Page 6 of The Devouring Time

God, how much did I drink last night? What did I drink? It must have been a bad batch, whatever it was.

No, wait. I wasn’t drinking last night. I had to get up early to go to Massachusetts.

Hart’s Leap. The uncouth butler. The secret room.

The injection.

My eyes fly open.

I’m sitting on a hard chair in a small room I don’t recognize. There’s a table with a newspaper on it, a wardrobe, a narrow bed with a thin blanket, and the chair beneath me. Everything has a poor air about it, in contrast to the run-down but still opulent estate I was just in.

How the hell did I get here? And how long was I unconscious?

I put a hand to my aching head, expecting to find blood from a blow. No blood…but my hair feels abnormally long. A lock falls into my eyes, and I pull it away to inspect it. Only the tip is bleached, the rest my natural dull brown.

And the clothes I’m wearing—those are mine at least, thank God. But this is one of my older suits, not the one I put on this morning to impress Hart. It ought to be hanging in my apartment in Greenwich, not…wherever the hell I am now.

This is just a dream. Myers drugged me, and now I’m dreaming. Or hallucinating. Or finally succumbing completely to shell shock.

But it feels real.

I stand slowly, carefully, my limbs almost unfamiliar. What the devil did they drug me with?

My eye is drawn to the newspaper, so I cross the room to it, hoping for some clue. The mast proclaims it the Widdershins Enquirer.

Widdershins—that’s the name of a town. Some dreadful little place on the Massachusetts coastline.

Someone has circled the date on the paper in blue ink, deliberately focusing my attention on it.

September 30, 1927.

No—that’s wrong. It has to be wrong. It’s May 18, 1926.

I couldn’t have been unconscious for over a year. That’s impossible.

From outside the closed door comes the sound of approaching footsteps.

Part Two

5

I freeze in place, completely at a loss as to what to do other than wait and see whom the footsteps belong to. With luck, it’s someone who can help me, or at least explain what the hell is going on.

If not…there is a window, letting in what looks to be late-afternoon light. I don’t care for the idea of jumping out and risking a broken leg or worse, but maybe I can at least draw attention to myself by yelling.

The footsteps pause before the door. My heart climbs to my throat as someone quietly tries the handle…and finds it unlocked.

It swings open and Adrian Evans steps through, a pistol in his hand.

I’m torn between relief that it isn’t Myers or Hart standing there, and the shock of the pistol, even if it is currently pointed at the floor. I put my hands up automatically: “Don’t shoot!”

Evans’s handsome face turns flinty. “This is for my protection—you don’t think I’m stupid enough to track you without some way of defending myself, do you?”

Track me? Defend himself?

“I’m a pacifist,” I protest. I’d had enough of killing in the war, enough of violence enacted by my own hands and others’. “What’s going on? Where am I? Why are you tracking me? The date on the newspaper⁠—”

“Drop the pretense, Mr. Caine,” he says, a look of distaste in his clear brown eyes. “You know why I’m here.”