Page 2 of The Book of Lost Hours
His fingers fumbled over the crown until it clicked into place, and he flung open the door.
What had once been their cozy, two-room apartment was instead a silent cavern of shadows.
Lisavet clutched his arm at the sight of what lay beyond.
Ezekiel gripped his daughter’s shoulders tight, kneeling down to look her in the eye.
“Listen to me, Lisavet. I’m going to find your brother, okay? I want you to wait in there. Stay right there by this door. Do not move from that spot. I promise as soon as I get Klaus, we will come and find you. All right?”
“But, Papa, what is that?”
A second rock struck the shop. This one found its mark, shattering the glass on impact. “This is the tunnel through Time that I told you about,” he said frantically. “The one that will take us somewhere far away.”
“But that was just a story!” Lisavet exclaimed, shaking her head as he propelled her forward. On the other side of the door, she could see nothing but shadows and darkness.
“It wasn’t just a story, Lisavet. Go inside. I’ll be right back for you, I promise.”
She dug her heels in, and he picked her up as he had when she was younger, tossing her over one shoulder. He deposited her on the other side of the door and stopped for just a moment longer to kiss her head and drape his brown coat around her tiny shoulders. It pooled on the ground at her feet.
“Be brave,” he said, his words muffled against her hair.
“Papa?” she said, her voice echoing.
He pressed a finger to his lips and left her, slipping back over the threshold.
The door closed behind him and never opened again.
F OR HOURS, Lisavet waited. Everything was deathly quiet and impossibly still.
She counted the seconds. At the top of every hour, she longed to hear the music of the clocks from the shop in which she’d grown up, but instead heard only silence.
A silence so all-encompassing that it seemed alive, like a solid thing you could touch.
Shadows obscured her vision and prevented her from seeing more than fifty feet ahead of her, but what she could see was strangely familiar.
Bookshelves. Towering on both sides and lined with leather-bound volumes of all sizes and shapes.
Like a library. Lisavet took a single tentative step forward, her eyes slowly adjusting.
Library wasn’t quite the right word. Indeed there were books, their leather spines packed in neat, even rows.
Sweeping archways and Roman pillars stood at intervals between the endless rows of shelves, and Lisavet’s eyes followed the path of one of them all the way up.
Where she expected to find a ceiling, she instead saw an inky sky filled with watery images, as though Michelangelo had painted the Sistine Chapel into the very stars themselves, each image swirling into the next like clouds drifting in the wind.
She wanted to walk among the shelves, but her father’s words echoed in her head.
Stay right by the door. Do not move from this spot.
When she turned around to face the door once more, it had changed.
Now it appeared blurry, like a watery reflection of a door more than the door itself.
It began fading away, familiar planks of wood consumed by darkness.
Lisavet lunged for the doorknob, but it evaporated beneath her touch, taking any chance of returning to her father away with it.
Lisavet sank to the ground where she stayed huddled on the floor, sobs racking her body.
The whispering started from somewhere within the darkness.
A gentle, curious jingle as the shadows sought the source of a sound they had never heard before.
Lisavet dried her eyes on the back of her hand, heart thudding.
She did not know it yet, but this was Time itself, that long cherished friend of her ancestors, learning to speak to her, and she, uncertain and afraid, spoke back to it.
“H-hello?” she called as loudly as she dared.
Hello, the whispers repeated, echoing her own voice back to her.
Lisavet stood up. “Who’s there?” she asked.
The whispers sounded again, closer now.
Lisavet’s breathing came fast and shallow. She took a few steps in the direction of the darkness, away from the place her father had left her.
“Stay right there,” she said. “I’m coming to find you.”
Stay, stay, stay, the whispers echoed.
Lisavet stepped farther into the shadows and darkness in search of Time.
N O ONE was coming.
Lisavet had been trapped for two weeks and in that time, she had learned three very important things.
The first was that the laws of nature didn’t seem to apply here.
She never got hungry. She never got thirsty or needed to use the bathroom.
Sleep was unnecessary in the traditional sense.
She could sleep, and sometimes did just to pass the time, but before long she began prolonging the time she spent awake, just to see how long she could go.
Second, there were no other doors hidden away in this place, confirmed by several days of searching. No way out.
And third, Time did not live here as her father’s story had suggested. Or if it did, it would offer her no help.
No one was coming. Perhaps no one even knew she was here.
The sky inside the quiet place was the most beautiful thing Lisavet had ever seen.
Filled with swirling colors that moved and shifted like aqueous stars.
For what must have been days, she lay on the floor between two bookshelves, staring up at it.
She relied on it, its immensity and its mystery, to remind herself that she was alive.
As she lay on the floor, she sometimes thought she saw her father’s face conjured in the swirling colors overhead but as soon as she focused her eyes on it, the picture vanished.
When she wasn’t hiding away among the shelves, she wandered up and down the stacks, singing in hopes that the sound might reach back through the disappearing door to her father, or that Time might finally take heed and come for her.
One day she took to screaming her way up and down the shelves.
Louder and louder, hoping someone would hear.
Eventually, someone did. Or rather, something did.
“Why in heaven are you screaming like that?” a voice said, sharp and irritated.
Lisavet spun around to see the ill-rendered figure of a man emerging from the bookshelves.
His image dragged through the air before joining with the rest of him, like ink dragging through water, distorted and semitransparent.
He wore a white powdered wig, a set of purple tails, and spoke in strangely accented German.
“I-I’m looking for my father,” Lisavet stuttered, too shocked by his sudden appearance to be afraid.
“Can’t you see he’s not here, girl? Good thing too. You should consider yourself lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“Most of the people here are dead. Only the dead live in this godforsaken place.”
“But I’m not dead. And I’m here.”
The man looked her up and down, assessing her claims. “So you are. Are you a timekeeper?”
“A what?”
“A timekeeper,” the man repeated impatiently.
“N-no,” Lisavet said tentatively.
“If you aren’t a timekeeper, who are you?”
“My name is Lisavet Levy,” she told him.
The man didn’t respond. He was listening intently to something in the distance.
“Shhh!” he pressed a finger to his lips. “Hear that?”
Lisavet listened. The soft sound of whispers met her ears. “Time!” she exclaimed. “It’s back!”
“Time?” The gentleman raised an eyebrow at her foolishness.
“Is that what you call that demon thing? Well, I suppose that’s as good an explanation for it as any.
Time is the beast that makes mortals of all one way or another.
It takes everything, heedless of wealth or status.
” The man curled his lip bitterly as he said this, and Lisavet got the impression that he had once had both wealth and status before Time took them away.
“If you’re not careful, it will take you, too, before you’re ready. ”
“Take me where?”
That was what she wanted after all. Perhaps it would take her out of this place. To America, like in the story.
But the man shook his head. “Nowhere you want to go. Believe me.”
Lisavet’s eyes grew wide as the gentleman’s image ebbed away into nothing.
The whispers became louder, calling out in formless echoes, hissing like water on hot coals.
Lisavet ran from it, though she wasn’t sure exactly what she was running from.
She took refuge in a particularly dark corner where the books on the shelves were dustiest. No more singing. Only silence.
S OON L ISAVET went off in search of the ghost again. This time, instead of screaming, she whispered, walking slowly down each row of books.
“Hello?” she said quietly, careful not to wake the sounds from before.
No answer. She remembered that the man had seemed to come from out of the books on the shelves. As her fingers brushed one of the dusty leather spines, another voice spoke.
“Be careful doing that,” it said.
Lisavet drew her hand back in alarm. “Who said that?”
“This section is for medieval England,” the voice said. “You’re far too young for that.”
On her left, a watery image shifted into focus. Fragments of light and color pulled together to take the form of a man. This one was younger than the last, wearing robes of coarse gray fabric. He had a hand pressed to his chin, contemplating.
“You’d be better off avoiding all of medieval Europe if I’m being honest. Though there are a few things that might be all right. Royals perhaps, or…” His eyes flicked in her direction. “Maybe you’d prefer the Romantic period instead. Do you like poetry?”
Lisavet mumbled something incoherent.
“You’re a bit young for love poems, I suppose. Tell me, are you set on England or are you open to somewhere else? Italy perhaps? Oh, Italy in summer. The Renaissance period. You would love it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The memories.”
“Memories?”