The Company of the Dead (19 page)

“This last line describes the assassination that sparked off the Great War.”

“That’s correct.”

“The ship went down almost two years prior to that.”

“Also correct.”

“It’s a hoax,” Lightholler said. “What else could it be?”

Hardas shook his head.

“You retrieved this document from the
Titanic
, right?”

Hardas nodded.

“So why couldn’t someone else have left it there, to be found?”

Kennedy placed his fingertips on the manuscript’s edge. “Considering the expense involved in the dives, that would be a fairly costly deception. Having said that, we considered the possibility. We considered
every
possibility. This manuscript also contains a diary. It outlines a series of events that happened long after the sinking. Some are accurate, and some quite bizarre. There’s an agenda that involves making timely purchases in some very lucrative industries. There’s also what appears to be a hit list: select individuals the author may have targeted for assassination. Sarajevo may be a case in point. Certain passengers on the
Titanic
, another. This manuscript is many things, but I assure you it’s no hoax,” he said, his eyes steady.

“You’re trying to tell me that some madman ran around killing all those people while the ship was sinking?”

“No,” Morgan cut in. “At the time, the
Titanic
was considered man’s greatest creation. It was built to be
virtually
unsinkable. I stress the word ‘virtually’ because clearly, in retrospect, she demonstrated some obvious design flaws. But tell me, who could have appreciated that at the time?” He gave Lightholler a pointed look. “We believe she may have been deliberately sunk, in order to remove those men.”

“She hit a fucking
iceberg
.”

“The question that intrigues us, Captain,” Kennedy said, “is
why
did she hit that iceberg?”

“I could give you five reasons right now,” Lightholler replied hotly.

Kennedy said, “The death of all those men created a powerful vacuum in turn-of-the-century America. A vacuum that could be exploited by someone privy to the knowledge contained in this journal. The author of this text had enough information at his fingertips to engineer any number of events. He also clearly documented his intention to intervene on the ship. We don’t know the details of what happened on the night of the sinking. We don’t know how he figures into what happened at Sarajevo, or the years that followed. We just know where it starts.”

Lightholler was in a daze. Three men were dead in the Midtown Tunnel—for this? He shook his head, aghast. “How could you possibly believe what you’re saying? Your sordid tale about reuniting America was preposterous enough. Camelot...” He spat out the word. “How could anyone come to possess this knowledge in the first place?”

Kennedy remained calm. He nudged the manuscript across the table again and said, “The man your great-grandfather spoke to in the cargo hold of the
Titanic
wrote this journal. His name was Jonathan Wells. As to how he came about this knowledge, it’s all here.”

Lightholler reached out for the journal and was surprised to find that his hand was shaking. His fingers left small rings of moisture on the cover. “What is this?”

“The memoirs of a time traveller, Captain,” Hardas replied.

Lightholler sat back in his chair. How could these madmen have influenced people at such a high level? Who, outside of this room, knew what they were up to? Kennedy and his cronies had misled the intelligence agencies of at least four countries, all for the sake of what lay on the table before him.

“You were right,” he said to Kennedy, rising from his seat. “I don’t believe a fucking word of it.”

“We’ll discuss it further after you’ve read it. And don’t worry, I don’t expect you to cover all of it in one sitting.”

“Not interested. You’ve got me here under false pretences, and I have no intention of staying.”

“You don’t really have much choice. You’re wanted by the CBI. You’re integral to our plan, and you’re not moving from this room until I say so. So you might as well settle back and read, Captain.”

The three Confederates left the room. He heard the tumble of a key in the lock.

Lightholler sat there for a few minutes, the anger welling up inside him. He kicked over the chairs and gave the ashtray a backhand that swept its contents across the floor. He went to the door and kicked it. No one responded.

He returned to the table.

Despite all his fury he opened the journal with care. It was handwritten throughout, with bold cursive strokes. Compared to the cover, the writing within was quite clear. The first page contained a list of names. It was smudged. A thumbprint here, an ink-stained impression there. The next few pages contained widely spaced paragraphs that had been crossed out roughly. In places, the nib of the pen had torn through the coarse-cut paper, indicating the writer’s dissatisfaction.

He sat amongst the scattered furniture, the cups and glasses and the spilt ash, and began to read.

March 20, 1911

March is reasonable.

It’s been March for the last three weeks. And before that came February.

But the year? What the hell can I add after writing that?

I’m beginning to forget things, important things, and memories are all I’ve left to me.

I want to break something, but I’m haunted by the image of a spider gnawing through the scaffolding of its own web.

March 21, 1911

If you are reading this journal and your name is not Jonathan Wells, then one of two things has happened. Either I’ve finally forgotten. Forgotten that I was even trying to remember anything at all. Or I’m dead.

You found this in some abandoned room or on a park bench. It might have been clutched to my chest. Either way, my recommendation is the same. Take a match and burn this fucker before you read another line.

March 22, 1911

Not today.

But every word and thought that comes until you’re right again.

It happened. It really happened.

So deal with it, you sad, miserable little shit.

May 24, 1911

I’ve written journal articles in the past. (If I press the pen any harder on the paper, will it lend any greater significance to that word?) Prepared papers for various medical meetings. And in my teens I kept a diary of sorts, though it was really just a chronicle of gropings. A paper belt notched by my pen so I wouldn’t forget anyone’s name.

The diary is long gone and the names are half-recalled, but to no purpose I can think of. I’ve been here for just on two months and already I feel my past slipping away.

Writing down words like “past” and “time”, I think I need to devise a new lexicon because the old words have lost their meaning.

It’s as if I’d lived my entire existence as a speck, a single dot on a page full of single dots, blindfolded, and then all of a sudden the blindfold was torn away and I found myself extending both forward and back, unfolding as a line beyond the confines of any diagram.

And if two lines, end to end, were to look at each other, what would they see? A point of existence, a fraction of their being. That is the ignorance in which we live, in which I have lived till now.

For some reason I don’t fully grasp, I’m beginning to forget things. My memory was never a problem before, but here, in the backwoods of a small Nevada town, I feel it all slipping away. The line behind me being slowly, inexorably erased.

Since I am the only time traveler I’ve ever met—the only conscious one, that is—I’ve got no one to compare my experiences with. Nowhere in my years of medical experience have I encountered a syndrome that behaves similarly. Prolonged thiamine deficiency will produce extreme memory loss, and Korsakoff’s syndrome will inhibit the formation of new memories. But to have the memories slip away?

There’s a pattern to it. My early memories are fine: childhood, school, college, all intact. But my recent memories—the seminar, the Waste Land, Gershon—are all fading away. My working theory is that it’s a psychological process rather than physiological. Regardless, I’m unfolding.

I suppose that since I’ve been torn from everything I ever knew, I’ve lost the cues that we as human beings unconsciously rely upon. There are no planes in the sky. The cars that trundle through this small town so infrequently are rudimentary at best. There’s no television, of course. No radio. There are telephones, but I won’t be able to make a long-distance call for a while. After all, the loading coil won’t be invented until next year.

The list could probably go on for pages, this catalogue of unmade things.

There’s no safe harbor for my memories, so I feel compelled to moor them here. No one has ever needed a confidant as I need one now.

My name was Jonathan Wells. I was a neurosurgeon. I have taken to calling myself Herbert since I arrived—a private joke few here would appreciate. I found a copy of
The Time Machine
in a dime store in Las Vegas and I keep it by the bed. I’m taking it with me when I leave town. Taking the book and leaving that name, once I’ve decided what the hell I’m going to do about all this.

I’ll be born in New York on October 20, 1964, which makes me minus fifty-three years old. Black hair, thick and in dire need of a cut, blue eyes, bloodshot, and pale, pale skin. My reflection in the warped glass above the table might be trying on Dorian Gray for size. It neither contradicts nor supports the above statement but wavers in an approximation of my state of mind, and it isn’t pretty.

I’d been a neurosurgeon for about two years before I started to sub-specialize. I ended up doing purely vascular work: aneurysms, vascular malformations, and of course the operation that got me here in the first place, the external-carotid to internal-carotid bypass. EC-IC for short.

But it wasn’t always vascular. In my second year as a consultant I got into a little difficulty while operating on a lumbar spine. The dura was torn, the nerve roots obscured in the sludge of welling blood. I couldn’t see a damn thing through the operating microscope. So I made a bargain with God. I promised that if He got me out of that situation, if the patient could be spared paraplegia, I would never touch another spine again. Not as long as I lived.

Promises, promises.

I finished the operation. The patient eventually walked, and so did I—straight from the patient’s room to my office. I phoned the Mayo Clinic. Two months later and I was on their advanced program, and it was vascular all the way.

I’m tired. I’m not used to writing with a nib and I can’t hang around waiting for someone to invent the ballpoint pen. Jesus, my hand is aching and I’m thinking strange thoughts.

May 27, 1911

I’m so fucking scared.

I was re-reading my last entry, thinking about the surgery I used to perform, and I picked up a knife. A dirty, tetanized knife. I was wondering if I still remembered what to do with it.

Before I knew it, I was drawing the blade across my wrist. A shallow diagonal that would divide the radial artery at an angle, and prevent the arterial spasm that God has designed to stop us from bleeding.

Shallow cut, little droplets of blood. But after I stopped shaking, even while I was shaking, I started to laugh. I mean, at least I remembered my anatomy. Specifically
my
anatomy.

But no more knives.

It was early February, 1999, and I’d been invited to attend a conference in Las Vegas, a seminar on cerebral ischaemia. An opportunity to get out of Boston for a while. It suited the hospital and it suited me. And hell, it was Vegas.

I was supposed to present our unit’s experience with the EC-IC bypass. The topic was chosen as a response to recent undercurrents of doubt in the procedure’s validity. These doubts weren’t based upon the operation’s results, which were largely dependent on the experience of the unit and its surgeons, but rather in the actual indications for the operation.

Originally the op had been designed to treat patients who’d suffered damage to the brain’s circulation. The neurological equivalent of a cardiac bypass. Conceptually quite simple. Take the blood supply of the face, head and neck, and re-route a portion of it to supply the brain directly. Technically, it was demanding. Aesthetically, it was beautiful. You marshal the body’s defences. You utilize the patient’s own “spare” tissues to aid in their reconstruction.

Unfortunately, studies suggested that the absolute indications for the operation were diminishing. The only valid ones remaining involved the treatment of rare tumors and trauma. The operation I’d trained in, that I believed would be a staple in the management of neurological patients, was to be relegated to obscurity. And so was I. With the radiologists shoving their tubes and pipes into sealed vessels and the physicians dissolving blockages with their snake oil, my work was disappearing.

Our paper proposed that EC-IC bypass was a
significant
component in the management of arterial disease in the brain. A controversial statement, and quite possibly a false one.

I should know. I wrote it. That’s how I got to be in Vegas, and that’s why
they
picked me. The right person, in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

June 1, 1911

Strange week, skulking around town, trying to keep a low profile. It’s a smaller world I’ve stumbled across. No one travels and no one trusts travelers and no one here could conceive of the miles behind me.

I mustered the courage to sell some of the gold today. Enough to ensure that I had better think about moving on soon. The ingots they’d provided were small enough to be carried on my belt and had been molded to resemble freshly mined gold. The impurities might have been added, as well as the fine dust that silted the belt’s many pouches.

I wonder if they had to erase any serial numbers in their twisted alchemy. I wonder why I’m thinking about serial numbers at all, and then of course I remember all too clearly and wonder at my wondering.