Authors: Steven Savile
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Short Stories & Anthologies, #anthologies, #Short Stories, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Fantasy, #magical realism, #Single Authors, #Anthologies & Short Stories
Time's Mistress (4 page)
A system of gears and cogs and valves?
A system of organs and blood vessels, muscle and tendon?
Organic or inorganic, a machine was a machine.
He shuddered at the thought, needing to believe that there was some way the artist, in many ways one of the very greatest the Aesthetic Movement had to offer, could imbue his new Annabel Leigh with all that had been, all he knew and all they had shared.
It was a gift and a curse.
He visited the artist in his studio, surrounded by the oils and watercolours that would make him famous.
“You must tell no one of this,” he urged Waterhouse.
The artist, nodded, working his peculiar magic with the mixture.
“I am in earnest, man. You must never record in a journal or diary what you do for me now. There is something ungodly about it. I fear posterity would not look kindly upon us.”
“And yet you have me raise the dead,” the artist said.
“I miss her with all of my heart,” Josiah Bloome said. There was no other explanation he could offer.
The man worked in his house of wax, fashioning her skin for the mechanical frame to wear. The place had a smell to it that Bloome came to think of as life. The recreation was perfect in every way. The man was a genius. In his hands she was born again. He watched as her nose and her eyes, her lips and her smile were reborn. He wept to see her familiar features laid flat across the glass-topped work surface, and then rejoiced to see it shaped around the glass cranium of the machine. He held her hands as they were crafted, remembering each and every blemish and beauty mark and insisting they were rendered precisely, such were the perfection of the Art.
At nights, Josiah sat with Balthazar learning the secret of the metal disks and how to create commands that would complete the illusion of Annabel Leigh’s return to him.
He was hungry to learn, his mind healed for the first time in forever, focussed, driven. He slaved away, wracking his brain to remember each and every movement and gesture she possessed in life, so that he could give them to her in death. The tilt of her head, the curl of her lip, the impish delight in her eyes, he tortured himself with all of it, needing to believe that the machine could be more than that; needing to believe that the machine could be his Annabel Leigh.
And alone, as he always had to be when the day disappeared, he began to remember so many other things he thought lost forever. He curled up on the cold mattress, pulling the blanket up to his chin, aware that soon the emptiness that marked the other side of the bed would be gone. It was every bit as chilling as it was thrilling.
O O O
And then they brought her back to him, in a wooden box just as those others had taken her away from him. It was part of the ritual he had insisted upon. The return. It had to be the same as the departure. Instead of mourners he had the men of the Mechanicum walk at her side, celebrants bringing her back to him.
They carried the casket into the front room and laid it respectfully on the table, handing him the crowbar to break open the seals. He slipped it into the crack between lid and frame, and worked it open.
Looking down on her his heart broke.
She was perfect in every way.
But she appeared so utterly cold and dead in the casket, just lying there. They had placed a white rose on her chest. They had stuffed her coffin full of the most fragrant flowers when they buried her, to mask the corruption of the disease. This single flower on her return was meant to be a token of rebirth, the delicate white petals life, the denuded thorns their mastery over the bite of death.
The experience so horribly mirrored the last time he had gazed down upon her lifeless face. “Help me get her out of there,” Josiah begged, reaching in to cradle the clockwork woman in his arms. She was heavy, far heavier than she had been in life. They lifted Annabel Leigh out of the casket and stood her in the centre of the room, encouraging Josiah to inspect their craft, to be sure he was happy. “We can make adjustments,” they assured him, like Savile Row tailors.
He couldn’t bear to look at her.
“We have fashioned a number of disks according to your instructions, all you need to do is wind the mechanism for the first time and insert the option of your choice.”
“I just want the company,” he said, standing beside the window out into the world. His fingernails dug into the wainscoting of the sill. “You can leave us now, please. How much do I owe you?”
“This is our gift to you,” Balthazar assured him. “There should be no money between friends. If we can bring you happiness that is reward enough.”
“Thank you,” Josiah said, though what they called a gift already felt like a curse. Still he could not bear to look at her in the middle of the room. It was a blessing that she was mute. To hear her would have been too much. It was enough to feel her behind him, that almost but not quite familiar presence.
The Magisters left him alone with his new Annabel Leigh. “The mechanism will last for twelve hours,” Balthazar explained, “before it will need to be wound again.”
She had a life of only twelve hours.
When the front door closed behind them Josiah Bloome finally turned away from the window.
He looked at her, marvelling at Waterhouse’s skill. She was exactly as he remembered, though of course when he talked to her and fussed around her she could not answer him. The only words were in his memory, but better that than all of her living there.
He slipped one of the disks into the slot at the back of her neck and slowly, tenderly, wound the mechanism. It was almost erotic. There was something heady and powerful about his touch bringing life. She walked away from him and sat in the chair beside the window, the failing light adding a golden aspect to her wax flesh as she simply sat, content to soak up the heat. Josiah had seen Annabel Leigh in the same seat more times than he could remember. Sometimes she would knit, other times she would read one of those Penny Dreadfuls and gasp at something on the page, but most often she would simply sit, tilt her head back and savour the sun’s kiss.
For a moment it was as though she had never gone.
He sat down beside her and told his Annabel Leigh everything she had missed over the six years she had been lost to him.
He changed the disk so that she might walk through to the kitchen to make tea, her favourite porcelain laid out precisely so, so that every movement she made was inch perfect. There wasn’t a rattle as she filled the tea pot and carried the tray through to library. They sat together a while in silence, Josiah pretending to drink, Annabel Leigh not. He thought about taking her outside, it had been so long since they had gone for a long stroll through Hyde Park in the rain, and there was nothing more romantic than that; walking side by side, looking up to catch the fat raindrops with their open mouths and laughing.
Tomorrow, perhaps. After all, they had a new life time to share together. There was no hurry to do it all again in a single day.
He lost all track of time, revelling in having her back. An hour before dawn he noticed her beginning to slow, her movements becoming jerky and imprecise as the mechanism at her heart wore down. It was like watching her die, slowly and painfully.
Twelve hours.
It brought it all back to him, the ravages of the Cholera, the dread he had felt knowing death would come to steal her away from him. All of it, brought back to him in the twelfth hour as he sat alone in the front room.
“Be careful what you wish for,” he told the wax face of his love, his heart breaking. There was no distance this time, no shock or protection. She was there, in front of him, and he could see the gears losing their tension and the half-life draining out of her.
He sat alone because he couldn’t bear to watch the final hour.
He picked up his precious Annabel Leigh and carried her to the cupboard beneath the stairs, hiding her away so that he could grieve alone. Death was not something he wanted to share with her. He could not face the grief of losing her again and again and again. It did not matter that this time all Josiah Bloome had to do was wind the mechanism to bring her back. All that meant was that he could re-experience the pain of losing her all over again.
He thought of lying beside her in bed, sleeping only to wake to her cold body, the life wound down to nothing. It chilled him to the core. Having to lean over and wind life back into her stiff limbs, to bring her back again and again from beyond the mortal coil. Who could have known that gears and cogs could so easily become the mechanisms of grief?
There was no beauty in lies, he thought, looking at the face of the woman he loved, at the ghost he had brought so hungrily into his own house, and slowly losing his mind as day after day he lost the one thing he had truly loved in life. To lose her once was tragic, to lose her every day, torture. No, there was no beauty, there was only pain. All the horrors of war paled beside the repeated grief he felt watching his wife die every day, like clockwork.
***
Ashes
When I was twenty-seven I tried to imagine what it would be like to be fifty, to have lived through the best part of my life, and the worst, and made it out on the other side. What single piece of advice would this hypothetical time traveling me impart if he could? It’s a tough question to ask given that you’ve not actually lived your life yet, but I decided on two words: be brave. They felt right. I had them tattooed over my heart.
I like to think it made all the difference.
Life up until then had been pretty much a little bit of this, a little bit of that, same as it is for most people. I’d had my share of missed opportunities, of course, hence the “be brave” motto. There was Sasha, who sat beside me from the autumn of 1980 until the summer of 1983, for one. Miss Bennett’s grand scheme had been no more complicated than boy-girl-boy-girl to keep the class quiet. She hadn’t banked on the poet in twelve-year-old-me’s soul, or my inability to let him out. Then there was Rachel. I fell for her. Down a flight of stairs in a guest house in Scarborough. It wasn’t graceful. I have no idea if it hurt, fear at the sight of this beautiful girl smiling at the top of the staircase wiped out all memory of pain.
Actually, I’ve done the whole falling thing more than once. There was this one girl, back at university, must have been around 1989, I guess. It was snowing. I was wearing cowboy boots. I saw her, she smiled, and I ended up flat on my back between her legs. It wasn’t as glamorous as it sounds. Much laughter ensued, most of it hers at my expense. At lunchtime in the refectory I managed to slip again because someone had dragged the outdoors inside. This time my dinner tray went sailing through the air in an arc that was almost as graceful as the swan-dive my body was taking. Who stood directly in the line of fire? You guessed it, the girl. She managed to avoid my pie and mash. I mumbled something about not usually being so clumsy and scuttled away cursing my fancy new cowboy boots. The universe was trying to tell me something. That night I went to a really cramped bar down on the Quayside, the Crown Posada, with a few of the lads. The Crown was a wonderfully narrow galley-style bar, no music, real ale on tap and packed with pretentious students talking oh-so-earnestly about nothing. When it was my round I took up position at the bar, ordered three pints of whatever was flat, thick, and warm that day, and turned around too quickly, sending those three pints of flat, thick, and warm all over the same decidedly
un
amused girl. She muttered something along the lines of: “Oh, for fuck’s sake! Watch what you’re doing!” and then saw it was me.
A braver man might have realized it was the universe trying to tell us something. A braver man might have acted upon it, managed a smile, said something witty and stumbled—quite literally—into the preordained relationship.
Not me.
I said, “Oh God, I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I swear you’ll never see me again.” And beat a hasty retreat.
See what I mean about being brave?
Then there was Claire, my best friend’s sister, who came with us to watch the ice hockey—though actually it was more like Mortal Combat to be honest—and made countless excuses to be the one to drive me an hour out of her way home so we could spend time together just chatting and had no idea I was hopeless lost around her. I didn’t mention, did I? 1983-86 was exclusively male territory, posh private all boys school. Congratulations to the private education system for turning out yet another dysfunctional sixteen year old incapable of looking a girl in the eye … never mind talking to her like, oh I don’t know, a human being. The idea of sitting alone in a car with a girl I fancied for an hour at least two or three times a week was enough to turn me into a babbling wreck of a human being. If she’d once, just once, smiled my way I think I would have died and gone—like the monkey in the song playing on the car stereo—to heaven. Probably kicking and screaming as my panicked reaction caused her to drive straight off the road and into the cruel sea.
But I wasn’t brave and she didn’t save my soul and somehow I made it to twenty-seven thinking something wonderful was supposed to happen with my life, so why wasn’t it?
I decided to take matters into my own hands. I went to a seedy tattoo parlor on the Westgate Road, halfway up the hill hidden away between the pawnshops and the second-hand stores, and had a huge shaven-headed brute stepped straight out of a Tom of Finland calendar ink the words “be brave” over my heart.
It was as I was walking out of that shithole that I first saw Isla Durovich.
She took my breath away.
I’d always thought that was the biggest cliché in the book, but there she was, this woman looking in the window of a pet store at one of the Capuchin monkeys hanging upside down by its tail, and I couldn’t breathe.
I put my right hand over the wound where Tom of Finland had inked those words to live by, and thought:
it’s now or never
. “Be brave,” I told myself, and crossed the street into what was supposed to have been the rest of my life.
And it would have been, if …
If wishes were fishes, as my gran used to say, beggars would ride. She never could keep her aphorisms straight.
Instead of being forever it was four years, six months, two days, fifteen hours and thirty minutes. And then the car hit her and I was robbed of my happily ever after. Sometimes the fairy tales suck. The whole idea that it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all is rubbish. The Isla-shaped hole in the rest of my life was unbearable. I was numb. I drank even though I don’t drink. It didn’t help. I didn’t leave the house. I closed the curtains and hid in the dark. It didn’t help. I looked at the packing list on the table, the last thing she’d written, all the things we were going to need for the honeymoon. It didn’t help. I listened to her voice on the answerphone. Hearing her say: “You know what to do,” just hurt. I lay on her side of the bed, trying to absorb her essence as though she might have left more than just an impression in the wrinkled sheets. I breathed in her fragrances, the shampoos, perfumes, even the musty old pages of her favorite books, obscure paperbacks she’d picked up at jumble sales and charity shops, all second-hand because, she liked to pretend, that meant they’d been loved and loved so much someone had wanted to share them with the world.
We’d mapped out our honeymoon from those old books: Eurostar from London through the tunnel to Paris, just because we’d always wanted to go through the tunnel. The train from Paris to Prague. Prague to Vienna down through the mountains to Venice. Venice on to Rome, then up to this little place on the Garda Lake. We were going to do it properly, four weeks of traveling. A full moon’s worth of exploring, living, and to hell with real life.
And just like that, the whole “be brave” thing became so much harder. Sometimes I think God punishes us by answering our prayers. I remember lying in bed, looking at Isla sleeping beside me, and just thinking I wanted this moment to last forever. I wanted the world to stop and it did, with a knock on the door and two sombre looking policemen with their hats in their hands. It was the hat in the hands that did it. That only ever means one thing. The older of the two asked if I was me, and then if they could come inside. Isla was a schoolteacher. Was. That’s still stupidly hard to say. It’s so … past tense. Final. I don’t like finality in words anymore. I like words that are open and that at least allow for some kind of hope, like the word yet. Yet is a powerful word. It’s a good one.
Kids had been playing in the yard during lunch when the ice cream man drove tantalizingly close to the gates. One of the grade three’s had wriggled through the gate and wandered across the road, following the Pied Piper of Ice Cream’s call. Isla had been on playground duty. She’d run into the road to save the girl and taken most of the impact while the girl had walked away with a few bruises. The policeman had called it a small mercy. It wasn’t. Not really. I didn’t get any comfort out of knowing the love of my life had died saving some kid I didn’t know or care about. That wasn’t mercy to me.
The funeral was on the day we were supposed to be married, and all I can remember is thinking it should have been raining.
I put a rose on her coffin and went home.
But it didn’t feel like home anymore. Home is where the heart is, and mine was broken and it felt like it would be that way forever. It wasn’t just that she wasn’t there, though that was a huge part of it, it was the part of me that she’d taken away; that was the worst. It’s hard to explain, but I was a better version of myself when Isla was around.
The last present she’d ever given me was still on the table beside the packing list and tickets; a vintage Omega watch. It was Speedmaster, the same model that Buzz Aldrin had worn when he took the second ‘giant step’ behind Neil Armstrong. The first watch on the moon. Not that this one had been into space, of course. Well, I assume it hadn’t. Aldrin’s had disappeared on its way to the Smithsonian, but I’m pretty sure Isla wasn’t
that
connected.
I set the time and put it on.
I couldn’t tell you why I did it, but I picked up her list and started randomly stuffing things into a backpack.
I was halfway to the station before I realized I actually intended to go on my honeymoon.
I took some battered old paperbacks with me, and a few fun little trinkets, things that were absolutely her, quirky little things that were like little pieces of her soul. If it couldn’t be a honeymoon then it could be a pilgrimage. I’d take those parts of Isla to all of the places we’d been meant to visit together and bury them at the different landmarks we’d talked about.
It was my version of scattering her ashes.
First stop, Paris.
There’s the obvious attractions, sure: the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Sacré-Cœur, the Champs-Élysées, Pont Neuf, and Notre Dame. But Paris for Isla would always be
Les Pont des Arts
because of Julio Cortázar’s book
Rayuela
. I only knew it because of that scene in
Amélie
where Audrey Tautou decided to do secretly good deeds for those who deserved it. Isla had made me promise to put a padlock on the bridge and throw the key into the Seine like lovers do. There’s something wonderfully romantic about thinking of something of ours locked there forever, even if it was the padlock from the suitcase she wouldn’t need anymore.
I fastened it in place and threw the key as far and as hard as I could into the river below.
The lights of Paris illuminated the wonderful dichotomy of the city; on one side of me the chaos of the medieval city, all angles and shadows, and on the other the serenity of the Louvre, so calm and so cultured. I savored the feel of the wind on my face and wondered what else there was left to do here. We had three days booked in Paris, but I was done here. I’d fastened our padlock and bound us to the city forever. I just wanted to move on to Prague and show Isla the next place on our journey.
I walked, head down, a tired, beaten man, shuffling through the same streets countless tired, beaten Parisian feet had shuffled through during the Second World War, looking for an entrance to the Metro.
There was a wonderful piece of pavement art chalked onto the path beside the entrance. It looked like a man struggling through a storm, his umbrella turned inside out while the rain began to wash him away as though he’d never been there. I dropped a handful of coins into the artist’s hat and went down for the train. I checked my watch. It had been losing time, but I’d never thought about getting it fixed. Nothing too drastic, maybe twenty seconds an hour, but that made eight minutes a day, or fifty-six minutes a week. In a month I’d lose a little over four hours, which meant something like two days over the course of a year. It was funny how time could just fritter away because a spring was coiled a little too loosely.
An old couple sat huddled up so close together they might have been Siamese twins. The woman had a yellow Kodak envelope in her hands and was thumbing through pictures. She
tutted
in that wonderfully French way when I sat down beside them and went back to her photographs, occasionally shrugging oh so expressively.
Her fingers fastened on one. She pulled it out of the pack and then turned to her husband, tapping it. They looked at the photograph together, and then she looked at me and said, “
Est-cevous? ilest, n’est-ce pas?
”
I felt like an idiot. My French didn’t go beyond, “
Je m’appelle
Steve,” and I wasn’t one hundred percent on how to say that. I shrugged in a much less expressive manner and said, “I’m sorry?”
“English?”
I nodded.
She smiled, slightly. “It’s you, isn’t it?” She said, holding the photograph out for me to look at.
It was.
Or more accurately it was me and Isla. It took me a moment to realize when it had been snapped—about nine months ago. We’d taken shelter under the bandstand at Hyde Park, because the rain was pouring down. We’d huddled up close and watched the swans while Isla had told me how swans mate for life and I’d asked her to marry me. I smiled. I couldn’t quite believe that some complete stranger waiting for a train on the Parisian underground had a photo of one of the happiest moments of my life. I could see it all in my head, me going down on one knee, her giggling, then putting her hand to her mouth when she realized I was serious, and the way she couldn’t stop saying yes.
I nodded. “Yes. Yes, it’s me. How did you get this?”
The old woman smiled, but it was the man who answered. “That is where Isuelt agreed to be my wife,” he said with a smile, obviously remembering the day. And I thought again just how much I missed the woman I never got to marry. All I wanted to do was grow old with her, like these two. “The war was over, and we were young, reckless and very much in love. I convinced her to come with me to England, and it was the start of a lifetime together. We went back for the first time last year, and it seemed only right we should take a photograph of the place where it all began.”
“I was asking Isla—my girlfriend—to marry me,” I said, pointing at the photograph.