Page 39 of The Book of Lost Hours

NO ONE WAS COMING.

Lisavet didn’t know how long she was alone in that room.

She drifted in and out of this world and the one she knew better, her consciousness suspended somewhere between.

Every now and then, she was aware of someone in the room with her.

Of hands checking her pulse and administering more medicine.

In the far reaches of her mind, she knew she was alive, but it was almost as if her body had forgotten that fact.

But then one day, she awoke with a gasp and sat upright, feeling a rush of blood through her veins.

Her eyes opened on a stark white room, the lights dim so as not to overwhelm her.

Her vision was blurry and strained. Her skin was clammy, and she was desperately thirsty.

Everything seemed to hum, from the walls to the floor to the very air inflating and collapsing her lungs.

Across the room there was a metal table with a tray of food covered in plastic next to a glass of water.

She was no longer wearing her own clothes, dressed instead in a set of plain gray pajamas.

Her feet were bare. Her coat, watch, and everything else she’d been carrying with her were gone.

Her legs shook as she moved to the side of the bed and braced herself into a standing position.

Every part of her body screamed in protest. She forced herself forward, anyway, intent on that glass of water.

She took several steps, struggling to keep her balance.

When she reached the table, she grasped the cup and gulped it down quickly, sloshing half of it down the front of her shirt.

She lost her balance and she let go of the cup to catch herself on the table. It hit the floor with a loud crack.

There was a shuffling sound outside the door. Lisavet was still dragging herself upright when it opened and a man in a navy blue uniform appeared. She glowered at him with as much ferocity as she could muster. He called for a nurse, who approached Lisavet as if she were a feral animal.

“You shouldn’t be trying to walk,” she said.

Lisavet jerked her arms away, stumbling against the table.

With the help of the guard, the nurse returned her to the bed.

Someone administered another injection in her neck, which made her limbs feel leaden, her brain foggy.

They forced water down her throat but it all came back up.

She drifted around in the haze of drugs, aware of two people standing on the other side of the room but unable to raise her head to look at them.

“Her system is in shock,” the nurse said. “She can’t even keep water down.”

“I told you, you need to be careful. She hasn’t eaten anything real in a very long time.”

Jack Dillinger. He was here. And he was talking about her as if she wasn’t.

“She doesn’t look malnourished,” the nurse said suspiciously.

“Treat her like she is, anyway,” Jack said. “It’s refeeding syndrome. Like what happened at Belsen. She can’t digest food normally, so give her IV fluids.”

This became her routine. For weeks, she fought to stay awake in the white painted room.

The nurse came in twice a day to administer fluids straight into her arm.

When she was alone, Lisavet sat perfectly still on the bed, staring at the wall or, occasionally, out the window.

Beyond the bars there was very little to look at.

A tree missing its leaves that indicated it was winter.

A brick wall across the way. A tiny, almost imperceptible square of sky that she could see only when she craned her head as far as it would go.

Three times a day someone escorted her down a hallway so she could use the bathroom and wash.

The only thing that kept her mind from going mad was the familiar whisper of Time ticking in the back of her head. It had not abandoned her.

They kept her there for three months with no explanations.

Long enough for the seasons to change outside the window, barren branches blooming into decadent white flowers.

Three months of wordless hands delivering food and then taking it away.

And then Jack Dillinger came to see her.

She was sitting on the bed with her head down when he came.

Legs pulled up to her chest. She heard the creaking of the door, but assumed it was her dinner.

“Hello, Miss Levy.”

Her head snapped up at the sound of his voice. Jack was standing in the doorway, dressed in a neat gray suit. On his left wrist, a watch ticked with tantalizing consistency.

When she didn’t respond, he came a little farther into the room and shut the door.

He was watching her more intently than she’d ever seen another person look at anyone before.

When he reached the end of the bed, he pulled the chair from the table around and sat backward to face her, arms propped up on the back of it.

Close enough in the tiny room that she could have reached out and touched him.

“Do you know who I am?”

Lisavet nodded. This pleased him. She could see it in his face.

“Good. You can call me Jack.”

He held out a hand for her to shake. Lisavet refused to take it. He was here. He was real. He wanted something from her.

“No need to be afraid, Miss Levy. I’m just here to ask you a few questions. Would that be all right?”

She didn’t answer. Jack sighed and reached into his pocket. He took out a lighter and a pack of cigarettes and held the carton out to her.

“Want one? I find that smoking makes awkward situations easier. Something to do with your mouth while you’re thinking of what to say next.”

This time he didn’t give up when she didn’t accept his gesture right away. She took a cigarette from the carton with two fingers.

“Let me get that for you,” he said.

Lisavet froze as he leaned forward and held the lighter up to the cigarette between her lips.

Up close he had aggressive features, intensely masculine and lacking any kind of nuance whatsoever.

Nothing like Ernest, who was all nuance, all subtlety.

She took hold of the lit cigarette between her first two fingers and inhaled, refusing to cough as the hot smoke hit the back of her throat.

“Attagirl,” Jack said.

He sat back and lit his own cigarette, taking his time. Lisavet cleared her throat a few times discreetly. She wasn’t certain if she liked smoking, but it was something to do. And it did seem to make the unfamiliar ache in her stomach less painful.

“Right,” Jack said at last. “Now. I’m gonna need to hear some words out of you, little miss. How about we start with something easy? What year were you born?”

Lisavet didn’t want to answer him. She never wanted to speak to anyone ever again. But there was a certain look about this Jack. A malevolence that told her that, eventually, she wasn’t going to have a choice in the matter.

“Nineteen twenty-seven,” she said quietly.

“Nineteen twenty-seven,” Jack repeated. “So that makes you… about twenty-five, twenty-six?”

Lisavet had no idea how old she was. She had stopped measuring the year outside the time space after Ernest. If she was almost twenty-six, that meant the year was 1953. It was winter so it must be January. Amelia would be three years old soon. That seemed right.

“I guess so.”

Jack didn’t say anything for a moment, pausing to take a pull from his cigarette. Lisavet did the same, mirroring him.

“You were stuck inside that place for a long time,” Jack said at last. “Thirteen years. Almost fourteen.”

“It didn’t seem that long.”

“I was hoping we could talk about Ernest.”

“I don’t want to talk about him.”

“That was some little memory game you played on him. He doesn’t remember a single thing about you. After nearly two years together. Not a thing.” Jack paused, eyeing her with greater interest. “How’d you do it?”

“What makes you so certain it was me?”

Jack peered at her down the length of his cigarette. “You know, Miss Levy. This will go much better for you if we agree to be honest with each other.”

Lisavet could hear the subtle threat in his voice. In her memory, she felt the harsh grip of his hands on her arms. She looked away, down at the cigarette between her fingers.

“It’s hard to explain.”

“Try.”

“When he was sleeping, I could see his memories.”

“See them? But not when he was awake?”

“No. Only while he slept.”

“And you were able to get rid of them? Erase them?”

Lisavet nodded.

“Do you know why? Why you could see them, I mean.”

“No.”

“Ernest had a theory about you. Wrote about it in his notes. Did he ever mention it to you?”

“Once or twice.”

“So you know about this whole ‘temporal departure’ thing? That you were somehow disconnected from the physical world and therefore able to pass through the dimensions of time.”

“Yes, I’m familiar.”

“Would you say that it’s an accurate theory?”

Lisavet met his gaze, saying nothing. Jack gleaned all he needed from her silence. He leaned forward, blowing a long stream of smoke into the air.

“So… besides erasing memories, what else can you do?”

“What else?”

“Well, I assume that isn’t the only thing. Am I right?”

Lisavet hesitated.

Jack made a clicking noise with his tongue. “You know, Miss Levy. If you answer all my questions in a satisfactory manner, maybe we can start talking about getting you out of here.”

Lisavet looked up at him, unable to keep the hope from showing on her face. He smiled at her, a smug, manipulative sort of smile.

“I can take things from the past. Touch things when I’m time walking. Ernest was never able to do that.”

“Time walking? What’s that?”

“Visiting memories from the books.”

He seemed to find this particularly interesting because he paused for a moment before continuing. “And?” Jack prompted. “What else?”

“I can insert myself into memories.”

“Insert yourself?”

“Make myself a part of them. As if I’m actually there. I can change things that happened. Alter the outcome.”