I felt Mary trying to pull me away but I shook my head, and again approached my uncle. This time I was ready for the hand. I caught it as I knelt down beside him, prying the wrench from his fingers, the weakness of his grip frightening me much more than the blood. I let the tool clatter to the floor as Uncle Tully wailed. The wall shook again with the impact of his head.
“Uncle, stop!” I pleaded. I risked inflaming him further and put out a hand to cup his skull, cushioning it, trying to think what to do. I’d only ever once glimpsed my uncle having a fit like this, and it was Lane who had calmed him. Lane had known how to restrain him, and in a way that reassured rather than punished, allowing no harm. Physically I did not have that capability; I could only use what I possessed.
“Uncle Tully,” I said, still loud, but this time with authority rather than fear. He tried to hit his head again, instead crushing my hand. I flinched at the pain, but did not remove my hand.
“Open your eyes,” I commanded. “Uncle, Marianna says to open your eyes.”
The drooping lids fluttered, then half opened, their usual blue now a dull, clouded sky. I gave them time to focus.
“What is ninety-seven times one hundred and three, Uncle Tully?”
He lifted his head to bang it again, but the movement was slight, and my hand took only a glancing blow. One of the wounds on his temple oozed but had almost stopped bleeding. He had been doing this a long time, while I had been next door, eating a four-course dinner. My guilt squeezed inward, tightening like a vise.
“Look at me, Uncle Tully. Ninety-seven times one hundred and three?”
“Nine …” his voice was croaking, “… thousand … nine hundred and … ninety, plus one.”
“That’s right.” There was no need to know the answers; his numbers were always correct. “Do you know who I am, Uncle?”
He hit his head again, and I bit my lip against the hurt. He said, “You are Simon’s … Simon’s baby.”
“That’s right. Your little niece. Twenty-seven times twenty-four?”
“Six hundred and forty-eight.” His face crumpled as if he might cry. “I … little niece … I don’t know where I am!”
“I know it, Uncle.”
“I can wait in the wrong place for twenty. I waited for twenty. …” His voice rose to a yell again, rasping as his sentence trailed away. He lifted his head to bang it, and behind him I saw the clock Mary had put on the bedside table, chosen because it was a particular favorite of my uncle’s, all its cogs and gears exposed rather than hidden inside a cabinet. My hand took another hard blow.
“Uncle Tully,” I said, “listen, do you hear the clock?” His head twisted in my hand, telling me no. “Listen, Uncle Tully, listen. What is the clock telling you?”
Uncle Tully finally went still long enough to hear an audible tick, and when he did, he froze. I held my breath. Mary must have been doing the same because the room went deathly still, the tick, tick, tick, tick like a mechanical heartbeat. My uncle’s eyes closed, his battered face intent.
“What is it telling you, Uncle?” I whispered.
After a long time he said, “It says that it is right, that its pieces are working, and that the when is now.”
“And the clock is working even in a different place, isn’t it?” He moved about in my hand a little, but he was not trying to hit his head. “I told you that when you woke up, that we would have done just what Marianna said to. Do you remember that, Uncle?”
“I waited … for twenty …”
“But you don’t have to wait for twenty here, Uncle, because this place is not wrong. It’s a place Marianna made for you. We did just as Marianna told us.”
My uncle frowned. “But Marianna said that when the men come, that … that I am to wait … in the tunnel.”
I looked hard at my uncle, watching his short, panting breaths. Every now and again he was capable of remarkable penetration, as if a light had somehow beamed through his fog. “Yes, Uncle,” I said softly, “that’s exactly right. Only this time the men knew all about the tunnel. So Marianna made another place, a place where you could make new toys and where they would be safe. That is where we are now. And you can hear that the clocks are ticking.”
Which to my uncle meant that the world was still turning on its axis. I waited, hardly daring to draw breath, to see if he would accept this explanation. If he did not, I had no other plan. His mouth turned down again, ready to cry. I was ready to cry with him.
“But … where is … the house? And Mrs. Jefferies? The girl is here. …” I chanced a glance back at Mary. She had sunk to the floor, her back against the wall. “Did the water take it all away? Like before? I don’t understand. …”
“The water didn’t come this time, Uncle, and it’s all right to not understand. I’ll stay with you until you do. But now you are very tired. Would you come with me and lie down, and have some —”
Uncle Tully’s eyes snapped open. “Will I get too tired, Simon’s baby? Will I go away? The forever kind, like Marianna?”
I paused, my uncle’s head still cupped in my hand, his white hair and white nightshirt stained with blood, pale skin stained with coming bruises. And he was searching my face, puzzled, the mind that could confound the best the scientific world could offer, asking if someday he would die. The thought filled me with a pain that I could not show him.
“I don’t want you to go away, Uncle. I want you to stay with me. But if you did … if you did get too tired, then we would not forget. We would remember. Always.”
Uncle Tully sighed. “It is right to remember,” he said, eyes dropping. “That is what Marianna said.”
He was relaxing now. I slowly took my hand away from his head, before he could realize it was there, letting his bleeding temple rest against the wall. “Would you like to come with me, Uncle Tully, and look at Marianna’s new place, and all your things that we’ve brought?”
He winced, eyes remaining closed. “My head hurts, little niece.”
“Yes. And it has gotten very dirty. Will you let me use the cloth on it? The cloth will touch, not my hand.”
Mary brought a warm cloth, and my uncle allowed me to not only clean his head but his face and the backs of his hands as well. He tottered upright and we helped him to his bed, bloody nightshirt and all. The slowness of his movements woke all my slumbering alarm. But he drank his tea and ate a piece of toast, and I wrapped the blankets tight around him, sitting beside his bed while Mary sponged the bloodstains from the walls. And the last thing I remembered was watching the rise and fall of my uncle’s chest, up and down, up and down, counting each precious breath.
I sat up, startled, a blanket sliding down from my shoulder. I was on the floor of my uncle’s bedchamber, heart beating hard for no reason I could name. One gaslight flickered in the windowless room, and in the glow I could see that my head had been on a pillow, though I had no memory of it being put there; I had no memory of going to sleep. I blinked, then spun about to look behind me. My uncle was right where he should be, beside me on the little cot, still wrapped tight and sleeping heavily, as he often did after being upset. He looked terrible in the gaslight, but at least this sleep was natural, nothing like the forced unconsciousness I had subjected him to.
When the clocks in the next room began to strike — a soft noise in this sound-deadened place — I stopped watching my uncle, got to my feet, pushed my own wild hair out of my face, and wandered out of the bedchamber. I felt each and every ache earned from a night on a hard floor, but those pains were nothing compared to the seething hot guilt in my middle. Lane had taken much better care of him.