The woman appeared to be in her late forties, with a slightly hooked nose, not unlike a bird, and a full head of dark hair piled up into a bun on the top of her head. She was dressed in a dark blouse and skirt that gathered around the bustle and stood quite tall, carrying herself with the air of a matron in a hospital about her business.
"Hello Enoch, my name is Miss Nightjar..." There was a kindness in her strong voice as she spoke, and something about it reminded Enoch very much of the sound of the bird that had fluttered off minutes before into what he knew to be a dead end.
"...'ow do you know me name?" Enoch muttered and stared wide eyed at the woman from his position on the ground against the wall.
"Your name is Enoch Ambrose O'Connor, the son of Owen O'Connor a local undertaker and you are sixteen years old."
"Should I know ye?"
"I shouldn't think so, no. But you have seen me before, and I certainly know you. I must say, I didn't care for your dismissal early this morning though I understand the circumstances."
Enoch tensed and glared at the strange woman as he started to stiffly push himself to his feet, keeping his back to the wall as he stared at her warily. "I never seen ya before. What the 'ell-"
"You never saw me before, actually, but that's hardly the issue here." Miss Nightjar corrected and Enoch's scowl only deepened as he watched her with an uneasy sort of curiosity as she continued with more of a softness to her words as she passed an eye scrutinisingly over his face. "My dear boy, you have had a difficult time of it, haven't you?"
"I don't fink I'm any o' your business, lady..." Enoch turned his face away self-consciously and turned up his collar to try poorly to cover some of the bruises and welts. He was thoroughly unnerved by how much this strange woman seemed to know about him, she spoke to him as though she knew him like an old friend. "Leave me alone." Keeping his head bowed slightly, the boy turned his back on her and started to walk back down the alley.
"More than you think it is. You're not the only one, Enoch."
Enoch couldn't help himself. He paused after only taking a few steps away and, though he didn't turn his head, his heart started to beat faster as he muttered, "The only what?" She couldn't possibly be talking about what a tiny part of him dearly hoped she was, could she?
"I think you know precisely what I mean. Wouldn't you like to know what's been happening to you?"
He didn't want to care so much about it, or anything at the time, but something very akin to the tingling in the soles of his feet when he embraced his power, compelled the boy to turn around on the spot and look back over at the woman. "What's that 'sposed to mean?"
"I know perfectly well what you can do, Enoch. Wouldn't you like to know why?" Something glinted in her dark eyes, something that made Enoch drop his guard and take a few more steps back towards her curiously.
"You can tell me that?" He asked cautiously, and glanced down at the palms of his hands without fully realising what he was doing before he curled his fingers into a fist and clenched them shut.
"I can, my dear boy. As much as you need to understand and that we have time for to begin with. Now...I'm sure we won't be disturbed here so..." Miss Nightjar turned an empty apple crate upside down with the heel of her boot, swept aside her skirts and sat down upon it. "Perhaps you should be sitting for this discussion." When Enoch didn't move she smiled just a little and inclined her head. "Tell me, do you really think that I mean you anything but help?"
She meant no harm, he was quite sure of that, though Enoch knew he'd never seen this woman before in his life. He couldn't explain how he knew, but something felt warm and almost protective about her, like a mother hen. Slowly, he sunk back down on the curb just across from her and said nothing.
"Let me first offer my condolences for the loss of your mother, Enoch."
Enoch stiffened and looked away at the wall at the olive branch held out towards him. He gritted his teeth, clenched his jaw and tried not to show much emotion. "Didn' agree ta talk about that. Stop it or I'll just go now."
The woman sighed and smiled a little too understandingly for his liking over at him before folding her hands in her lap a little formally for their location. "Oh very well. You, my dear boy, are peculiar."
Enoch's eyebrows shot towards his hair as he lost his guard and genuinely looked quite surprised at her. Peculiar? Was that just her own way of calling him a freak too? He composed himself slightly and glared at her.
"Speak for yourself. I'm not a freak."
"Don't misunderstand me, Enoch. I am far from calling you a freak. I'm not at all fond of that word, it implies that something is wrong." She unfolded her hands and began to tap her fingertips together lightly. Her nails, which Enoch hadn't noticed before were quite unusually long, made a soft tapping as they connected. "There's nothing wrong with you, boy, just different. Or, as we call it, peculiar."
"Well I ain't that either."
"Oh, so you think that being able to restore life to dead things is an attribute everyone around you possesses?"
Enoch opened his mouth to retort and shut it again in alarm. She really did know about him. He swallowed warily and uncurled his fists to look down at his hands again.
"'ow did you-"
"I know more about you, Enoch O'Connor, than you do at this moment. As I said, you're not the only one, you know? There are many, many others like you."
"You?" Enoch asked, and cringed at the hope he heard in his own voice, it was almost like a child. "Can you do it too? Is that 'ow you know?"
"Oh no, perhaps I chose my words poorly...there are many others but not exactly like you. But am I peculiar? Absolutely." A smile crossed the woman's face as she held her chin high and looked quite proud for a moment. "You don't think that bird following you was just a bird, do you?"
Enoch just stared at her vacantly, in much the same way his uncle had stared at him that morning when he'd outright told him what he could do, disbelieving. "You tellin' me that bird was you? That's mad. People can't turn into-"
Miss Nightjar just raised one thick, dark eyebrow which cut Enoch off as surely as if she'd just gagged him. She fixed him with a challenging look, as if daring the boy who raised the dead to tell her that turning into a bird was impossible.
"Okay I got the point." He mumbled and for once, shut his mouth and didn't argue anymore. "What...what d'you mean I'm...whatever you said I am?"
"Peculiar. Simply put it means that you are one of those who have a unique...ability or quality that normals do not. We'll have plenty of time to discuss it in far more detail later."
"There are others...are they all...like...whatever you are?"
"Oh no, not at all. There are few who are born like myself and my sisters, that's another thing I would prefer to discuss at a later time. Peculiarities come in many forms, some, like yourself are aggressive-"
"Now I'm aggressive?" Enoch interrupted and thought of his family briefly. Was this woman calling him dangerous like they thought he was? His abilities, his...peculiarity wasn't all bad, in fact he didn't think it was bad at all.
"In as much that you can activate it yourself, not that you are dangerous." She pierced Enoch with a pointed look as if she had read his mind, "Some don't even begin to manifest until well into life. Others right from birth and many, like yourself, come in one's youth. As I'm sure you know, Enoch..." She raised a finger and gestured to the bruises all over him, "...normals do not often take kindly to our kind. They fear what they cannot understand. It's quite human to do so."
Enoch just blinked and stared at the dirty ground between them. His head, which had already been aching, was throbbing harder with the ridiculous information that had just poured into it.
Miss. Nightjar consulted an old pocket watch she had pulled from somewhere and tucked it away again. "Now, we have a train to catch in a little over an hour and so we'd better get a move on if we want to catch it."
"What?" Enoch snapped out of his dazed reverie and stared at her. "What makes you fink I'm goin' anywhere wiv you? I don't know you."
"Because, Enoch...I can give you a home. A home where you won't have to hide, and with the company of other children much like you. There are things, normal and otherwise, who would hurt you here. Have I said anything untruthful to you thus far, my dear boy?"
Enoch frowned at her choice of words, but the presence of the matron looking Miss Nightjar had, from the moment she had first spoken, meant a certain kind of security that Enoch had never felt before since he was just a toddler in his mother's arms. He wanted to be on his own, but at the same time, a larger more dominant part of him dearly wanted somewhere to belong. There was no good future for him hiding in the shadows of London and suspected of murder, only that of an early death when winter came, if nothing had killed him before that.
"They might be lookin' for me." He muttered but slowly started to push his aching body up to his feet as he kept his blue eyes fixed on a point just over Miss Nightjar's left shoulder.
"If anyone is, Enoch, they won't know they've seen you. You have my word, you'll be quite safe if you come with me."
xxxXxxx
It was almost a full hour later by the time Enoch jumped down from the horse drawn taxi cart outside Paddington station in the company of a strange woman who he did not know at all but somehow trusted completely. They hadn't spoken a word in the fifty-three minutes it had taken to reach the station but Enoch knew his appearance had drawn the driver's curiosity. He was filthy and battered and looked every bit as if he'd been pulled off a street corner begging. As they left and Miss Nightjar had paid the fare from a purse she had withdrawn from some invisible pocket on her person, she waved a little mottled brown feather beneath the driver's nose so quickly that Enoch might have missed it had he even blinked.
"Where are we going anyway?"
"Swansea. It's around a four hour train ride away in southern Wales. A train which we are very nearly late for, so no dawdling now." Miss Nightjar rapped her knuckles on the counter of the ticket booth on the platform where the bespectacled elderly man behind it had been starting to doze.
"Two for your next train to Swansea, please."
"Of course, madam." He had a voice like chalk scratching on a blackboard in a school classroom, Enoch thought as he ran a hand through his already thoroughly tousled hair to try and cover the cut and one of the worse bruises on his eye.
The man squinted across the counter at the woman and the boy as he took the money and his dim eyes came to rest on the grubby looking lad.
"You there, boy? Have I seen you somewhere before?"
"I should think not." Miss Nightjar spoke before Enoch could think of a response to give and he looked over at her with a deadpan expression ready to go with whatever story she came up with. "This is my nephew, we're simply returning from London today. I apologise for his appearance, childish roughhousing taken a little too far."
It seemed satisfactory enough and the tickets were handed over just a moment before the train came thundering into the station.
Enoch had never been on a train before. He'd never even been in a station before let alone left London. Smoke streamed onto the wooden platform as the great iron train squealed to a halt on the tracks. Conductors in slightly shabby red uniforms leapt from the doors onto the platform, their gold buttons glinting through the smoke that shrouded all the comers and goers briefly from the waist down.
The boy found himself examining the train with the same kind of curiosity he listened in to the conversations of old soldiers about military exploits. When Miss Nightjar prodded him pointedly in the back, he jerked forward and stepped off the platform and onto the stairs in a doorway. He ducked his head to pass through the entrance and straightened up right away as they entered the car.
Either side of the car was lined with long benches in front of the glass windows and fitted with cushions covered in a hideous mottled green fabric. Beneath the benches was empty space wide enough to fit small cases of luggage and sacks. Metal rails stretched the length of the ceiling from which hung strips of leather to hold onto while standing. Over each lot of seats flickered a weak electric light which impressed Enoch considerably with the very limited exposure he'd ever had to electric lights. In its entirety, save for the hideous fabric patterns, the interior of the train car was quite pleasant to Enoch and more luxurious even in its simplicity than his own home.
Miss Nightjar ushered him along to the very end of the car where Enoch sunk onto the final place on the bench and for a moment could not have been more grateful for a soft place to sit. Others filed into their car, but to Enoch's immense relief, there were few of them who all took their seats along the benches.
Two minutes went by which Enoch spent staring around the train car and tapping his feet on the floor restlessly before the conductor began to pace down the middle.
"Tickets ready please..."
Miss Nightjar held out the tickets as the man approached them. He took one glance before punching a hole through each ticket with a little metal contraption not unlike pliers in appearance. They continued to sit in silence for just a few more minutes before the train suddenly lurched and Enoch gripped onto the metal bar at the edge of the seat at his left and turned to look out the window as the train began to pull away from the station.
They had barely been moving for ten minutes before Enoch felt eyes on him. He looked away from the door to the next train car he had been staring at and over at Miss Nightjar. But she wasn't looking at him. She sat with her hands neatly folded in her lap beside him and her bird like eyes fixed on the window of the opposite side of the car as the cities old buildings flashed by them. Enoch's blue eyes came to land on the man and woman sitting just opposite and to the right of them. The man's nose was buried in a newspaper as he strained to read it by the dim lighting over his head but the woman, whose hands twisted a handkerchief in her lap, was staring quite shamelessly at them.
Enoch scowled in response and self-consciously tried to pull his collar back up over the welts on his exposed neck. He had no hat now to pull down over his face and hide the bruises there and so tried in vain to direct his stubborn curls to cover his forehead and eyebrow a little.
Miss Nightjar seemed to notice this and arched an eyebrow at the couple stealing glances at the young boy before turning and casting a more critical eye over his injuries herself.
"We'll have you fixed up in no time, Enoch." She spoke quietly in the otherwise silent cabin and he only grunted in response, more embarrassed by her drawing attention to it than the bruises themselves.
xxxXxxx
The four hour train ride was predominantly silent, save for the occasional guffaw of laughter from a group of men at the far end of the car who sat swapping stories and jokes as they puffed on their pipes.
Miss Ingrid Nightjar brushed out the creases in her skirts as the train began to slow as it approached Swansea's station and looked to her left at the teenage boy she had taken charge of. A smile cracked her lips as she saw he was still sleeping with his head slumped back against the window and looking distinctly less confrontational than she had seen yet. Enoch had been asleep most of the ride and he couldn't hardly be blamed for doing so.
In all her years of finding and caring for peculiar children in need of help, Miss Nightjar rarely found them in any better circumstances than Enoch had fallen into.
She cleared her throat and gently tapped one finger on the boy's shoulder as the train began to pull into the station and draw to a stop.
Enoch jerked awake and drew in a hasty breath as he was pulled out of his dreamless sleep and back into consciousness on the thin cushion of the train's seating. "What, what?"
They'd come to a stop, he realised after a moment and turned to try and see where they were out the window but all that was visible were clouds of steam and coal smoke that had rushed from the train as it squealed to a halt. Yawning, Enoch scrambled to his feet and was immediately aware of how much he ached again, made worse somehow by sitting in the same position for so long.
It was another hour before Miss. Nightjar consulted her watch once more and came to a halt in the Welsh countryside just outside and overgrown hay meadow by the coast. The sun had just set and the cool ocean breeze was edging on the brink of crisp.
"Where are you takin' me anyway? This is middle of nowhere." Enoch grumbled just as his stomach growled loudly. He'd hardly eaten a thing in the last twenty-four hours and was finally just beginning to realise how hungry he really was.
"We've almost arrived, as a matter of fact, and supper should just about be waiting for us when we do. Just over there, you see?" Miss Nightjar pointed out across the meadow and Enoch squinted to follow her line of sight.
On the far side of the meadow all he could see was the weather beaten shell of a house. It wasn't exactly a ruin; it was too recent for that. But the elements out in the exposed countryside had done their work to it. By any means it was certainly uninhabited.
"...What that old thing?"
"Yes, 'that old thing'. Don't be too cynical now, young man, follow me."
"I got a lot to be cynical about." Enoch grumbled but his companion had already marched off again, this time towards the cliffs to Enoch's bemusement. Hungry, tired and sore, he followed obediently until he stood just a metre from the crumbling rocky edge overlooking the tossing waves. He'd never seen the sea, or even country until today.
"What's the big-" Enoch turned away and whatever he was about to say was lost as he suddenly found himself alone. He turned in a full circle and stared wide eyed around him, "Miss? Hello?"
"Do be quick about it, Enoch. In here, boy."
Her voice came from behind him and Enoch spun on the spot to see her arm extending from an opening in a rocky outcrop that he hadn't noticed before. It was so overgrown with heather and grass that he wasn't sure he would have ever found it otherwise.
Enoch stepped over towards the rocky formation and pushed aside the heather that concealed the opening as Miss Nightjar's arm vanished. It was just wide enough for a grown man to fit in if he ducked and Enoch did have to in order to stick his head in hesitantly.
"Don't be afraid now, there's a path here just follow me."
"I'm not afraid." Enoch muttered, although he was a little as he squeezed himself into the confining space. All light of the outside world was shut out and he couldn't so much as see his hand when he held it in front of his face. There was nothing for it but to step blindly ahead and follow the woman's voice as she led him down a narrow, stony path into the very face of the cliff they'd been standing on top of minutes ago.
Enoch tried to focus on his breathing as they went on and on. Long breaths in and out. He ran his fingers along the wall at his side in an attempt to hold onto the one sense he felt he could still use in the darkness and nothingness. Miss Nightjar would speak from a few steps ahead of him every so often, assuring him there wasn't far to go and they would be back in the open air soon but Enoch only grunted in response. After a full ten minutes without having any idea what direction they were walking in, the path suddenly took a definite incline and then, just as long as it had taken to descend, Enoch saw a light ahead of them. It was the moon, which seemed so bright after twenty minutes of pitch blackness that it unnerved him for a second before being shrouded by Miss Nightjar's back ahead of him.
They scrambled back through a gap very similar to the one they had entered and, thoroughly disoriented, Enoch staggered around in a circle to try and get his bearings.
"But wh-"
He cut himself off and stared off behind the outcrop. There were lights, warm and welcoming that flooded from the old farmhouse that seemed eerily similar to the one they had just seen abandoned. Enoch pressed his eyes closed for a few seconds and then opened them again and really looked around at his surroundings. The house wasn't the only thing that was the same. The rocky outcrop they had just vacated looked much the same, and he walked right around it twice to be sure. The meadow in front of them was no longer overgrown but newly mown and altogether pleasant looking.
"This isn't..." He spun and stared at Miss Nightjar who was watching him with a small twitch of amusement on her lips. "Where are we?"
"Exactly where we were a half an hour ago, Enoch, you should be asking when we are. To that, the answer is April 3rd, 1901."
He must have misheard her, or misunderstood or temporarily gone insane and was hallucinating. Enoch just stared at her like she was mad and before he could bother to bridle his tongue, simply blurted out, "What the bloody 'ell does that mean? It's 1909, you old bird."
"Dear me, we'll have to do something about your manners in time, young man." Miss Nightjar cast a critical glance at him and shook her head before pointing to the house, now considerably larger and less weather beaten. "You've entered a time loop now, Enoch. There will be plenty of time to go into detail about this as well once we have you properly fed and cleaned up-Ah...that would be Nigel there..." She raised an arm in greeting and Enoch looked away from her towards the edge of the meadow and the large gate across the path that he hadn't noticed half an hour ago was there at all.
A boy, who from his height Enoch guessed must have been around his own age, he couldn't see much more in the dim night lighting, stood there at the gate holding something in his arms. As soon as Miss Nightjar waved, the boy did too and the thing, which Enoch now saw to be a rabbit, leapt from his arms as he turned around and ran back towards the house.
"Well...let's go shall we?" Miss Nightjar nodded curtly to Enoch who was still staring at the house as if it had just leapt into existence from nothing, which it may as well have done, and strode off towards the house as he hurried to catch up.
"Enoch O'Connor, welcome to your new home."