Frozen in Time by Ali Sparkes Page A

as he did now, standing right here next to them. He was wearing the same clothes. In his basket on the front of the bike was a striped paper bag and a comic of some kind. Ben squinted and made out Eagle on the top of it, in bold, angular letters.
    ‘Blast it! I never did get to read that!’ muttered Freddy. ‘I suppose it’s long gone now. Never got to eat those bull’s eyes either. Rotten luck!’
    ‘Oh no—don’t tell me you ate bull’s eyes too!’ grimaced Rachel.
    ‘They’re sweets, you goose!’ laughed Polly.
    After Freddy had gone in, nothing else happened. After a while Uncle Jerome wound the tape forward at high speed. ‘What time was it when your father put you into stasis?’ he asked, eyes still on the screen and hands poised above the buttons.
    ‘Just after lunch,’ said Polly. ‘We had chops. I cooked them! Mrs M was off that week.’
    ‘So … about now then.’ Uncle Jerome was watching a dial of numbers. ‘This is the time code,’ he said. ‘We’ve been watching for about ninety minutes-worth now and if your meat man and Freddy here came in just before lunch, I believe you would have eaten by now.’
    ‘Yes, we ate around one, I should say,’ said Freddy, glancing over Uncle Jerome’s shoulder at the spinning time code numbers. ‘So I reckon we’d be down in the chamber about now. Maybe … maybe we’ll see Father going off somewhere … do you think?’
    Ben eyed the spool on the side that was getting smaller and smaller as the tape wound on. There wasn’t much of it left. He really hoped they would see something else before the tape ran out completely, but as it went on shrinking, there was nothing else but the lane and the blossom blowing in the wind and the occasional bird flitting in and out of the hedgerows.
    ‘Not much more now,’ sighed Uncle Jerome. ‘Sorry.’ But even as he said this a shadow was thrown across the lane at the top right corner of the screen. A young man walked into view. He was wearing a jacket and tie and a trilby hat. He paused at the gate, leaning on it while he did something with his shoe— pulled a stone out of it, Ben thought—and then glanced down the driveway before walking on up the hill. Something tugged at Ben’s memory, but this was clearly just his imagination. He didn’t know the man. This was forty years before he was born!
    Now the tape was clicking and whirring on the spool, filling up to almost full. Uncle Jerome prepared to stop it.
    ‘Wait!’ said Rachel, just as he went to stop the tape. ‘Look!’
    As soon as she said this the tape ran out, flicking madly like a whippet’s tail as the spools spun on at speed and then began to gradually slow. ‘There was something else! Something dark came in. Look—you have to look again!’
    Uncle Jerome stopped the spools, re-threaded the tape and wound it back slowly. Just as the tape began to flicker, where it was a little squashed from being threaded at one end, something dark did come in. The bonnet of a car. A black car, gliding up to the gate. Only the first glimpse of windscreen rolled into view before the tape ended.
    Freddy and Polly looked at each other wide-eyed. ‘A car!’ gasped Polly. Freddy nodded.
    ‘So? A car! Whose car? Could be anyone’s,’ said Ben, exasperated and disappointed. ‘What does that tell us?’
    ‘You don’t understand, Benedict,’ said Uncle Jerome. ‘Cars were not that common an occurrence in 1956. Even on through roads, and Darkwood Lane only goes up to the woods and downs. Anything other than the delivery van was very rare. Someone came along that day—almost certainly for a reason.’
    ‘But who?’ said Polly. ‘Who drove up to us? Can’t we see something?’
    Uncle Jerome held the image of the car steady on the screen. It had a high black bonnet and a metal grille like long teeth between two round headlights. The number plate was only partially in view, obscured by part of the five-bar gate.
    ‘The man before,’ said Polly. ‘He