Which maybe it is. But why is he just sitting there? Why hasn’t he used whatever powers he has to have done with me?
Is this just to be a talking shop? If so, then what really is the point?
He clears his throat then, with the very faintest of smiles, leans towards me again.
‘Talking of choices. Where’s your wife, Otto?’
I was intending to turn away, to leave him sitting there, but now I turn back. There’s a strong tone of insinuation in his voice that suggests he knows something that shouldn’t be known. Something foul.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You want to go to her? To see what she’s doing, right now? I can show you if you like.’
I take two steps toward him, my fist raised, and as I do, so the two figures appear once more. His bodyguards. His selves.
Brothers …
I take a step back, away from them. And as I do, so they vanish into the air, like projections, leaving a second set of footprints in the dust. Footprints that lead nowhere.
‘Well?’ he asks. ‘I can show it to you if you want. But no, that wouldn’t satisfy you, would it? You need to know. To see. Maybe even to touch.’
I look down, horrified by the suggestion. Wanting and not wanting what he’s offering, if only to confirm my darkest suspicions.
Only …
Urd make me wrong! I beg, feeling a sudden weakness in my limbs.
Which is, of course, just what he wants. To weaken me. To undermine me.
Because that’s it, you see. Part of me recognises what’s being done to me here. Just as Ernst wasn’t Ernst, this Katerina is not my darling girl, but a fake, plucked by Kolya from the timestreams to betray me; to seduce my dear friend Will and break my heart.
I know this. Know it almost for a certainty – for isn’t this just how Kolya goes about things? – and yet part of me still believes she has cheated on me; that same part that will not be content until I see it for myself.
And yet … to see it … No, I surely haven’t the strength.
Kolya stands, his slow movements showing his age, then looks to me.
‘What’s up, Otto? Afraid to face the truth?’ He laughs. A cold, mocking sound. ‘You think she’s our creature, don’t you? And yes, it would be easy to do that. Very easy. Only you’d know, wouldn’t you? You of all people.’
My mouth is dry now.
Walk away, I tell myself. Go now, before this bastard pours his poison in your eyes and ears. Only something stops me, makes me turn again to face the old man, seeing now how he holds a parcel out to me.
‘Here,’ he says, throwing it to me, making me take a hurried step forward to snatch it from the air. ‘Enjoy!’
And he’s gone.
497
Meister Schnorr looks back at me from where he sits beside the screen. ‘You really want to do this, Otto?’
I nod, knowing that it’s actually the last thing I wish to see, because once seen…
I’ve discussed this now with Urte, and it seems it’s true. Once seen there is no removing it from my head. Not without removing her. For Katerina’s central to the loop. And not just to the loop, but to reality itself. Core reality.
Over the years we have refashioned the Tree of Worlds and cannot undo now what we have done. Not without losing all that I most treasure.
In this it is Kolya’s master stroke.
I look to Ernst. ‘Does she …?’
‘Know about it?’ He shakes his head. ‘As soon as we found out what was going on we … well, we made a decision. To keep it from her. Bad enough that they got to you, Otto. But Katerina would have gone mad.’
I nod, but my whole self feels cast down.
‘You want us to stay?’
‘No, leave me, I’ll call you when I’m done.’
And so they leave.
I lock the door behind me, then walk over to the screen. I have only to touch it and it will begin. Whatever it shows.
Yes, but do I want to see?
The sensible thing would be to destroy this … this fake. Only – as I’ve said – there’s a small part of me that needs to know. That almost needs to gloat over it, even as the larger part of my soul dies.
Because nothing will be the same after this.
The screen lights up. Too close to it, I move back a little, and for a second or two fail to recognise just what I’m looking at. But then I understand. It begins where I ended it, the two of them together at the foot of the stairs, in Stuart London, in 1609, locked in a passionate embrace from which I watch them break.
Eyes wide with wanting, he grasps her hand. ‘Come …’
And she obeys, taking his hand as he leads her down the dimly lit passageway to another set of stairs that lead up into another part of the inn. One I’ve never seen before this moment.
Fakes, I say to myself, trying to convince myself of that, even as they pass the camera’s vantage point. Only they don’t look like fakes. Far from it. Because every little gesture seems familiar.
Familiar and authentic.
Will flings the door open, then pulls her in beside him, drawing her into an embrace, Katerina laughing now, excited.
And that alone makes me groan, That she should want him. Above all others at that moment. Him.
And on the screen now she is undressing him, even as he unlaces her from her dress. And as their clothes fall away, so I drop onto my haunches, groaning with the pain I feel, knowing that for all Old Schnorr denies it, this is them – my wife and my latest friend – naked on that shabby little bed.
I look away, even as the soundtrack grows louder, even as the noises of their foul enjoyment fill the room I’m in.
Urd save me, no.
I am compelled to look back, and as I do, so, with a gasp and an increased excitement, they begin to fuck.
This is hell indeed. To witness this. To watch her lose faith with me and fuck another. And to enjoy it, too. This is worse than all the small deaths I’ve ever suffered. Oh, much, much worse. And no mistaking this, these two seem real. Not actors, but my lover and my friend. And I fall to my knees, as I did once before, and, head in my hands, howl out my bitter agonies.
Katerina … My darling girl. How in heaven’s name could you ever do this to me?
498
‘Watch,’ Ernst says, and turns the screen on once again.
I look to him and shake my head. There’s nothing he could show me now that would convince me otherwise. Nothing that could make this any better. Except, that is, to erase all trace of her, even if I could. Even if this new reality we now inhabit allowed such changes.
But he is adamant. ‘No, Otto. Just watch. And remember who it was that gave you this. This is his last throw of the dice. Just think how desperate he must be, resorting to this.’
I turn, looking at the screen. For a moment I’m silent. Then I look to him again.
‘What is this?’
‘Watch,’ he says again. But this time it’s an order. And when it’s done and the screen goes black again, I look away, thoughtful.
I make to say something then stop.
‘Well?’ Ernst says patiently. ‘You’ve seen now, how it was done.’
‘Have I?’
And indeed I have. Have seen them afterwards, on the screen, sat naked side by side on the edge of the bed, smoking a post-coital cigarette, as the film crew – two of them clearly Kolya’s ‘brothers’ – tidy up about them.
Making a blue film, as they used to call it. Hard porn. And there’s part of me that believes the artifice. That this was all a set-up. But still a small part clings on. Believes it’s really them. Punishing me. Making me suffer as only such betrayals can. My soul destroyed by what I’ve seen. Never to be the same.
Ernst huffs and walks away. And, even as he does, so I hear the door behind me creak open, and turn to see Katerina herself, standing there in the doorway, a query in her eyes.
‘Well?’ she says, the slightest impatience in the words. ‘They sa
id you wanted to see me …’
She’s clearly still angry from our last meeting, but her voice trails off as she sees what’s on the screen on the far side of the room.
She double-takes, then looks to me. ‘What in Urd’s name …’
I turn my head away, unable to look at her. I feel disgust, and hurt … and an anger to match her own.
‘It’s you. Can’t you see? You.’
499
She steps up close to the screen and looks, studying the frozen image as if it were a painting and she some connoisseur.
For a long time then she’s silent, like she’s considering what story to tell, what lies to trot out and make things right again. Only nothing can make this right.
‘It’s strange,’ she says, not looking round. ‘Seeing yourself like this. It’s all rather indecent. And yet, at the same time, completely innocent.’
‘Innocent?’ I climb to my feet, unable to contain the anger – the bitter, spitting anger – that I’m feeling at that moment. ‘It’s you! It’s you fucking doing that, not some stranger!’
‘And yet not.’
And now she turns, her eyes uncertain. ‘You shouldn’t have shown me this, Otto. Now it’ll be awkward … with Will, I mean. Knowing that there are versions of us, out there in the timelines, that have done this.’
‘And you?’ I say, the bitterness growing by the second. ‘You sure as fucking well enjoyed it.’
Katerina shrugs. She looks down, abashed. ‘The me in the film? Sure. But what if I didn’t know you in that world … that timeline? What if that was one of the hundreds of worlds you died in? In which you’d never met me, never fell in love? What then? Was I to live like a nun?’ She pauses, then: ‘I have a passionate nature. That’s all this says of our relationship. That this is what I’d have been without you. A sexual adventurer, if that’s how you’d like to call it. But that’s only because I didn’t have you in my life, Otto.’
Only how can I believe that, now that I’ve seen her with another? How can I ever shake that off? Fated we were. Only now …
Now I suspect every man she’s ever met, every so-called friend, and ask myself which among them have fucked her? Has Ernst? Or maybe Svetov? And I imagine a long queue of men, there at her door, each waiting to be fucked.
Ridiculous, I know. The imaginings of a madman. But I simply cannot stop it. I’ve seen it now, the worst thing a man could see. A cuckold’s vision of the world.
She turns fully, straightening up, and looks to me. Her voice is gentle now, conciliatory. ‘So what are we going to do?’
‘Do?’ And again, it’s angry. I can’t help it, but I also can’t sustain this. I still love the look of her, the touch of her, the smell. She is all I ever wanted in this life. But Fate has tripped us at the last.
‘Urd help us,’ I say again. Only this time it’s a whisper, a coil of smoke about the sharpest of needles.
Urd fucking help us.
500
And then Time slips. The sky moves sideways, and just as suddenly she’s gone. To come again? Who knows? Only that a messenger – a young boy, no more than eight or nine, is there now at the back door to the inn, bidding us follow him, down to the river’s edge as dawn breaks over the city.
And there, at the quayside, we come upon him, floating face down in the shallows, drowned, his throat cut, his pocket picked.
Dead, I think, recalling how I’d felt, only moments before, seeing him in my darling’s arms. As if the wish were father to this deed.
And Katerina?
I ask the boy. But there was no sign, it seems, of a woman with him.
I want to go back, to ask her, yes and confront her again, only it’s at that very moment that I notice the paper trail, the pages of his latest play marked on the reverse with arrows, pinned to the wooden walls of houses, pointing the way. I follow, gathering up the handwritten sheets, hurrying to do so before someone else plucks them from the walls.
London, I think. 1609. Where it all began.
And suddenly I’m there, back at St Paul’s, and the bookshop, where there’s a huge stack of leatherbound printed manuscripts of Of Time and Tides, dated a year hence. And as I take a copy from the pile and turn it, facing me, so I recognise whose work this claims to be. Whose symbol is branded into the thick leather cover of the work.
The lazy eight.
Okay. But why? For this seems petty by his standards.
I turn the cover, looking, wondering why this path should lead here of all places. And even as I do, so someone grabs me, grappling with my arms, while another kicks my legs away, forcing me down onto my knees in the mud. And, drawing a blade, he cuts me from ear to ear, the blood gouting from the gaping flaps of flesh.
‘Dead,’ he says quietly, letting my head fall back, his pale eyes at the last staring into mine. ‘And no way back.’
501
I wake to find myself in limbo. Or at least something closely resembling it. A white room. A perfectly white room, without a window or door to be seen.
More cell than room.
I reach up to gently touch my throat and feel the thick scar there.
‘Where am I?’
It’s Kolya who answers me, making me turn, to see his presence there where a moment ago there was nothing.
‘Somewhere that the youngster can’t get at you,’ he says, which makes me wonder about a lot of things.
‘Your younger self, you mean?’
He nods. ‘They live within much smaller loops than us.’
I blink, surprised, but he continues.
‘Oh, I’d kill you, sure enough. If it meant something. Only there’s little point to it now. It all reverts.’
‘And this?’ I ask, tenderly touching the scar at my throat.
‘Was just a gesture. The last move in a very long game. No. This loop is done, Otto Behr. Nothing can alter it any longer. No more births, no more deaths. Just repetition.’
‘And Katerina?’
But he ignores that. ‘Are you still curious, Otto?’
‘Curious?’
‘As to why it happened as it did?’
I hesitate then nod. Only I don’t expect the truth from him.
‘Tell me,’ I say. And he tells me. About the world he ruled. The great globe-spanning empire that he built. And about his use of Shakespeare to write the history of that world – the same book that was there on Master Hecht’s shelves that time. And how I took that world from him. Yes, and robbed him of a son.
And this is the nub of it. For he was the only son Kolya ever had in all those worlds he made his own. The one and only he considered his, anyway. A boy, little more than eight years old when I took him from Kolya. Out into the void, where I dumped him. Left him to die in the eternal cold, beyond Kolya’s reach for once.
His single failing. No wonder he hated me.
‘What about Reichenau?’ I ask, but he shakes his head. ‘That abomination? That was my sister’s child.’
‘But I thought—’
‘Then you thought wrong.’
He is silent for a moment, then stands, leaning on his staff.
‘Your day is over, Otto. Mine too, I guess, only … I have this unfinished business with your daughter. You know, the one you lost.’
‘Martha?’ And I try to sit up, only I black out, and when I come to again he’s leaning over me, his face a hand’s width from my own, his foul breath in my nostrils.
‘It’s many years since she called herself that,’ he says. ‘She’s the lost girl now.’
I close my eyes, a tear rolling down my cheek.
Alive. My darling girl’s alive.
I drift into sleep and wake to find the old man gone, another in his place.
‘Aren’t you dead?’ I ask him, and he smiles back at me.
‘Aren’t you?’
Kavanagh is different from how I remember him. The bullet holes that killed him have healed over, but his scarred and shaven head is still familiar.
�
��Where’s the other one?’
‘Kolya? He’s gone. Word is that he’s dying.’
‘Dying?’
‘Old age,’ he says. ‘Or should we call it Time?’
‘And me?’
Kav hesitates, then answers me, somewhat reluctantly it seems.
‘You’re dying too, my dear friend. You’ve got a cancer, there, in your head, wrapped about your brain stem – a glioma. Malignant and incurable. You’ve been having proton therapy…’
I look puzzled, shake my head.
Kav sighs. ‘Apparently they put you into this huge scanner that uses high-energy beams of radiation to destroy the cancerous cells. Only, well, only sometimes it doesn’t work.’
‘And it’s not working for me?’
He hesitates again. ‘I don’t know. I think you’d need to ask.’
Dying, eh? Well, that makes sense of it all.
I close my eyes and ask the question I asked earlier again. ‘Where are we?’
‘On the shores of Lake Michigan.’
‘Your home town.’
‘Yes, only things have changed.’
‘Changed? In what way.’
‘You’ll see. But I’ll leave you be for now. You need your rest, Otto.’
Only I don’t hear half of it. I drift off again.
And wake to find Ernst sat beside the bed, holding my hand.
‘Otto …’
There are tears in his eyes. My oldest friend. I squeeze his hand and smile weakly. It’s good to see Ernst. He’s always had my back.
‘Is it true? That I’m dying?’
He gives a single nod. ‘Least, that’s what the senior consultant says.’
‘Fuck … And no jumping back?’
‘Those days are done with, Otto. At least, in our circles.’
‘Then who’s running the show?’
‘Svetov, mainly. But the idea now is to contain time travel, not proliferate it. We’ve become watchmen, guarding the timelines.’
‘And does it work?’
Ernst smiles. ‘So they say.’
‘But you’re not so sure?’
There’s a moment’s silence, then I gesture to Ernst to raise me up on my cushions. He does, making me comfy.
The Master of Time Page 44
