by April White
Ringo boosted me up to the top of the wall and scurried up after me. I could barely breathe with the shock that coursed through me at the view of Elian Manor. It was deserted and in a state of decay that told of years of emptiness.
Weeds grew up through the paving stones in the driveway and paint peeled off the window frames. The door was locked and all the windows had been shuttered. Between the two of us and a long stick, we were able to lever the heavy cellar door open.
The light from my Maglite sent things skittering into the darkness, and except for spiders and whatever was attached to the beady eyes that glowed from the corners, the cellar was empty. The kitchen door at the top of the stairs was also locked, but Ringo used a brick to break the lock, and we slipped silently into the shadowy room.
“No one has been here for years,” I whispered. Both the whisper and the statement were unnecessary given the emptiness of the room. Ringo went to the butler’s pantry and opened a cabinet.
“The good china’s gone, but the everyday stuff is still ‘ere.”
There were still pots and pans as well, but nothing to suggest anyone had cooked in the kitchen for a very long time.
Our tour of the rest of the house was much the same. Big white sheets covered the furniture to protect it from dust, and clothes still lived in all the closets except the ones in Millicent’s bedroom. Those closets were empty and the room was bare. My mother’s old bedroom, the one I had moved into, looked just the same as it had the first time I’d seen it. I unlocked the cabinet where I’d found her drawings of Bedlam and my father. They were still there.
Which meant I hadn’t taken them.
As deeply disturbing as the empty manor house was, the fact that my mother’s drawings were still locked in a cabinet meant that I’d never retrieved them, and without those drawings, I wouldn’t have been able to meet my dad or rescue my mom.
Ringo found me in that bedroom, staring at the drawings which I had lain out on the bed. He had been exploring the rest of the house, and his simple pronouncement made everything so clear.
“The last date I could find that anyone might ‘ave lived ‘ere was 1967. There was an obituary for Tallulah Elian, and a notice, signed by Mrs. Millicent Mulroy, for the termination of the staff.
“Millicent Mulroy?” I breathed. “She married her pilot.” I stared at Ringo with wide eyes.
He nodded, his expression more solemn than I’d ever seen.
“Time has split.”
I Clocked us into Archer’s cellar room at St. Bridgid’s School with the breath-holding hope of Christmas morning and the wincing anticipation of a horror film. But I knew what I would see even before my eyes adjusted to the dark. The air in the cellar annex was stale and musty from moth-eaten carpets rolled in a corner. Empty bookcases were stacked against a wall and tables lay inverted on top of each other with their feet in the air like giant dead bugs. I didn’t even need to use my Maglite to find the four-poster bed at the far end of the space. The curtain was drawn back and the mattress was missing, which made the bedframe with its wooden slats look like the ribcage of a skeleton.
Ringo clicked on his Maglite and swept the room slowly as I strode back to where he stood at the spiral. It was the old one that had been scratched into the original plaster wall, not the chalk spiral I had drawn in this space at Archer’s request.
“’E never lived ‘ere after the war, did ‘e?” Ringo’s voice sounded hollow in the lifeless room.
“No, he never did.”
“I Saw you come,” Miss Simpson said when I found her in her office. School wasn’t in session yet, as it was still the tail end of summer, but Miss Simpson was already there getting ready for the new term.
There was no smile of welcome when Ringo and I knocked on her door, and only the barest hint of recognition in her eyes at the sight of us.
“Do you know me?” I asked quietly.
“You’re a Clocker. We don’t get many of you at St. Brigids.”
“Many?” I had been the only one.
“We have two Mulroys and a MacFarlane this term, so no, that’s not many.”
Two Mulroys. Millicent’s … grandchildren? Ms. Simpson studied me as I processed her words. “What did you See about us?” I asked her.
“You were gathering information here at school, finding allies. You won’t stay long, but in the end, you’ll destroy us.” Miss Simpson smiled at that.
“Why does that make you happy?” I asked her with the little breath I had left.
Miss Simpson’s eyes looked dreamy as she recited.
“Because out of the ashes the phoenix will rise.
The truth will be born, where before there were lies.
And one line will live when the other one dies.”
The key was where I’d originally found it on the lintel above the door to the Clocker Tower, which was deserted with no sign that I had ever been there or made it my own. Ringo locked the door behind us as I crossed to the painting and drew back the drapes.
The London Bridge was just as it had always been, the Clocker spirals painted in with swirls of paint. I traced a swirl with one finger absently, as Ringo stood behind me near the desk.
“You have no history here, neither of you.” A voice came from the doorway, and I didn’t turn.
“I wondered if you’d come, Doran,” I said, my eyes still on the painting.
“This time stream you created is not so easy to navigate. I wasn’t sure I’d find you,” he said with no irony at all.
“I created?” I stared at him, incredulous.
“Don’t put this on Saira.” Ringo was indignant enough for both of us. I finally turned to face my cousin, who had entered the room. Doran looked slightly disheveled, which was odd enough for him that I looked closer.
“What’s wrong with you?” I asked him.
He grinned wryly. “Well, the wreckage you left behind in London was more than even I could sift through for something so small as the Monger ring.”
I stared at him. “Did you find it?”
He shook his head with a grimace. “If it remains intact, it has become a needle in a haystack.”
“If it does? You mean it could be gone? No more Monger ring?”
He looked oddly serious. “The Mongers no longer have the power to compel, and in fact, their power has been crushed.”
“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?”
“I suppose it depends who you talk to, doesn’t it?” His words were flippant, but his tone was utterly serious.
His mood seemed to match mine, and I shrugged. “Doesn’t matter without Archer.”
“Ah yes, your Victorian Vamp. Sadly, there was no sign of him in the rubble either.”
I felt my fists clench by my sides. “He doesn’t deserve your disrespect. He was a better man than you’ll ever be, Doran.” I ground the words out through my teeth.
“But why do you speak in past tense?”
Ringo stared at Doran. “Because ‘e died in 1944.”
“Yes, but time split the moment that bomb went off. There are now two time streams, and on one of them you have a history with the Vampire.”
I gasped. “How do I get there? Can I just go back before the split and then Clock forward again?”
He looked pityingly at me. “Saira, you know better than that. When young Henry split time in France, you had to go back and repair the split before you had access to the true time stream.”
“But we were there when it split! I can’t be in the same time as myself.”
“I suppose that’s a conundrum then, isn’t it?”
“And you’re not going to tell me how to fix things, are you?” I could feel a very familiar anger rise up – the same anger Doran inspired every time he dropped into my world and scattered bits of information like breadcrumbs for the birds to eat before I could follow them.
“My aunt would be rather disappointed in me if I did that, but then she has already given you a clue, hasn’t she?”
> My eyes narrowed as I considered his words. “Your aunt is Miss Simpson? Are you a Seer too?”
“Of course not. My mix is dangerous enough to my health without adding another Family to the recipe. I’ll leave you with this though, dear cousin: as with nature, everything needs a check and a balance, or a yin and a yang, if you will. Just as your Vampire gives you balance, so, too, does weakness offer balance to power, or the bad balance the good. There is no possibility for color in a world where everything is black or white. Only in shades of gray does an opportunity exist to find the rainbow.”
With that, Doran stepped forward, past Ringo, to kiss me on the cheek. “Congratulations on your marriage, Cousin. I do hope you find your happiness,” he whispered, just before he stepped through the painting and disappeared.
“Well, that was spectacularly un’elpful.” Ringo sounded disgusted, which was my usual reaction to Doran’s visits. But I was still reeling from the hope his words had ignited in me. Archer had existed on the time stream where we met and he was still there. I just had to figure out how to get back to him.
“No. For once, Doran gave me something useful.” I looked my friend in the eyes and promised, “Archer’s out there, on the true time stream, and we’re going to find a way back to him.”
Epilogue – Archer
The bullet wounds in my chest wouldn’t heal without the blood my body had begun to crave. It had been too long since I’d last fed, and I knew it would require so much more than either of my companions could give without killing them.
Connor’s Wolf lay in a coma next to me, his heat a balm to the chill that had begun to creep through my veins. Blood had soaked my shirt and was beginning to pool under me. I looked for Tam, who had taken my Maglite, the habit to carry one courtesy of my association with my wife, and was exploring the back of the passage.
“They stored their own food and water here. There’s probably enough for about a week or two if we ration.”
My voice croaked with dehydration when I spoke. “Don’t touch my blood, or let Connor touch it. He’ll heal better if he stays Wolf, but don’t let him get thirsty.”
Tam cocked his head at me like a dog does, and I wondered what the rest of his mix was in addition to Seer. “You sound like you’re going somewhere.”
I slipped my hand into my pocket and pulled out the little silk wrapping I carried there. My fingers fumbled with the ties as I removed the little syringe Shaw had given me.
“Tell Connor when he wakes that I tried his cure. Tell him I’ve lost enough blood that it may work.”
I uncapped the syringe and rolled up my sleeve with trembling fingers. “Eventually I’d get hungry enough that I’d go feral and kill you for your blood,” I told him without meeting his eyes. “I saw it happen to a friend of mine.” The syringe slipped from my fingers twice until finally it rolled out of reach. I choked back the sob of frustration in my voice. “Can you … help me?”
He searched my eyes for a long moment, the truth of what I said sinking in. “You’re a Sucker.”
I nodded. He considered me another moment, then apparently made a decision, because he moved to pick up the syringe. I barked at him, “Not with your skin.” Tam nodded and used the clean silk bandage to pick up the barrel of the needle. He knelt beside me.
“Let me do it,” he said.
My breath was coming in ragged gasps and I nodded helplessly. “A vein,” I remembered to tell him. He carefully cleaned a spot on my arm, then pushed the needle under my skin.
“If you see my wife, tell her she was the only thing I saw at the end.”
He looked strangely at me, his finger already in the process of pressing the plunger on the syringe. “I thought you said this was the cure.”
Fire began to crawl up my arm. It coursed through my veins with every pump of my heart, and I closed my eyes as if the sun burned behind them. I was in agony, and completely at peace. I whispered with the last of my breath.
“It is.”
A burnt out car in Oradour-sur-Glane. (photo credit: TwoWings, CC BY-SA Wikimedia Commons)
A Note about the History
It may be an obvious thing to set a book about the Immortal Descendants of War during the deadliest war in human history, and I actually did consider other conflicts first because it was so obvious. But I’ve always been fascinated by World War II – its causes, its effects, and its extraordinary heroes and villains. My mother was born during the war in a tiny German village in what is now part of Poland. She was six months old when her mother fled the village on foot with her three children, twelve hours ahead of the Russian army. My mom’s memories of childhood in the aftermath of war, living in poverty, battling stomach tuberculosis caused by malnutrition – those were stories that I grew up with.
The German atrocities are well recorded, though until I began to research the setting for Waging War, I had never heard of the massacre at Oradour-sur-Glane. It is a small village near Limoges, France, and the remains of it still stand as a memorial to the events of June 10th, 1944. Accounts of the events surrounding the massacre from various sources including court records, German soldiers, and the few French survivors generally agree that a burned-out ambulance was discovered by a troop of German soldiers who had been searching for Sturmbahnführer Kämpfe, who was kidnapped and ultimately killed by the local Maquis. The Maquis had been effectively harassing the 2nd SS Panzer Division on its way to Normandy, and the journey, which should have taken four days, took seventeen, thus allowing the Allies to solidify their presence in northern France after D-Day. The massacre appears to have occurred as reprisal for this Maquis activity.
As the Germans conducted a house-to-house search of the village looking for caches of Maquis weapons, they rounded up the men into the village square and sent the women and children to the church for “safekeeping.” There was a small explosion inside the church (sources disagree as to whether it was caused by soldiers or by someone from the Maquis), Germans began shooting, and in the end, nearly every woman and child in the church was dead, either from gunshots or from the subsequent fire.
The men, who had been moved into several barns around the village square, were shot to death by German soldiers. The village was then looted and burned. In the end, 642 French civilians were murdered in Oradour-sur-Glane. It is the deadliest massacre in French history.
The village was targeted when two French collaborators went to the Germans with inaccurate information that Kämpfe was being held there and would be burned to death, though apparently he was already dead by then in another village. In the subsequent war crimes trial, the German soldiers claimed that the massacre was legal under the Geneva Convention as a reprisal against the extensive Maquis activity in the area. Their commanding officer, who had ordered the reprisal, had been killed in the war.
Although there were approximately 40,000 French people convicted of collaborating with the Germans during World War II, there were also about 40,000 French resistance fighters who blew up bridges, derailed trains, rescued British and American pilots, ambushed German troops, and killed any German soldiers who surrendered to them. The British Special Operations Executive (SOE) was formed by Churchill in 1940 to wage a secret war against Germany on the continent. The SOE provided weapons, short-wave radios, money, and trained spies to the French resistance efforts.
Nancy Wake was an SOE agent whose French husband had been tortured and killed by the Gestapo in an attempt to determine her whereabouts. Nancy was nicknamed the White Mouse because she excelled in evading capture. On her first night with Gaspard, the local Maquis leader in the Limousin area, she overheard him tell his men to kill her and take her money. She survived by declaring that she was the only one with the codes for the weapons and money drops, and if they killed her, they’d get nothing from the English. She went on to lead a network of over 7,000 Maquisards as they conducted numerous attacks against German installations, and she once rode nearly 500 kilometers on a bicycle to replace codes her wireless operat
or had been forced to destroy. Nancy Wake was one of many extraordinary women who fought with the French resistance and were instrumental in helping the Allies win the war in Europe.
London was bombed for 57 consecutive nights during the Blitz of 1940, and bombings continued sporadically for the next five years. On June 12th, 1944 the first V-1 rocket was launched against London. The Doodlebug or Buzzbee, as it was called, made a very distinctive “whirring” sound, and my lovely neighbor Madeline remembers running out of the shelter as a seven-year-old Londoner to listen to them. Ben Aronovitch, in his fantastic book series The Rivers of London, describes the architecture of the modern city as the result of the air raids. There are neighborhoods where old Victorian and Georgian buildings stand sandwiched between concrete monstrosities that were built on bomb sites in the 1950s. The eclectic nature of London’s landscape is the direct result of the German bombing.
The efforts of the Bletchley Park codebreakers did, by some estimates, shorten the war by two years and saved countless lives, yet their work remained unknown outside intelligence circles until 1974. Alan Turing’s remarkable work mechanizing the breaking of the Enigma code was documented in the Academy Award-winning (and excellent) film The Imitation Game. The film also provides tremendous insight into the lives of the men and women who worked in total secrecy and whose war efforts went largely unrecognized until thirty years later. When I visited Bletchley Park, several of the film’s sets were still on display, and the props and set dressing were incredibly helpful in bringing to life the mansion and the huts as they were during the war.
The British Secret Intelligence Service did order all but two of the Colossus machines destroyed at the end of the war, but continued to use the last two to break the Lorenz cipher, which remained in use by the USSR for nearly twenty years. When that fact was made known to the Soviets, the remaining Colossus machines were broken up and “thrown down a coal hole,” according to a docent at Bletchley Park. Not only was Colossus instrumental in breaking the code of the German high command, it was the world’s first computing machine and would have put the UK at the forefront of computer technology if its designers had been allowed to talk about it.