Grace has disappeared and I am accused of doing her harm.
Arbogast has tracked me down to the chambers by the lake and is asking me about the accelerator, and is suspicious of me. He has found a locked room under the clock tower and has found its key in my possession, but I cannot explain how it got there. I do not know what has happened to Grace, and my ignorance sounds like guilt. I convinced the detective that the device is a transmitter for sound and vision which is the new technology called teleo-vision, and that I am an inventor. But I know that he is not convinced, so I do not have much time. He will return, and I had better be gone when he does.
As I set the controls for the future of time, I realised that the settings have been changed from the last time I had worked on the machine. I had set up the controls for the maximum jump forward that the machine could manage, which was just over twenty years. But the controls had been dialled right back to just two or three days, and I then noticed that the run counter showed twelve runs. But I had only done three runs - the two short experiments with Edisson in the first decade of this century, and the huge jump that had delivered me to 1925. Somebody else was using the machine.
A chill went up my spine at that realisation, especially if that person had done nine time shifts. I did not know the real consequences of a jump in time, but it was clear from Edisson's note book that each experiment that I had piloted was troubled, and left my memory ravaged and empty. I looked to the shelf with his note books, and saw that indeed the books had been disturbed.
There was my note to Edisson, written when I had first arrived in this time, when I did not know who I was. And look, on the following pages, in a circular looping script, there are another series of notes and reminders.
The author had carefully recorded the settings of each time jump, clearly progressing from six hours to twelve hours, one day, two days and three days, and then three more trips of three days each. And, oh my God, there is a note recorded on each page, where the traveller is leaving a message for herself:
"When you read this, know that you have travelled days through time, and you are in a familiar and a safe place. Know that your name is Grace Cain, and your mother is Alexandra, and your brother is Alex Cain." And there are other prompts and notes, written to remind a memory shattered person of their true self. And there, as the truth of it, there was the locket and chain that Grace wore so close to her heart, always, that was a gift from her mother.
I took the locket up in my hand, and as I did so I felt a spiralling unravelling within my head, and a furious tug of memory shimmered and shattered within my mind, and I grasped and pulled and tugged at that thread, and there it suddenly was. I flipped open the tiny glass to find the two tiny feathers that I had placed there oh so long ago, but they were gone - but my memory now was clear.
This locket had once been given to me by a shattered and strange man, long ago, whose shape had shimmered and shifted. And my mind remembered his strange prowling walk and the circling familiarity of his movement around me in that ancient library. And the fucking cat, I remembered the fucking cat.
And like a series of explosions in my mind, hard strong percussions of realisation washed over me, and I remembered. Catherine, my mother who was not my mother; Odette, with her loved and precious scars from the cat who I could never match; the tiny feathers that I had clutched to my breast as I made my last huge jump through time, my search for my mother, Alexandra. And the spawn of myself and my mother, our corrupt, unwholesome daughter, Grace, who was so innocent because she did not know that final truth.
The whole horrendous cycle plummeted down into my mind, and then I was furiously hunting through the notes and checking the settings on the machine. I needed to find how long her last trip was set up for, because the locket and the chain were the clue. She had set them aside the last time she had entered into the accelerator, for she knew that she could not have metal near her skin when the machine was activated. Grace was travelling now, but how far, how when, would she arrive?
And the image of those thick black markings on her shoulder blades leapt to my mind, and I knew that she too, like me, was entranced by those two tiny feathers. And every trip she had made, she too clutched them to her breast, and they were foreign to her and corrupt, and the machine was merging the two separate lives - the human child of unholy seed was merging with the tiny relics of the bird.
Grace was becoming a shifting, shaping, sharing of lives. Grace was becoming a monster. And I was the monster's father, but she did not know.
As my mind was plummeting and roiling with my memory shattering down through time, I felt a shimmering hum within the accelerator. I leapt away from it as fast as I could, throwing myself onto the floor, well outside the electro magnetic and etheric fields as they buzzed and roiled with a purple light and a falling descant of power.
I watched, spellbound, as an elongated shape materialised within the machine, and it was the naked body of a woman, her torso arched back against the wooden chair within the device, her neck and head thrown far back in a rictus of pain and ecstacy, her legs contorted also, spread wide apart.
Grace's hands, for of course it was Grace, were hard upon the centre of herself, three fingers of one hand deep inside her cunt, two fingers of her other hand still swirling on her clit, the shudders of her shattering orgasm still upon her; that had harnessed and focused the etheric power that had thrown her here.
"Grace, don't be afraid, it is I, Alex." I had to help the girl, for I knew of the confusion that existed when the accelerator stopped, and the blur of memory that a time shift would bring. "Here, let me help you from the machine. My God, I did not realise what you were doing."
She pushed back from me, afraid. "Who are you, and why do you touch me?" And with a rising cry, her voice burst, "why am I naked, and oh, why am I shamed between my legs? I am not like this." And from her hand fluttered and dropt two tiny feathers, that floated to the ground. Her arms were long and dark, and she moved them with a strange motion.
I held her close and wrapped a blanket about her, and stroked her black black hair, to calm her. And slowly she settled, and stilled her restless hands, and I pulled her close. I could feel a rapid pulse through her body, and held her dark head to my chest. She was my child, and afraid, and I held her. But I could never tell her. She was corrupted, but she was innocent.
As she recovered from the transit and slowly came to her senses, I wanted to find out what this journey had cost her, both in terms of her mind and physically. So I said nothing about her journey through time, but soothed her, stroking her hair gently, and calming her, murmuring so she could hear my voice, which was usually familiar, and might still be.
"What do I do here, when am I?" So she was aware that she has travelled in time, but was clearly still vague as to who she is and why she is here.
"It is three days since I saw you last, and your mother and I were with you in the apartment." I did not want to remind her of the coupling that went on then, but to discover whether she remembered it.
"Mother?" Her voice was vague, a question there.
"Your mother, Alexandra." I did not want to say that she was my mother too, but to see if Grace remembered that I was her brother.
