CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR #2
She laughed once, and the sound broke in the middle.
Then she read the screen.
“Checkout from Gladstone’s Library. Ten a.m.”
The absurdity of it entered the ruins and stood among them like a fourth person.
Archie stared. “You crossed a century with two injured men and are being reminded to vacate your room?”
Ceci pressed her hand over her mouth. Duncan could not stop the laugh that came then, soft, disbelieving, nearly helpless.
Archie joined him, then Ceci, and for several seconds they sat in the wet grass and laughed with the kind of shock that came dangerously close to hysteria.
It ended when Archie winced hard enough to fold over.
Duncan caught him.
“All right,” Ceci said, wiping her face with the back of one muddy hand. “We need to get you medical care.”
“No hospitals,” Archie said at once. Ceci looked at him. “You may have internal injuries.”
“And no papers, no identity, no explanation compatible with sanity.”
“She’s right,” Duncan said.
Archie turned on him. “You cannot possibly have absorbed the century quickly enough to become medically modern.”
“No. I have absorbed that you are in pain and hiding the extent of it badly.”
Archie’s mouth tightened.
Ceci looked down at the phone. “It’s almost dead. I can call emergency services, but then we have police, hospitals, identity questions, possible immigration problems, and two men who officially do not exist.”
Duncan heard the fear beneath her practical list.
“What do you suggest?”
She looked toward the path, then back at Old Hawarden’s closed gate.
“We get to Gladstone’s first.”
Archie lifted his brows. “Your original destination?”
“Yes.”
Duncan followed her gaze. “Why?”
“Because I was staying there. My things are there. My ID. My charger. My wallet. My rental car keys.”
“Rental what?” Archie asked.
“Later.”
“I am developing a list.”
“I know.”
She looked at Duncan. “If I can charge the phone, get my things, and think, I can make better decisions. We need a private room, internet, records. I need to find out what happened after we left.”
Duncan looked back at the red gate.
After we left.
For everyone else, those words contained minutes. For Sabrina and Grace, they held lifetimes. He stood and found that his knees were less steady than he preferred. He still had the estate key. No, Ceci did. She clutched it in one hand. Its iron looked darker in the modern rain.
“Can you walk?” he asked Archie. Archie gave him an offended look. “What a hostile question.”
“Answer it.”
“With sufficient admiration, yes.”
Ceci came to Archie’s other side. “Lean on us.”
“I hate this.”
“Do it anyway.”
He did.
They rose badly. Archie’s weight dragged for one terrifying second before he steadied between them. Duncan took most of it, but Ceci kept one arm around his back, her face set in concentration. Her hand trembled against Archie’s coat.
Duncan saw her trying not to look at the modern signs, the path, the road below. She had come home and found it stranger than memory allowed. They began down the hill. Every step introduced the century by assault.
The path was surfaced differently, smoother and harder beneath the mud.
A small sign warned visitors to stay off unstable masonry.
Another gave historical dates in bright, printed text.
Metal railings edged part of the descent.
A square black plaque held a pattern of tiny blocks that meant nothing to Duncan and made Ceci mutter, “QR code,” in a tone of exhausted disbelief.
Archie stared. “Does everything here have labels?”
“Almost.”
“How democratic.”
Duncan kept his eyes moving. Trees. Fence.
Path. Road. No Voss. No men. No threat he understood.
That was the worst of it. In 1938, danger had edges.
Men had hands, weapons, voices, and rooms. Here, danger could arrive as sound from the sky, a machine on the road, the little black object in Ceci’s pocket, or questions spoken by strangers whose laws he did not know.
The farther they moved from the gate, the more his body understood what his mind had not yet accepted.
He had left.
Sabrina’s face at the door. Grace pressing the estate key into his hand. Margaret saying, Live if you can. The house glowing behind them.
He had left them.
His step faltered.
Ceci noticed at once. “Duncan?”
Archie shifted, trying to take his own weight. “What is it?”
Duncan looked back through the trees. The ruins were already half hidden by the curve of the path.
“I left the door open.”
Ceci’s expression changed. “What?”
“At Hawarden.” His voice sounded strange to himself. “The front door. I stepped out first. I don’t remember if I closed it.”
Archie went very still.
Ceci’s face broke.
Then she reached for his hand, the one not holding Archie. She turned it palm up and pressed the estate key into it.
“No,” she said. “You brought the key.”
Duncan looked down at the iron in his hand.
The logic was poor. He knew that. A key in 2023 could not close a door in 1938.
It could not protect Sabrina from grief, Grace from years of waiting, or Margaret from a household hollowed by absence.
Yet the weight of it steadied him. Archie leaned against him more deliberately now. “The door was not left open.”
Duncan looked at him.
Archie’s voice was soft. “They were there.”
Duncan closed his fingers around the key. The grief did not lessen. It became bearable enough for the next step. They reached the lower path just as a woman in a bright waterproof coat came around the bend with a small dog on a lead.
She stopped.
Duncan stopped.
Archie stared at the dog, then at the woman’s coat, which was yellow in a manner that suggested warning rather than taste. The woman looked at the three of them: soaked, muddy, disheveled, Archie half carried between them, all dressed like escapees from a historical pageant that had gone violent.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Are you all right?”
Ceci’s entire body changed.
It was the strangest transformation Duncan had ever seen.
One second, she was a woman displaced, terrified, muddy from the passage between centuries.
The next she became modern. Her voice shifted first. Her posture followed.
She smiled with practiced apology, the kind used on strangers, officials, people at desks.
“Yes. Thank you. We’re okay. He slipped near the ruins.”
The woman looked at Archie. “That looks nasty.”
Archie offered his most dazzling smile while visibly close to collapse. “The ground and I disagreed over boundaries.”
The woman blinked at his accent, then smiled uncertainly. Ceci tightened her arm around him. “We’re staying nearby. We’ll get him cleaned up.”
“Do you need me to call someone?”
“No,” Ceci said quickly. Too quickly. She softened it at once. “Thank you. Really. My phone is dying, but we’re almost back to the car.”
The word car did something to Archie. Duncan felt it. The woman hesitated, then nodded. “Okay. Take care.”
She moved on, glancing back twice. Archie waited until she was out of earshot.
“Your century dresses people like warning flags.”
Ceci let out a shaky laugh. “That was rain gear.”
“I shall need warning before witnessing more of it.”
“You’re going to need warning before witnessing almost everything.”
“I suspected as much.”
Duncan looked at her. “You lied very easily.”
Her smile faded. “I used to be married. I’ve attended faculty meetings. I have a lot of training.”
Archie gave a pained little laugh. Duncan did not understand the whole answer, but he understood enough.
They reached the road.
Duncan stopped again.
The road was black, smooth, marked by white painted lines.
Cars passed at intervals, faster than sense, each one hissing over wet surface with mechanical confidence.
Headlights cut through the morning. Their shapes varied, blunt, sleek, bright, ugly, all too enclosed.
Faces appeared behind glass and vanished. Archie watched them, lips parted.
“Absolutely not,” he said.
Ceci grimaced. “We have to.”
“I revise my earlier interest in the future.”
Duncan studied the road as he would have studied enemy movement. “How does one cross?”
Ceci looked at him, then, to his alarm, laughed.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. That’s not funny.”
“It appeared funny.”
“It’s just a lot.”
“Yes,” Duncan said. “It is.”
That sobered her.
She looked both ways, then did it again. “We wait. We cross fast when there’s a gap. No one steps out until I say.”
Archie looked at Duncan. “She has become quite imperious in her natural habitat.”
“I find it reassuring.”
“I find it arousing and inconvenient.”
Ceci shot him a look, but color rose in her face despite everything. Duncan felt an answering warmth, absurdly alive under the fear. The century might have changed. Desire had followed them.
Good.
Let it.
Ceci guided them across.
A car appeared around the bend halfway through.
It was far enough away, but Duncan’s body reacted before judgment could.
He pushed Archie and Ceci ahead, putting himself between them and the approaching machine.
The car passed after they reached the other side, horn blaring.
The sound shattered the air. Duncan spun, reaching for a pistol he no longer held.
Ceci grabbed his coat. “It’s okay. It’s okay. That was a horn. Just a horn.”
His heart thundered.
The driver shouted something through the glass as the car sped past. Archie stared after it, breathing hard. “Charming people, the future.”
Ceci’s hand remained on Duncan’s coat. Her thumb moved once, grounding him. He looked down at her.
She looked frightened, too.
For him.
That steadied him more than the explanation.
They made the rest of the walk slowly. The village began to gather around them in pieces that refused to belong together.
Old stone houses with impossible windows.
Signs too bright. Wires. A parked van with lettering along its side.
A woman pushing a pram while speaking into nothing until Duncan realized a small white device sat in her ear.
Archie leaned close. “She appears to be conversing with a ghost.”
“Phone,” Ceci said.
“That explains nothing.”
“I know.”
Gladstone’s Library appeared through the wet morning like a mercy and a wound.
Duncan recognized the shape of it, though not the details.
The building had endured. Altered, certainly.
Cleaned, repaired, lit differently, surrounded by signs and surfaces and arrangements that belonged to this new world.
Yet the bones remained. Ceci stopped at the sight of it.
For a moment, she seemed unable to breathe. Archie touched her wrist. “Home?”
She looked at the building, then at them.
“No,” she said. “But it’s where I started.”
Duncan understood the distinction better than he wished. They approached the entrance just as a woman inside unlocked the door. She looked up, saw them through the glass, and froze. Ceci swore under her breath.
“Right,” she said. “Okay. Let me talk.”
Archie looked down at his torn, blood-marked clothing. “Are we in trouble?”“Worse,” Ceci said. “It’s the hospitality desk.”
The door opened.
The woman inside, middle-aged, with short gray hair and a name badge Duncan could not read from where he stood, stared at them in horrified concern.
“Cecily? My goodness, what happened?”
Ceci’s face shifted again into that modern performance. Relief struck Duncan so suddenly that he almost missed the danger.
The woman knew her.
Ceci had existed here.
She had been expected.
“I’m so sorry,” Ceci said. “We had an accident near Old Hawarden. My phone died. Can we come in? He’s hurt.”
The woman stepped aside at once. “Yes, yes, come in. Do we need an ambulance?”
“No,” Ceci said.
“Yes,” the woman said, looking at Archie.
Archie smiled, though he had begun to shake. “I am opposed in principle.”
The woman blinked. “Is he in shock?”
“Yes,” Ceci and Duncan said together.
Archie looked betrayed.
They crossed the threshold.
Warmth surrounded them.
Modern warmth.
No coal smell. No fire. No banked grate.
The air emerged invisibly from the building itself, even, dry, and astonishing.
Duncan stopped despite himself. Lights glowed overhead, steady and bright.
A desk stood ahead with a machine on it, a flat black screen and a keyboard like Ceci had shown him in photographs.
The floor was hard and polished. Somewhere nearby, a printer began to work, spitting paper with a mechanical chatter.
Archie whispered, “I hate that.”
Ceci tightened her hold on him. “You’ll hate a lot for a few days.”
“Only days?”
She looked at him. The tenderness in her face nearly undid Duncan where he stood.
“Maybe longer.”
The woman shut the door behind them. “Cecily, where have you been? We were about to call about your room when you didn’t come down yesterday, but your things were still there, and then no one could reach your mobile.”
Ceci went utterly still.
Yesterday.
Duncan heard the word as if it had cracked the floor. Archie did too. His head turned toward Ceci.
Ceci’s lips parted. “Yesterday?”
The woman frowned. “Yes. You missed dinner last night. We thought perhaps you were ill or sleeping. Are you sure you’re all right?”
Ceci looked at Duncan.
Then Archie.
Duncan felt the future shift beneath them again. To Hawarden, they had been gone eighty-five years. To Gladstone’s Library, Ceci had been missing since yesterday. The gate had returned her almost exactly to where her own life had left room for her absence.
Almost.
Because now she had brought two men through with her.
The woman at the desk looked between them again. “Who are your friends?”
Ceci drew a breath.
Duncan watched her choose the first lie of their new life.
“This is Duncan,” she said. “And Archie.”
Archie leaned more heavily against them both. The woman waited for more.
Ceci lifted her chin.
“They’re with me.”