belongings were some unwieldy items of equipment and some books:
Germans Against Hitler: The Stauffenberg Plot and Resistance Under the Third Reich
and
The Plots to Kill Hitler: The Account of Fabian von Schlabrendorff.
For now, the hotel had put these things into their lost property.
‘And you’ve no idea where he went?’ asked Karla.
‘I think somewhere far from here,’ said the receptionist. ‘I think somewhere he knew when he was small.’
‘Perhaps Germany, then,’ said Karla. ‘Was he expecting to return?’
‘I really couldn’t say,’ said the receptionist. ‘But we won’t keep his things in lost property forever.’
Karla asked about the photographs, whether they had arrived in time for Mr Birchler to see them, but the receptionist could not be sure what Mr Birchler had or had not received before leaving. Karla left her contact details with the receptionist and with the desk of her own hotel in Spain so that Lukas would be able to get in touch and so that she might get the photographs back at some point.
In fact, this package had not yet been delivered to the Hotel Schlüssel; it was still in transit. When it did arrive, the receptionist, seeing that Lukas Birchler was not a guest of the hotel, wrote on the envelope ‘
Unbekannt!
’ and ‘
NACHSENDEN
’, before recognising the name, remembering him and adding ‘
INS AUSLAND VERZOGEN
’. She put it back in the post, to be returned to the Spanish hotel whose address was printed on the envelope.
Karla, meanwhile, was aboard the aeroplane that would take her back to London. She had not heard from Lukas again, but she was very pleased to have encountered him after so many years and to have had the chance to catch up. She had been so tickled to discover that he really did have an inventing shed in which to build those machines he had always talked about – everything from the homework robot to what he had always called his big project: a machine that could travel through time. He used to talk about that a lot. Karla had said that if she could go back in time she would like to be Jean Harlow kissing Clark Gable but Lukas had said it would not work like that. What he had been interested in was whether one could go back and change the past. And if not, he had said, at least one might learn something by being there.
Karla, strapping herself into her seat on the plane, recalled hearing someone say on the radio that most people, if they could travel back in time, would want to go and kill Hitler. She pictured Lukas, with his trilby and his walking stick, leaving the Hotel Schlüssel, looking precisely like the man in the photograph. She wondered whether she would ever see Lukas again and it occurred to her that she would not.
ALISON MOORE
Alison Moore’s short fiction has been included in various anthologies including
Best British Short Stories, Best British Horror
and
The Spectral Book of Horror Stories
. A selection from her debut collection,
The Pre-War House and Other Stories
, has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra, and the title story won the New Writer Novella Prize. Her first novel,
The Lighth
ouse, was published in 2012 and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Awards, winning the McKitterick Prize. Her second novel,
He Wants
, was published in 2014. Both
The Lighthouse
and
He Wants
were
Observer
Books of the Year. Her third novel,
Death and the Seaside
, will be published in August 2016. www.alison-moore.com
WONDERS TO COME
CHRISTOPHER FOWLER
Roy Brook spent his life in meetings.
For this one he sat in the seventeenth-floor boardroom of the Atlantica Hotel and shook with air-conditioned cold. With him were five senior engineers, seated around the walnut conference table, clutching dead Starbucks cups. The session had been called to determine why the hotel construction had missed its deadline. A Skype link had been set up with the consortium heads in Guangzhou.
‘Let’s put this problem in perspective,’ said
Germans Against Hitler: The Stauffenberg Plot and Resistance Under the Third Reich
and
The Plots to Kill Hitler: The Account of Fabian von Schlabrendorff.
For now, the hotel had put these things into their lost property.
‘And you’ve no idea where he went?’ asked Karla.
‘I think somewhere far from here,’ said the receptionist. ‘I think somewhere he knew when he was small.’
‘Perhaps Germany, then,’ said Karla. ‘Was he expecting to return?’
‘I really couldn’t say,’ said the receptionist. ‘But we won’t keep his things in lost property forever.’
Karla asked about the photographs, whether they had arrived in time for Mr Birchler to see them, but the receptionist could not be sure what Mr Birchler had or had not received before leaving. Karla left her contact details with the receptionist and with the desk of her own hotel in Spain so that Lukas would be able to get in touch and so that she might get the photographs back at some point.
In fact, this package had not yet been delivered to the Hotel Schlüssel; it was still in transit. When it did arrive, the receptionist, seeing that Lukas Birchler was not a guest of the hotel, wrote on the envelope ‘
Unbekannt!
’ and ‘
NACHSENDEN
’, before recognising the name, remembering him and adding ‘
INS AUSLAND VERZOGEN
’. She put it back in the post, to be returned to the Spanish hotel whose address was printed on the envelope.
Karla, meanwhile, was aboard the aeroplane that would take her back to London. She had not heard from Lukas again, but she was very pleased to have encountered him after so many years and to have had the chance to catch up. She had been so tickled to discover that he really did have an inventing shed in which to build those machines he had always talked about – everything from the homework robot to what he had always called his big project: a machine that could travel through time. He used to talk about that a lot. Karla had said that if she could go back in time she would like to be Jean Harlow kissing Clark Gable but Lukas had said it would not work like that. What he had been interested in was whether one could go back and change the past. And if not, he had said, at least one might learn something by being there.
Karla, strapping herself into her seat on the plane, recalled hearing someone say on the radio that most people, if they could travel back in time, would want to go and kill Hitler. She pictured Lukas, with his trilby and his walking stick, leaving the Hotel Schlüssel, looking precisely like the man in the photograph. She wondered whether she would ever see Lukas again and it occurred to her that she would not.
ALISON MOORE
Alison Moore’s short fiction has been included in various anthologies including
Best British Short Stories, Best British Horror
and
The Spectral Book of Horror Stories
. A selection from her debut collection,
The Pre-War House and Other Stories
, has been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 Extra, and the title story won the New Writer Novella Prize. Her first novel,
The Lighth
ouse, was published in 2012 and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Awards, winning the McKitterick Prize. Her second novel,
He Wants
, was published in 2014. Both
The Lighthouse
and
He Wants
were
Observer
Books of the Year. Her third novel,
Death and the Seaside
, will be published in August 2016. www.alison-moore.com
WONDERS TO COME
CHRISTOPHER FOWLER
Roy Brook spent his life in meetings.
For this one he sat in the seventeenth-floor boardroom of the Atlantica Hotel and shook with air-conditioned cold. With him were five senior engineers, seated around the walnut conference table, clutching dead Starbucks cups. The session had been called to determine why the hotel construction had missed its deadline. A Skype link had been set up with the consortium heads in Guangzhou.
‘Let’s put this problem in perspective,’ said