Time's Mistress

by Steven Savile

  Did that make them ghosts?

  He walked down streets that would never know the moon falling silver across them, by windows that would never reflect midnight.

  Meer still hadn’t worked out why he continued to do this to himself. It was as though his life had become one of those elaborate Chinese finger puzzles—no matter how hard he pulled and worried at it, life only clung on all the more stubbornly. Always and forever was such a long and lonely time. That was the first lesson he had learned. He had thought that perhaps it was even more like a puzzle than he had guessed, that there was some trip or trigger or lesson he had to complete to move on to the next level and slip out of this Hell on earth. That would have given some sort of meaning to the meaningless, but there were no meanings, profound or otherwise. This memory of London was nothing more than existence flashing across the mind of a dying man, that instant of the bullet piercing the temple slowed down to a crawl.

  Was that even possible?

  Could there be a grain of truth in that old cliché of life flashing before your eyes?

  He shook his head. No. There was no truth in it. That much he knew for sure and certain. He had thought for a while that perhaps it was time itself that was broken. Meer remembered the scientists talking about time as a spiral and space as a curve and the way it all rolled out from some central point, the universe expanding until it reached that elastic breaking point and snapped back on itself, everything that had happened rolling back toward the beginning—life in reverse. But even that didn’t work, because that would only mean living through the same day twice, once clockwise, once counter.

  On the corner of Piccadilly and Regent Street he saw them. He had walked here in another life. It had been his boy’s favourite place because of the noise and the people and the bright lights and glass buildings of the Trocadero filled with amusement arcades. But of course, that was just another way in which this remembered city was wrong—the post war fog from before the Clean Air Bill juxtaposed with the bright shiny dome of an entertainment pavilion that wouldn’t be built for another fifty years. These were all just fragments of the London of his life.

  He reached out instinctively with his left hand to grasp his boy’s smaller one, and lifted him up into his arms. He weighed less than nothing. Meer hugged him fiercely, as though it might be the last time he could. This place had long since stopped being peculiar to Draydon Meer, but that he could simply think about his boy and reach out knowing Jonas would be there despite the fact that two paving slabs earlier he had been alone, well that kind of magic could never become common place.

  Meer felt their presence then. It was as familiar as it was vile. He shuddered at the first glimpse of them. He had come to think of them as gargoyles for all that they resembled the gothic stone guardians that watched over the city, but they were more than merely watchers. Across certain parts of the city they scoured the rooftops, the skittering of their claws on the slate tiles an ever-present, like the ruffling of starling feathers and the caw-caw of pigeons. They crawled through the high guttering, traversing the city unseen by those below. They weren’t gargoyles though; they were manifestations of his Id. The dark subconscious given wretched form. What that said about the inside of Draydon Meer’s head did not bear thinking about.

  They were always lurking around Eros, as though the blind love statue somehow drew them to it. Perhaps it did. They moaned; a low ululating sound that infused the fog with grief. At first they were no more substantial than the other shapes in the mist, but this time as he neared they did not dissipate but rather took on solid form, scuttling forward on hands and knees menacingly. Their grossly malformed heads twisted left and right, nostrils flaring as they breathed in the cloying smog. As one their eyes came around to stare balefully at his boy.

  Fight or flight was what it always came down to. The gargoyles clawed their way relentlessly forward, stony eyes fixed on Jonas. The slow drag of their talons on the pavement grated on his nerves. They fixated on the boy because he wasn’t meant to be here. He was wrong. Time was like that, it tried again and again to heal itself. It didn’t take a genius to understand it. Some things were meant to happen and the world would do its damnedest to make sure they did. Jonas’ death was one of those things.

  December 9th, 1952. The day was etched onto his soul. It was right in the middle of the worst of the great smogs that had smothered the post-war city. Guys and the other hospitals were overflowing, cars and busses abandoned in the middle of the road. Ambulances led by the drivers holding blazing torches took five hours to carry the sick to the emergency rooms, becoming hearses along the way. Jonas had asthma. His windpipe had closed up as panic closed in, choking the life out of his rag doll body. Meer had held him in his arms, screaming for the ambulance. He leaned up against the metal railings, part of him struck by the irony that those same railings had once been a part of stretchers used to carry the wounded and the dying during the war. When it had finally arrived there had been no oxygen left and seven other people dead and dying inside. The ambulance men had laid Jonas on his side on the floor, not even on a pallet, and told him they had two more pick-ups to make. Meer realised sickly that he had wasted three precious hours that he could never get back and killed his own son in the process. Had he carried him in his arms the five miles across the city he might have made it.

  There hadn’t been any gargoyles that day, at least none that crawled and slithered through the fog.

  They had barely moved at one mile an hour, the driver too frightened of what he might hit in the fog. Jonas died in his arms, a sad, wheezing, frightened death looking up at him begging Meer to do something to save him.

  And now every day he relived December 9th, 1952, he tried to find another way to save his son. He checked his watch, taking the gold fob from his pocket and studying it. Twelve minutes past nine. Jonas had lived eighteen minutes longer than the last time they had walked this way. They had made it this long before. He knew what would happen next. On the stroke of the quarter hour Menlough would appear. Menlough was worse than the gargoyles of his Id by far. Menlough was a reaper. Emaciated and unreasonably tall, Menlough was a clockwork golem, constructed from rusted iron and tarnished brass. Where the wind blew back the tails of his coats it exposed his green heart of cogs and staves instead of flesh and bones. Meer didn’t know where Menlough came from, but the significance of the mechanisms was painfully clear. Time, time, time. They had had too long together, Jonas had to go.

  He let go of his son’s hand, knowing it was the last time he would feel its tiny warm presence before their time ran out. The next time he held it that hand would be cold.

  “Go! No, not that way, there!” Meer pointed down one of the narrow alleyways that disappeared toward Soho. He had tried saving his son in a hundred different ways, some he had forgotten, and he had tried a thousand variants, clutching the boy to his chest, carrying him through the fog, his sadness salty on his cheek. He had tried to fight Menlough and his kind off but they were remorseless. He had tried to hide, hoping the world would end around him, but then the first bird had fallen from the sky. It had been a sign of the creeping death. He had watched the starling fall. It was always the first. Other birds fell in their hundreds and thousands to turn the street to feather and bone, but the starling was always the first. The tiny creature lay twisted. Its wings were broken. The bird’s blind eyes gazed up at the sky dreaming of avian angels come to carry them home. It had taken him a dozen failures to realise the gargoyles were responsible—and it took him a moment more to realise that he was looking down at one of the wretched creatures now. The end was closing in on them.

  He heard the soft flutter of another bird falling and then the flurry of frightened wings and the distant drum of carcass after carcass coming down. He couldn’t see them because of the fog but that didn’t make the sounds any less horrific.

  He stumbled forward, trying to draw Menlough away from his boy. “Here! Come here!” Meer flapped his arms, making a show of him
self. The creature inclined its mechanical head, the sound of the gears grating loudly. The clockwork man wasn’t alone. Out of the mists eight more of his brethren glided, their feet barely seeming to move as they closed in on Meer. He knew each and every one of them and had come to think of Menlough and his brothers as the Infernals, each somehow representing another Dantesque level to this hell of his. Menlough’s twin Kai Seda, was elemental where his brother was elegant, his fine cogs and gears moving in their intricate dance as he emerged from the smog. Fire blazed in the heart of Arak Shai, the one he thought of as the torturer. He had good reason. A thousand times he had found her leaning down over his boy, the oil of her mechanisms dripping like acid onto Jonas’ grey face. Her silks followed the contours of her body, rippling with the turgid breeze. They moved silently, like ghosts. Footfalls would have been a blessed relief. There was none of the coarseness of Kai Seda or disfiguration of Kor Luca. Her body was perfect in its grotesqueness. The others drifted into the square, taking up positions around the statue. They were the demons of this place.

  None of them moved to stop Jonas as he ran between them.

  They never did.

  Meer had tried killing himself but that didn’t help. He slid the knife in, eyes flaring as it fell through his fingers because even as they glazed over the smog began to clear and the pain began to fade. The knife never hit the floor. It simply ceased to be in this city fantastique of his mind, this personal hell he confined himself to.

  That was what it was, he knew—or at least some detached part of his sub-conscious did. He was in hell, his own personal hell. It wasn’t brimstone and flame for him, no ice, there was merely too little time and a dying boy. There didn’t need to be any more than that to make it unbearable. What could be worse than walking empty fog-wreathed streets clutching his dying boy? Hell did not need the gribblies or the sabre-toothed gwars. It didn’t need anything—because nothing was so much more frightening.

  Above him he heard the crackle of static as speakers mounted into the walls crackled into life. They made him jump every time. And the damned whistling! Meer turned round and around again, trying to see where the whistling came from. It was an old war melody being whistled off-key. A moment later he heard the singing, a dry old voice telling him that: “While you’ve a lucifer to light your fag, smile, boys, that’s the style.” It was just another peculiarity of this London he had conjured … a song from fifty years ago meant to keep the spirits of the troops up while shells and shrapnel rained down on them. Here, now, it was anything but inspiring. The refrain ate away at him with its demand that he smile, smile, smile, knowing as he did that there was nothing left to smile about.

  The Infernals never spoke—they had no means of projecting words, only the ceaseless tick tock tick tock of their mechanisms. The singer had to be human or at least more mundane than gargoyles or tin pot demons.

  “Where are you?” Meer yelled, earning himself those same seven lines over and over again. “What’s the use of worrying?” It taunted, and then up close, so close he could feel the prickle of breath in his ear, “Just smile, smile, smile.”

  He lurched forward a stumbling step and spun around.

  There was no one there.

  There never was.

  A part of Draydon Meer suspected he was the mysterious singer—or just another part of him was. No matter how desperately he wanted there to be another being of flesh and blood trapped in this hellish rendition of London with him, he knew he was alone.

  He plunged headlong into the fog, running away from the singer, away from the Infernals, toward nowhere, because sometimes nowhere was the best place to be.

  He ran down into the ground, staggering down the steps into the Underground. Immediately the quality of the air changed. It was dead air down here, stale and deoxygenated. He thought he saw shadow shapes moving in front of him. He struggled to hear the slap of footsteps on the cold tiles of the tunnel’s floor. The old wooden escalators groaned and wheezed as they lumbered up and down the steep descent. The air smelled of … yesterday. That was the only way he could think of it. “Jonas? Jonas is that you?”

  The boy didn’t answer.

  Meer took his fop watch out of his pocket again and checked the time. Only four minutes had past. Two hundred and forty seconds. Next to no time, and yet … too much time. Old posters for cigarettes and alcohol lined the sides of the tunnel. The white tiles were smeared black with soot where the creative bill-stickers hadn’t already glued up their adverts.

  He heard the whistle of the train—a long, low lament that echoed mournfully down the tracks. He had never seen the train. He heard the steel wheels driving over the track. Heard the screech of the iron breaks and the blare of the horn, but he never saw the train.

  He was always too late.

  Not today, he promised himself.

  “Run, Jonas! Get on the train! Don’t wait for me!” He yelled, hoping the boy would do as he was told, and knowing even as he yelled that the increased exertion from all of the running and the poor quality of the air was going to kill his son. He wouldn’t even reach the platform before he stumbled and fell, wheezing and unable to catch his breath as panic choked the life out of him.

  He looked over his shoulder. There were no signs of any of the Infernals. They, like the gargoyles, belonged to London above, not London below. Down here was the realm of the Disenfranchised—the Lost Boys and Girls of London—though they were anything but the gang of Pan’s delinquents the name suggested. The city was every bit as harsh a place as it was fantastic. The Disenfranchised were truly that, lost, spiritually and physically. They were the closest things to ghosts the city had to offer. They were invisible to polite society, wretched souls that clung to the dark places, hiding out in the shadows. Meer ran hard, arms and legs pumping. His feet slipped on the slick floor tiles, his head filled with that damned order to smile, smile, smile. They would be here in less than a minute.

  He careened around the bend, grasping the banister and taking the stairs worn smooth by the shuffle of countless feet three and four at a time before he jumped the rest of the way to the bottom.

  There was no sign of Jonas.

  The silver shell of the train however was nestled up against the platform, its doors open invitingly.

  It was less than fifty feet from where he was to the safety of the train. Safety: that was how he thought of the train. It wasn’t a part of the city. It rumbled eternally on beneath it, going to places beyond the fog. Outside. That was all he could think about—that was all his world came down to— getting the boy outside of the city. The fog would be receding already five miles outside of the Square Mile, the East End and the River. It rose from the river first and slipped and slithered through the still-dreaming streets, and when it finally relinquished its choking hold the streets around the riverbanks were always the last to be freed. That was the way of it. Southwalk, Rotherhithe, Wapping and Mill Pond would be the last bastions of the fog. The train would carry them out beyond that, to breathable air.

  Breathing hard he ran for it.

  Behind him he heard the sighs of the Disenfranchised freeing themselves of their prisons.

  A valve hissed somewhere and the doors slid closed. He hit them full on, trying to pry them open with his fingers as the carriage lurched away from the platform. He ran alongside it, pulling at the door but the mechanism refused to give. For ten feet more the train dragged him along the platform, his shoes slipping and sliding across the ceramic floor, and then it spat him out and he went sprawling. He hit the ground hard and lay there gasping.

  He saw Jonas’ face pressed up against the glass window, his boy being carried away from him. He didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

  Meer lay on his side, gasping.

  The Disenfranchised gathered around him, clawing at his clothes, at his pockets and at his face and hands, looking to take from him everything he had. He didn’t care. They could not reach the one thing he cared about. He watched the back of th
e train disappear slowly into the dark tunnel as they stripped him.

  He didn’t care what they did to him. They could kill him—strip the flesh from his bones with their filed-down teeth if they wanted to, Jonas was free. He would be out beyond the reach of the fog in air he could breathe and there was nothing any of them, not the Infernals, the gargoyles, the Disenfranchised or even the whistler could do to prevent that.

  For once Meer did smile.

  Then a sliver of fear wormed its way into his mind as he heard the fabric tear beneath grubby fingers. What if he died? Would it all reset? Would he find himself back out there on the foggy streets looking for a way to save his son? Would death snatch defeat from the jaws of victory or would the world end with Jonas free and alive anyway? Because what father wouldn’t sacrifice himself for his own boy if that was what it came down to?

  Their faces were weird, as though they were plastered with the advertising bills, crusted images of pin-up models, lipstick girls and cigarette smoking heroes forming the features of damned. He had never seen them up close before. As he struggled to roll over onto his stomach and stand he saw more of them pushing their way out of the tunnel walls. The tiles cracked and the posters tore as the Disenfranchised tore themselves free of the physical stuff of the city—the very dirt of the place—and shuffled toward the tunnels to block his exit. Low ululating moans escaped their chipped and brittle lips as they swayed, arms outstretched, grasping.

  Draydon Meer scrambled to his feet, pushing them away from him. There was nowhere to run, not along the tracks after the train or back up the tunnels toward the surface.