Time and time again, p.33
Time and Time Again, page 33
This previously bustling monument to Berlin’s economic miracle was a very different place to when last he’d exited it, scattering forged Socialist pamphlets behind him. It was sombre and quiet now. The great female statue in the centre of the atrium had been draped in black as if in penance for the store’s unwitting role in the national tragedy. Black banners hung where previously there had been coloured silks and chandeliers. Every member of staff had on a wide black armband. But no amount of ostentatious mourning was going to turn round the fortunes of Wertheim’s department store now. It was a ghost shop, forever tainted by its grim association with the Empire’s darkest day. The massive deductions and almost desperate promotions being offered were shunned by even the most committed bargain-hunters. Stanton reckoned he was one of only half a dozen shoppers in a store that had previously served thousands by the hour.
Three members of staff approached him at once.
‘I need a lady’s nightdress and cap. Loose, plain and simple – my wife is an invalid. Also a day dress and items of undergarment.’
He was led to the second floor where the ladies’ clothing department was located, the centre of a small crowd of overly attentive staff. He was at once asked the most obvious question.
‘And what size is Madam?’
Stanton cast his mind back to the footprints in the cellar … those working boots would have been perhaps a UK size six. Glancing at the female staff lined up in front of him, he selected one on shoe size.
‘Perhaps like you, miss,’ he said.
After making his purchases he drove back to the Kempinski and hung the lady’s day dress in the closet of the spare room, placing the underwear in a chest of drawers. Then he put the surgeon’s mask and gown and the nightdress and cap into his bag and slipped some sedatives and his gun into his pocket.
On his way out of the hotel he approached reception.
‘I hope to be bringing my sister from hospital this afternoon,’ he explained brusquely. ‘You will oblige me by having a wheelchair waiting at my disposal.’
He drove his hired car to the Berliner Buch hospital, the place where Bernadette had sat her vigil over his unconscious and poisoned body. There were some parking places available in an area reserved for senior staff and ambulances and Stanton took one. Towing and clamping were blights of the future. He’d be happy to pay a fine.
He walked up the great stone steps of the building, through the colonnaded entrance and into the hospital. Once inside he ducked into the first lavatory he found and put on his surgeon’s gown. Then, unchallenged, he wandered further into the hospital and found a porter. He enquired about the whereabouts of the female police prisoner, explaining that he’d heard she was something of a circus freak and he wanted to get a peek.
The porter was happy to oblige, giving directions and saying that he didn’t think the Herr Doktor would be disappointed.
Stanton made his way to the correct floor, picking up a wheelchair on the way. He left the chair at the entrance to the lift and sought out the correct room. The door was guarded by two uniformed men whom Stanton approached without breaking his stride.
‘I must check the patient’s pupil dilation for signs of diaspora,’ he said, making up a condition as he spoke. ‘The process will take only a few seconds. Kindly accompany me into the room so you may witness that the inspection has been performed and that the patient remained secure in your care at all times.’
There was hesitation on the faces of the officers. Stanton pressed on before they could articulate it.
‘If you allow me to be in the presence of your charge unsupervised I shall be forced to report you to your superiors,’ he snapped. ‘The police have entrusted this hospital with this woman’s care and I shall not allow myself to be placed in a position which compromises your own security protocol. I insist that you secure your charge while I am required to lay my hands upon her.’
The bullshit worked. Once more the prevailing German predisposition to obey authority stood him in good stead. The two guards dutifully followed Stanton into the room, where he swiftly immobilized them, spinning round and hitting the first man in the temple with his left, followed by a right upper cut to the second man’s jaw. Both went down and Stanton administered the same sedative he’d been forced to give Bernadette a week earlier.
Then he turned to the figure lying on the bed, feeling quite suddenly almost overcome by the momentous nature of the meeting.
Two time travellers from different versions of the universe meeting in a third.
She was unconscious, as he’d expected her to be. Her wounded arm and shoulder were heavily bandaged and looked badly swollen. Her blood was poisoned just as his had been and without twenty-first-century medicine she would surely slowly die.
He put his hands on the coverlet.
There was no time to dwell any further on the incredible nature of the encounter. That he was about to touch the skin of a being from another age. After all, he was just such a being himself.
He pulled back the coverlet. She was dressed in the usual hospital standard open-backed nightshirt. He produced his pocket multi-tool, cut the straps and pulled the garment off her.
He gulped and almost looked away. He’d never seen such damage done to a body. He’d seen bullet scars before, he had a couple himself. And whip scars and knife scars and the faded marks of bone-splitting bludgeons, but never all on the same body.
The tattoos were also unnerving, a tangled mass of poorly executed and extremely violent imagery in a naïve, amateur style that reminded Stanton of Russian prison tattoos. The disfiguring scribbles were punctuated with official-looking numberings and what appeared to be some form of medical record, listed under the woman’s right breast. There was also a series of messy Caesarean scars at the bottom of her stomach.
He took the nightdress from his bag and leant forward to lift the woman’s shoulders from the pillow and put the gown over her head.
Then, quite suddenly, the woman’s left hand shot upwards and took hold of his throat in a vice-like grip, a grip Stanton recognized as practised and one that would collapse his larynx in seconds. He resisted the instinctive urge to grab at the wrist of the attacking arm, fully aware that in a tug of war the advantage lay with her. She had her grip established and he had only seconds left.
Her eyes were open.
He was sure she’d been unconscious. She was deeply fevered and her body was wasting away and yet some primeval survival instinct had jerked her from unconsciousness at the feel of an alien touch and lent her incredible strength.
‘Nobody rapes me,’ she snarled in English.
The pain in Stanton’s throat was intense. He could feel the various cartilages in his larynx collapsing; his voicebox was about to be forced into his trachea. He’d never known a grip like it, and this was a woman, and a sick one at that.
He had no choice. His hands had been on her shoulders. He let go, drew both his hands back and then chopped them into either side of her neck.
The grip didn’t slacken at all. Not a millimetre.
It was incredible.
He’d held back on the blow certainly, but only very slightly, because he didn’t want to actually kill her. She was now very close to killing him.
He double-chopped her again. And again. Her neck was like steel cable. It was as if he was karate-chopping a lamppost.
His head was swimming. He was starting to black out. This was ridiculous. Impossible. Ten seconds earlier he had been about to remove a helpless woman from her hospital bed. Now the same woman was squeezing the last breath of life out of him.
He remembered the multi-tool with which he’d cut the straps on her gown. He’d put it on the cabinet beside her bed. He flailed an arm towards where he thought it would be and found it. The scissor function was still extended. He swung it round and plunged it deep into the woman’s extended arm.
It gave him less than a second. He felt a momentary slackening. She hadn’t let go but there was the tiniest fall in pressure. Her eyes had widened too. He did not believe that she was fully conscious but the stab in her arm had brought her a little closer to the surface.
He hit her again.
The eyes flamed for a moment. Then they closed.
She slipped back into unconsciousness.
And as she did so, slowly the vice opened.
Stanton had no time to dwell either on the agony in his throat or the appalling shock of this woman’s savagery. She had nearly killed him, from a prone position on a hospital bed, weakened by infection and with one arm completely disabled. Tattoos or not, it seemed perhaps that those other Companions knew what they were doing when they chose her after all.
She seemed genuinely unconscious now but nonetheless Stanton was wary. He thought about administering a sedative but not knowing what drugs were already in her body decided he couldn’t risk it. But he kept a needle ready just in case. He tore a length of sheet and bandaged the scissor wound he’d made, then he wrestled the nightdress on to her naked body and finally placed a lady’s bed cap on her head.
It was a strange moment because with the cap on her head and the white ruff at her collar, this snarling savage was transformed into a picture of innocence and calm. Apart from one or two small scars, her face was unmarked and seeing it framed in white linen was a revelation. She looked gentle. Stanton could hardly recall the skinny, sinewy, scarred and disfigured warrior’s body that lay beneath her gown.
He gathered her up in his arms and, stepping over the prostrate guards, crossed to the door and took a look outside. The corridor was empty. That was all the luck he needed. As long as he could get from this room unseen he felt confident he could brazen out the rest. He marched out of the room and towards the lift. He looked neither right nor left and held his head high. A nurse appeared in front of him. Instantly he barked an order.
‘This patient is dehydrated and has fallen into a faint. Fortunately I was on an inspection round or she would be prostrate on the floor right now. But we will speak about that later. For the moment there is a wheelchair by the lift. Bring it immediately.’
It was agony for him to speak after the damage that the woman had done to his larynx. Perhaps his rasping voice was even more intimidating because the nurse jumped to attention and almost saluted. It wasn’t her job to enforce security or to ask questions. Quite the opposite. Her job, which had been drummed into her since first she began her training, was to obey doctors. She scurried off at once, although in fact Stanton was walking so purposefully that despite her panicky desire to please they arrived at the wheelchair at the same time.
‘Thank you, nurse, that will be all,’ he said, gently lowering the woman into the chair.
While in the lift, he pulled off the surgeon’s gown and stuffed it into a cavity under the seat of the wheelchair. Now he was a fond husband collecting his wife from hospital. When the lift doors opened on the ground floor he wheeled the chair confidently towards the front doors.
‘Soon have you home, my dear,’ he said as he passed the reception area.
Then straight through the front doors and out into the open air. There was a wheelchair ramp to the left of the stone stairs and moments later Stanton was putting his fellow Chronation into the Mercedes.
45
THE WOMAN’S WOUNDS had been nothing like as life-threatening as Stanton’s own had been. He had been shot in the stomach; she had been shot in the arm and the upper chest, towards the shoulder, missing the heart and the lungs. Nonetheless, blood infection is equally serious whatever the size of wound that causes it, and Stanton’s new roommate’s arm was horribly swollen. He could only hope that it hadn’t taken too deep a hold and would respond to antibiotics. The idea of performing an amputation in a hotel room was pretty daunting, even one which had such a newfangled convenience as an en-suite bathroom.
To his relief, the woman responded to treatment, and once Stanton had cleaned her wounds and begun a course of antibiotics, she very quickly started to show signs of recovery. By the end of the first night her fever had begun to subside and her sleep was less disturbed.
He bathed her, attended to her bodily needs and fed her as best he could, spooning tiny amounts of thin soup into her mouth when her consciousness seemed closest to the surface. He wondered about trying to set up some kind of intravenous drip of sugar solution. He felt he had the skills to jerry-rig one but decided against it as it would have looked very strange to the maids and waiting staff who visited the room. Hotels don’t like people dying on their premises and Stanton did not want to alert the management to how serious his ‘sister’s’ condition had been when he brought her in.
He tended her for four whole days before she regained her consciousness and her strength began to return. In that time he could only speculate on the character and nature of this other version of himself and on the cosmic strangeness of their mutual situation.
And it was cosmically strange.
The chain of events that Isaac Newton had set in motion two (and three) centuries earlier had resulted in this incredible junction of beings from two separate worlds meeting in a third. In a hotel room.
As he sat watching her in the long hours of the night, measuring her pulse and listening to her breathing, Stanton had a constant sensation of being out of body. As if all the various versions of himself he now knew to have existed were somehow separate to him. His first life, which had ended with the spearmint kiss of a stranger in a cellar in Istanbul. His second, which was a mystery to him except for the knowledge that he had lived it in the century into which the woman sleeping near him had been born. And born long after he must have died. And now this third life, which began when his scarred and tattooed patient had first made her imprint in the dust on the cellar floor in Constantinople, and so rebooted the loop, thus sending Stanton and the whole world back around it once again.
And who was she? What terrible things had been done to her? And why? What world had these other Chronations been seeking to fix?
Having washed and cleaned her each day, he knew her scars by now as well as she must have known them herself. Better, in fact, particularly the crazed white spaghetti of healed lacerations that covered her back and buttocks and the backs of her legs.
These were marks of a cruel and terrifying abuse. She had suffered under a thick lash. A cat o’ nine tails. Thin canes and heavy batons. She’d been stabbed with a stiletto dagger, slashed with knives and bitten by men and animals. She’d been shot and she had been burned. Stanton felt naked fury welling up inside him to see evidence of such abuse.
How had she even survived it?
The same way that she was currently surviving her near fatal encounter with septicaemia. Because she was clearly the toughest individual he had ever encountered, male or female. Not as strong as him, certainly, but immeasurably tougher.
Nonetheless, even a superwoman should have been dead with the kind of punishment and cruelty this woman had sustained. Clearly whoever had tormented her had also prevented her from dying. It seemed to Stanton that they had been trying to break her, and had refused to allow her release until they had done so. They had tortured her and beaten her but each time they had stitched her wounds and set her broken bones, the obvious conclusion being that they had done this in order that she would get well enough for them to attack her again.
Who did that? Who cared so much about controlling another person, bending them to their will? Subduing the spirit of a single individual?
He stared at the sleeping woman.
She didn’t look so tough now.
Asleep on her pillow, her face framed by the white nightcap, the snowy sheets against her chin, her breath gentle and even. What dreams were diverting her subconscious, he wondered.
She had a fine face. Sharp and angular but noble. The nose had been broken and was bent, but not disfiguringly so. Stanton found himself wondering if she might even be beautiful.
He would know when he could see her eyes. He’d seen them once but only for a moment and then wild with fire and from a faraway place. He didn’t know what colour they were.
Speculating on the colour of her eyes brought his thoughts almost inevitably to Bernadette. Those green and sparkling Irish eyes. Smiling eyes as the old song had it. Not smiling, though, the last time they’d met his. Then they’d been wet with anger and pain. Would he ever see them smile again?
He felt his own eyes closing. He was tired; he had tended the woman for days, getting very little sleep. His head nodded in his chair.
Almost asleep now. His breathing falling into a rhythm with that of his strange and mysterious charge. His comrade. In many ways a sort of sister.
But as he drifted he sensed the movement.
Of course he’d known he should have manacled her, secured her to the bed. But somehow he hadn’t been able to bring himself to. Her wrists and ankles showed the marks of having been bound so many times, sore, permanently bruised and scarred. He just couldn’t add to that. And she’d seemed so peaceful.
She wasn’t peaceful any more.
His eyes snapped open to be confronted by a vision of death. An avenging angel, clad in voluminous white, descending on him like a snow eagle swooping down on a rabbit.
He saw her eyes now as she fell towards him, burning embers in a face of ice.
There had been a fountain pen and paper by her bed, with which Stanton had been keeping a diary of her symptoms. The pen was in her fist now. An inky dagger. She must have been aware of it for a while. Lying in bed, feigning unconsciousness, awaiting her chance.
There is always a weapon available if you care to find it.
That’s what his SAS fight instructor had told him. Clearly she’d been taught the same lesson.
