Time's Mistress by Steven Savile Page B

until it was full. Then it would stop. And when it stopped, I’d go to a little watchmaker’s shop in the Jewish quarter of Prague, and he’d say, “I know all my customers’ names, Steve. It’s just good business.” This time I’d know how he knew my name, because we’d done this dance before.
    If he gave me that choice again, fixing it, or using it, I’d keep on using it until I was ready to go on scattering the rest of Isla Durovich’s ashes in Vienna—on a picnic blanket on the green in Bellevue Höhe overlooking the entire city—and Venice—on the Grand Canal—then Rome—taking in the breathtaking view of the Eternal City from Gianicolo Hill—and finally that little lake house in Garda that was just us, our little dream house.
    And when I was ready, I’d go on to the third battered paperback in my bag, but not yet, and I couldn’t go back four years, six months, four days, thirteen hours, and fifteen minutes to the moment I’d had Tom of Finland tattoo “be brave” over my heart, and live it all again, because forty-eight hours was forty-eight hours. The watch couldn’t save any more time. Not in the year I’d had it.
    But I didn’t need to go back. As tempting as it was to wish I could save the child myself, or go back to that day we first met and be brave all over again, I couldn’t change things. This was the way it had to be.
    All I needed to do was to let him rewind the watch on all of its saved time, and step out of his shop onto the moonlit Parisian streets. There would always be an old couple waiting for me on the platform with their Kodak moments, and a painter on a bridge tomorrow desperate to share the happiest moment of his life with me.
    That was Isla’s last gift to me, seconds saved here and there from our last year together that all added up to time to remember her.
    ***

The Hollow Earth
    The woman might have been beautiful, once. It was impossible to tell because the flickering blue blush of the gaslight cast a pall of sickness across her face. The harsh light picked out the shadows of her pocked skin, flaunting her imperfections. Whatever she might have been, she was not beautiful now.
    She carried a basket of wilting flowers. The wet stems nestled against the pearly ruffles of her blouse leaving a grimy circle of damp beneath the swell of her left breast.
    The man who called himself Nathaniel Seth smiled at her pantomime of propriety as she adjusted the lie of her bustle on her generous hips and teased the set of her porter’s knot. It was all a show, an elaborate charade to mask the fact that she was loitering on the corner of Bedford Square.
    A flower girl.
    A prostitute by any other name.
    Where other girls made for the warmth of the palatial Alhambra down in Leicester Square or the dancing rooms of the East End where the music of desire filled the snuggeries and lust parted the amorous from their shillings, this one waited out the night on a dimly lit corner, clinging to the dark places she knew well.
    She listened hungrily to the sounds of the night, the clatter of horses’ hooves sparking on distant cobbles, the cries of the street hawkers and below them, the soft feet of the young cadgers running back to their nests to share whatever spoils their light fingers had plucked.
    He cursed his luck, willing her silently to move on, find another perch or slip into a Hansom Cab and disappear into the cloying smog.
    He could smell her perfumes, wantonly applied to douse the reek of those other wanton fragrances that clung to her ample flesh. It was cloyingly sweet.
    At that moment the world had such small horizons: it spanned from the mouth of the Square to the shadowy steps of the British Museum. He opened his hand, stretching the stiffness out of his fingers. His pocket-watch ticked against his breastbone. He counted the movements, inhaling and exhaling shallowly with every third one, twenty breaths in a full minute of watching the woman.
    She showed no sign of