and shimmer in the light – and then she is gone, vanished beneath the moon's silver path.

He glares an accusation at his trembling hands, bites his lower lip and shakes his head. Then he rubs his eyes and looks again, just to be sure.

Nothing there, of course. Nothing. Except for an ever-widening circle spreading outwards, reaching towards him. He holds his breath and rubs his eyes once more. No. I imagined it.

The night's sounds intensify, and the moon's light brightens. Something's not right, he thinks. With minute accuracy, he can hear the gentle lapping of the waves on the shore, a restless sound, as if every bubble is speaking its own secret: Shush. Shush. Something hidden. She-ush.

A wavering glance across the sea is enough to satisfy him it's empty.

Just water, he tells himself, only half-believing. But as he considers the longdiagnosed madness that conjured that image, she surfaces again.

Her head is up now, out of the water, her mouth in the soft ecstasy of what he thinks a woman drowning must look like: her arms raised out of the water seemingly helpless. He sees her like this for a second or so, frozen in time. Then down she goes again.

He is riveted to the spot in disbelief. After maybe two minutes under the water she surfaces a third time. It's impossible! But no, perhaps not. A scenario flashes before his mind's eye. A clubber, maybe, a little high on drugs; she took a playful dive in the water, and here she is – drowning in front of my eyes! She's real!

He shouts – breaking across the night's sounds with a voice sounding strangely thin and flat over the sea, as if he is shouting in a padded room.

“It's okay. Don't worry! I'll help...”

He doubles backwards and forwards in helpless panic at the Solent's edge looking about him with big wide eyes, not sure what to do next. In response she suddenly stops, stock still in the water and fixes him with a curious gaze. Her movements are reminiscent of how a woman looks if a stranger walks into her boudoir and interrupts her while combing her hair. For a moment, their eyes meet, and then, as she realises the situation, she suddenly throws her arms up and, with an almost ironic gesture, disappears beneath the surface, gasping and spluttering, the brine closing over her head.

He steps into the water, but the cold shock sinking through his trainers makes his neck hairs stand in reflex, and he remembers he cannot swim. It also shocks him back to reason. She surfaces again, spitting a spluttering arc of brine and he turns tail and scuffs up the beach to where the life-ring stands in a plastic box by the ice-cream kiosk. Drowning. I can't have her drowning.

He lifts it quickly and champ-champ-champs down the shingle to the shoreline, where, with a mighty throw he hurls it to her.

It's a bad throw: over-eager, and panicky, and he curses as it appears to collide with her, so that, suddenly disoriented, her body flattens on the water.

Dazed, she grips the ring, and in this way he pulls her in – netting a helpless woman from the sea, her shining skin pale in the moonlight.

When he draws her closer still, he wades in to land her.

“It's okay. It's okay,” he says, reaching down to her icy body, only half able to see her through the darkness and the mesmeric moonlight, but nevertheless feeling a supernatural sense that something is not quite right.

He hooks her under her arms and pulls her up from the water. Now she really starts to struggle. A violent crazy thrashing in the water, that makes him gasp at her power.

“Don't panic, I've got you,” he says - but no he really hasn't. She is as slippery as a fish, and utterly set on drowning. They lock into a battle of wills, and her thrashing in the water scatters the moonlight like spilled jewels, while the dark sea noises all around them are filled by the sounds of other voices calling in the night. A strange language hisses and gurgles around him, and he looks away from her to see the heads of others in the water, shouting to her and glaring at him.

He stops a moment, absolutely frozen, lost in surprise and utter confusion at these unexpected apparitions. She seizes her moment - slipping from his arms, and splashing back into the sea. And he is sure, utterly convinced, that as she goes, he sees something - something he cannot quite explain that will haunt him in his dreams. For as she dives into the deeper water, the crossed fins of a tail rise high into the air behind her.

He stands, staring at the scatter of widening circles where all the heads that were glaring at him disappeared, and at the spot where she thrashed and foamed. Then he sits down, soaking, suddenly cold and afraid, and not sure what to do next. * You can download the rest of Turn The Tides Gently by Matt Wingett from Amazon. http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B006L4C9CG/ * Book Extract The Opening to: The Three Belles Star In "We'll Meet Again."

* 1. The Lost Sailor The more I look, the more exciting it gets! Bright, smiling blonde-haired Anneka surveys the audience for a few seconds more, then inhales a short, sharp breath and fires a grin at Sally. "This, I would say, is a success!"

The redhead beside her gives an excited jump for joy, her shining curls bouncing as she lands, her right hand clenched in front of her, a little fist of triumph.

"Oh, yes! I should say so!"

Their eyes drink the room. Sailors, soldiers and airmen mingle with WAAF officers, Wrens and ATS girls - and it's not only Forces attending tonight. Civvies in white cotton shirts, tweeds and flat caps, pin-stripes and trilbies add to the crush, as does a sizeable contingent of young women in flowerprint dresses.

On a table, the Daily Mail speaks of Russian vanguards closing on Odessa and of German retreats. The War-tide is turning. There's hope in the air. And the vocal trio called The Three Belles is making its Pompey debut in the Guildhall bar. What a night to be alive!

Dark, glinting eyes framed with sleek brown hair approach through the crowd.

"Isn't it spiffing?" Izzie, the third Belle, tottering on tiptoes, her head back and her chin up, calls over the crush. "I never expected so many!"

"Tip-top," Sally shouts back.

A Home Guard drawn from Reserved Occupation in the dockyard sidles between Anneka and Sally, puts affectionate arms round their shoulders and says "Ready girls?" while an able seaman with a cheeky face chips in: "Your voices ain't gonna break my beer glass are they, ladies?"

Anneka flicks a raised eyebrow and gives an ironic smile. "It's all for the War Effort, you know." Then, hearing her chirruping mobile, she shrugs off the soldier and fishes in her handbag. The screen lights her face, her golden hair flaming ghostly white.

A text reads: :-( Soz cant make it! :-) Gd luk 2nite xxx She thumbs a hasty reply - a smiley and a X. A few minutes to go, she thinks. All this planning and prep. 40s night.

Props... music... costume. And to think we're being marked on this. Degree in historical harmonies. Notes of distinction, maybe? It's fun and an education.

'S life, really!

Now they're ready. The two ersatz heroes of the amateur dramatics society drift off to mingle with the audience when the Belles break from the banter and nod to each other excitedly. It's time. Time to step into their 1940s stage personas: blonde Anneka becomes the flirtatious Betty, brunette Isabelle becomes kind-hearted Dorothy and red-headed Sally becomes the mischievous Gail. Fictional forties characters, they've scripted and worked up as part of their degree course. Their lecturers are seated in prime positions on the front row to mark the performance.

Bof-bof-bof. A slick young fellow taps a retro mic and announces:

"Ladies and Gentlemen, what you've all been waiting for. Please give a warm hand for... The Three Belles!"

The band strikes up - the audience cheers - and the classic 16 bar leadin to Chattanooga Choo Choo fills the air with cupped wah-wah and carefree joy. Then The Three Belles' tight vocals wake an era gone by: a time of filmic poses, of tragedies and victories, of love and loss. Music flutters in the air, a dove of peace waiting to settle on the shoulders of the audience unconsciously leaning in - spellbound - misty-eyed romance.

The show's first half is a dream of tugged emotions. The seamless harmonies of the Belles: redhead, blonde, brunette, blending their old songs with appearances by guest singers and a comedian. A stranger, happening upon that crush of uniforms, those smiling women behind their mics, the military men with peaked caps pushed back, gals teasing, flirting, giggling, might think that maybe, just maybe, time has stepped backwards and snubbed the modern day. Magic fills the air.

The Belles conjure a Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy Of Company B, and In The Mood, concoctions infused with equal measures of joy and sadness.

Nostalgia like a sweet bitter drug. Then, as the audience's tears are pricked by the fake poignancy of blue birds over the white cliffs of Dover, an air raid siren wails through the room like a mourning ghost, and serious-looking men appear, announcing: "Keep calm, and follow us please, ladies and gentlemen. Do not run."

They shepherd the audience to the "safety" of a smaller room where, lights out, a khaki-clad member of the am-dram cast strikes up an impromptu song by torchlight. Knees Up Mother Brown, Don't Fence Me In and Lambeth Walk - old songs that maybe once rang through the original Guildhall, before the incendiary hit it those years ago.

Grateful for the break The Three Belles review the show and snatch a team-talk. Afterwards, Sally, laughing as ever, straightens up her red hair and reapplies some lippy, while dark-haired Izzie double-checks the set list.

Anneka, turning to chat with the band's cornetist, is suddenly captivated by the sight of something - or more accurately, someone - on the far side of the room.

A melancholy figure gazes out through a window at the square below with a kind of mute incomprehension. A sailor wearing the thick duffel coat and heavy sea boots of the Royal Navy, his tally cap reading only "HMS" to throw off the Enemy. He is young, in his twenties - striking - and blonde Anneka-Betty can't resist stepping over for a chat.

"Hello," she says breezily, approaching with a broad smile. "Are you all right?"

He turns to her as if in a dream. His young eyes have crow's feet around them, she notices, his face a look - what is that he's playing? Worried?

Haunted? Quite an expression!

"Oh, yes, Miss, right as rain," he says without much force of conviction.

"But you see, the thing is, I am trying to remember why I'm here..."

"Why you're here?" Betty-who-is-Anneka repeats, and gestures his getup with an ironic wave of her arm. "Well it looks like you're in the right place! I have to say, you've gone to quite an effort!"

His eyes take her in for a moment, then he looks from her down at his uniform. A momentary struggle, hunting for words. "Really Miss, it's all a blank. A kind of darkness." He pinches his chin between his thumb and the

crook of his index finger and goes quiet for a few seconds. "But if I remember rightly, I came here to see someone... yes... " he smiles suddenly, as he makes a realisation. "I've brought a surprise. A surprise for my gal."

"Well, that's marvellous," Anneka-Betty replies with a grin, glad the actor has found his way back into character again. Like a blind man stepping in through his front door, she thinks, home at last.

"My you've got a lovely smile," he says. "Cheers me right up, looking at you does. Makes me think Al Bowlly's right: Tomorrow is a lovely day. And you know, I think it will be. 'Specially after the surprise."

"What surprise?"

"I've got to give something special to my Betty... that's right. For Betty."

Anneka likes this. Character play; shifting identities. Actors have the chance to be whoever they want. She's intrigued and decides to help him along, like helping him into a new coat.

"Betty? That's me!" she laughs and sees his eyes settle on her with sudden intensity.

"It's you?" he asks, surprised. "Is it? Is it really you?"

"Of course it is," Anneka nearly laughs. Shellshocked she thinks. That's his character. What do they call it these days? Battle fatigue... PTSD. Something descends on her, suddenly, like a physical blow, and her legs bend a little. An invisible weight she has to step back and support. She feels different, as if it's not only him who has stepped into that new coat, but she too has stepped into a new way of thinking. It's like she's been cut down the middle and there are two of her now, fighting for control of her body. Two realities, one person. She is inside the skin of another person, and has the bizarre impression of looking out at the world through a different set of eyes.

She flickers between the two: for a few seconds she is modern Anneka, and then she is this other woman called Betty. A double act all in one. Her head spins, and she speaks her next words as if from a distance.

"So, sailor, where you headed?"

"That's censored Betts," he says, tapping his nose twice with his index finger and tipping his head forward and sideways. "Walls have ears, after all."

Oh, very good. Anneka thinks. A little side-step to wriggle out of the details.

He moves closer, eyeing her more intensely. Still haunted.

"My, it's been a tough old time, hasn't it?" he asks. His words are troubled, but there is something likeable - vulnerable - in the way he says them. Somehow the Betty part of her two-woman show is touched by his warmth, by his humanity. A flutter rises in her chest in response to his words.

He is a half-remembered name, nearly recalled. Words of love, have I heard them before? Should I have? She is giddy with excitement, a flush in her cheeks, the hot excitement of meeting him, his familiar body, strong, known, she is under his influence, his spell. He goes on: "I don't know how we cope, sometimes. Pompey, dear old Pompey's going to take more hits before this is over." He looks inwards briefly in quiet thought. A change of mood. Eyes seeking approval. Confiding. "You know, I heard that sireen, and I reckoned I'd find you here, Betts..."

"Sireen?" she repeats. "Oh, siren, yes, got you."

"Yeh. I knew I'd find you here at A.R.C. We've got to stick to it, Betts.

We're dedicated, you and me. 'S why I like you."

Modern Anneka surfaces and considers him a little longer. This is good she thinks. After that false start, he's really in character. But the thought is no sooner internalised than the other woman fights her way to the surface and both Anneka and Betts seem to speak as one as she adopts a fake upperclass voice and says: "Like me? But really sir, we've only just met! What's your name, sailor?"

"Oh you are a one, Betts!" he says with a smile. "You know Freddie Budden's your sweetheart, Betts. Always will be." He steps closer in, confiding something really meaningful, his eyes shining with his love for her.

"I goes away tomorrow - and you'll still be here at A.R.C fire-watching. Well, Betts, let's see how good a fire-watcher you are. ...Look at my heart. It's burning for you!"

"A fire-whatter?" Anneka asks, the unfamiliar word jarring her back to the modern day for a moment. Despite his oddness, she thinks, there is something about him... But through her other set of eyes, she is falling under a spell. Warmth and sadness all at once. Is he really going away? Can it be true? She wants to hold him, and laugh and cry, and block out the whole world and this stupid war, so it's just her and him, together. Then the modern woman fights her way to the surface again, like she is drowning, flailing between realities, and she looks at him with eyes of wonder. He is brilliant at this! He makes me really believe I'm a different person. Who is he? She wracks her brains. Local Amateur Dramatics? Maybe a professional? Right down to the scuff marks on his seaboots, and that Navy duffel coat that smells of fires, and war and the sea, he is so authentic the modern voice breaks through before dying away in the static of her mind, and the spirit wireless retunes.

He says: "I've got something special for you, Betts. What we talked about."

Betty gives him a flirtatious smile. She can feel her sadness mingle with expectation, a bitter-sweet principle in the blood, like dark chocolate and strawberries, like love and loss. "So... what exactly have you got for me, sailor?" She stands close to him with shining eyes.

"This, Betts," he says, pulling out a red leatherette-covered ring case, in an oval shape. "Like I promised you." A snap reveals a little silver ring crusted with sparkling stones. His face grows serious. Without a pause he goes down on one knee.

"Betty, I would be truly the happiest man in the world if you would accept my hand in marriage. Marry me Betts. Before I goes away to sea, let's get engaged!"

Delicious! - modern Anneka giggles with her Twenty-First Century girl's sense of irony. It's the laugh of a drowning woman, and then she thinks with a thought she does not recognise as her own. He's perfect! I love him!

Fluttering her eyes to the ceiling she answers: "Of course I will, Freddie!" She starts to giggle like a little girl as he really - yes - he really does - slide the ring on to her finger, handing her the jewel case to free both his hands and push it home. Her heart is all haywire, a UXB waiting to go off.

"Oh, thank you Betty!" he shouts with joy as the all clear wails around them, like relief exhaled. "You've made me so very happy!"

He stands, takes her in his arms and pushes his face towards hers, the rough feel of his woollen greatcoat beneath her hands, the smell of dust and

grime and smoke hitting her nose. She leans towards him too, then suddenly, with a shock of realisation Anneka surfaces fully from her dream. Woah! This guy is seriously overstepping the mark.

"Hang on a minute..." she pushes back against the wool, the cold press of a metal button on her hand.

A questioning look of incomprehension, mouth agape. He's about to speak when "We're back on!" an excited voice calls from behind her, over the sound of the all clear. "Come on Anneka!" Izzie-who-is-Dorothy is standing a little way off, and Anneka steps away quickly from the sailor. She straightens her dress, eyes him with confusion of her own, then looks disbelief at the ring on her hand.

"We'll talk about this later," she says severely, trying to work the ring off.

"What do you think you're playing at!? ...Oh damn it this thing won't come off." He is about to come back at her, but he's thrown by her assertiveness.

"Later," she says, holding her hand up to silence him. "I'll speak with you later."

She turns and strides back towards Dorothy-Izzie, unconsciously dropping the ring case in her handbag as she goes, not aware of the look of confusion on Izzie's face. To her, it seems that where Anneka was standing by the window on that summer evening, a shadow has gathered around the figure of a man. It is strange, but she allows it to pass under her conscious radar, in the way the half-noticed weirdnesses of the world go by unremarked. All she registers is a fleeting sense of menace which she rejects in favour of her brighter version of the world.

"What was that about?" she asks, seeing Anneka's discomfort.

"Search me. Some prat getting carried away with his roleplay. Come on, I'll tell you later."

The Belles reunite as the hubbub of excited audience members spills out from the "shelter" and the audience members find their seats for the second half. The girls resume with Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree and all is right again. "Betty", "Dorothy" and "Gail" are in the flow of live performance - the heightened reality of the now - when there is no future and no past but everything gathers together into a single flowing eternity.

Yet as she sings, Betty occasionally remembers her strange sailor. She looks for him but cannot see him, and during the instrumentals she tries to work the ring off, turning from the audience to tug and twist it, until redhaired Sally-Gail steps over to her, leaning close. "What's going on Annee-Belle?"

"This bloody ring," Anneka replies speaking to one side, her head down.

"Some joker put it on, and I can't get it off. I'm meant to be getting engaged before the next number."

She raises her hand. Sally looks surprised at the silver band with its tiny stones glittering in the light. "'That is rather posh," she says. Then, meeting Anneka's desperate look she adds: "Other hand." Decisive. Always decisive.

"What?"

"Use your other hand. It's a minor detail. No-one will notice. We'll get it off later."

Even as she is talking, Betty's stage sweetheart is tapping the lozenge mic in mock embarrassment.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to do something a little bit irregular, now. I want to interrupt this show to make an announcement."

He straightens and eyes the audience. Get this right. Character has a certain posture. Pause for effect. Sense of seriousness. Embarrassment, too.

Vulnerable.

"You might well know that I've known Betty for some time now. I like to think that in the blackout, Betty and me, well, we've made a bit of light shine.

She's a lovely girl. A beautiful girl..." Pause. " And I... well, Betty, there's something I'd like to say."

He pulls Anneka from the crowd towards him. She smiles as he takes a ring case from his pocket.

"Betty, I love you. And if we can keep Gerry away long enough, I'd love to make you mine."

He kneels and looks adoringly into her eyes.

"Betty, will you marry me?"

Anneka-Betty looks around the room with a smile. The icing on the cake!

A lovely touch to play to the sentimental streak in the crowd. She sees the faces of her friends, and the fans of The Three Belles, feels the charm the sentiment is weaving on the audience. Everyone knows it's a game, but even so, it's pulling them in. She holds out her right hand and laughing says: "Yes! Yes Kenneth, of course!"

A spontaneous cheer breaks out as he slips the ring home. Then he takes her in his arms, and they kiss. More rapturous applause.

In the middle of that stage kiss, Anneka-Betty opens her eyes and catches sight of that strange young sailor from earlier. He is scowling, a look of white rage in his eyes. She feels the hairs on her neck stand up, a shudder run down her spine. Her heart grows cold for a second. But then the crowd moves, and where his face was there are just the smiling faces of friends and well-wishers.

Anneka stands in the middle of the room in that stage embrace, wondering who the hell that weirdo was. * You can download the rest of Turn The Tides Gently by Matt Wingett from Amazon. http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B006L4C9CG/ * Book Extract: Heaven's Light Our Guide 1. An Unexpected Appointment The moment Miss Tolstoy saw the note on her desk, she felt a pang of unexplained foreboding.

It read: Dear Miss Tolstoy, An appointment has been made for you to be Audited on 16th October at 5pm. Please attend at room 345.

Thank you, M Hopkins Co-ordinator, Audits.

She froze for a moment as she stood over her desk, and then doublechecked the date.

"But that's this afternoon!" she muttered to herself, pursing her lips and glaring at the paper pointedly, as if she hoped it would take the hint and go and bother someone else.

The Guildhall Clock across the square from the Civic Offices struck the hour. She looked up, her shoulders and stomach muscles tensing defensively. 9am. Only 8 hours to go!

"What am I being audited for?" she spoke loudly to the open-plan office.

But no-one answered.

Discomfort surged through her body and she looked around her workplace for reassurance, mentally cataloguing its familiar blue dividing screens, its rows of reliable filing cabinets, the stalwart heavy-duty office carpet. Then, in a moment of paranoia, she wondered if the letter's signatory was in the room, watching her. She whipped her head around quickly to see if anyone ducked behind a filing cabinet, or whether hostile eyes were assessing her, even now, from behind a pot plant.

But no. Everyone was acting quite normally. A couple of colleagues were drinking tea and chatting in the kitchen area. Another, at the workstation opposite, was plugged into her iPod while diligently reading emails. It was all as it always had been.

She sighed, dropped her shoulders, seated herself thoughtfully and checked her emails. Three from the Ministry of Happiness reminding me to smile more, she thought. She stared at them absently for a moment, her chin resting on the palm of her hand, her elbow on the table. Then she snorted through her nose in derision, lifted a little pink book from her desk drawer and stared at it with passive aggression.

The Happy Diary had been supplied by the Ministry of Happiness for her to record how many times she thought pleasant thoughts in the day. All her colleagues had one. The little book had arrived on the day that central government had announced they would be sending a team of Auditors to councils around the UK. It was something of a shock to discover that Auditors were, right now, in the building.

Auditors... A Happy Diary...

Miss Tolstoy thought it a strange thing to do: to use one arm of the Executive to threaten you with the axe, while the other did its best to tickle you in the ribs.

Although it was the time of the morning when she was supposed to fill it in, she replaced it in her drawer with a kind of half-throw, and instead buried herself in her work for the Department of Parking Regulation: assessing the island's roads for either the application or removal of double yellow lines.

Her morning was punctuated by bouts of deep unease. By lunchtime, she had worked herself into a near-frenzy of worry about the appointment that afternoon. When she bumped into her departmental boss, Mick Solomon in the lift, she took their moment alone to blurt out: "Solly, I'm being Audited this afternoon..."

"Oh, yes?" he answered distractedly, not raising his tired eyes from a premeeting briefing document. "Are you?"

"You mean you didn't know?"

He shrugged in an off-hand sort of way, poring over his document. Above his lined face he was balding, while below he was spreading out from the middle, like a beachball, she thought. The thick vertically-striped shirts he had taken to wearing to distract onlookers' eyes from his burgeoning horizontality served only to make him more... beachballesque, she decided, stumbling on the adjective in a rare moment of fancy.

"It's the new administration," he replied offhandedly, still engrossed in his briefing. "They're bringing in so many directives at the moment - I'm getting buried," he waved the stapled sheets to illustrate. "This is the Auditing thing central government have been talking about, is it?"

"Well, I was asking you," she said, her voice cracking.

He looked at her sharply, this slight woman in her mid-twenties with her brown ponytail and downcast face. His eyes softened behind their glasses and he asked: "Lynda, what's wrong?" She is such a timid creature, he thought. They call her the office mouse, the way she blinks around at the world so defensively.

"My job... it is safe, isn't it?" she sobbed. "You're not thinking of dropping me... I mean, you know, letting me go?"

Solomon's eyes widened with surprise and he adopted a reassuring tone: "Lynda, I have not been told anything about this, but I'm sure I will have a say in it all. So, no, I'm not thinking of dropping you, or letting you go, or saying goodbye, or whatever you want to call it. Relax, this is all part of the new regime's bedding-in period. This is what they all do: flex their muscles for a few months. They'll settle down soon enough. Besides, you're too good a team member to let go. You need fear nothing. Nothing at all."

Further conversation was curtailed by the entrance of another co-worker, leaving Lynda to turn away and discreetly dry her eyes with a little dab of Kleenex that she drew from her sleeve.

Despite Solomon's reassurances, Lynda couldn't relax. At excruciatingly short intervals that afternoon she checked the clock on her PC. 1.17 pm. 1.22 pm. 1.31 pm... and so on, as if a bomb were ticking away on her monitor.

Then, at 4.48 pm, she stood and wandered like a sleepwalker from her desk to the lift and pressed the button for the third floor. She looked as if she were being walked to the scaffold. It was her plan to go to the meeting slightly early - but whether it was to leave a good impression or to display a sort of half-hearted defiance that she could choose the time, if not the place, of her execution, she hadn't quite decided.

At 4.49 pm, she got out of the lift and followed the corridor to the end, counting the room numbers as she went along.

At 4.50 pm, she got to room 344.

With a little leap of her heart, she realised it was the final room in the corridor. She checked the note in her hand, which definitely said room 345, and then looked around with big lost eyes. There were no more rooms. The corridor just came to an end, and there was a blank white wall straight ahead.

After perhaps half a minute or so in a kind of formless panic, she pulled herself together and knocked on the door of room 344, just to make sure there hadn't been a mistake. The door opened just enough to allow a clerk with small round glasses and a bald head to peer out. His face didn't show the slightest hint of emotion as he asked in a flat voice: "Yes, can I help you?"

"Hello, I'm looking for room 345," she said.

His eyes went wide with surprise for a moment, and then his face grew tight and impassive again.

"This is room 344."

"Yes, but I'm looking for 345."

"That's not here."

He closed the door suddenly and left her standing there, completely at a loss. Well! How rude!

She thought for a moment, reread the letter one more time, and then knocked again.

The same man answered, again opening the door a tiny amount. He looked at her a little impatiently.

"You see, I'm being Audited," she explained, holding up her note. "It says to come to room 345, but this is room 344, and I can't find room 345." She blurted the last bit, suddenly afraid that he would close the door in her face again.

He blinked at her from behind his little round glasses as if he were looking through a double-glazed window at some noisy youths playing in the street.

He took the note from her hands and looked at it dispassionately, and her even more so.

"Well," he exhaled, in a slightly patronising voice. "It does say room 345."

He considered for a moment and then said decisively. "Wait here for a few minutes. I'm sure the room will be along shortly." Then he handed back the piece of paper, and closed the door.

She stood there for a moment, in that silent white corridor with the blue carpet, not sure whether he was being sarcastic or not. Then she realised that he clearly was, and looked at the note again, trying to find a clue what to do next.

There was no phone number on the note, she realised, so she wasn't going to be able to get hold of anyone from Audits straight off. She'd have to go back to her desk and send an email or something. But she knew in her heart of hearts that that would be a terrible thing to do. Miss Tolstoy was never, ever, late for anything. That is just how it was with her, and she thought back over that very morning as an example to prove it.

7.00 am: wake to my flat in Cosham. 7.02 am: shake the night's filing and sorting out of head and step from bed. 7.03 am, make a cup of tea...

She recalled how, over the next 15 minutes, she ate breakfast in the tidy kitchen of her Cosham flat and listened to Radio 2. Radio 2 nearly always accompanied the toast and apricot jam she scrunched, although she did occasionally have honey on a croissant to Breeze FM's breakfast show.

Sameness, she thought with an internal sigh, is safeness.

After breakfast, she had spent 12 minutes in the shower, etc, 10 minutes getting dressed... and by two minutes to eight after a brief walk, she was ready to make the short railway journey from the suburb of Cosham on to the island itself, where, after 13 minutes, it ended at Portsmouth and Southsea railway station.

I am never late for anything, she told herself as a statement of her creed, and began to feel that something terrible was going to happen if she didn't make this appointment, with a worm of panic starting to wriggle in her tummy.

At 4.59 pm, she hurried back down to the end of the corridor, and traced the numbers again. 301, 302, 303... all the way through to the last door in the corridor, 344 - and once again came to that blank white wall ahead.

She felt as if she was going to burst into tears as she turned and took her first step to go. Then, to her surprise, she heard a door open behind her and a woman's voice call after her: "Miss Tolstoy?"

It was exactly 5 pm. She looked around, to find, to her complete astonishment, that the end wall actually did have a door in it. A woman in white, with deep chestnut hair in a neat, slightly mannish style, was looking at her through a pair of black spectacles. An interested smile played on her lips.

"Miss Tolstoy, we are ready to Audit you now."

"I, I didn't see the door," she said, drawing nearer, mystified. "I didn't see it."

"Ah, well, I suppose it's the new decor," said the woman, whom Miss Tolstoy noted was dressed in a pure white trouser suit that seemed to radiate white dazzling light.

"Come into the Auditing Office," she smiled.

As Miss Tolstoy walked into the end room, she noticed that the white door actually did have a white number vaguely embossed on it, but the bright light of the corridor had completely bleached it out.

"I am Miss Peters," she said, holding out a firm hand. "I am your Auditor."

The room they stood in was a dazzling white, without the slightest hint of dust, dirt or wear, and no discernible features. It was just a plain, featureless box with a white desk at its centre. Miss Peters gestured to Miss Tolstoy to take a seat at it, while she seated herself opposite. She pulled out a large white file from a drawer and began to read it, seriously.

Miss Tolstoy looked at the file with some surprise and felt her nerves start jangling away again. "I understand there is going to be some restructuring," she said. "With the new government?"

Miss Peters said nothing at all, poring over the file in front of her. After three excruciating minutes in absorbed silence, she looked up at Miss Tolstoy, with a smile.

"Do you have a cat, Miss Tolstoy?" she asked, with a kind of detached interest.

"Er, yes... Yes, I do."

"I see," she said, and wrote a note in pencil on a sheet in front of her. "Any other pets?"

"No, but I hardly see what - " "And what about parents?"

The question was so surprising that she quite lost her train of thought.

"They... well... when I was little, they... well, they were killed in a plane crash, I -" "Aha!" Miss Peters looked at the page before her with some satisfaction and held up her hand to silence Miss Tolstoy. She ticked a box and repeated, with some pleasure, “A plane crash...� * Download the rest of Heaven's Light Our Guide, here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B007E2O6YI/ * Book Extract from The Tube Healer The Tube Healer by Matt Wingett * Someone that pretty shouldn't have to cry.

That was the thought in my mind just before the transformation.

She had the most beautiful skin - fine features and high cheekbones, like a Rossetti painting, lithe and elegant. But she was lost in herself - living in her own little hell. Her lips were trembling, her skin pale. Maybe she was crying because, somewhere along the way, a man had broken her dreams.

Her 8-month-gone bump could have been testimony to that.

The tube is the most private place for public grief: the way we all travel drawn in on ourselves. Like zombies: lolling, insensible, sardined against each other at rush hour without a tremor of acknowledgement in our minds, and only the tiniest exhalation "scooz" as we push by.

It was there, in the London Underground with its noise and its smell and discomfort, right there, that I saw the first miracle.

What else can you call it? Down there in the London Clay, among the pressed flesh in the tunnelled underworld, an amazing thing happened: new life, new life...

That change amazed me. Her weeping finished in a moment, and from her smiling mouth suddenly a peel of laughter rang out across the carriage: big, rich and joyous, a bubbling fountain of noise bursting from her body.

Then there were her eyes. They turned from iron-grey to sky-blue. All this in an instant of surprised transformation.

I couldn't help myself. I pushed through the crush to take a closer look at her, as if I were the photographic negative of a crash-scene ghoul. Where once there had been a body trapped in the wreck, now there was a person sitting and laughing in dazed joy. It was bewildering.

I leaned close. "What happened to you?" I asked.

She looked at me with shining blue in her eyes. "Did you see him?" she asked. "Did you?"

When I looked around, the object of her gaze was already walking out through the sliding doors, becoming a shadow in the underground. I turned back to her, seeking more information.

"What happened?" I asked again, bemused.

"I don't know," she said, and laughed once more. Puzzled, I pushed through the commuters towards the doors to follow him, but a thicket of bodies barred my way, and the doors slid shut in my face. Peering through the glass, I could see a shape on the platform, moving away, obscured by other travellers. An army coat, I noted, and long hair.

That was my first experience of the phenomenon that came to be known as the Tube Healer. * During that summer, a rumour started to circulate. In an office in Putney, a secretary walked in to work who, the day before was a neurotic wreck, and was now, to the utter bemusement of her colleagues, transformed into a bundle of smiles and confidence.

In Dalston, an artist whose muse had been lost to him for years walked back into his studio, purposefully washed his brushes, threw off a dust sheet and started to create the most beautiful, sumptuous art.

A middle-aged journalist from Richmond whose life had been embittered by years of grieving for a cruel lover, finally realised that her life was actually better without him.

All over London, in pubs, and clubs, in mothers' groups, in knitting circles, at the checkouts of shops, in cafĂŠs over lattes, in book clubs and

churches, that rumour became a kind of currency to be exchanged and traded.

People spoke of miracles. It was as if each had found themselves blinking into the light of a brand new day, after undergoing a massive life change. And it was noted by their friends that it happened in the darkness below the streets.

In that incendiary time it seemed that London blazed with new life - as if the sun had managed to find a way to come out at night, and the lost people of the world were basking in its light - even under the ground. The friends of people who had been touched by him decided that, rather than walk, they too might take the tube.

So, Transport for London announced a puzzling statistic. The number of journeys taken on buses dropped off, while the platforms of the tube stations became a press of wondering people, waiting for deliverance to shuttle on down the line towards them. From that underworld, each passenger hoped to return all Persephoned up - a new spring in their lives.

I put my ear to the ground, and my thoughts began to circle endlessly around what had happened to these people who had been changed by him. I walked the tunnels in wonder during the day, and when I was alone at nights, I yearned for the shadow in the army coat, and woke suddenly with staring eyes from dreams of who and where he might be. * You can download The Tube Healer for free, here: http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/128159 *