Time's Mistress

by Steven Savile

  The red-eyed waiter pushed passed me, wrapped his arms around Federico’s waste and started heaving against his stomach, trying to force whatever it was that was choking him out. One, two, three. Quick jerks. Something red, glossed over with blood spat out of his lips and skittered across the floor and he was left gasping for breath in the waiter’s arms. Everyone was looking at Freddie. Not me. I was looking at the red thing that had come out of his mouth. It was blood definitely, and some kind of film, almost like an egg without the shell, the film meshed with white lines. While I stared at it, the white lines became thin spidery legs that twitched, stretching the mucus-covering that had eased the passage of whatever it was into this world. I tried to tell myself it was raw tissue from Freddie’s throat and stomach lining but it wasn’t. The legs finally tore the membranous sack and clenched the air, finding the strength they needed to support the things’ golf ball sized body, and then it was skittering away into the darkness beneath another diner’s table. I wanted to scream so badly there was no way not to. I reached out for the table. Needed it to keep me from falling. I couldn’t have seen what I had just seen.

  I couldn’t have seen Ania Chaborik’s face on that … that … thing.

  I couldn’t have …

  “Caro? Caro?” It was Federico, wiping the blood from his lips as he reached out to steady me. I shook his hand off, backed away, turned and ran out of the cafe and into the rain.

  O O O

  “What the hell was that … that … thing?” I said bluntly. There were two ways of looking at it, and over the last three days I’d stared at both pretty hard. The first was that none of it had happened, no phone call, no Federico, no Veronica, no blood-spider, that I was the victim of one ugly hallucination but I knew that wasn’t true. So the other angle was that all of it was real. That was so much worse than merely seeing things.

  He’d come looking for me after I left my machine to pick up all his calls. In each message he sounded progressively more desperate. I don’t know why, but I liked that. The clock on the wall had stuck at three. It had been like that for days but I didn’t have a spare battery to get it going again. Every time the phone rang Deuteronomy would start brushing up against it, trying to dislodge the handset from its cradle with his paw. Dumb cat didn’t realise the kind of trouble that was waiting on the other end of the line. After three days the calls finally stopped. I thought he’d given up. I was wrong. An hour later Federico was pounding on my door. Hard. Demanding that I answer. Finally, I gave in. I opened the door for him.

  Now he was pacing the hardwood floor of my lounge, making cats cradles with his fingers. He looked like Hell … No that wasn’t true. He looked a little better than Hell. He’d looked like Hell when I ran out on him, now, if anything, he looked slightly worse.

  He didn’t offer me a smooth lie; it was too late for that. He looked at me with eyes that looked as dark and broody as a thunder-sky. “You know what it was,” he said, rubbing at his chin. “It was someone … a friend … I can’t remember who … it was my memories of them. Gone.” He threw his hands up helplessly.

  I got up from my seat and went over to the window to stare out into the street. I half expected Veronica to be sheltered in the doorway opposite but, as Federico had pointed out when he finally calmed down enough to talk, it wasn’t raining. A steady stream of cars, Volvos and Nissans of each and every colour and hue, moved in a metal snake down the road, a red city bus making the rattle at the tail.

  “You don’t seriously expect me to buy into that, do you?” I said, doing my best Gillian Anderson impression. I didn’t turn around to look at him. I didn’t need to, thanks to the light he was reflected in the glass like a spectre overlapping the street below.

  “That’s how it happens,” he muttered, still pacing. “I have no control over it you know … she chokes it out of me … I can tell it’s going to happen a while before it does. I find myself thinking about someone a lot. Not just how they look, things they say, everything. It’s as if she is leafing through the memories one by one, weeding the person out of my mind, then when she’s done, everything is out, it’s as if they become a hairball or something … you know, they just have to get out and I start choking … until I cough them out … That, back there in the cafe, that was nothing … I thought I was going to die the first time she stole someone from me.”

  He was telling me the truth, or at least he thought he was, that much was painfully obvious.

  “You’ve got to help me, Caroline. I can’t take much more of this.”

  That much was obvious, just from looking at him. His eyes seemed to be falling into his skull, the cavities around them were so pronounced. Actually, it was as if he’d taken to wearing blue mascara on the skin beneath his eyes, or someone had punched him hard enough to bruise the entire eye socket of both eyes. And his hands … the folds of skin hung from his fingers like gloves that were far too big for his birdlike hands.

  Prognosis terminal, Mr. Chuavas. Two, three days at most, I’d say, if you asked me, I thought darkly. Two or three days.

  “How?” I asked. “How can I help you? What can I do?”

  “Tell me stories, tell them fast. I need to know my life. I need to share your memories, pretend they are my own. I’m running out of things for her to take, Caro. There isn’t much of me left …” Two or three days, I said to myself. “I need some fake plastic memories to buy me time … I don’t know what else to do, how else to fight her …”

  “Jesus … I need a drink,” I said then, going through to the kitchen to brew a jug of strong black coffee, Swedish style. Thick enough to stand a spoon in. Freddie stayed in the lounge. “Put some music on,” I called through. “This is going to be a long night.” He grunted something and after a minute Ani Difranco was telling us all about her Little Plastic Castle. I got the joke after a minute. Goldfish have no memory and the little plastic castle is a surprise every time… “Funny, Freddie,” I said, pouring out my first cup of the night ahead. Corkscrews of steam curled up under my nose as I carried the two cups through. “So you haven’t lost your sense of humour, huh?”

  He managed a smile. “I just remember you loving that damned song … Used to hum it everywhere you went.”

  We sat down facing each other, no putting it off anymore. I reached over to the bookcase for one of my many photograph albums and flipped it open on Marcus’s baby face. I turned the page quickly. I didn’t want my son getting mixed up in this. Besides, Marcus was no business of Federico’s. None. Five years back in five pages and there was Freddie leaning against his car on that hill … I stared at the picture trying for the life of me to remember what was special about it. Nothing. It was gone.

  I looked for a different photograph, one I knew something about. It was of me and Louise Langeby smiling over the top of huge ice cream sundaes dripping with cola sauce and mint green liqueur. I smiled slightly, remembering just how incredibly competitive Louise had been about everything. In the photograph her hair was pulled up in its usual business-like ponytail, her face sans makeup, pretty but nothing special. I smiled inwardly, wondering what Louise would think of me; people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, right? I rested my fingertip on the photograph and began my long night as Scheherazade, telling stories to save a life.

  “This was taken a year after we graduated high school, in an ice cream parlour in Gamla Stan. Wonderful ice cream. We were celebrating because Louise had just landed herself a job as a copy editor with Bonniers.” I stopped thinking about the words I was saying, found myself visualising them instead, reliving the memories …

  The inside of the ice cream parlour was cold even though the paraffin heater was pumping out warmth. It had been a stupid idea coming for ice cream in January. Snow lined the street and banked up against the window like a scene from a Christmas card. Louise was really getting on my nerves, all of her talk about Bonniers this and Bonniers that, and the way she curled her lip up whenever she deigned to think about my own fledgling caree
r as a makeup artist at Face. Still, the ice cream was good.

  “Tell me about our break-up,” Federico interrupted, breaking the illusion. I looked at the clock, trying to get some sense of how long I had been under, but it was still stuck at three. The neons out in the street prevented the moon from giving any hints.

  But it wasn’t the moon I was looking at.

  It was Federico.

  Only Federico.

  Always Federico.

  A thin dribble of blood was running from the corner of his mouth, losing itself in the cracks of his chin. He didn’t seem to be aware of it so I reached out to wipe it away but his hand snaked out and grabbed mine, his grip surprisingly strong, hurt. “Don’t,” he hissed, refusing to let go of my hand even when he felt the urge to move fade from my muscles.

  I didn’t know what to say. I looked up from the ribbon of blood into his dead eyes. I was wrong; the sky had never lived in them. A flat rolling emptiness of oblivion consumed them. That was all there was to him. Emptiness. Oblivion.

  “Tell me about our break-up,” he repeated harshly.

  I shook my head, no. His fingers dug into my wrists. Twisting. “Tell me, Caro. You know you will so don’t make me hurt you.” I couldn’t break his hold, no matter how much I wanted to. “Needless pain is such a waste of good suffering.” The more pressure he put on my wrists the more vehemently I shook my head. But I couldn’t help myself; I started thinking about it …

  The room was dark, for once not bathed in moonlight. Shadows cast by the limbs of the old tree in my parents’ garden danced on the white wall. I watched them trying to put some sort of message into their movement; a subtext about the decline of civilisation and the end of Empire, or something equally bogus. Free spirits that they were, the trees were having nothing to do with it. “I don’t love you anymore,” I said at last, knowing he couldn’t see my eyes. We’d made love less than an hour before. I felt cheap. Dirty. Used. I could never have said the words if he had been looking at me. The darkness gave me the strength to say what we both knew: It was over.

  “You were it, Caro.” Federico’s voice was consumed by sadness. Blood was running from both nostrils now. No longer a thin trickle, it was bleeding into the collar of his shirt. He looked as if he had been shot in the neck. “You were the one. My North, my South, my East and my West … and you left me …”

  It really was like an ugly hallucination, the way the past kept overlaying the present with its painful memories.

  Something was beginning to happen inside me; I could feel it. Not like Freddie had explained it, not some kind of hairball at the back of my throat. It was in my stomach, a severe cramp, like a period pain but so much more intense. It felt like my womb was on fire and my ovaries were about to burst. And spill bloody red spiders onto the floor, that damned voice goaded.

  “You left me,” he repeated softly.

  I had started crying; I don’t remember when. I hurt so much. Inside and out. “I’m sorry,” I managed, trying to curl up into a foetal ball even though he still had my hands. “I’m sorry.”

  “Sweet Caroline,” he soothed, lowering me to the floor. One moments softness exchanged for a brutal kick to my belly. A second kick, crunching into my breastbone. “You were always the one … It had to be you … I’m sorry, Caro. If … If I hadn’t loved you, it wouldn’t hurt so much …”

  I sobbed, breaking.

  I thought I was going to throw up; felt something soft brushing up against me. Deuteronomy. I tried to push him away but my body wouldn’t answer my mind.

  Something sounded, a banging, a knock at the door: “Don’t go away now,” Federico whispered, brushing back my hair tenderly before he went to answer the knocking. I tried to move but it was impossible. So I just lay there in a ball, wishing I were dead while the spider of reality crawled inside my ear and whispered:

  “Whyyyyy don’t youuuu kill him?”

  It was laughable; I couldn’t even move and despite his outward frailty there was steel moving that loose flesh of Federico’s. I didn’t have a hope in Hell.

  There were voices but I couldn’t hear what they were saying, not at first. I could just make out Federico’s but the others … some female, I guessed before I finally blacked out.

  O O O

  A ring of faces surrounded me when I came too. Federico’s dead eyes looking down paternally, Veronica’s still clouded with fairy dust and angels. But there were others. Faces I hadn’t seen since high school. Ania, Louise, Neha, Mary and Elisa, each looking at me as if I had somehow betrayed them. Each face impossibly young, every eye haunted by the kind of emptiness only death can bring. They crowded around me like so many spiders chittering over their prey.

  Come to feast.

  That was when I felt it; the first dribbles of blood trailing down the inside of my thigh. The pain in my womb, already unbearable, doubled, trebled. I could feel, literally feel, something crawling down through the lips of my vagina, hungry to be out in the world. I was screaming and they were all leaning over me and cooing, urging me to give birth.

  I was wrong.

  There was a lot of blood.

  I felt Federico’s fingers on my temples, soothing, gentling. And I felt Federico’s fingers inside my head, picking through my memories, weeding them out, plucking out what he wanted, what he needed.

  When it came, the memory was born in the same kind of mucus-covered spider that Freddie had coughed up. This one wore a man’s face, older, it had meant something to me once but now there was nothing, a blank space where this man had been in my life.

  Deuteronomy watched the blood-slicked spider as it crawled down my leg, his eyes feral, bright. Instinct took over. The cat lunged, no time for playing with his food. One clawed paw snagged the spider and his open mouth came down instinctively to eat.

  Federico was screaming but he couldn’t move with anything approaching the speed or agility of the cat. Deuteronomy finished eating the small spider and turned to consider the old man screeching at him with disinterested eyes.

  Good boy, I urged, biting back on the pain as a second memory began its journey down the birth canal. Now do it again … Anything was better than this monster I used to call a friend swallowing my life, my memories, whole … But Deuteronomy wasn’t going to be doing it again. The thing that was Federico saw to that. He took my cat in his hands and began to pull, cracking his ribcage then splitting it open with burrowing fingers, fishing the memory out before it had had a chance to dissolve in Deuteronomy’s stomach acids. Dropping the cat he stuffed the bloody spider into his mouth and swallowed it whole, licking his fingers as if to savour a particularly rare delicacy.

  I didn’t have the strength to cry any more than I was already crying. Black holes were opening up inside my skull. Holes were people had lived once upon a time. One by one The Real Thief of Time delivered my memories into the world, memories of Ania and Elisa, Louise, Mary and Neha, the mucus-covered spiders into each of their mouths, bringing back a part of themselves that the Thief had already stolen. They were feeding themselves off me. A swarm of those blood-slicked spiders skittered all over the floor. They just kept pouring out of me, a lifetime of memories. It didn’t matter that I didn’t know who they were anymore; I knew they were feeding off me like vampires, claiming back a month or a year of their stolen age with each swallow.

  What they didn’t take Federico devoured, swallowing the chitinous memories down like a glutton, licking his fingers after each mouthful——not to enjoy, I realised distantly, but to drain, to make sure he got each and every last drop of memory soaked blood from them.

  And with each one another line was erased from his face, another tendon firmed beneath the slowly tightening skin.

  He drank from me until I was empty.

  O O O

  I lay there on the floor, waiting to die.

  But it wasn’t going to be that easy.

  They were gone, whoever they were, like ghosts, phantoms, things that never were, never would be
.

  I was alone with the emptiness inside my head. The blackness that used to house laughter and friendship, lovers and sadness. Everything around me was strange. The floor on which I bled, I’d never seen it before. The music still playing on the stereo, likewise, sounds I had never heard before.

  I crawled onto my knees, ignoring the bloody mess of a cat someone had slaughtered. I didn’t recognise the face I saw reflected in the window. A young girl of fourteen or fifteen surrounded by a halo of dawn’s early light. It had to be me but I could have been looking at anyone. Looking at myself I felt the first cramps of period pain coming on. Everything felt stiff. Sore.

  Had I been raped? The thought sent a chill shivering down the length of my spine. There was enough blood. And it hurt enough … Oh Jesus … Is that what had happened?

  I touched myself tentatively, but it was impossible to tell. Everything felt raw.

  I closed my eyes, searching for something inside; some memory that would help make sense of things. Nothingness stretched back for years and years where memories had been, back until it faltered at the foot of a flickering flame … A face … A young boy …

  Marcus …

  That was his name …

  Marcus.

  My son.

  I looked at myself in the window again. The girl I saw looking back was too young to have a son yet the memory remained, stronger than anything else. More real. Marcus, my son. The one soul I had truly loved in this life of mine. My one. My North, my South, my East and my West.

  Somehow, I understood, without knowing how I did, he had the key to me.

  Whoever they were, they’d left me one thing, one guiding light, for a reason. Only it wasn’t a light, in the same way that cancer isn’t a light, or AIDS, or cot death. They are ways out, but they aren’t the light at the tunnels’ mouth. His face in my memory was more like the darkest spot in heart of a black hole, sucking up light and sound and everything else greedily. He was everything to me.