Necessary Evil (Milkweed Triptych) Read online

  On lonely nights she pleasures herself while watching him sleep. It is one such night, spent imagining his calloused hands on her naked body, when she discovers that Raybould Marsh can be something more than her lover.

  He can be her savior. He can save her from the Eidolons.

  What would Raybould do in the face of inescapable doom? Every time line ends with the Eidolons. But he would see it differently: every preexisting time line ends thus.

  So why not build a new time line? From scratch?

  She sits bolt upright, the first tremors of orgasm forgotten.

  *

  Springtime again. The butterfly stretches her wings.

  Outwitting the Eidolons is a superb challenge. The only challenge worthy of her attentions. It becomes her sole focus for years on end: mastering manipulations; piercing the dark heart of the knottiest paradoxes; culling insights from obscure potential futures; skirting her own death at the hands of enraged allies and determined enemies; weaving cause and effect across decades.

  She inspects every detail, for she must leave nothing to chance. The plan must unfold over so many years that the tiniest crosscurrents will grow into cyclones capable of unraveling the slender thread of her machinations.

  It is a Herculean undertaking. But she succeeds.

  *

  It will start with a man named Krasnopolsky.

  Soon, the doctor will use the civil war in Spain as a field test for his children’s abilities, thus proving to his benefactors that he can make real their dreams of conquest. The triumphant feats of Willenskräfte will be filmed for further study. Krasnopolsky will be one of the cameramen. He will witness unnatural things. Things that disturb him.

  It will be easy for her to nudge Krasnopolsky’s disquiet into thoughts of defection. The British will send a spy to collect him. A spy named Raybould Marsh.

  He and she will first glimpse each other at the port in Barcelona. She will set the hook with a wink.

  And thus, after the war begins, Raybould will return to the Continent, seeking information about the doctor’s farm. She will let him capture her.

  He will bring her to England, where he and his colleagues will show her to an Eidolon. The Eidolons will see Raybould, too, and sense what she intends for him. He will catch their interest. And that moment will become her anchor, the graft point from which the new time line will grow. But there will be so much more to do.

  With her guidance, brother will rescue her. She will become the most valuable advisor to the highest echelons of the military. She will guide them through the annihilation of Britain’s army on the beaches of Dunkirk; direct the systematic destruction of Britain’s air defenses. Her Willenskräfte will become a scalpel, cutting away all hope.

  Raybould, meanwhile, will attempt to raise a family. It hurts to think of him with another woman. But it’s a necessary part of the plan. And his misguided infatuation with the freckled whore won’t last forever. He is meant for one woman and nobody else: she is the woman who sees through time, and he the man who will transcend it.

  She will orchestrate a bombing raid that kills Raybould’s infant daughter. He will go mad with sorrow. Grief will make him careless. He will spearhead a surprise attack on the farm. The British will use the Eidolons to transport soldiers to Germany. It is a very clever idea. But she will thwart the British, to lay the groundwork for a desperate withdrawal. The Eidolons will claim Raybould’s next child for themselves before letting the few survivors make a panicked retreat to England.

  Britain’s survival will require drastic action. Raybould’s compatriots will break the Wehrmacht with supernatural winter and lure the Red Army to finish the job. Their ploy will succeed. But in spite of Raybould’s efforts to prevent it, the farm will fall to the Soviets. The Soviets will claim the doctor’s work for themselves.

  Including her. And brother.

  Events will coast without her adjustments for over twenty years. The British Empire and the Soviet Union will settle into a precarious stalemate. Eidolons on one side, the doctor’s research on the other. But when the time is right, she and brother will escape. And their return to England will lure Raybould out of retirement.

  He will be a different man by then. Bowed, but not yet broken. The strain of living with a child twisted by the Eidolons will have destroyed his marriage. But he endures because Britain is free; he endures because he believes his sacrifices are meaningful.

  By then, the Soviets will have improved the doctor’s technology. But Raybould’s attempt to eliminate the Soviet Willenskräfte army will fail, and he will be grievously injured (not killed, of course; she will never allow that). His beloved Britain will fall under withering attack.

  Then, and only then, will Raybould be in the proper emotional state for what she needs.

  Lost in despair and rage, he will unleash the Eidolons. But the demons will inhabit his empty son and use human eyes to see humanity in full. Raybould’s anguish will become the thing that hurls their time line into the malevolent abyss.

  But. She will have long since set her anchor in the past, long ago laid the bait to lure Raybould back. And in the final moments of that world, when he finally comprehends her plan, he will step forward to save her.

  He won’t understand he’s doing it for her. He’ll think he’s seizing a second chance to save his infant daughter.

  But all that matters is he relents and allows the last of the warlocks to send him into the past. He will arrive at the anchor point, and create a new time line.

  One in which she isn’t consumed by the Eidolons.

  *

  Saving herself means stitching new threads into the tapestry of possible futures. It means breaking Raybould Marsh, the man she loves, and forging his sorrow into a tool for destroying the world.

  It means tempting him with the one thing he desires above all else. It means luring him into the past.

  It works.

  one

  12 May 1940

  Westminster, London, England

  I crouched in the painful embrace of a hawthorn hedge, the screams of a dying world still echoing in my ears.

  Hot sweat tickled my scalp. But I shivered from chills, nausea, and the lingering touch of the Eidolons. I hadn’t realized just how ill I felt until those demons took me apart and reassembled me twenty-three years in the past.

  I was a time traveler. A refugee from the world’s end. The sole survivor of a cataclysm that I had caused.

  The western sky blushed orange and pink beyond a swath of royal parkland. The last traces of gloaming silhouetted lampposts in St. James’. All dark, all unlit. The only other light came from a narrow gap in the opaque curtain covering the window overhead; a shaft of pale light speared through the shadows above my hiding spot. London itself was a hulking presence sensed but unseen in the night. The Admiralty building loomed behind me, cloaked in blackout. I could smell the dampness from a recent rainstorm and woody sap from where I’d cracked a few hawthorn branches in my hasty exit through the window. Everything was silent but for the occasional distant hum of a car along Whitehall.

  The darkness lent an unexpected familiarity to this place and time. Like encountering an old lover after leaving her behind long ago, and discovering she hadn’t changed a jot.

  This was the spring of 1940. Those early days of the Second World War, before France had fallen and we’d lost an army on the beaches of Dunkirk. Before the first dominoes had toppled in that long chain of events culminating decades later in a demonic apocalypse.

  My job was to break that chain. Somehow.

  The suffocating weight of that task left me breathless. I couldn’t take in the sheer enormity of it all without becoming dizzy. A spasm cramped my gut.

  I took a steadying breath and tried to ground myself in the here and now. In a previous life I had been a gardener, and so I concentrated on my immediate surroundings.

  Long thin shoots poked randomly from the top of the unkempt hedge. They broke the clean, level lin
es of the shrubbery. The slender branches had just begun to swell with white May blossoms, and my shivering caused green thorns to skitter against the window glass of the Admiralty. Thorns like those had pierced my shirt when I leaped from the window. They raked my skin from waist to armpit.

  It was probably a quickset hedge, a century old or more. But now there was a war on, and people had more pressing concerns than keeping the hedges tidy.

  That simple observation, more than anything else, even more than the blackout, forced me to accept the reality of it all. Will had done it. He’d sent me back.

  Picture this, if you will: A man, not quite fifty-three years old, a bit heavier than he ought to be, plagued with a bad knee and a worse temper, his face and voice ruined by fire. Make him nauseated, feverish, alone. Now watch his back bend, his shoulders slump with despair, as he grapples with the enormity of his impossible task.

  That was me.

  Footsteps rattled floorboards inside the Admiralty, approaching the window where I’d made my escape. I retreated deeper into the hawthorn, clamping my jaw as thorns pierced me in a dozen new places. I put the cold, unyielding stone of the Admiralty building at my back and tried not to breathe. My muscles ached with the effort not to tremble lest somebody heard the bramble rattling against the windowsill. My stomach gurgled.

  Somebody fixed the blackout curtains. Darkness engulfed me.

  And then a woman’s voice floated through the shadows. She had to be standing in the room where I’d landed, just a few feet from where I now hunched in the cold and dark. What she said was muffled by the window and the curtains, but I could still make it out. I think she intended that.

  “Ah.”

  I knew that voice. Another spasm twisted my gut.

  A man said, gruffly, “What?”

  Of course, I recognized his voice as well. But I wasn’t ready to think about that yet.

  “It worked,” said the woman.

  God as my witness, I could hear the corner of her mouth curling up as she said it. Only two words, but more than enough to send another volley of chills rattling through me.

  Gretel. The clairvoyant who manipulated the world for decades—and killed my daughter and destroyed my marriage—in her paradoxical bid to elude the Eidolons on the last day of history. I and the people I cared for had been nothing more than unwitting pieces in Gretel’s long, elaborate chess game. As had Great Britain itself, and the Third Reich, and the Soviet Union. Puppets all. I trembled again, this time with rage.

  It worked.

  Yes, it had. She’d tricked me into unleashing the Eidolons. And then, as the world had ended around us, she’d dangled an irresistible carrot before me: the chance to save my dead daughter. Because she knew Agnes was the only lure strong enough to yank me out of my apathy; by that point, I didn’t much care the world was ending.

  And now she knew I was here. Knew that she’d won.

  Or had she?

  For my Gretel, my bête noire—the Gretel who instigated the bombing raid that killed Agnes; the Gretel whose specter had haunted every day of my life in the decades since war’s end—had perished along with everybody else when the Eidolons ended the world. But, of course, she didn’t care. For though she was mad, she wielded the power of the gods. Thus her long game amounted to nothing more than a convoluted self-sacrifice. A feint at the Eidolons, a bit of supernatural sleight of hand, so that another version of herself could thrive. So that a different Gretel, the Gretel of this new splinter time line, could live free of the Eidolons.

  What a privileged perspective I enjoyed. A sickening thing, this insider’s view of her cold-blooded machinations. Revolting, the extent of that madwoman’s psychosis. Terrifying.

  I doubled over and retched while the footsteps receded and he took the prisoner back to her cell. I knew he was doing that because I had been there.

  I am there. Right now. But so is he.

  Was this me, shivering and sweating and bleeding in the darkness? Or was I that other person, safe and warm inside the Admiralty? I had his memories, but he didn’t share mine. Didn’t share my wounds. Didn’t share my disfigurement, didn’t feel the constant pain in my throat. He hadn’t endured two failed attempts to start a family.

  Tears squeezed through the corners of my clenched eyelids when I thought of family. My darling daughter, Agnes, dead so young. My son, John, a soulless vessel carved by the Eidolons to facilitate the eradication of humanity. And my wife, Liv, with her freckles, cutting wit, and poisonous resentment.

  A new realization hit me in the gut so sharply that it threatened to loose my watery bowels. This was 1940. None of that had happened yet. Liv still loved him. Loved him in a way that had long since withered and died for me. Loved him in a way he didn’t deserve. It wasn’t fair. I hated him for it.

  But the seed of an idea lodged in the fertile soil at the back of my mind. I couldn’t dislodge it. Nor did I want to.

  I waited until I was certain Gretel and her escort had gone downstairs and nobody inside would hear me shaking the hedge. An owl hooted in St. James’ while I extricated myself from the hawthorn. Several minutes of cursing earned my freedom along with a bevy of fresh scratches. They bled freely as I staggered across Horse Guards to the park.

  Footing was precarious; many of the city’s parks had been turned over to gardening and home defense. I took a tumble in a trench that had probably been dug for the sake of filling sandbags.

  My head throbbed in time with the pulse of sweat down my temples. Another wave of nausea rippled through me. The watery churning lent an urgency to my wanderings. But I knew the park had no public loo. Not in 1940. And I couldn’t spare the time to find one.

  As I squatted in the mud beside the lake, it occurred to me that I’d once seen this shoreline studded with tents. A staging area. That memory dredged up others in its wake, most particularly of a strange and frightening encounter. But my thoughts skittered away again; I was reluctant to dwell on that, though I couldn’t put my finger on why.

  My relief was short-lived. I had just pulled up my trousers when a light shone in my face. The mild throbbing in my temples flared into a mature headache.

  “Oy now, what are you about?”

  Oh, dear God, no. Not now.

  I couldn’t see for the light in my eyes. Something pale fluttered in the shadows outside the torchlight. Possibly a handkerchief. A second voice with a plugged nose said, “Christ. I think he shitted in the lake.”

  “I’m ill,” I mumbled. Each word a fire in my throat.

  The full extent of the humiliation slowly dawned on me, easily the worst in all my miserable life. The possibility Gretel knew about this made it even worse. At that moment I didn’t care about saving the world. I wanted it all to go away.

  “Maybe so,” said the second voice, “but the royal parks aren’t your personal toilet. That’s rotten disgusting.”

  The first man tipped his electric torch so that it wasn’t aimed directly into my eyes. I made out the glint of a badge and the silhouette of a bobby’s helmet.

  “I’d like to see your identity card, sir.”

  And that’s when I realized I was in trouble. The dread lay so heavy upon me I thought I might sink into the mud.

  HMG had issued ID cards to all its citizens at the start of the war, back in 1939. We’d carried them until the early 50s, when the wretched National Registration program was finally scrapped.

  But none of that mattered. Because today, in 1940, in wartime, I was required by law to produce my ID card for the coppers. I was required by law to never venture outside the house without the card on my person. But ID cards had been far from my mind as the Eidolons devoured the world.

  I started to shiver again. “Lost it,” I rasped.

  “Is that so? How’d you lose it, then?”

  I couldn’t tell the copper that I tossed it during a bout of spring cleaning ten or twelve years ago. But the second copper sensed my hesitation before I could concoct a plausible lie.
r />   “I won’t ask again. Where’s your identity card, sir?”

  “I … I haven’t got it.”

  “Right,” he said. “You do know we could haul you in for that? And for that.” He gesturing at the lakeshore with his truncheon. “Bloody public indecency, that is.”

  “Francis,” said the first copper. “C’mere a sec. You,” he said, pointing to me, “stay put.”

  I’d been hauled in by the coppers enough times to recognize when a difference of opinion was brewing. I eavesdropped and considered making a run for it. The still night air carried their whispered conversation to me. I had to strain to hear it over the lapping of the lake, but I knew they were arguing.

  “We’re taking him in,” said Francis, still holding the handkerchief over his nose.

  “He needs a hospital,” said the other copper.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “You can tell the poor old duffer is confused. Look at his eyes. Probably half senile. Could be somebody’s da.”

  “Maybe that’s what the Jerries want us to think.”

  “Look at his scars. He’s seen some action. Bet he fought in the Great War.”

  “Maybe he fought for the Boche.”

  “Being a bit extreme, aren’t you?”

  “No. You’re being a bit lazy.”

  “Let me try to sort the poor fellow out, what?”

  They returned. I hadn’t moved. I knew I was in no state to make a proper fugitive. They’d catch me, and that would spike my mission before it ever started.

  In my younger days I might have considered taking them both by surprise. And on a very lucky day I might have succeeded. But I was older and wiser now, which is to say slower, so I knew it would take but one well-placed truncheon to make an even bigger hash of things.

  The first copper took the lead again, and that gave me hope. “What’s your name, sir?”