He wondered if The Emporium had relocated. He was never sure. It always happened when he slept but maybe, he wondered, he might just have gotten himself awake before anything had happened. He pulled the curtains back an inch and peered out. The last time he could recall was that it was Christmas Day and The Emporium had been a shop of some kind, dealing in dodgy shoes and as it turned out, true love.
It was snowing, not the feathery, magical kind of stuff that everyone hoped for at Christmas, but a blizzard of needle-sharp flurries traveling horizontally at high speed. He let the curtains fall shut and fumbled his way to his desk he tapped the coaster. The delay in supplying a mug of hot coffee was enough to make him wonder if he’d caught the magic off guard. He smiled when it appeared, leaned back and blowing the steam he looked around. Naturally the candles had lit themselves, giving enough illumination for him to know that all was as he remembered, well almost. They had not gone anywhere else but something was different.
At first, he could not put his finger on it. Then it hit him. I mean, it literally hit him.
The newspaper was not huge but when flung at speed it was large enough to land with a resounding thud as it bounced off his arm in front of him. The Book of Un-Reality narrowly missed taking a direct hit and in protest took refuge in the draw, slamming it shut and locking it from the inside.
“Hello,” Thrumps said to the quivering mass of printed pages that were now agitating themselves into a right tizzy. He gently scooped them up and shuffled them into some kind of order in a bid to gain control. Eventually they yielded to the firm hand that held them together and he placed them flat on the desk. Almost apologetically they flipped over to reveal the headline on the front page.
Trains Wrecked in Terrible Accident near Gretna Green.
A total of five trains, killed 226 people and injured a further 246. The vast majority of those killed were territorial soldiers on their way to participate in the Gallipoli campaign.
Disaster struck when a troop train headed for Liverpool collided with a passenger train that had been moved onto the main line due to its late arrival. Moments later, an express train smashed into that wreckage, igniting the gas-powered lighting system triggering a fierce blaze that engulfed them all, as well as a further two other undamaged trains in a matter of minutes.
And so it continued, listing the regiments involved, putting names to civilians that could be identified and calling for public assistance to ascertain the details of the remaining dead. It was the last paragraph that really hit home though.
One of the survivors, Gem Coldshell, was admitted to the infirmary as early labour had been brought on by the resulting trauma, and although later successfully delivered of a baby girl, the mother had lost her fight for life. The child was placed in the care of the local orphanage as the identity of the father remained unknown.
Thrumps read it all again and checked the date.
1915, the year his grandmother was allegedly born, according to the scant details he’d been able to dig up when he’d had a notion to research his family tree. He idly wondered if this new bit of information would help his search, but then realised that he was being stupid, he had all the resources he could ever need right in the desk in front of him, well actually hiding in a locked draw, but he’d come to that problem in a bit.
So, he thought running his finger gently along the fold, the woman in the dream was my mum’s mother, who’d have thought.
“Maybe a little heads-up would have been nice so I could have asked more questions,” he said out loud to the locked draw-front. The almighty thump from inside indicated that The Book of Un-Reality had other ideas about that.
He leaned back and sipped his coffee. He knew his mother was named Moira. He’d met her in another dream ages ago, saving her from death in 1945 when she was serving with the Red Cross in London. She’d had a little boy then, which must have been him but he didn’t remember the war, the bombings or anything from that time. In fact he was suddenly aware that he knew very few details of his childhood. It was as if he had always been a grown-up, which naturally couldn’t be right.
He peered through the keyhole of the draw.
“Is this trying to give me information I’ll need in the future?” He asked.
He was greeted by silence, but then what did he expect. Something about all this was troubling The Emporium book, and to be honest right now he wasn’t too sure he wanted to find out what it was. But he also knew that given time he may well have no choice.