John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“Welcome to the Hudson/Gold Power Generating Station,” the guard told him gravely, packing his personal effects into a Chiquita banana crate that he’d been using as a footstool. “I trust you’ll take your work here seriously.”

“Where are you going?”

“To the next guardhouse in. Can’t have two bugs in one jar.”

“But you’re here in the daytime,” said Orson. “I’ll be working nights.”

“Can’t have two bugs in one jar,” the guard repeated, as though Orson were forgetting his manners.

“Two bugs,” Orson mumbled. “Okay.”

“Did you find out about the lost time accidents?”

To his shock Orson realized he’d forgotten to ask. “I thought I might hold off for a while,” he replied. “Until I get my bearings.”

“Fair enough. When you figure it out, be sure to let me know.”

Orson squinted at him. “You mean you don’t know, either?”

“It doesn’t seem to mean much,” said the guard. “Just a fancy way of saying the system’s conked out. The house of cards falls down on them every once in a while, and the management needs a term for that — a technical term — to make it sound more like an act of God. It’s nothing more than an excuse, if you ask me.”

Orson went quiet for a moment. “An excuse?”

Monday, 09:05 EST

I searched the tunnels all day, Mrs. Haven, with nothing to show for it by sundown but a cramp. It’s never occurred to me how easy it would be to hide an object— any object, even a human being — in the coils and convolutions of the Archive. Who’s to say the chambers I’ve discovered are the only ones here? I have only the blurriest sense of where one room ends and the next one begins, after all. I’m using decades-old memories to navigate by.

Sensing the next sleep cycle approaching, I began yanking objects out of the walls at random, hoping to uncover hidden chutes and galleries; instead I had to dig myself out from under landslides of VHS cassettes and take-out trays and Sharper Image catalogs. As exhaustion set in, I found myself asking a question I’d never thought to ask before: What if these grottoes and trenches came about not by accident, as a by-product of my aunts’ dementia, but as part of some larger design?

This idea had just hit — I was lying on the kitchen floor at the time, massaging a crick in my neck — when a sound carried in from the Archive. It was the real thing, Mrs. Haven, not a subsonic hum or a liminal whir or the grannyish complaining of my bowels: a series of knocks, as if someone were testing a wall or a door — or possibly even the floor — for points of entry. It seemed whole rooms away, but these walls swallow sound, as I’ve mentioned before. It might almost have been close enough to touch.

I dropped onto my belly like the cockroach I’m becoming and scrabbled slowly forward, pausing every few feet to make sure the sound hadn’t stopped. It was coming from somewhere to my right, I was certain of that, but pinpointing it was maddeningly tricky. When at last I reached the spot where the knocking was sharpest, I attacked the wall in such a frenzy that the ceiling should have fallen on my head. The detritus was packed more haphazardly there, like a spot of slightly mealier decay in an already badly rotten set of teeth, and in no time I’d exposed a narrow door. Its knob made a crack when I turned it, as though it had been painted shut from the inside, and the knocking grew brighter. It was coming from a radiator pipe — that was obvious now. The door gave a pop, like the report of an air gun, and I toppled in.

I found myself in a dust-choked recess, barely wider than my spread arms, the bulk of which was taken up by an enormous bed. There was no space to spare between the bed and the walls, not even the width of a finger: it must have been brought into the room in sections and assembled inside, like a ship in a bottle. An entire family — grandparents, parents, grandchildren and all — could have passed the night in it without discomfort. The knocking was coming from a heating pipe beside it, just as I’d guessed.

How to explain what happened next, Mrs. Haven? The urge overtook me, filthy though that great bed was, to climb over the footboard and hide under its covers. I’d never encountered so totemic an object, Tolliver-wise: I imagined my elders sleeping between those varnished bedboards — all the heroes and the villians of this history of mine, from Enzie to Kaspar to Ottokar himself — and felt a genealogical ache to join them there. However this monstrous object had come to be shoehorned into that cramped and airless chamber, it had traveled across a vast expanse of time and space to do so. It was possible that generations of my forefathers had been born in that bed, and even likelier that some of them had died in it. But in spite of this thought — or because of it, maybe — I wanted to wrap myself up in those sheets.

“You don’t have to be quiet,” came a voice. “I’m already awake.”

A bunched, loglike mass near the headboard started twitching at this, like a sackful of mice. You’d think I’d be innoculated against surprise by this point, Mrs. Haven, but what I was seeing nearly dropped me to the floor. I clutched at the pipe to keep from falling over: it was scalding, and I snatched my hand back with a cry. But the pain passed at once, was flushed clear of my brain, because the thing under the covers had sat up.

“It’s you, of course,” I murmured. “Who else could it possibly be?”

I can’t explain how I knew that the thing on the bed was the man I’d been named for — Waldemar Toula, the Black Timekeeper of Äschenwald-Czas — but I was sure even before I’d seen its face. It had to be him, Mrs. Haven. And therefore it was.

“I had an eyeglass somewhere,” he said, shivering slightly. He spoke in a damp, droning hiss, like steam issuing out of a pipe.

“A what?”

“Not an eyeglass — what’s the word — what’s the blessed word for it in English?”

“A monocle,” I said, as though it were the most ordinary question in the world.

Already my mind was recovering its equilibrium, finding a place for this latest impossibility in the same walk-in freezer where the others were kept. I’ve had practice integrating the unintegratable by now, after all. I felt no need to question the reality of what I was seeing.

“You can’t do anything about this radiator, can you?” he said, letting the coverlet slip from his shoulders. “It’s banging loud enough to wake the dead.”

Deliberately, quietly, my great-uncle came into focus. His face composed itself out of a field of charged mnemonic particles: I’m aware how this must sound, Mrs. Haven, but I don’t know how else to describe it. His body caught the light and held it strangely, as if he’d been assembled out of dust. He was dressed in a chalk-stripe suit of banker’s blue, but his jacket and his tie were badly creased, and his hair had the chopped, formless look of a military buzz cut gone to seed. He was smaller than he looked in photographs. I hadn’t expected his wheat-paste complexion, either, or the Parkinson’s-like trembling of his hands. He looked less like a fugitive from justice, all things considered, than a drunk who’d spent the night under a bush. This wasn’t the dapper Goering look-alike of 1938, or the headstrong physics prodigy of the first years of the century — it was the ailing, ragged indigent of Budapest during the famine, superimposed over faded snapshots of my father in his youth, and perhaps some spectral iteration of myself.

“I want to know what’s happened to me,” I said. “I want to know who brought me here. And I want to know why.”

Waldemar gazed past me at a soot mark on the ceiling. His pupils had an oily, milky cast.