Time's Mistress

by Steven Savile

  O O O

  Brannigan Locke listened to the deafening chorus of the bells, his mind ringing with the old nursery rhyme.

  “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clements,” he said.

  I’ll give you five farthings, the bells answered him over and over. I’ll give you five farthings. I’ll give you five farthings.

  He waited and waited, the full minute of the chimes stretching out into the longest minute he had ever lived through.

  Between the sixth and seventh chime he intoned the words Stark had written down for him, sealing the symmetry of the incantation, demarking the boundaries of effect where this moment of time would be excised from.

  Then he grasped the rope and forced the great bell to toll an eighth time.

  O O O

  The sky above Fabian Stark bled.

  The rain was tinged with rust, as though the Meringias’ presence on the Prime Material acted as a conduit for the infernal machinery of the hollow earth to bleed into reality. Stark was weak, already he could feel the draw of the Art reducing him. He knew what he had to do, but knowing made the task no simpler.

  As the first hammer struck the city’s bells, he sank to his knees. As the first note blended into the second he tore open his shirt, yanking aside his cravat. He was skin and bones, dark shadows filling the clefts between his ribs and the hollow of his gut. Between the second and third peel of noise he smeared more of the white petroleum jelly across his bare chest, a circle within a square, a triangle within the circle, the most basic element of all conjurations, opening himself up to The Art.

  He felt those first familiar stirrings within his flesh, the frisson of the elements coming to life inside his body, the air filling his lungs, the rain on his face, sinking into his skin, the hard-packed earth against his knees, and the fire in his heart, all of them coming together.

  The flesh beneath the salve began to sting, the heat rising from beneath his skin.

  “Millington,” he said, not looking around. “Do not let me fall. That is your job. Do not let me fall. More importantly, no matter what transpires, no matter how much I might beg, do not let me run, I beseech you.”

  “I am here,” the actor said, resting a hand on Stark’s shoulder.

  The fifth bell chimed, a symphony of sound reverberating out across the rooftops of London, from the Old Bailey Bell, down to the river, west to St. Martin’s in the Field, north to St. Giles, and back to St. Clement’s. His skin thrilled to the music of the city.

  “I summon thee, Meringias!” Stark cried, throwing his head back. The blood red rain streamed down his face, into his eyes and mouth. “I summon thee, dweller of the deep!”

  The sixth harmonic rang out, and counter-point to it came the slow thump-thump-thump of the beast’s heavy wings.

  “COME TO ME!”

  O O O

  Anthony Millington stared in mute horror as the beast descended from the blood-red sky.

  The seventh bell rang out the coming of the hour.

  The creature Stark called Meringias landed beside him, wicked claws digging into the stone of the funeral slabs as it did. The air stank of brimstone and was haunted by the incessant skittering of the black spiders drawn back to the steps of St. Paul’s by Stark’s summons. His skin crawled at the sight of them.

  He stood behind Stark, determined not to let him down, just as he knew the others had taken up their stations around the city, all sharing the same grim determination. Alone they were less than the sum of their parts; together they were strong.

  Stark gasped—a sound that could only be described as agony—and swayed. Millington steadied him. Stark was burning up. His skin was hotter than Hell.

  “The little manling is begging us, my lovelies. See him on his knees? We are amused by his contrition. We shall eat his sweetmeats with pleasure and remember his cowardice before our might.”

  The spiders cried out in appreciation, thousands upon thousands of the hairy black pedipalps parting to allow the chittering its full voice; it was a distressingly human sound. The spiders were excited by the prospect of the feast.

  They swarmed up the steps, wave after wave of bulbous black carapaces surging forward.

  Millington did not move.

  Stark shivered; no mere tremor, it was a violent convulsion that tore through the entirety of his body. He buckled beneath Millington’s steadying grasp. Millington did not allow him to fall.

  “Shall we eat it now, my lovelies? Shall we? Yes, we shall.”

  Stark leaned forward, head and shoulders sagging. He began to chant, vicious sharp words that Millington couldn’t fasten on, words that cut at the edges of his concentration as he tried to understand them. The intensity of his voice heightened, taking on greater and greater urgency as the beast neared, until he was screaming and the Meringias’s barbed claw was scratching through the squared circle on his chest, drawing a thick ribbon of blood to the surface.

  “Open my flesh, Meringias. Cut me down, it will be your doom,” Fabian Stark promised.

  The creature’s laughter was harsh.

  “You doubt me?”

  “You are weak, manling. Nothing. This place is ours now, we have arisen from the deep places, we are home. Your time here is done.”

  “Time,” Stark said, thoughtfully. He actually smiled as he dwelt upon the word. The way he said it scared Millington, more so even than way the Meringias stared, naked hunger in its blazing eyes. Beyond that one word Millington heard the echoes of an eighth hour tolling. “Just ran out … do you feel it, beast? Do you feel its pull on your corporeal form? This is not your sky. This is not your rain, not your air, not your earth. This is not your time.”

  Millington had no idea what his companion’s words meant, but he could feel the truth of them. It was as though the air itself was rebelling against the creature’s unnatural presence. It crackled with energy.

  “We claim it for our own, manling. That is enough. The feeding will be grand. We scent millions of souls ripe for the taking … and we are hungry.”

  “Begin with me,” Stark said, offering himself.

  “No,” Millington said, instinctively stepping forward to protect the young magician.

  But the beast ignored his protestations, lunging forward to pierce Stark’s bare chest with a razor-like claw, opening him up from throat to belly with a single savage motion. Stark screamed, a sound unlike any Millington had ever heard before. It emerged from three mouths, Stark’s, Millington’s and the beast itself. It took him the space between heartbeats to realise it was not merely one of pain but one of triumph as well. The triumph was Stark’s, the anguish, the beast’s.

  Millington stepped back, forgetting his promise for a moment, but Stark did not fall. He could not, Millington realised with horror. The Meringias threw itself forward, burying its face in the young mage’s guts and feasting ravenously. So fierce was the daemon’s hunger that it crawled within Stark’s skin to better devour the marrow of his life, sucking his bones clean. And in that moment the final part of the trap was sprung, the elements coming together to bind the two. Even as he died, Stark’s screams took on a new, haunting quality. For a moment they rang out like joyous laughter and then he was dead and the bells of London were ringing out all around them, their chimes growing more and more frenzied.

  Millington saw Stark’s legs: they had calcified, the blood inside him merging with the stone of the funeral slabs, flesh fusing with the stone, becoming stone. The blood ceased spilling, hardening to the same granite as the Cathedral steps.

  The rain burned against Millington’s scalp. It sizzled off the stone creeping up Stark’s flesh, even as the fire in the young man’s eyes burned out.

  And the creeping death touched the feasting beast, its teeth fusing with the hollow bones it gnawed on. It tried to rise, to break contact with the metamorphosing man, but could not. Stark’s transmogrification continued relentlessly, the man becoming one with the elements he served. A stone man rooted deeply into the ea
rth, rained down upon from the heavens, unmoved by the wind, the very fire of the daemon’s being fusing them together.

  A hideous tearing greeted the beast’s desperate screams of anger and frustration, and suddenly it was free, its huge leathery wings carrying it up into the air. It settled on the great dome, sneering down at the man who had sought to bind it.

  The black wound in the side of the Whispering Gallery was gone, sealed, whether by the bells, the hour stolen, or some other Millington could never hope to understand. But then, so was his companion; like a victim of the Gorgon, Medusa, turned to stone before his very eyes.

  The rain ran down his grey face. There was no trace of rust in it.

  Millington looked down at his feet where hundreds of pebbles were strewn across the lawn, up the steps and along the funeral slabs. It took him a moment to realise that they had only moments before been spiders. He stared up at the Meringias, lost. There was nothing he could do to stop the creature. Nothing he could do to banish it now that Stark had fallen, his sacrifice for naught. He wanted to run as the huge beast began to unfurl its enormous leathery wings.

  The bells fell silent.

  For a moment there was only the sound of the rain.

  And then an inhuman scream tore the dawn in two.

  The creeping stone death had not relinquished its hold upon the Meringias; its wings had calcified, and now the granite was closing over its face. It rose again, sheer stubborn will tearing its claws free of the stone dome, and in the air it seemed to be free, safe from the relentless consummation of the earth.

  But it could not fly forever.

  Millington ran beneath it, his head raised, never letting the daemon out of his sight.

  It settled on the roof of the Old Bailey, beneath the shadow of Lady Justice’s sword, and immediately lost more of itself to stone. And rose again, the weight of its body dragging it down. It barely reached the roof of St. Clements, and as its claws settled so its transformation was complete. The daemon reduced to a gargoyle to look down over the city streets, forever trapped within the sound of the bells in an hour that did not exist.

  He walked back to the Cathedral’s steps, to Stark’s side.

  The young man’s stone face wore a smile.

  That was enough for Millington.

  It had to be.

  It took all of his strength to lift it from the steps to the shrubbery beside the funeral slabs. In time the vegetation would claim Fabian Stark, but there was one hour that could never touch him.

  That was the hour between dawn and morning, the lost hour, that Fabian Stark stood as protector over. “The man of the hour,” Millington said, christening the statue.

  O O O

  Down below, in that other place, beneath the molten sky, the homunculus crept forward.

  The others had left, gone to the world above.

  It was curious; that curiosity burned within it.

  They had left behind the doorway, the skin and bone they had needed to move between the worlds.

  It knelt beside the ruined corpse of Nathaniel Seth, looking at it with something between fascination and desire.

  It licked its lips, looking furtively left and right.

  It was alone.

  Alone to do whatever it wished.

  Whatever …

  It scampered forward and climbed quickly inside the dead man’s skin, trying it on, stretching out into it, to fill it. It felt good. Right. It concentrated on the wounds, spreading its essence out into them. They would heal, in time. And it had time. All the time in the world. An endless hour.

  And so the man who called himself Nathaniel Seth rose up again to stand on his own two feet.

  The daemon of the hour.

  ***

  The God of Forgotten Things

  He took the dying girl’s hand in his, as though by sheer force of will alone he could stave off the inevitable.

  He had never imagined dying alone.

  For as long as it was within his power he wouldn’t let her go.

  Holding her hand he tried instead to conjure all of the memories he had accumulated over his life; all the things he kept alive by remembering. Locked away inside him were things that had been cherished once, and now, without him to remember them, would simply cease to be part of the everyday and would fade into the blurred landscape of the Realm of Forgotten Things forever:

  The simple joy of attaching a baseball card to your bicycle with a clothespin so it hit the spokes as you rode, letting you pretend you were on a motorcycle. Hoppity Hop and Hoppity Horse, Klick-Klacks and Sea Monkeys, Lite Brite and Loop-da-loops. Spirographs and Etch a Sketches, Jumping Jacks and Mr. Potato Head. Captain Action, G.I. Joe, Creepy Crawlers, and Big Wheels (perfect for making wooden go-karts if you removed the huge rear wheel). Playing on construction sites on a Sunday in the days before rabid security dogs, nearly drowning, nearly buried alive, uncountable near crushing accidents, all in the name of childish FUN. Building forts out of bricks and branches and mud to sit and read books or play cowboys and Indians in. Slinkies and Saturday morning matinees, pirates and swashbucklers, duelling with make-believe swords. Playing when it was okay to give a kid a plastic gun that fired fancy Spanish caps. Rubik’s Cubes, Chutes and Ladders, Pong and Lincoln Logs, Whizzers and the Starland Vocal Band.

  And the core beneath it all: Imagination.

  Before childhood had its dreams doled out by graphics and gadgets that plugged into a console. Long before the Great God Television spawned its hundreds of channels and children made their own adventures in their minds.

  Going out to bust ghosts, to have adventures, to play at being explorers beyond the fringe of the neighbourhood when the cars were a nuisance and not filled with potential predators. Tea parties and EZ Bake Ovens which were anything but easy to bake with. He carried all of these things and more, kept them safe. As the God of Forgotten things the old man nurtured the hidden treasures of all of our childhoods, keeping them safe from our forgetfulness.

  He looked at the little girl swallowed in the swaddling clothes of the too big hospital bed, the drips and sensors monitoring her vital signs as they hiccoughed towards the flatline.

  Her death was inevitable. Her organs were failing and shutting down one by one.

  He continued to read from the book he was holding: Hoke Berglund’s mesmeric The Forgetting Wood. He had chosen the book because he hoped the story of King Wolf’s by-blows sneaking out of the wood to steal away children might somehow reach her in whatever darkness her soul had taken refuge; that she might somehow respond to the story.

  Nurses came and went throughout the day, sparing him their looks of pity. They saw an old man and a child; perhaps his granddaughter, dying, and they shared his heartbreak without actually understanding the true nature of what it was they were actually sharing.

  After all, candy stripers and staff nurses were not renowned for being tapped into a hotline to the wisdom of the spheres. An old man was an old man and a dying girl was a tragedy, and never the twain should be Gods or followers whose paths have crossed for a final farewell.

  He stood up. Across the cramped room was a small mirror.

  “What good am I?” the old man badgered his reflection—the face in the mirror was far from glorious. The lines ran deep and wide. “A god of petty trinkets and plastic toys.” He was talking for someone else’s benefit; not the dying girl, and certainly not his own. Someone who could have intervened, if they cared enough to do so. “For all that the miracle of creation flows through my veins I can’t actually do anything … I remember things best left forgotten and fumble toward understanding or lack thereof, of the most mundane mysteries. I can’t even keep a little girl alive.”

  For a fragment of a heartbeat, the stress drew the miracles to the fore, threatening to unleash all that he remembered on the world, and the memories showed through the map of his face—and in the glass he saw things long since lapsed from the collective memory of everyday people. The secrets beneath the sur
face that made him Him.

  Kids building ramps to launch their bicycles through the air like Evil Knievel, the bicycles cobbled together from scraps salvaged from various junkyards. Super 8 mm cameras and projectors. Forgotten youth filled with Rin Tin Tin and The Lone Ranger, Hopalong Cassidy, Tom Mix and Pez dispensers. Playing with telephones made of tin cans and string, blowing an infernal racket on plastic kazoos and playing practical jokes with squirting flowers, fake cigarettes and hand buzzers. Sky King, Have Gun Will Travel, Sugar Foot, Wanted Dead or Alive, Give-A-Show Projectors and Bazooka Bubble Gum. 10 pence comics, Doc Savage and Tarzan and Sherlock Holmes. Drive-in movies with homemade hotdogs and cokes in real glass bottles. Days spent playing with miniature petrol station play sets, and building cut-outs from the back of cereal boxes. Shooting marbles, and losing favourite ‘steelies’ to dead eye shots. Vinegar withered Conkers and Stink Bombs. Pedal cars and Silly Putty. Green Slime and Weebles that wobbled but wouldn’t fall down. View Master and Presto Magic papers, Hungry Hippos and Buckeroo Banzai. The things inside him never ended. He was infinite. He contained multitudes of memories. Hunting tadpoles in the creek, and searching for bullets and shells soldiers had discarded during a war equally long since forgotten. Punch balloons and candyfloss. Battered yellow Tonka Trucks and Hot Wheels and Matchbox Cars racing on narrow plastic tracks. Stalking the neighbourhood with a Red Ryder BB Gun. Spending all afternoon building plastic model cars and planes, just smash them up in the driveway in some horrific accident. These were all the things that made him Him.

  And he couldn’t imagine letting go. Letting them go.

  It wasn’t death that scared him.

  It was ceasing to be and all the things that would be lost along with him.

  So he knelt beside her deathbed, waiting. He held her tiny hand in his and felt the flutter of her pulse.

  “I’m not ready yet,” he repeated and knew, truthfully, that he wasn’t. Her eyes were glass. She was going. He looked back over his shoulder toward the door. No one was in the corridor. Breathing deeply, he leaned in to kiss the girl they all thought was his daughter. Their lips didn’t actually touch. They didn’t need to. A mere fraction from contact, he inhaled, drawing her out of herself and into him, absorbing her. It was a strange sensation, like drinking, swallowing and not being able to stop as more and more of the girl’s spirit poured down his throat.