John Wray - The Lost Time Accidents

“You have me at a disadvantage,” he said finally. “My eyesight is poor and my memory’s worse. I don’t recall that we’ve been introduced.”

If not for his delivery, Mrs. Haven, I might have believed him. But he spoke smoothly and mechanically — glibly, even — like a ventriloquist’s marionette.

“I asked you a question,” I said, giving the footboard a kick.

He nodded placidly. “Can I trouble you for a glass of water?”

“How long have you been lying in this bed?”

A look of relief crossed his face. “ That I can tell you exactly. I’ve been counting the knocks, you see, to make the time go by.” He arched his back and heaved a drawn-out sigh. “I’d just made it to three hundred and eight when you arrived. Now I’ll have to start again from the beginning.”

I thought for a moment. “So you’ve just gotten here.”

“That’s true, I suppose.”

“Where were you hiding before?”

“Before—?”

“That’s right, Uncle. Back when you were creeping around in the Archive, leaving clever little clues for me to find. Or can’t you remember that, either?”

He smiled up at me now: a perfect idiot’s smile, almost flirtatious. “As the soul grows toward eternal life, Nefflein , it remembers less and less.”

“Don’t you dare quote my great-grandfather’s notes to me.”

He let out a bright, soggy snuffle at that — midway between a laugh and a snort of contempt. “Who has more right to quote a father than his son?”

“You have no rights at all. Not with me.”

“Don’t go putting on airs. We’re Familie , my boy. You ought to treat your flesh and blood with more respect.”

A wave of sickness hit me when I heard those words, Mrs. Haven: a decade’s worth of shame and indignation, breaking free of the containing walls I’d built. I thought back to the day I’d first learned of my namesake’s existence, at an age when I still thought of my name — and of my family — as a thing to take pride in. I remembered the thrill that I’d felt, as a child, on those rare occasions when the Timekeeper was mentioned. I remembered the moment I’d finally grasped what he’d done.

“What is it, Nefflein ? You look a bit green at the gills.”

I stood at the foot of the bed, fighting to maintain my balance, opening and closing my fists. “Ridiculous as it might sound,” I said, “I’ve imagined what would happen if we met.”

“That’s not ridiculous in the slightest. Take a look — here the two of us are!”

“That’s right, Uncle. Here we are, just as I pictured it.” I took in a breath. “And I told myself — I made a vow to myself — that if this day ever came, I’d carry out your sentence.”

“What sentence would that be?”

“The sentence of death.”

His milky eyes widened. “ Death , little Waldemar! Whatever for?”

“For the crimes—” The blood roared in my ears. “For the crimes you committed at the Äschenwald camp.”

“ Ach! — for that. I thought perhaps for figuring out about the Accidents.” He snuffled again. “No one else could, you know.” He shook his head. “Certainly not your grandfather, that Yid-loving ass.”

A surge of electricity shot through me as my fist met his jaw — the kind of prickling chill ghost hunters describe in their memoirs — and he fell backward with a satisfying thump. I felt grateful to him then, as I watched him scrambling to right himself: he was playing his part obligingly and well. But then something shifted, Mrs. Haven. Things fell out of proportion. The hissing built to a shriek as he drew himself upward: the bedsheets rose behind him like a jellyfish, billowing up until they darkened half the room. I saw him now as Marta Svoboda had seen him, as Sonja had seen him, as the prisoners at Äschenwald had seen him, and I felt the same unreasoning dread they must have felt. He took hold of me and bent me back until my shoulders touched the floor. His blank gray features overwhelmed my sight.

“You should thank me,” he said. “Not everybody has your opportunities.”

“Thank you? What do you mean?”

“Who wouldn’t want to take his forefathers to task for their sins?” He wrapped himself around me like a shroud. “Who wouldn’t like a chance at playing judge and jury?”

“If I execute you, Uncle, it won’t be for my own sake. It will be to take you out of circulation — to take you out of contention — so you can’t ever—”

“Can’t ever what? Continue in this duration, living proof that the chronoverse can be manipulated — that time travel is possible? Who will benefit from this settling of accounts, Nefflein , aside from you yourself?”

Silence fell for a moment. His face buzzed and flickered.

“That won’t work on me, Uncle,” I said through clenched teeth. “No end can justify the means you used at Czas.”

He was back in bed now, frail and docile again. But there was a new light in his clouded eyes, or so it seemed to me. “You’re a Toula,” he whispered. “Don’t try to deny it.”

“That means nothing ,” I hissed back. My voice was sounding more like his with every word I spoke. “Toula’s a name, that’s all — an empty noise, like Oppenheimer or Goering or Haven. Don’t treat it like some sort of magic spell.”

He laughed and swung his legs over the footboard. “Let me ask you this, Nefflein . Can you be sure — can you be absolutely certain — that you’d have turned down the chance I was offered in that godforsaken camp? If you knew you were right, that you’d cracked the great riddle, that you stood on the cusp of true and tangible proof that the gates of chronology — of mortality itself — were close at hand and waiting to be forced? There was no other way, I can promise you that. Extremes had to be gone to: blood sacrifice made. There was no way short of death to force a breach.”

I fell back from him dizzily, shaking my head. “That’s not science, Uncle. That’s witchcraft.”

“Synonyms, Nefflein .” His voice had gone rapt. “Two words for approaching the nexus of things.”

“I’d never have done what you did in that camp. I’d have found some way out. I’d have cut myself free—”

“What was that?” He took a dragging step toward me, his hand to his ear, leering sightlessly into the dark. “I can barely hear you, little Waldy. You’ll have to speak up.”

“Why are you here?” I stammered. “How in God’s name did you end up in this place?”

To my surprise this question stopped him cold. He looked confused for an instant, blinking down at the floor.

“I don’t know,” he said softly. “An accident of some sort. I can’t seem to recall.”

I watched his face for a time. I saw no cunning there.

“I can’t either,” I told him.

He said nothing to that. I propped myself against the wall between the doorway and the bed and waited for my body to recover. The horror of my situation was clear to me now: more convincing by far than the man on the bed, or the room we were in, or the labyrinth of trash to every side. The Timekeeper kept himself still, his dead eyes wide open, staring sadly past me into empty space.

LATER THAT NIGHT, in his empty apartment at the corner of 109th and Fifth Avenue (in a tenement house with the unlikely name of the General Lee), Orson laid out the cards, all fifty-four of them, in a crescent on the floor beside his desk. The power was out, a not-uncommon state of affairs in Harlem, and the six tallow candles he’d lit and stuck into bottles of Yuengling Draft bathed the scene in an appropriately pre-Enlightenment glow. He’d taken out a book from the library that he had no intention of returning— Tarock für Trotteln , by Yitzak W. Yitzak — and he read the introduction and first chapter before so much as glancing at the cards. The rules were still opaque to him, as much due to Herr Yitzak’s schnapps-addled prose as to anything else; but the history of the game held him entranced.