Read Online The Trouble With Time by Lexi Revellian - Free Book Online

you asked the wrong question,” the man said over his shoulder.
    Pretending not to hear, Floss picked her way towards the safety of City Road. At the gates she paused. They were solid rust, with barely perceptible scraps of black and gold paint clinging here and there. And beyond the gates . . .
    The surface of the road was broken up into great zigzag cracks, with grass and small trees growing through the tarmac, and in places an invading carpet of ivy. The only noise was the wind in the trees and the patter of rain. Buildings across the street looked normal at first glance. Look again, and you could see the broken window panes, the encroaching creepers, the damp spreading down the walls from sagging gutters full of weeds. Floss climbed up the gate, hanging on to the stone pilaster, and craned in both directions. The front wall of one house had collapsed into a heap of bricks, exposing the rooms like an opened dolls’ house. A lamppost lay at an angle across the road. Further away was a pile of fallen scaffolding, next to an area of water like a small lake. Everywhere was going back to nature; no lights, no traffic, no humans. The place smelled like the countryside, not like a city. In the distance skyscrapers appeared intact, until you noticed black specks spattered over their smooth façades, indicating missing panes of glass. A movement caught her eye – at the other side of the pond a wild boar trotted towards the water, surrounded by a troop of striped piglets.
    Perhaps this was all just a very, very vivid dream, and she was actually lying in a hospital bed, badly injured and unconscious with morphine dripping into her veins. This struck her as a more inviting prospect than the alternative, that this was real. She shut her eyes tight for a few seconds, and opened them again fast when something ran over her hand.
    Floss shook off the spider and started to climb the gate. She got to the top and stopped, remembering what the man had said about wolves and lions. It no longer seemed quite so improbable. Perhaps he had simply been telling the truth. His eyes had looked sane. Maybe she should go back and ask him what was going on. On the other hand, she’d just watched him kill a man. An idea came to her, an irrational idea she was unable to resist. Floss clambered down the far side of the gate and warily headed towards Old Street Roundabout.
    She was going to go home.

CHAPTER 12
The answer to the right question
    Finding her route to Islington wasn’t too hard; the roads were still recognizable, even though their surfaces were breaking up and well on their way to becoming linear forests. Floss only got lost once, in an area with new unfamiliar buildings. She kept a wary eye out for carnivores, but didn’t see anything larger than a fox trotting along the pavement. Cats stared at her but wouldn’t come near. A small herd of deer had taken possession of Shoreditch Park, which had changed very little. Floss remembered reading that tree seedlings won’t grow where deer browse.
    On the way, she climbed twenty flights of stairs in one of the more robust-looking skyscrapers, and from there she could see that the desolation spread to the misty horizon. No light, no fires, no movement, no aeroplanes. The view had a strange beauty, with trees flourishing in all the spaces between the buildings. There were more tall office blocks than she remembered. The city looked to have been abandoned for a long, long time. Something catastrophic had happened here, and Floss couldn’t work out what. Nothing seemed to add up.
    It wasn’t until she got to her street, a Victorian terrace facing a main road and backing on to the railway, that she fully acknowledged the futility of her journey. Doggedly, she worked out which was number eleven, and stood gazing at the house where her tiny attic studio had been. Most of its stucco had fallen off, and buddleia stems thrust out of the windows. The remaining portion of roof sagged, and a sycamore