Time's Mistress

by Steven Savile

  He was trapped.

  He roared with frustration, lashing out at them, pushing the creatures—because they weren’t human, not anymore, they were all the things he had lost during his long and lonely life, his innocence, his hope, friends, loves, all of the things he had taken for granted and that had been wrenched away from him—back toward the walls, trying to force them back into the very earth they bled out of.

  He drove them back, slamming the flats of his hands into their hard shells. Each impact jarred some vague memory or guilt free as he pounded them with the full force of his fists, desperate to be free. And then a gap opened up among them and he ran without looking back. He saw blood on his clenched fists as he pumped his arms. He didn’t dare risk the mechanical escalator or the lift to the surface. He took the winding stair. One thousand and twenty three steps to the world above and then he was out, beyond the ticket barriers and into the street again.

  If anything the fog was worse now.

  He looked down at his open hand, half-expecting Jonas to take shape out of the thick grey stuff of the air and it all to begin again, another failure played out, but he didn’t.

  He didn’t know what to do. He had never made it this far. He didn’t know whether to walk or run, to hide or to try and find away over one of the bridges. It was growing increasingly difficult to breathe. The fog was choking the life out of him.

  He heard the damned whistling again, mocking him now.

  “He’s gone,” Meer cried out. “You can’t reach him now. He doesn’t have to move, doesn’t have to run. The train is taking him out beyond the fog. He isn’t going to die this time.”

  “Yes he is,” the whistler said. Somehow the man had come up right behind him without Meer hearing so much as a footstep through the broken bodies of the dead birds. They had stopped falling, he realised. The silence was somehow worse. “There’s nothing you can do to stop it. No last minute heroics. No salvation. He’ll die this time like every other time because outside of this place he is already dead. That monkey’s gone to heaven.”

  “No,” Meer said, denying the man. He didn’t say anything else.

  He felt rather than saw the whistler move. The man walked slowly around to face him, his footsteps measured and slow. He was carrying Meer’s wolf’s-head cane. He hadn’t even realised he has lost it. Meer looked up to see his own eyes and lips and hair and everything else looking back at him—but they weren’t the same, not quite. The whistler was in negative, the sunken hollows of his eyes darker than dark, the planes of his brow and ridge of his nose whiter than white—so much so they disappeared within the smog making the whistler look as though he were melting. “But then, so are you,” the whistler said. “This isn’t some fantastic place, some great blue heaven. This is in here,” he tapped at his temple. “None of it is real; it’s a construction, a fabrication, an illusion—all fancy words for the truth: it is a lie. Why do you think there is so much fog? Because there’s nothing beyond it. We’re standing in London on the brink of never—you’ve just sent your boy out into nothing. That, my ignorant friend, is what Hell is. Failing your boy again and again and again and having to live through it for all eternity because you keep thinking you can win. You can’t.”

  “That’s not true,” he said, but the words whispered away insidiously inside his mind. Could it be true?

  “Why do you think we always let the boy go? Why do you think we never try and stop you, only follow you?”

  He didn’t know.

  “Yes you do,” the whistler said, party to his thoughts as they raced. “I could try every door in this street and it wouldn’t open, but you, you just have to reach out and the stuff of hell forms behind it. That’s the nature of the Dreamer. You fashion. You move on, it ceases to be. We have to follow.”

  But if that were true … all he had to do was reach Jonas before he reached the end and disappeared into never.

  “You won’t find him, he’s gone, the train only goes so far down the tunnel then it simply ceases to be. He was on the train. That means he’s gone.”

  “Is this my punishment? My life dragging out slowly before my eyes while I … what? Die?”

  “You’re already dead. I told you.”

  “And this is hell?”

  “For you.”

  “There has to be a way out. Through the fog. Under it,” he looked up to the sky, “over it. I can’t go on watching him die. There has to be a way … ”

  “To win? No,” the whistler shook his head. “If you don’t believe me, look down.”

  He did. He hadn’t realised that he was clutching Jonas’ warm small hand so tightly. The boy looked up at him with his big trusting eyes.

  He wanted to scream.

  He picked the wheezing boy up, clutching him close to his chest. He was shaking. They both were. He looked up. The gargoyles were already there, starting to move along the gutters. He looked about frantically for an open door, pushing them as he moved down the street, working his way toward St. Martin’s in the Field, one of the oldest churches with a bell tower in the city.

  Time, he thought. Time. Looking up at the face of the huge clock on the side of the church, and seeing the tears in the sky where the gargoyles clawed their way through into this reality.

  There was nowhere to run where they could not find him. He knew that, and still he ran.

  He didn’t know where he was going until he was climbing the stairs of the old bell tower, his son clutched close to his chest, smothering up against his coat. The wind was fierce as he pushed open the door. For a moment he just stood there, stunned as the fog roiled beneath him. He strained to see beyond its tendrils, out over the rooftops and the river, but there was nothing to see.

  He didn’t want to know anymore. He didn’t want to hope. This was hell all right. He didn’t know what he had done to deserve it, but he would work it out eventually.

  Draydon Meer clambered over the railing and stood on the narrow ledge one hundred feet above the city though all he could see beneath him was fog. He brushed the hair away from his boy’s face and kissed him softly on the forehead.

  And then he stepped out into nothing, wondering if his mind would invent the pain for him. He wanted to hurt physically as well as mentally, even if it was only for a fraction of a heartbeat.

  There was no impact.

  For a moment there was nothing. It was as though they had been cocooned in the fog. The he heard the ethereal strains of conversation, other voices, other Eden’s, so far away from him it was all he could do to open his eyes and look down.

  He was alone, one the corner of Courtney Place, the streets lost to the Goddess of the Smog.

  He checked his watch. It was a little before eight. On the corner of the street a vendor was selling roasted chestnuts, beside him another was selling the daily rag. Meer reached into his pocket for coins and bought both. Hunger gnawed at him as he folded back the crease and saw the day’s date writ bold above the headline of the newspaper: December 9th, 1952. It took a moment for the significance of the numbers to sink in, then the fog that dampened his mind cleared and he remembered. It was the day his boy died. He looked at his fob watch again. He had time. A little more than an hour.

  And hope flared inside him as this stray voice that wasn’t quite his own whispered: “Perhaps this time you can save him?”

  All he knew at that moment was that he had to try.

  There wasn’t a father alive who would do anything else, not while there was still a chance.

  Before he knew it, he was running, his little boy’s hand in his, so desperately grateful for a second chance to break his own heart.

  ***

  Last Kisses

  Come here.

  Closer.

  That’s it. Don’t be shy. All the way in. Come on.

  I’ve got something to tell you.

  A secret.

  Ready?

  Love is a sickness.

  Never forget that.

  You’re young.
You probably think it’s all hearts and flowers and pretty girls’ smiles and broody boys and losing yourself in sad songs and thinking you’ll never find the one. Sure, it’s that, but it’s other stuff too. Stuff they don’t like to talk about.

  But me, I’m contrary. I like to talk. Talking is as close as some of us come to magic.

  Think of me as a magician. No. Make that the magician. And a kiss is my spell.

  Imagine a sickness capable of lighting the darkness and firing the heart, inspiring poets to pretty words and torturing time until it stands still. That’s the L word for you right there. There’s a reason it can move mountains; it’s the same reason it brings down kingdoms. It makes fools of all of us. And the magic of it is that all it takes is a single kiss.

  I have to admit I like love. I can work with it. It’s my favourite mischief-making tool. I mean who doesn’t want to catch fire? And what is love if not the whole world set on fire?

  Let me paint the scene: 1646 and all is far from well. England is deep in the throes of Civil War, which always amuses me because let’s be honest, there’s nothing civil about war, is there? Cromwell’s Roundheads (the bad guys if you like the Royal Family, they’re the whole rule by the people for the people mob) are making short shrift of the King’s men (England’s always had this thing for blue blood, don’t ask me why). It feels like forever since the Royalists last tasted victory, but then three years is a long time when you are fighting for your lives.

  Picture painted, enter our hero, a tricky young fellow with a passion for a certain Calvinist’s daughter.…

  If you didn’t catch the inference, that’d be me.

  O O O

  I’m a bad man. I’ve got the attention span of a newt and I’m drawn to shiny things. Frankly, life’s so much more interesting with a little mischief to liven things up.

  Like I said, she was only the Calvinist’s daughter, and if I was feeling a bit more creative I am sure I could come up with a bawdy little limerick to finish that little thought, but for now you’ll just have to settle for the boring old truth: she was a wee Scottish lassie, flaming red hair and a heart-shaped face.

  I remember the important things.

  I remember that it was the last time I was ever going to see her.

  She didn’t know that.

  She had dreams. They included me. The poor girl was in love.

  So was I, of course, but my love only lasted a few minutes before it flitted off to some other unlucky lovely. I won’t pretend it wasn’t a poignant moment. It was. Two hearts beat as one and all that nonsense. See, I can be sentimental too.

  I leaned down and touched her cheek, knowing all it would take was one last kiss to set it all motion. Grand plans. Cogs grind the gears that turn the wheels that keep the world running.

  How could I resist?

  You know me; I couldn’t.

  Well, no, let’s be honest. I didn’t want to. That’s different.

  So I did the deed and sealed it with a kiss, and that was that.

  She skipped out of the old barn and straight into—and under—the path of a coming horse. Horses will always try to avoid trampling someone, but the rider was an idiot and his manhandling caused the poor animal to kick out. Its hoof caught my red-haired lovely in the head. She didn’t die straight away. We carried her broken body back to the chapel and laid her down. I left her father to stand vigil. He waited six hours for her to go. As the life left her eyes he kissed his little girl farewell, and so my kiss was on his lips. See how it works?

  Greif took him to a house in the hills between his village and the next. The widow MaCallan lived there, and for a while he hid his grief in a kiss, a kiss is a kiss is a kiss.

  And so it went, in that last kiss, my tricky little kiss moved onto the lips of the widow MaCallan.

  Not that she kept it for long.

  She wasn’t that kind of woman. Within an hour there was another knock at the door.

  A young lad who come dawn would be escorting King Charles down south to Parliament where the New Model Army waited.

  And so my kiss went south.

  The who’s who is a little dull, and not frightfully important. Kisses came and kisses went, between men for the King and against, working their way finally to the King’s gaoler. It all gets a bit confusing, trying to keep track, but the important thing is where it ends up, not where it is in the middle.

  He had lips like warm steel. That’s the other thing I should have told you, I’m never truly gone from my kisses when I send them out into the world to do their thing. What’s the point of causing mischief if you’re not around to enjoy it?

  Remember what I told you right at the start? Love is a sickness. What I really meant is that it mutates like a virus. That first last kiss with the Calvinist’s daughter was full of hope and longing, the one she shared with her father loss and grief, and by the time it reached the widow MaCallan it was lust and hunger to drown out the loss, then it was fear of the unknown, and now as it reached the gaoler it had changed again. Now it was righteous anger at the tyrant who had ruled over us all. I’m rather pleased that my love is so versatile. Mother would be so proud.

  As is so often the case, fate sealed itself in the confessional when, plagued by the demons of doubt, the gaoler sought solace in the hands of God. In that holiest of holy rooms he confessed his fears, believing that the coming trial was a sham and that the King’s enemies had always intended to murder him.

  On bended knee, the gaoler kissed the Archbishop’s hand. And just like that that kiss of mine became a traitor’s kiss.

  The priest ran and didn’t stop running until he stood at the gates of Whitehall.

  He was too late.

  The scaffold was already being erected outside the Banqueting House. The King had refused to plead, insisting that the trial was illegal as he could do no wrong. He was the King. How could they accuse him of anything?

  For Cromwell that refusal was an admission of guilt.

  The priest begged to be allowed to see the King, who had been found guilty of all mischiefs that had afflicted the nation, which let’s be honest, was a bit much, considering a lot of the mischiefs were mine.

  But I’ve never been one to hog the limelight; if they wanted to give him credit for my hard work, well, so be it. Some of us are just meant to work away in the background doing what we do. We don’t expect the praise and the plaudits. Or something like that.

  They led the priest into the Banqueting House.

  He was the last man aside from the executioner to see the King alive.

  When he kissed the King my love became mercy.

  O O O

  Of course it didn’t feel a lot like mercy standing outside in the square with the crowd of onlookers come to watch the King lose his head.

  Funny how one little kiss could trigger a chain of events that only ended once they’d arrived at the executioner’s block. Cause and effect. Chains of reaction. But then, how many men have lost their heads over something as simple as a kiss? Don’t tell me you haven’t. I don’t believe you.

  As the axe came down a curious quiet settled over the mob. All it took was one clean stroke. There were no cheers. Beside me a young man stared at the headsman’s block. I could see immediately that like the Calvinist’s daughter he was a lynchpin. A man around whom great events twisted and turned like serpents. His name was Samuel Pepys. He was going to be remembered all the way through history as a great man, one who was there for so many huge moments in London’s history—moments he actually wrote about so the rest of the world could remember them. My kind of man, Sammy. How could I resist? I grabbed him by the face and kissed him. Not once. Twice. Once for the Lord Protector, the second for the Great Fire.

  Why kill one man when you can burn down an entire city?

  ***

  The Angel with the Sad Eyes

  “Did you ever wonder why Dante decided on nine levels, not say four or six or some other random number?” the voice from the television
screen asked. It wasn’t actually something I had thought about. I shook my head dutifully, waiting for it to go on and explain. “Hell on earth, right? That’s what it was all about. There are nine layers of sky above us: the troposphere, the stratosphere, the mesosphere, the thermosphere, the exosphere, the ionosphere, the magnetosphere, the homosphere and the hetrosphere. Nine layers of sky to parallel the nine layers of perdition and then, finally, the grand prize, hell on earth. Think about it, makes perfect sense.”

  I looked at the face of Damien distorted by the wide screen and reminded myself again why I loved him. He was anything but what you would call normal. He was grinning like a loon. I shook my head. This was so typically him. To stumble upon some stupid bit of science and realize it had some vague link to something else, in this case literature, and try to convince the rest of the world that he’d cracked the big secret, found the meaning of life. He didn’t appreciate it when I told him it had already been done. Lying in bed I’d whisper: “Forty-two” in his ear over and over. Some couples had romantic words of love they used for pillow talk—we had Douglas Adams.

  Damien’s last great spark of genius had been some nonsense about finding the frequency of ghosts. He’d read somewhere that the afterlife resonated in the crystalline structure, and made the leap that if you could somehow tap into the energy of a snowflake before it melted you could tune into the frequency of the dead. We ended up with a very wet attic that winter.

  I love Damien but I’m the first to admit he’s as nutty as a fruitcake. That’s one of the things I love most about him. Still love about him. My mother always used to say I collected misfits. He was my beloved misfit. His defense is that all great scientists are mad, that there is a fine line between genius and insanity. He constantly berated me for not thinking outside of the box when we were together.

  I hated myself for cheating on him. For destroying what we had. It wasn’t fair to him and it wasn’t fair to me. It wasn’t even a moment of weakness. More like a moment of gross stupidity.