The Time Collector

by Gwendolyn Womack

  Teaming up with an architect, Roan had carved out a six-thousand-square-foot home and tucked it away in the back corner of the building along with a front door only accessible from the inside.

  Roan could never have created such a futuristic home, at least not on the exterior, in a New Orleans residential neighborhood, where every effort went into re-creating houses to look like they were from a previous century. His entire loftlike house had gleaming wood floors and unusual design elements. Glass cutouts in the living room peered like windows into the adjacent dining room and kitchen, and four brilliant stained-glass panels hung on the living room’s back wall. They ascended to the ceiling in beautiful arcs and were backlit with strategically placed pin lights to create the stunning effect of sunlight coming in from the outside world.

  Aside from the stained glass, there was no other art or decoration in sight.

  Except for the flowers.

  Roan had vases of roses, daisies, and violets scattered throughout the house that he replaced once a week when he visited the flower market.

  He’d found out at an early age that flowers were the most sensitive of all receptors and could hold vibrant imprints for days. The only problem was that when the flowers died, the imprints died with them. But if there was any hint of disturbance in the house, the slightest shift, Roan would be able to sense it right away in the flowers. So he always kept vases of them in every room. They were more reliable than an alarm system.

  He took off his gloves and shoes at the door, leaving his things and the gift bags by the entry, and walked through the house, touching all the flowers in every room to read their imprints.

  After he inspected the flowers, he headed to the kitchen and opened the refrigerator to stare uninterestedly at its contents. He grabbed a bag of shelled pistachios, seeded crackers, and an unopened jar of Greek tapenade from the pantry. He uncorked a bottle of the Paring, a Bordeaux-inspired blend.

  “House,” he said to his voice-activated home system, “play Mozart, Sonata no. 32 in B-flat Major.”

  The sound of the violin filled the air.

  Roan headed to the living room, where three sofas took up the center of the room and connected at their corners in a U-shape. They were positioned within a sunken circle that was ringed by three steps leading down to it.

  “House, light the fire in the living room. Dim lights, setting three.”

  The stone gas firepit in the middle of the circle came to life, creating an immediate campfire feel. The lights dimmed to resemble barely-there candlelight.

  Roan sank down on the cushions and propped his feet up, drawing sips from the velvety red. As he listened to Mozart and Regina’s sonata, he thought the music sounded different. This recording lacked the rich resonance of the original.

  It lacked Mozart and Regina, Roan mused, remembering their concert.

  He always enjoyed encountering something Mozart had touched, and Roan hadn’t had time to linger on the string of memories within Regina’s bird box—he’d been too busy looking ahead to his meeting with Stuart and then becoming distracted by Melicent Tilpin.

  Melicent Tilpin.

  Her name entered his mind like a cloud obstructing all other thoughts.

  What to do about her? Did he really want to know to what extent she possessed his ability and start a friendship?

  He and Stuart may have become friends over the years, but that didn’t have to happen with every psychometrist he met, especially with someone he was so attracted to.

  Before he could stop himself, he went to the entry and got one of the Trove gift bags. Holding the handle, he could feel Melicent’s emotions when she handed the bags over to him, her jumble of nerves. She couldn’t imagine why he was buying all her work and she was so caught up with trying to figure out who he was. Roan was fascinated by her thoughts—she’d found him attractive. He hovered over that feeling a bit longer, until the act of holding the bag handle began to feel like holding her hand.

  He let the bag go in frustration and set it aside, no longer compelled to look inside. He didn’t need to further complicate his life by getting caught up with a budding psychometrist, no matter how pretty she might be.

  He sipped his wine and leaned back on the couch. “House, clear sky, constellations.”

  The home planetarium screen transformed the ceiling into a night sky illuminated with stars. The Stellarium program was set to show what the sky above New Orleans looked like through a telescope in real time.

  Roan found and ticked off constellations in his mind as he brought out his lucky coin from his pocket and rolled it across his hand. He ignored the imprints in the coin and focused his mind on the music. Closing his eyes, he drifted off, riding the strings of the violin and content in the moment … stars, a home fire, good wine, and Mozart.

  What more could he need?

  Perhaps the answer to when he should read the imprints within those exquisite snow globes was never. Maybe it’d be for the best to forget the woman with the pocket watch entirely.

  When the sonata ended, Roan got up and stretched. Before he went to sleep tonight, he needed to open Stuart’s package. Holly had left it on his desk in the warehouse, and Roan didn’t want to wait until the morning.

  His office was tucked away in the adjacent corner of the warehouse, surrounded by the thousands of antiques he’d acquired over the years. The pieces sat in the dark, like an army of ghosts he had assembled. Roan knew every imprint.

  When he flipped on the light to his office, Stuart’s package was sitting front and center on his desk.

  Inside the box he found a letter along with a heavy iron key that looked to be several hundred years old.

  Roan put the letter aside, deciding to touch the key first so he wouldn’t be influenced by what Stuart might have to say. He wanted a clean read of the imprints. He had a feeling it might explain why Stuart had wanted to meet.

  The moment Roan touched the key, the memories within it began to tug at him, along with something else, something with a stronger current.

  The pull, the sense of imbalance, began in Roan’s hands and crept down his body.

  Without warning he’d stepped out of sync with rest of the world.

  A strange energy wrapped tightly around his hands like a cord and pulled. Then the imprint flooded his mind.

  PRAGUE

  1489

  MIKULAS AND SINDEL STARTED something they couldn’t finish. Hanus mumbled a curse as he strained to tighten the screw beneath the foliot. His hands were slick with oil from lubricating the gears, and he kept losing his grip on the tools.

  The engineering behind the clock was sound. Hanus would concede that much to his predecessors, but the interface wasn’t accurate enough. The clock’s original builders had tried to do too much without mastering the calculations.

  Hanus was a clockmaker, astronomer, and master of the astrolabe, and the one man who could get this clock to do what was expected. For not only did Prague’s astronomical clock tell the time, it charted the passage of the sun and the phases of the moon, tracked the zodiac signs, and calculated, every day, the hour the North Star would appear.

  The city’s grand clock crowning the top of town hall was a true marvel.

  Prague was the meeting ground for astronomers across all of Europe, and the clock was a pinnacle of scientific achievement. But its lack of accuracy had become an outrage, and the town council could no longer ignore the crisis.

  The councilmen had chosen Hanus from all the other candidates to be in charge of reworking the monstrosity and adding a calendar dial. Hanus was a wizard at both numbers and the night sky. He had studied under Sindel’s successor at Prague’s Charles University and at the Leipzig University in Germany and graduated from each at the top of his class. Of course he had accepted the challenge.

  “What if you fail?” his wife, Catherine, asked him, one night while they lay in bed.

  “I will not,” he whispered in the dark, kissing her forehead.

  If
anyone could chart time for both the Earth and the Heavens, Hanus could. He had built his knowledge upon Aristotle’s, Ptolemy’s, and Hipparchus’s theories, and though he would never say it aloud, his expertise exceeded Sacrobosco and Peurback, the authors of the two leading textbooks on astronomy at the university. He’d seen the original geared astrolabes designed by al-Biruni and Abi Bakr from the East and learned the devices’ capabilities. Just as he could take apart any lock, a skill taught to him by his father, a master locksmith, so could he do the same with the astrolabe and understand its mechanisms.

  Repairing the clock took almost a year. Hanus worked ceaselessly, even moving into the clock tower to work through the night. His son would come to assist him when he wasn’t busy with his studies. The boy would bring food and wine along with messages from his mother to stay warm, to eat, to sleep, and to come home soon.

  Hanus would laugh at his wife’s messages. Catherine knew he would not return home until he was finished. He was time’s conductor in the clock tower, directing a symphony of crown wheels, gear trains, and torsion springs. Never had he felt more connected to life and the stars than he did standing in the center of the clock. He even kept the tower key around his neck like a talisman.

  “Perhaps I’ll never leave here,” he said, winking to his son as he drank his wine, “and remain a ghost when I die.”

  * * *

  When the clock bell rang over the city, people on the street gathered and cheered. Even the city councilors were waiting to congratulate him. From that moment on, wherever Hanus went, people tipped their hats to him with the highest respect. Prague was once more the most advanced city in the sciences, thanks to him.

  The city councilors hosted a banquet in his honor to celebrate the achievement.

  The revelry lasted all night.

  The banquet was on the second floor of town hall in one of the grand rooms filled with tables made of wood so thick they looked like giant trees turned on their sides. The tables were laden with a feast of smoked duck, sliced beets, savory pearl barley, spinach garlic pancakes, and cheese mousse.

  Hanus surveyed the party with haze-filled eyes. He’d drunk more wine than usual tonight, his cup filled again and again without his asking.

  The councilmen sat at the head table away from him, whispering and nodding amongst themselves. The burning candlelight splayed shadows across their faces in ominous patterns, making Hanus wonder if they had heard of his other offers.

  When he’d first started working on the clock, word of the repair had traveled throughout Europe. Before he’d even finished, he had received several offers from other cities to construct a new astronomical clock, one as good, if not better, than Prague’s. Now that he had achieved the impossible, twice as many offers were arriving for ten times the coin. Hanus was already lining up the opportunities.

  Would the council try to stop him?

  A worry for the morning, he thought as he tried to brush off his unease. He had done his duty and earned his reward. Catherine sat laughing beside him along with their children, who were watching wide-eyed as jugglers performed with lit torches.

  Hanus applauded song after song and drank cup after cup until the evening became a spinning blur. He laughed and looked over to Catherine to find her seat was empty. He didn’t remember when she and the children had gone home or why he hadn’t gone with them.

  Someone had wanted a word, but now he didn’t remember who. A vague image returned to him. Had he, like a drunken fool, told the head councilman of his plans to build another clock?

  He stared into his cup and a seed of fear began to grow inside of him as he remembered the exchange. He had spoken. He’d done more than that—he had boasted, “I’m the best clockmaker in the world!”

  The head councilman smiled through thinly pursed lips. “And Prague is in your debt. But surely you must see that the clock cannot be re-created elsewhere.”

  “The world needs better clocks, not only Prague.” Hanus went to drink from his cup to find it empty.

  “Drunken fool.” The councilman’s eyes narrowed into dark slits.

  Another councilman leaned forward, no longer pretending to be civil. “You have not yet responded to our request to hand over your designs for safekeeping. The council demands it!”

  “Demands it?” Hanus slurred. “I will not. It is my work.” His calculations for the clock he had hidden away in a secret vault under his house. Not even Catherine knew where they were.

  He squinted at them, having trouble keeping focus. Suddenly he felt like an animal trapped in the woods and surrounded by huntsmen who meant him harm.

  With a glimmer of understanding he began to see the night for what it was: this wasn’t a banquet, it was a capture.

  A serving girl came to fill his cup again and he waved her off, realizing they wanted him drunk.

  He stood, his legs unsteady. “Excuse me,” he tried to say, but even to his ears the words were unintelligible.

  Outside the hall, he tried to get his bearings. He was so drunk, the two men suddenly gripping his arms barely registered. His head lagged, resting on his chest as they dragged him up the stairs and into the room next to the tower. His last coherent thought was that he wished he had gone home with Catherine.

  * * *

  Hours later Hanus fought to regain consciousness and push past the pain and agony coursing through his body.

  He could no longer see.

  His mouth was on fire and thick with blood. His abductors had brutalized him and left him to die.

  Thoughts circled him. What have they done to me? I will never see my wife and children again. He would die alone and the clock’s plans would stay buried like hidden jewels no one would ever find.

  Helpless rage forged his last bit of strength. His body afire from his wounds, he crawled on his hands and knees to the tower door. He gripped the wall and pulled himself up.

  Blind, he reached out in the dark with his hands. When he felt the lock, he took the tower key from around his neck and used it for the last time.

  Staggering forward, with muted grunts he found every screw, coil, and dial that could not be rebuilt without him—every piece—and destroyed them all.

  When he was finished, he crumbled to the floor, his body too broken to go on. At least the men who had done this to him would never see the clock work in their lifetime. They had failed.

  Hanus reached for his tools and grasped the sharpest one to stop the pain. It was time to die.

  7. THE BRACELET

  ROAN BACKED AWAY FROM HIS DESK, struggling to breathe as he tried to expel the horror of what he’d witnessed. He bent down and put his hands on his knees and heaved in gulps of air. He tried to calm down and brought his hands together into a Ganesha mudra only to find his hands were completely numb.

  He began to apply acupressure to all the major pressure points in his hands—the base of his thumb, his wrist, his palm’s inner and outer gate, and the heart and lung meridians—until the nerves in his hands started to tingle and wake up like a fiery trail of ants.

  This key Stuart had sent him was to the tower of Prague’s astronomical clock from the 1400s. The clock master, Hanus, had worn it around his neck until the day he died.

  Hanus’s violent demise was imprinted in the metal like a permanent black mark. His captors had gouged his eyes out and taken his tongue so he couldn’t build another clock or tell anyone else how to do it. Afterward the poor man had gathered his last remaining strength and destroyed his work and ended his life.

  Why the councilmen would blind the one person who could restore the clock was beyond Roan. But he also knew that question could never be answered. He could only witness the past as an observer. It didn’t always mean he understood the why of things. That was the limitation of his gift.

  Even with such a tragic imprint, this key wasn’t a normal relic, and what he’d experienced wasn’t a normal imprint. There was another element running alongside the imprint within the key, a signature of so
rts that Roan immediately recognized.

  He’d only touched one other object in his life that had made his hands go numb, and it’d been with Stuart.

  They had been on a climbing trip to Colorado, bouldering at the Rocky Mountain National Park. They’d been climbing all week and were due to fly out the next day. They were at the bar at the lodge outside the park having a celebratory drink after tackling two of the hardest V16s in the world, Hypnotized Minds and Creature from the Black Lagoon, when Stuart asked him to hold something.

  “I found something at a dig last month I need to get your opinion on.” Stuart took out a small box from his bag and opened it to reveal an ornate gold ring.

  He placed the ring with great ceremony on the table between them.

  Roan kept his gloves on and picked it up for a quick appraisal. “I’d say sixteenth or seventeenth century, a man’s ring based on the armorial signet and square bezel set … uninscribed with no engraving.” He went to hand it back.

  “Right. Now gloves off, mate,” Stuart said in challenge.

  Roan raised an eyebrow. “Here? At the bar?”

  “Why not? Afraid it’ll interfere with your magic mudra power?”

  Roan laughed. Stuart never failed to make him laugh. Their laughter, like climbing, was one of the highlights of their friendship. With Stuart nothing was sacred.

  Maybe Roan was as competitive as Stuart, because before Roan could rethink what he was doing, he took off his gloves and held the ring without even doing a mudra to prepare. Within moments he was in Holland in 1633, lost within the intricate memories of the man who had worn it. But unlike a normal reading, while Roan held the ring, his hands began to go numb and a river of ice spread up his fingers.

  The sensation pulled him out of the imprint.

  He stared at his unfeeling hands, stupefied. That had never happened before. He put the ring back down.