Already my mind was recovering its equilibrium, finding a place for this latest impossibility in the same walk-in freezer where the others were kept. I’ve had practice integrating the unintegratable by now, after all. I felt no need to question the reality of what I was seeing.
“You can’t do anything about this radiator, can you?” he said, letting the coverlet slip from his shoulders. “It’s banging loud enough to wake the dead.”
Deliberately, quietly, my great-uncle came into focus. His face composed itself out of a field of charged mnemonic particles: I’m aware how this must sound, Mrs. Haven, but I don’t know how else to describe it. His body caught the light and held it strangely, as if he’d been assembled out of dust. He was dressed in a chalk-stripe suit of banker’s blue, but his jacket and his tie were badly creased, and his hair had the chopped, formless look of a military buzz cut gone to seed. He was smaller than he looked in photographs. I hadn’t expected his wheat-paste complexion, either, or the Parkinson’s-like trembling of his hands. He looked less like a fugitive from justice, all things considered, than a drunk who’d spent the night under a bush. This wasn’t the dapper Goering look-alike of 1938, or the headstrong physics prodigy of the first years of the century — it was the ailing, ragged indigent of Budapest during the famine, superimposed over faded snapshots of my father in his youth, and perhaps some spectral iteration of myself.
“I want to know what’s happened to me,” I said. “I want to know who brought me here. And I want to know why.”
Waldemar gazed past me at a soot mark on the ceiling. His pupils had an oily, milky cast.
“You have me at a disadvantage,” he said finally. “My eyesight is poor and my memory’s worse. I don’t recall that we’ve been introduced.”
If not for his delivery, Mrs. Haven, I might have believed him. But he spoke smoothly and mechanically — glibly, even — like a ventriloquist’s marionette.
“I asked you a question,” I said, giving the footboard a kick.
He nodded placidly. “Can I trouble you for a glass of water?”
“How long have you been lying in this bed?”
A look of relief crossed his face. “That I can tell you exactly. I’ve been counting the knocks, you see, to make the time go by.” He arched his back and heaved a drawn-out sigh. “I’d just made it to three hundred and eight when you arrived. Now I’ll have to start again from the beginning.”
I thought for a moment. “So you’ve just gotten here.”
“That’s true, I suppose.”
“Where were you hiding before?”
“Before—?”
“That’s right, Uncle. Back when you were creeping around in the Archive, leaving clever little clues for me to find. Or can’t you remember that, either?”
He smiled up at me now: a perfect idiot’s smile, almost flirtatious. “As the soul grows toward eternal life, Nefflein, it remembers less and less.”
“Don’t you dare quote my great-grandfather’s notes to me.”
He let out a bright, soggy snuffle at that — midway between a laugh and a snort of contempt. “Who has more right to quote a father than his son?”
“You have no rights at all. Not with me.”
“Don’t go putting on airs. We’re Familie, my boy. You ought to treat your flesh and blood with more respect.”
A wave of sickness hit me when I heard those words, Mrs. Haven: a decade’s worth of shame and indignation, breaking free of the containing walls I’d built. I thought back to the day I’d first learned of my namesake’s existence, at an age when I still thought of my name — and of my family — as a thing to take pride in. I remembered the thrill that I’d felt, as a child, on those rare occasions when the Timekeeper was mentioned. I remembered the moment I’d finally grasped what he’d done.
“What is it, Nefflein? You look a bit green at the gills.”
I stood at the foot of the bed, fighting to maintain my balance, opening and closing my fists. “Ridiculous as it might sound,” I said, “I’ve imagined what would happen if we met.”
“That’s not ridiculous in the slightest. Take a look — here the two of us are!”
“That’s right, Uncle. Here we are, just as I pictured it.” I took in a breath. “And I told myself — I made a vow to myself — that if this day ever came, I’d carry out your sentence.”
“What sentence would that be?”
“The sentence of death.”
His milky eyes widened. “Death, little Waldemar! Whatever for?”
“For the crimes—” The blood roared in my ears. “For the crimes you committed at the Äschenwald camp.”
“Ach! — for that. I thought perhaps for figuring out about the Accidents.” He snuffled again. “No one else could, you know.” He shook his head. “Certainly not your grandfather, that Yid-loving ass.”
A surge of electricity shot through me as my fist met his jaw — the kind of prickling chill ghost hunters describe in their memoirs — and he fell backward with a satisfying thump. I felt grateful to him then, as I watched him scrambling to right himself: he was playing his part obligingly and well. But then something shifted, Mrs. Haven. Things fell out of proportion. The hissing built to a shriek as he drew himself upward: the bedsheets rose behind him like a jellyfish, billowing up until they darkened half the room. I saw him now as Marta Svoboda had seen him, as Sonja had seen him, as the prisoners at Äschenwald had seen him, and I felt the same unreasoning dread they must have felt. He took hold of me and bent me back until my shoulders touched the floor. His blank gray features overwhelmed my sight.
“You should thank me,” he said. “Not everybody has your opportunities.”
“Thank you? What do you mean?”
“Who wouldn’t want to take his forefathers to task for their sins?” He wrapped himself around me like a shroud. “Who wouldn’t like a chance at playing judge and jury?”
“If I execute you, Uncle, it won’t be for my own sake. It will be to take you out of circulation — to take you out of contention — so you can’t ever—”
“Can’t ever what? Continue in this duration, living proof that the chronoverse can be manipulated — that time travel is possible? Who will benefit from this settling of accounts, Nefflein, aside from you yourself?”
Silence fell for a moment. His face buzzed and flickered.
“That won’t work on me, Uncle,” I said through clenched teeth. “No end can justify the means you used at Czas.”
He was back in bed now, frail and docile again. But there was a new light in his clouded eyes, or so it seemed to me. “You’re a Toula,” he whispered. “Don’t try to deny it.”
“That means nothing,” I hissed back. My voice was sounding more like his with every word I spoke. “Toula’s a name, that’s all — an empty noise, like Oppenheimer or Goering or Haven. Don’t treat it like some sort of magic spell.”
He laughed and swung his legs over the footboard. “Let me ask you this, Nefflein. Can you be sure — can you be absolutely certain — that you’d have turned down the chance I was offered in that godforsaken camp? If you knew you were right, that you’d cracked the great riddle, that you stood on the cusp of true and tangible proof that the gates of chronology — of mortality itself — were close at hand and waiting to be forced? There was no other way, I can promise you that. Extremes had to be gone to: blood sacrifice made. There was no way short of death to force a breach.”
I fell back from him dizzily, shaking my head. “That’s not science, Uncle. That’s witchcraft.”