Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych) (16 page)

He’d blown it to pieces the following year. Part of the Eidolons’ blood price in exchange for destroying an invasion fleet. Will had begun to drink before then, but I think that was the night that broke him. After that, the Eidolons’ relentless demands for blood and slaughter hastened his decline. And relentless they were, for every drop spilled was another piece of the map, another Eidolonic fingerhold into our world. Thus Will and the others set fires, sank barges, even derailed a train. Atrocities committed against our own countrymen, all to fuel Milkweed’s secret war against the Götterelektrongruppe.

I shook my head. Nothing I could do about it right now. I’d fix it when Will returned. What was one more item on the ever-growing list of things to put right this time round? Didn’t seem to matter much at this point. The sodding list was already absurd.

My scars got looks, of course. By now I’d grown accustomed to the double takes, the stares, and the way people conspicuously looked at anything other than the ruined side of my face. But I discovered a bright side to looking like a wounded veteran.

The war dominated most conversations. And they took an optimistic tone, for the most part. The BEF was still putting up a fight on the Continent; most folks believed things would turn around once the French recovered from the Jerries’ underhanded evasion of the Maginot Line. We had a new Prime Minister, one who clearly understood the Fascist threat. The possibility of complete and utter disaster hadn’t yet penetrated the national psyche. Standing alone against our enemies hadn’t yet become a grim possibility. We hadn’t yet lost an army at Dunkirk.

And so it didn’t take long before the conversation at the bar turned to the last time we beat the Boche. From there it was just a few pints before somebody approached the old duffer with the scars.

“You a vet, mister?”

“Yeah.”

“Great War?”

I started to shake my head, but caught myself. I was the right age for a veteran of the previous war. So instead, I nodded. “Royal Flying Corps.”

“You were a pilot?” More men gathered round. The entire country hungered for good war stories. And there was nobody more flash than an ace.

“Yeah.”

One fellow said, proudly, “My son is in the RAF. He’ll give the Jerries what for.”

“God bless him,” I said, raising my glass. “God bless all the fighting boys.” We drank to that.

“What’d you do, sir, if you don’t mind saying?”

“Flew reconnaissance for three years. We stuck a camera under my Bristol”—I set down my pint, to better explain with my hands—“then I flew over enemy territory. Snapped troop movements, artillery emplacements, and such.”

“Get shot at?”

“All the bloody time. Spent more time patching holes than I did in the cockpit.” That got a laugh. “Once had a round come up through the seat and snap off my goggles.”

“It didn’t.”

“Still have the pair to prove it,” I said.

“Do any dogfighting?”

I shrugged. “Saw some combat.”

“How about von Richthofen? You ever fight him?”

“Red Baron? I’m still here, aren’t I?”

That got another laugh from the group. Somebody slapped me on the back.

“Ever get shot down?”

The bloke who asked this got a couple of dark looks, but I pretended not to notice. “Austrians got me. Shredded my plane out from under me, sent me spiraling down. God I loved that Bristol. I aimed for no-man’s-land.” I swigged from my pint and set the empty glass on the bar. “Woke up in a field hospital. That’s how I got these,” I said, pointing to the burn scars on my face. That broke the ice, when they saw I wasn’t shy about my experiences.

True story, almost every bit of it. Replace the burns with an amputated arm, and you had the story of my mentor, John Stephenson. He’d shown me the goggles.

I couldn’t very well tell them the truth, could I?

Kept as close to the old man’s exploits as I could. I could spin the story well and do justice to the old man’s service. He didn’t talk much about the old days, but I listened when he did. Usually over a brandy or three.

I wouldn’t have done this if I weren’t a vet. I might not have had any respect left for myself but I still respected the men in uniform. And I
was
a veteran. Of a secret war. And battles that hadn’t happened yet, or perhaps would never happen in this new history.

And I’d been having a shit time of things for as long as I could remember. It was nice to be appreciated, just for a little while, and even if it weren’t for the things I’d actually done for King and Country. It was good to have the gratitude of a few countrymen.

The details were irrelevant. I told Stephenson’s story as a substitute for my own experiences, but it was my anguish that came out in the telling.

The fellow who’d first asked me about the war shook my hand. “You done the country proud, sir. Thank you.”

And, God love them, the other fellows raised their pints to me. Nobody had ever thanked me for my service. Very few people knew the truth of what I had done and endured and suffered for the sake of Britain. But even they had never said a kind word about it. Not even the old man. I dug out a handkerchief and pretended to blow my nose so my new mates wouldn’t see the water in my eyes.

But I couldn’t help it. I was so goddamn lonely.

By the third pint I was feeling less constricted, less crushed by the weight of my responsibilities. Even played a few rounds of darts. My game was rubbish. But, God … getting pissed with a few mates, ignoring my worries for a short while … I couldn’t say how long it had been since I’d done that. I’d started spending time in pubs after the trouble started with Liv and our son, John, but that had always been a furtive escape. Not genuine relaxation.

The barman clicked on the wireless a couple of minutes before six o’clock, giving the valves time to warm up before the BBC news. We suspended our dart game; conversations fell to whispers as the clock chimed.

“Here is the
Six O’clock News,
and this is Alvar Lidell reading it. German forces continued to cross the Meuse River today, pressing into France via bridgeheads established at Sedan and Dinant. After four o’clock today, the French Ninth and Second Armies were less than seventy-five miles apart. General Gamelin stated…”

I finished my pint while the others listened. Didn’t need to hear the broadcast. The Jerries would rout us, then slaughter the Tommies while they tried to evacuate. Hitler would make the French sign their surrender in the same railway carriage where the Kaiser’s men had signed their surrender to end the First World War.

Nothing I could do about any of that. I’d traveled through time to stop the destruction of the world, but I couldn’t work miracles. The world didn’t spin according to my whims. I couldn’t change the course of the war with a wink and a whisper. I wasn’t Gretel.

Guess I’d lost track of my pints, because somebody asked, “Who’s Gretel, then?”

“The gypsy witch behind all of this,” I said, waving my arm and spilling foam on the bar. “We’re all just puppets to her. Fucking Punch and Judy. That’s us.”

Maybe I had relaxed too much. No matter; they chalked it up to the old duffer being deep in his cups. Which I was, though that was beside the point. They still talked to me, still treated me like a human being. And for that I was grateful. I could have stayed all evening.

Though it was still raining, I opted to walk back to the warehouse rather than pay for a taxi. Tomorrow’s errand would be expensive. I stripped out of my sodden clothes and immediately began to shiver in that drafty space. So I tipped the contents of my briefcase into an empty barrel, and set fire to the former contents of the Milkweed vault.

And nearly set myself ablaze. The fire was more energetic than I’d anticipated. The original fragments from Krasnopolsky merely melted, cracked, and gave off the smell of vinegar. Cellulose acetate. But Lorimer had apparently put the reconstructed Tarragona filmstrip onto cellulose nitrate film stock. The reel went up like a bloody Roman candle. Would’ve lost my eyebrows had I been a bit slower on my feet. I’d suffered enough burns for one lifetime.

A plume of blue-black smoke roiled from the barrel and wafted along the drafts swirling through the warehouse. It stung my eyes. But the flames provided warmth, so I endured the smoke while changing into dry clothes.

I couldn’t burn Gretel’s battery. Didn’t want to bother taking it apart, either. Reckoned it was a regular witch’s brew of corrosives and Lord only knew what else. Instead, I took the damn thing down to the jetty and hurled it into the Thames. It sailed into the night, then hit the dark water with a
splash
and
kerplunk.
And sank, I hoped forever, from the realm of human affairs.

*

The next morning, I gathered all the cash remaining from what I’d nicked out of the Anderson shelter and headed to Whitechapel. Fairclough Street was the place to go for illicit, contraband, or otherwise illegal purchases. Stephenson got his American tobacco from the black market here. This was also where Will had bought his morphine when alcohol could no longer numb the pain of fulfilling the Eidolons’ demands for blood.

I brought my doppelgänger’s ID card. The forgery cost me a substantial sum. It was a solid, though: the fence had a set of blank cards, the real thing, taken straight out of the National Registration Office. Didn’t ask how that had been arranged. He even replicated the date stamps, and smudged them as in the original. I reproduced the original cardholder’s signature easily enough, since it was my own. The cards didn’t record the holders’ date of birth. If they had, I’d have simply told the fence to push mine back twenty years to 1890.

An hour later, I held an exact replica of Raybould Marsh’s ID card, identical in every detail except the serial number. The forgery was more than enough to keep the coppers happy if I got stopped again. They’d have to check with the NRO to catch the discrepant serial number, but that would only happen if I got hauled in again, or if the Security Service caught me, at which point the ID Card would be the least of my worries. Still, it was with no small sense of relief that I tucked the new card away.

The previous evening at the pub had given me a sense of comradeship, of being appreciated. But by morning the warm glow had faded and that thick familiar loneliness, cold like dead ashes, had taken its place. So I spent more cash on a decent shirt and tie.

And wore them both when I returned to Walworth for the third time in two days. I told myself it was simply to return my doppelgänger’s ID card. A quick trip back. I’d wait for Liv to step out, slip inside, put the card back in its spot, slip out again. Not even five minutes. One less thing to worry about later, I told myself.

No. I didn’t believe it, either. I’d done my best to save the world. Now I just wanted to feel like a human being again. To be in her space again. Just for a little while.

Didn’t see anybody watching the house. But I was too lonely to care one way or the other.

I took a steadying breath. Hesitated. Gathered my courage. Knocked. Liv opened the door while I wrestled with whether to abandon this idiocy or to knock again.

Her eyes went directly to my scars, but just for an instant. She recovered well. “May I help you?”

This was my first good look at her since I’d arrived. I’d become so accustomed to the faint wrinkles at the corners of her mouth, the age spots that had replaced her freckles. But now the passage of time had been reversed, and she stood before me as the woman I remembered. The woman I’d met at the Hart and Hearth. The woman who’d loved me. The mother of my children. My wife.

I didn’t know if she could ever be mine again. But I would always be hers.

Speak,
I commanded myself.
She won’t recognize your voice.

“Good afternoon. Mrs. Marsh?”

She raised an eyebrow. Liv’s way of saying,
Yes, what?

“My name is Liddell-Stewart. I work for the Foreign Secretary. I’d like to speak with you about your husband.”

Her eyes widened, her mouth fell open. It stabbed me like an icicle in the gut, the sight of her terror. I forged ahead before she drew the wrong conclusion. “No need for alarm, Mrs. Marsh. He’s perfectly well.” Or so I hoped. “I’m not here in an official capacity. I understand you have a newborn at home. So I came to apologize.”

Liv looked me over. I saw the gleam in her eyes, and braced myself for a cynical retort. And it was forthcoming. “Would this apology include groveling?”

Yes, this was my wife. But I made a show of being caught off my guard. “I—” I stopped. Shook my head. “I beg your pardon?”

“Sniveling would also be acceptable,” said Liv. “Or cowering. I’m not particular. Though I do expect a magnificent apology.” Her gaze hardened. “It’s the least you can do.”

“Ah … As you wish, ma’am.”

She chewed her lip, mulling things over. Then she stepped back, opened the door more widely. “Come in.”

And I did.

interlude: gretel

She remembers the cipher future with the uncompromised clarity of a demigoddess. Sees every step the other-she takes to lure Raybould into the past. Remembers a quarter-century of prologue.

But now she stands at the headwaters of an entirely new time line. This universe is one day old. It is a hatchling, too weak and blind to fend for itself. Unshaped clay awaiting the sculptor’s hands. Spider silk and golden thread awaiting the touch of a master weaver. Awaiting her.

Her Willenskräfte will be the loom that imposes form and structure upon this new time line. Like any youngling, this universe requires order. Purpose. She will impose it.

Brother comes for her. He delivers a battery.

The world fades behind a shimmering curtain of gossamer possibilities when she draws upon the Götterelektron. Her first true glimpse of the splinter time line. So beautiful. She wants to explore. Every thread, every tributary, every wispy one-in-a-million. What a delicious thrill to explore these vistas, to race off into the distant fringes of the not-quite-impossible. She can’t resist. She skips ahead—a day, a week, a month, a year—following the luminous paths of potentiality for a peek at the world she and Raybould will create, the life they will have together …