[
Part I]
[
Part II]
[
Part III]
Part IVHe watched as they transversed the gleaming ocean, setting off little ripples in the dust that expanded into increasingly wide waves until they collapsed into bands of foam on either side of the room and slid down the walls.
He listened and kept very still while the tall black-haired woman and the twitchy fellow came to stand a short distance away from him, and the librarian introduced the round-faced girl in the nubby oversized coat to him as Senator Key.
“You can call me Eva if you want,” she said, and crouched beside him. “Does it hurt?”
He felt as though his leg bones were being ground into paste every time he made the slightest movement, and the skin from his hip to his foot felt like it had been flayed, fried, and replaced on the limb, so that the burning flesh wormed holes into the muscle and sent drops of blood spitting into the air.
“Not much,” he said.
Mercifully, she didn’t believe him. She made the tall woman retrieve a pair of gloves and a tray of gleaming instruments from the black leather case she was carrying, and Eva started an intravenous line of painkillers into his arm. She tied and removed the rubber strap above his elbow with quiet attention, careful not to let it pinch or snap against his skin.
“What’s your name?” she said. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
“Dennis Dickinson,” he said.
She summoned pillows out of nowhere to support his head and back, instantly quenching the fire in his muscles that was the result of arching his spine for many hours, trying to keep himself from being wrenched in half by the pressure bearing down on his leg.
“Eva,” said the twitchy man, bobbing above her shoulder as she adjusted the pillows, “what happened here? What is all of this silver stuff?”
“It’s
tempicutis,” she said, and took the pair of silver scissors that the tall woman offered her. “Residue of time travel. I’ve never seen quite this much in the same place.” Then she leaned in and asked Dennis quietly if she could remove his pants.
He consented just as quietly, and she began with the greatest delicacy to snip away the fabric from the waist down, in the direction of his sunken leg. Ordinarily the experience of a girl rummaging about in his trousers would excite or amuse him, or at the very least provide him the opportunity for a raunchy quip. He stole a kiss off the cheek of the first girl to ever make the mistake of taking the seat next to him on a train – that was in 1860. Eighteenth-century girls were less uptight, and he had a lot of fun with them. This one now, who paused in her work every few minutes to silently survey his face, had a pretty sort of slate-blue eyes, even if her hands were cold, and her small red lips had a pleasant and oddly familiar shape. She might at one time have drawn his gaze across a ballroom, provided there was no one blonder or bustier present.
His gaze was drawn to her now, but not for the reasons it once would have. Those days were over; he had no inclination to look at her, or any other girl, ever again – but this was surely an exception, for he was not looking so much at her as at the little powdery crown of
tempicutis that had gathered at the top of her head, and the little flecks of it that stuck thickly to her eyelashes like beads of dew clustered along curling grass.
She brushed it from her eyes with the side of her elbow as she explained to the twitchy fellow that the silver stuff he was looking at was billions of slivers of time that had been sloughed off in the course of Dennis’s rampage through it.
Upon hearing this, the man put his hand out, cupped, toward a stream of
tempicutis as if to catch it from the air like snow. But the particles wouldn’t stick to him; they made a radical turn to avoid his hand, drawing a twisted arc just above his skin. He swept his hand up into the arc and its flecks scattered like marbles, hurtling off in every direction.
The dust wouldn’t touch the tall girl, either, or the librarian, but as he watched, and as she diligently peeled back inch after inch of frayed calico from his mutilated leg, the
tempicutis around Eva made sweeping curves in her direction and settled, bit by bit, over her body like a second layer of skin.
When she’d finished and his leg was bare she stood up abruptly and shook like a dog, sending the particles that had gathered on her off into a cloud that churned, drifted, and gradually dispersed. All across the room, they were fading now, blinking out like stars and leaving dull dark patches in their place. Within moments the place seemed as though a veil had descended upon it.
When all of their eyes had adjusted, they could clearly see his leg where the skin merged with the grain of the floor as if they had been melted into one another. There was no clear seam between them; little patches of his skin swam among the surface of the timbers in a hazy ring around his leg, and tiny splinters of wood mottled the flesh halfway up his thigh.
The twitchy man turned away from the sight, grimacing, while the librarian stayed exactly where he stood, and the tall girl took a step closer, with curiosity swimming on the surface of her dark eyes.
“Where would you say the fusion begins?” she asked Eva. “Do you think it goes down to the bone?”
“We’ll see,” said Eva. She removed her gloves, placing them into a folding plastic box that came out of the black case; then she reached into one of the deep pockets of her coat. She retrieved a small, tawny-gold object that looked a bit like a metal book, with two claw-like hinges on its left side and a cover into which a map of Annaghmakerrig, with the numbers of its coordinates within the universe, was delicately incised.
She opened it, cracking it from its center. When it was splayed flat in her hands, two more flaps opened automatically from within and folded down at the top and the bottom, doubling the surface area of the object. There was the faint sound of gears turning and clicking into place, and Eva steadied it with one hand gently grasping it on either side. Finally, she turned a small knob on the side of the thing, and the flat empty square that lay between her hands and within a thin border of incised acanthus leaves flickered and hummed and burst into a silvery light.
When the glare had dimmed, they could all see directly through the surface of the thing to the floor, and through the surface to Eva’s fingers, which appeared at the edges of the screen as if in an X-ray: little silver bones surrounded by a ghostly shadow of skin.
She turned the knob again and flesh began to grow on the bones layer by layer, veins covering tendons covering bone, and finally each layer of skin. She turned the knob the other way, and skin, tendons, and veins bubbled away as if evaporating. She adjusted the knob for a few seconds more before she had it the way that she wanted.
She held the device out in front of her so that its screen captured the site of Dennis’s fusion with the floor. They saw, captured upon its flicking screen, the choppy mash of splinters intermingled with skin; then, with a twitch of the knob, they saw splinters blended with bubbly yellow fat and thick bands of pink muscle. Dozens of snaking blood vessels tangled with the lines of grain in the wood like different colored lengths of string, and the great red artery at the center split and then rejoined to accommodate a large, dark knot.
Finally, there was the bone, with splinters in its surface and suspended in the syrup of its red and yellow marrow. Eva dropped back onto her heels with a small grimace and folded the device shut.
“How did you do this?” asked the tall woman of Dennis, as Eva replaced the thing in her pocket.
“It was an accident,” he said. “I was traveling and I got caught.”
“I don’t get it,” said the tall woman. “How does one get
caught in a floor like that?”
“Don’t you see?” said the twitchy man, who had reeled over to the other side of the room, but took the opportunity to come shooting back like a boomerang. “He was stuck in the midst of time-traveling. His leg and that floor look like they grew together because they literally did, over dozens and maybe hundreds of years.”
“Years,” echoed the librarian, who stared blankly at the man as he twitched and worked his hands inside his pockets. “He can’t have been there for years. He wasn’t there last night.”
“But you see, he was,” said the twitchy man. “He experienced all of those centuries by himself, sometime between when you last saw this place and when you found him here this morning. He passed through them, or rather,
they passed through
him. His journey started at some point in the past when this floor didn’t exist, but he was here in the exact spot it would be, and the building grew up into him, and him into it. From his perspective, as he traveled through time, the process might have only taken a few minutes.”
“You just said it took a few
centuries,” said the librarian.
“I don’t have time to explain the physics of time travel to you,” said the man, as he launched himself on another agitated orbit around the room. “You’ll have to read the book.”
“What book?” asked the librarian.
“Viola,” said Eva to the tall woman, “go outside and order me a CS unit, please.”
The tall woman nodded and left silently, nearly colliding with the twitchy man as he swept unsteadily past the entrance to the hallway.
He stopped mid-stride when Eva called to him, and asked him to go outside as well, please, and to take the librarian with him.
He was left alone with her, silent in the middle of the spare room, with small triangular flags of sunlight racing across the walls behind them, cast in through the awkward angle made by the jumble of buildings outside the windows. She sat on her knees with a single crease in her brow and her lips pursed together, and at some point she had taken his hand in hers, but he hadn’t noticed when.
He recalled it, then, as if the twitchy man’s words had caused the memory to settle in his brain: the brilliant blaze of the journey, in which he had watched an entire landscape burn, crumble away, and then reconstitute itself around him, sweeping with black beams toward greater heights than it had ever reached before. The people were like smoke on the air, leaving ghostly trails of themselves wherever they went, and then petering out, but the buildings – those coal-black monoliths – stayed constantly in his vision, inching toward the sky more quickly with every day that passed in front of him, and there were thousands of days. Each was like one cell in a film reel, and the reel was yanked so fast that he couldn’t see the seams in between them, nor distinguish day from night. The sun and moon passed over his head in constant blurs, scoring two flaming trails into the sky. Stars burst into being and shriveled into darkness. Lives churned all around and pushed their substance through him.
In the middle of it all, he lay with his leg snagged in the center of a building whose walls swelled up like waves on either side of him, then darkened with age, and the chips in the paint that appeared with each passing year were like black stars that multiplied until they were the substance of the sky itself.
He felt pieces of his flesh and pieces of the wood trade places, relaying splinters and cells like members of two armies that collided, overran, and engulfed one another, until he was as much a part of the place as it was of him, and the reel finally stopped, leaving him in the cell of a cold December night, four hundred and fifty one years from when he had started.
Now, several hours later, he lay on his back with his leg in that vice and his other leg starting to cramp, thinking that time, moving at its normal rate, felt like stagnant water, when he knew that it could surge like the fiercest ocean, sweeping new lives and new things into existence against the sand or, just as easily, sucking them back down into the void.
He lay holding her hand, which had gathered a thin coat of sweat, and staring at her auburn hair that stole fragments of sunlight out of the triangles on the walls and sent them tumbling up and down its length in small yellow bursts. He moved his palm gently against hers and felt that there were scars on it, drawn like the shallow ridges of hills on the Annaghmakerrig Midlands. He knew that she was the one for whom he had come to this place.
He didn’t mention it, though, but stayed perfectly still while they waited, silently, with sunlight painting broad strokes across both their faces, until she spoke.
“Why did you do it?” she said.
He stared at her, startled, and she returned his look evenly, with those icy blue-gray eyes that seemed to ask nothing of him, and likewise offer nothing, but rather dared him to fill their emptiness, to see what sound might come thundering out of the darkness when he tossed his words into the void.
So her told her the truth: “Punishment,” and then was quiet, as his ears pricked, anticipating the echo.
She said nothing, but simply nodded. She must have noticed him searching her face, however, because she said, after a moment, “You don’t have to explain. I understand.”
“Do you know what I did?” he asked.
“I don’t have to,” she said. She paused, then added, “I mean, you can tell me, if you want.”
“I don’t have to,” he said. “I mean – that’s okay.”
Afterward they were quiet again, while all around the library the machine of the city groaned and rumbled into wakefulness, and the black shapes of Ingets setting their skeletal wings astride the golden air began to cloud the windows. The painkillers had dampened the fiery ache in his leg and put a fog around his brain, and he might have tumbled into sleep against the pillows, except that Viola and Claudius appeared through the hallway, and led a pair of men with a chainsaw into the room.
[to be continued]
[© 2011 M.B.K.]
