17.
 “Very well. Let me demonstrate what happens to memory. Do you remember this fellow?”
Arthur stared at the sallow face, with blackish eyes, that conjured in mid-air. It hung over the dully glowing dinner table like a dreadful decapitation with open eyes. “No, I’m afraid not.”
“That’s surprising. Given how rarely you interact with people, he was a major player in your life just hours ago.” Cuphandle pointed his index finger at the apparition, mumbled something, and pointed at Arthur.
Arthur looked again at the sallow death-mask before him and said: “Oh yes, now I remember. That’s Major Jarlid. He had to leave suddenly to rejoin his family.”
“Says he, says he.” Cuphandle waved, and the apparition vanished. “He passed on within an hour after contractually deeding the clock to you. It was the clock that kept him alive, in the deal he made years ago. Major Jarlid, you see, was shot on the battlefield during World War I, when T. E. Lawrence’s Arab allies were raiding an Ottoman army garrison near Baghdad. He only made you think you remembered him from your army days.”
“You mean, I had never met him before?” This business of magic was beginning to wear on Arthur, since it seemed you couldn’t win unless you were a miserable, dead, conniving old soul from long ago, with misery and deceit up your sleeve.
“No, he picked you out of the phone book. He looked under R for Rotten, and then A for Awful, but finally found you under L for Lonely. Had he not been shot, he might have lived to a very ripe old age, nearly a century. Because of his luck in encountering my predecessor and colleague, Major Jarlid was given an entire new life to live, and he chose to start from childhood. Ironically, in one of those twists of fate, he actually did serve with the U.S. Army in Iraq. He got his stories a bit mixed up about how and when he encountered the djinni and the clock. By a supreme irony, he was shot again in the more recent Mesopotamian wars, and recovered in a U.S. Army field hospital before being retired to die in a few years from a ruptured hemo-glow-wormulus.”
“I see,” Arthur said. “That makes about as much sense as the rest of this prefabricated tale of prevarication and prestidigitation. I’d like to start life over as a healthy, intelligent, handsome twenty year old with a lot of money. Can we skip the baby and growing up phases?”
Cuphandle laughed. “Not so fast, there. I can promise you youth and health to start with, but not material well-being. Skipping the baby and teenage phases will be no problem. You’ll know what you need to know so that your wealth in the new life will not be significantly less than what you have here. Why don’t we get on with it.”
“Okay,” Arthur said.
Cuphandle leaned forward with his hands between his knees. “Mr. Latchloose, do you remember the apparition we just saw over the table?” He waved a hand, and a dismal vision of a head with dark eyes hovered in pitch darkness under the ceiling just above eye level. Major Jarlid wore a green saucer cap with scrambled eggs on the bill, and rattled invisible chains in gnarly death-claws.
“Who is that?” Arthur said, staring at the already fading face over the table
“There you go,” Cuphandle said. “That’s what it’s like to replace new time with old time.”
The vision faded completely, and Arthur could not remember why he was staring into the ceiling. “What do you mean?”
“Let’s go find out about your future, what’s left of it.” Cuphandle raised his hand, and nothing happened, but Cuphandle’s expression was filled with expectation, as if something enormously important had just transpired.
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Copyright © 2014 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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