Mummers' Curse by Gillian Roberts Read Free Book Online Page B

the dresser, either a grisly piece of humor or just plain grisly. On a black marble slab, a lighted panel said:
    YOU HAVE
    359,160 HOURS
    15 MINUTES

27 SECONDS
    LEFT IN YOUR LIFE. ENJOY THEM.
    THE TIME IS NOW: 10:47 P.M.
    Enjoy them, indeed. Who had thought the device up? What kind of person bought it as a Christmas gift—and for whom, with what motive? As I watched, my remaining time dwindled, second by second. Three hundred and fifty-nine thousand hours didn’t seem enough, particularly when I could watch them diminish. I worried whether the clock maker had accounted for the leap years in my future, for daylight saving time, for medical breakthroughs and random violence. Did this mean it didn’t matter if I exercised or started smoking again or rode a motorcycle without a helmet or jaywalked?
    When the telephone rang, I realized that I had dozed off. The Doomsday clock said 1:05 a.m. Also that I had two hours and eighteen minutes less to live.
    The caller brusquely asked if Mackenzie was there and told me that if so, I should immediately wake him.
    We’d overslept. The alarm on the real clock, hastily and wrongly set for a.m. instead of p.m., had remained silent. Actually, only one of us had overslept since I’d never intended either to go to sleep at eleven or to be up at midnight.
    Mackenzie looked so exhausted, I felt cruel for waking him. It didn’t seem fair that baddies got to do their thing whenever they so pleased, and goodies had to play the game according to the criminal’s timetable.
    I saw him off, then shuffled back to bed, intending to sleep straight through the last day of my vacation, even if it meant missing hours, minutes, and seconds of remaining life.
    It had taken me awhile to get used to the wide-open expanses of the loft after years in my historic but constricted house. When I first moved in here, I felt stranded in a wilderness. Nothing above the high ceilings but roofing, nothing below but other spaces, too often silent, and an art gallery that was closed at night. For a month, I half hoped the walls would close in, like something out of Poe, but now, I was accustomed to a skylit ceiling and plaster and brick horizons I could barely see at night. The dangerous expanse had become breathing space.
    Macavity, who was supposed to be the skittish one, had taken ten minutes max to call the place home.
    All of which was to say that both the cat and I were soundly asleep when the door to the loft opened.
    I wouldn’t have noticed, it was done so quietly, except that Macavity did notice and pounded over my hip and chest en route to his under-bed hiding spot. It’s amazing how much a cat makes itself weigh when it’s stomping you. “Detour, you inconsiderate beast,” I groaned. The cat spoke back.
    “Since you’re already up…”
    I screamed. And lost a huge number of seconds and minutes of the potential joy I had left.
    “Din’ mean to startle you, thought I heard you—”
    “For God’s sake! How could you not think you’d scare me? What are you doing here? You just left! Why didn’t you knock, or make noise—what are you doing here?”
    “Workin’. And now that you really are up…”
    I was. Definitely. All systems jump-started even though, squint as I might, I couldn’t see a hint of daylight through the windows, or even through the skylight. “It isn’t tomorrow yet.”
    “It’s four forty-six a.m.,” he said in a bright voice that assumed I was lucky he hadn’t let me sleep past this fabulous hour. “I’ll make coffee,” he added, and he relocated to do so.
    There followed an inordinate amount of grinding, tamping, clattering, and cabinet-slamming for so minor a task.
    I dragged my bod out of bed, into the arctic of a brick-walled expanse whose heat had been turned down for the night. I insulated my feet with a pair of Mackenzie’s ski socks and pulled a hooded sweatshirt on top of the oversized T-shirt I wore as a nightie. I did not look like an ad for eternal