Page 27 of The Book of Lost Hours

SEVERAL MONTHS AFTER THEIR night in the Swiss hotel, Ernest brought Lisavet a little paper-wrapped package with a blue ribbon tied around the middle.

At first, Lisavet had assumed it would be a book.

Lately, they’d been spending almost every night together walking through the endless expanses of history before disappearing somewhere they could fall into each other, and nearly every week, Ernest brought her a new book of poetry.

She memorized new stanzas the way she had spent the past eleven years remembering thousands of altered versions of history.

But the shy, nervous look Ernest gave her told her this was no volume of poetry.

“I’ve been looking for this for months,” he told her. “Ever since you told me your name.”

A strange buzzing feeling seemed to radiate from the box as she opened it. When she saw what it was, she cried out. Her father’s pocket watch, old and bronze and patinated from age, passed down from father to son for over a century. Lisavet sank to the ground, holding it in both hands.

“How did you find this?” she asked.

“Lots of letters back and forth to German timekeepers. A little bit of arm twisting. A great deal of bribery. It’s his, right?”

“Yes,” Lisavet gasped, clutching the watch tighter. “Yes. It’s his.”

She was almost afraid to open the case, wondering if it was even possible for it to still work. As if reading her mind, Ernest took the watch from her.

“I had it looked at by a friend of mine who works in our servicing department. It still runs.” He spun the crown on the side of the case to demonstrate. The watch’s hands sprang to life, ticking out an old familiar pattern.

Lisavet held her breath, waiting for a door of some kind to appear. When none did, she frowned. “Does it still… I mean, could I use it to…”

“To leave?” Ernest asked, giving her a tentative smile.

“Hypothetically, I mean,” she said hurriedly. The idea still terrified her, especially in light of Ernest’s theories, but the notion of having a choice set her pulse racing in an entirely different way.

“You could,” Ernest confirmed.

He wound the watch backward a few times, the way all watches like this one worked, until the ticking of the gears grew louder.

His thumb hovered over the crown before pressing it down with a click.

A few feet ahead of them, a door of worn wood materialized, appearing like the specter of a distant memory.

Lisavet stared at it, dumbstruck, as though it were more than just a door, but a portal to the past. Wondering where it might lead.

Wondering if it would take her home again.

But the questions soon faded from her mind as she remembered that this watch had served ten long years in the service of Nazi soldiers since the last time she’d seen it.

Who knew how many doors it had opened in that time? Who knew where this one might lead her?

Ernest pressed the watch back into her palm and kissed her knuckles without a word, seeming to understand implicitly what she was thinking. Together, they watched the door disappear, their hands holding either side of the watch.

That day he also gave her a gun. A silver revolver that fit easily into the pocket of her coat.

The incident with the Russian was still burned into the back of her mind and she held the gun with trembling fingers.

Ernest showed her how to use it, warned her to be careful, and then never spoke of it again.

From then on, Lisavet kept both the watch and the revolver on her at all times, measuring the hours from one visit to the next.

Occasionally, as the months continued and the year became 1950, she daydreamed about leaving the time space, all the while knowing that she never would.

Ernest had told her about his theories. The reason she could touch things when they time walked.

The reason she could see his memories. He called it “temporal departure.” A part of her marveled at the idea that Time was no longer a part of her.

That it could not control her. Standing motionless in the time space, she could still feel its presence, could identify its subtle whispering the way she had when she was just a child.

It still spoke to her, she realized, only now she understood what it was saying. Now, she could whisper back to it.

Ernest’s theory gave her a new kind of freedom.

She tested the limits of Time, becoming a master of it, so skilled in her ability that she no longer needed to use a book to time walk.

She needed only to think. To conjure a place or a memory in her head before it appeared in front of her.

She never did this around Ernest, not wanting to alarm him.

The first time she inserted herself into a memory, she did so entirely by accident.

She was in Ancient Greece, a scene plucked from a book.

In front of her, a group of shepherds herded sheep up the hillside, talking and laughing.

Lisavet had come here for the sunshine and the ocean and to taste one of the apricots growing on this side of the island.

She sat in the shade, the watch in one hand, a piece of fruit in another.

Watching a tiny lamb walking away from the herd on uneasy hooves.

It stumbled over the rocks and landed flat on its back.

Lisavet laughed at the indignant bleating noises it made.

The animal’s ears pricked at the sound. It looked at her.

Sure she was imagining things, Lisavet took another piece of fruit from the tree and bit into it, entirely unconcerned.

The lamb teetered closer to her. She held out a hand, more curious than anything, and was shocked when its smooth nose pressed into the palm of her hand.

Its tongue lapped up the juice from the apricot, warm and wet and real.

She made a noise and drew back in alarm.

She’d never been able to touch a living thing in a memory before. Only objects.

Down the hill, one of the shepherd boys came running after his missing lamb. He suddenly stopped, staring right at her.

“I see you’ve met my lamb,” he called out in Greek.

Lisavet froze. He was talking to her . Smiling at her.

The apricot dropped from her hand. She shook herself loose from the memory instantly, grateful when she saw the safe, quiet shelves of the time space around her once more.

The book she had used to enter the memory had changed.

Some of the pages turned to dust beneath her hand. Gone.

It happened two more times before she became aware of the pattern.

The soft hush of Time that seemed to wrap around her in the instant before the memory parted, allowing her into it.

Both times, it was the same, a handful of pages destroyed.

She swore to herself she wouldn’t do it again, but on the third occasion, she heard it coming and leaned into it anyway, wanting to test her theory.

That time, when she emerged from the memory, she saw the whole second half of the book disintegrate in her hands.

She was changing Time, she realized with a shudder.

And by changing it, she was destroying it.

Never again , she told herself. And this time, she meant it.

J ACK HAD bought Ernest’s lie without a hitch.

It wasn’t hard. A Russian timekeeper had attacked her.

That was easy enough to prove. They caught the man a few weeks later, dragging him out of the time space and subjecting him to thorough questioning.

He admitted readily to what he had done and claimed that Lisavet had knocked him unconscious.

He didn’t know what happened to her, but when Ernest suggested that he might have killed her, he didn’t outright refute it.

Ernest told them he’d found her body. Her neck bruised, her larynx crushed just enough to cause gradual asphyxiation after she’d escaped her attacker.

He wrote a full-length report and submitted it to Jack, each word making him nauseous.

“It’s a real shame, that,” Jack said. “We could have used her.”

Ernest said nothing, remembering the Russian timekeeper’s screams as they pried information out of him.

He didn’t tell Lisavet what he had done to buy their freedom.

Both of them were too in love, so blinded by their feelings for each other that everything else felt insignificant.

Deep down, however, Ernest knew that it wasn’t freedom he had bought them with his lies: It was time.

More of it, but never enough. Eventually, it would catch up to them.

His fear showed plainly on his face, even though he tried to hide it.

“Why do you always look so sad?” Lisavet asked him one day.

They were lying in a forest somewhere in Russia, watching the first snow of winter in 1745.

Ernest had laid his coat over the ground for the two of them and they were close.

So close that he could hear the ticking of the watch in her pocket.

He had been watching the snow fall against the ink black sky, but she was watching him.

Noticing the way his eyes seemed to darken and change until it was like he was looking through it all to somewhere far away.

“Do I?” he asked.

“Sometimes. Whenever things get quiet it’s like you go someplace else.”

Ernest grimaced. His mother used to say the same thing after he came back from war.

“That’s just called thinking.”

“Then what do you think about that makes you look that way?”

I was thinking about losing you. About all the lies I’ve told so that we can be here like this. I was thinking about what happens if they find out.

He decided to answer the question more broadly to avoid having to talk about his current thoughts.

“I was just thinking. Why haven’t you ever visited memories closer to the present?”

It was something he’d always wondered. Aside from the single New York memory he’d taken her to, Lisavet had never been to any memories after the year 1938.