Prehistoric Clock (19 page)

It was indeed Morse Code, emitted with clarity and precision. They repeated the entire message twice more.

Professor, all is well. Hope you like your new leg. Billy, Tangeni and friends are safe with me. Have made tremendous progress with your temporal differentiator. Working on plan to rescue you. Difficult though. Spies are everywhere. Will return here at same time once a week. Hold tight. Wave if you understand. Sorensen.

He didn’t wave right away. He wanted to prolong this wonderful moment—an illicit communication for his eyes only, from friends willing to brave the wrath of the Council itself. True friends. When he finally did wave, the two figures standing against the bulwark responded in kind.

As he watched the ship leave, a rousing warmth in the pit of his stomach rose to his throat and his eyes and ears, drawing glad tears. His heart lifted and remained afloat for hours. He barely ate that day and all the next. And despite the enormous responsibilities and the world-altering disclosures heaped upon him by the Council, the only thing he truly cared about that week was obtaining two coloured counters and a single die.

He and Billy had a game to play. Snakes and Ladders. As when he’d waited indefinitely atop the rickety walkway above his great machine, Cecil was back to rolling his figurative die, hoping for an intervention. This time, it was not only Lisa and Edmond he must save but Verity and Embrey too.

He opened the board and set the pieces onto square one. The ups and downs were all ahead of him once more, but at least during this wait, he was not alone.

A small house spider scurried across the board, raising a smirk on Cecil’s lips.
So miracles do happen.

He considered how the game might end, if indeed it
could
ever end once it had begun. “Well, here goes.” He slid the red counter forward.

He checked the telegram. The lad had just rolled a five…

To whomever braves time to find this,

Come and seek us out! At the attached coordinates, you will discover the ruins of the only land-based Leviacrum tower left standing on this continent. We explore constantly, but that edifice is the closest we have to a home in prehistory. Yet it is not sufficient to keep us safe. The deadly creatures that reign over the outside world have made it imperative for us to delve underground, into the stupendous network of manmade tunnels fanning out from those coordinates. There is evidence of a technologically advanced civilization we believe may still exist deep within the bowels of this prehistoric realm. Might it hold the key to our salvation, to our return through time? Though we have unearthed a few of its secrets, we know not how or why it came to exist so far back in time. Even as I write this letter, the great towers rust and crumble. They will one day pass out of all human knowledge unless time is breached again and the breacher returns home. I therefore bequeath this mystery to you, dear traveller, in the event of our death. For we are captives here, driven beneath this vast, unconquered wilderness red in tooth and claw.

I am Lord Garrett Embrey, exile from the year 1908. Two years have passed since Professor Cecil Reardon, inventor of time travel, disappeared through time with two dozen others. We know nothing of their fates. Of the original survivors of our freak time jump, only I and one other remain. She is Verity Champlain, Captain of the Gannet airship,
Empress Matilda,
and I love her with all my heart. That she returns those feelings is the solace that sustains me.

I am securing this letter to the base of Big Ben in hope rather than expectation. We shall not return. Verity and I left these ruins because the area is too dangerous, but I suspect an errant time traveller would not happen upon this specific age by chance, and would therefore already know of the disappearance of Westminster. Let this be the start of your quest, then, dear traveller, and may we meet soon.

Be wary of the sound of thunder: the giant baryonyx roam these coasts; of sudden shadows: look up to the Hatzegopteryx, cruel kings of the skies; and venture across the lakes at your peril. As the decrepit Leviacrum towers illustrate, dinosaurs and man can never co-exist. Perhaps our erstwhile enemy, Agnes Polperro, was right and Nature only suffers interlopers—in time, in fate, in the food chain—temporarily before expelling them in its own subtle ways. Sooner or later, if Nature is governed by balance, the ebb and flow of time may swallow all man’s attempts to change its course.

Our airship’s next flight will be its last, as we have almost exhausted the hydrogen reserves. Verity and I will soon begin our next great adventure. For today, as the sun reached its zenith, we joined hands at the foot of Big Ben, a hallowed place where twentieth century grass still grows and time no longer chimes. While the sun’s corona haloed the clock, we turned our faces toward heaven and plighted our troth beneath the eyes of God.

We live during the infancy of flowers, and she is my rose, the first and only one I shall ever love. We are without flag, without country, without sure means of survival. But we have each other, and that is more than enough.

What lies in store for us, I wonder.

Hopefully,

Garrett R. J. Embrey

Verity M. Embrey

Five Past Eight

1916

The howl of the wind outside his single porthole window kept Cecil awake, but barely. The days had grown long, interminable over the past several months without word from outside. Even the meagre telegrams that had arrived with clockwork regularity for many years, each containing but one number—the result of Billy’s die roll for their epic games of Snakes and Ladders—had ceased. At least in his old quarters he’d been able to gaze out across London from his balcony, to pretend he was still a part of the world below. Here, on the 112
^th
floor, he was nothing but a rusty old cog in the monotonous grind of a soulless machine.

His bushy beard was silver-white and reached down to his chest. His sore fingers, the prints worn away by too many cuts and abrasions during his obsessive fiddling with sharp edges and brittle lenses, hurt all day until he rested them in bed under his pillow. He slept more and more these days. No one seemed to complain, though, as his sharpness in the lab had long begun to wane. Truth be told, the scraps he’d fed the Council during his first few years spent in the tower, and his utter failure to reproduce his great machine—a deliberate failure—had relegated him to a kind of twilight position within the establishment. They treated him with benign neglect, neither resisting nor rewarding his small breakthroughs in other fields, despite his continued propensity for hard work.

It was genius they wanted—time travel or nothing—and he had let them down.

He’d slept peacefully each and every night with that knowledge.

The shadowy walls of his quarters slithered to life as he conjured, bittersweetly, his great adventure in prehistory. Airships swooped amid flying reptiles, diving bells plumbed the depths of a sea teeming with monstrous creatures, his friends fought with him and for him against impossible odds, and he grew to love them over time.

Ah, would that I were a young man again. I’d never go near a blasted laboratory. The world outside is much too interesting as it is. Am I right, Lisa? Am I right, Edmond?

Do everything within your power. Nothing else matters. You will never be complete if you don’t try. Let God stop it if He must.

Hurtful words from long ago. He hadn’t uttered them for years, but their sentiment haunted him like the scent of African lily perfume whenever he came across it in the tower’s dining hall or the movie theatre. The wound was still tender. It had never healed.

He closed his eyes, changed sides on the bed and snuggled against a double pillow. Not even rain pelting the window could keep him awake now that he’d found something worth dreaming about. He imagined his wife and son running toward him on the lonely, rickety walkway overlooking his giant machine, moments before its cataclysmic reaction. But their smiles quickly dropped, and they yelled something at him in unison. No sound escaped their lips.

A terrific crash jolted him, and he sprang upright on the bed. He spun toward the open window, shielding his face from the violent gust of wind he was expecting. But none came. Nor was there any rain. The storm had ceased apoplectically. He checked the wall clock.

Ah, five past eight. Right on cue. But what broke the glass?

He got out of bed, put his single slipper on and walked over the shards to the window. Before he reached it, the slick, broad form of a man swung in through the gap, narrowly missing him. The intruder thudded sideways onto the carpet and gave an audible wince.

“What the devil? What do you mean by breaking in—”

“Quick, help me untie the rope,” the interloper said as he leapt to his feet. A good six feet tall, he was young and handsome, with wide, straight shoulders and a rough and ready face, like a rugby player. He wore a navy blue slicker.

“Who are you? Tell me why I shouldn’t throw you back out right now and pin a bill for the window to your backside.”

“Five past eight. We’ve got seconds!” The man yanked at the knot around his waist, unfastening the rope, then he tossed it onto the floor. Next, he tore his slicker off to reveal a bizarre metallic contraption, about the size of a large rucksack, strapped to his back. He tightened the thick harness about the shoulders and around the waist of his khaki suit.

“What the hell is that?
Who are you?
”

The young man was too busy to answer. He clicked two levers on either side of the metal box and without warning snatched Cecil toward him by the wrists. “Here—when we jump, you’ll need to wrap your arms
and
legs around me. Make sure the mechanical one is set to its walking gear so you can hold it bent around me. Is that clear?”

An escape! After all these years?
“I understand.” He didn’t, but he would rather take this chance, perhaps his last, than spend the rest of his life cooped up in oblivion. “It’s already set to that gear.”

“Good. All right, here we go. Hold on tight, Cecil.”

Cecil? Who called him that? None in the tower, and he hadn’t spoken to a friend from the outside for going on a decade.

Ugh!
His stomach vaulted into his brain as they jumped into a million suspended dew drops. The five past eight time glitch had rendered the storm a three dimensional, interactive tableau—spectacular and terrifying in equal measure. He crushed his limbs around the man. About a third of the way down, a whirring, clicking noise began in the metallic contraption. A dozen bulky silver rods shot out from either side. They immediately doubled in length, then tripled, becoming slenderer with each action. Finally, dovetailing metal lengths fanned out from each spine, forming streamlined wings. This new air resistance snatched Cecil and his rescuer from their deadly plummet and set them on a gliding path away from the tower.

The storm resumed with a shimmering stutter. A flash of lightning jived a million raindrops back to life, and they pounded the metal wings. Cecil clung even tighter as the birdman let go of him to pivot and angle the wings by means of levers at the base of the shell. He expertly guided them toward the deck of a medium-sized airship hovering a hundred feet over the Thames. A dozen African aeronauts waited with a giant net, to catch the fliers if they should overshoot their landing. Luckily, the birdman brought them down safely, skidding onto several wet mattresses arranged together on the quarterdeck.

“Well, how the hell do you do, Professor?”

Were he not already punchdrunk from too many shocks in too short a time, Cecil would have cried out with joy at the sight of his old Namibian friend, Tangeni, bounding over the mattresses wearing a slicker several sizes too big.

“Tangeni! I knew it was you behind this.”

The African pilot, now sporting a short, black-grey beard, threw his arms around Cecil and wouldn’t let go, and Cecil fancied he outdid that grip of affection with one of his own—one of the most heartfelt embraces he’d ever given.

“I thought you’d forgotten me, my friend.”

“Never. We thought of everything to free you, but they were one step ahead of us at every turn. In the end, we took inspiration from our old friends, the flying dinosaurs. It was his crazy idea.” He motioned to the birdman, who gave a bow. “The timing was everything—in and out before your captors knew a thing. And now that we have you back, there will be no stopping us. But come, they’ll hunt us to the ends of the earth when they find out you’ve escaped.”

Heavy rain thrashed the deck. Tangeni returned to the wheel, promising to share a brandy or five with Cecil as soon as he’d seen to their escape from London. Meanwhile, the birdman fetched blankets, raincoats and sou’westers for Cecil and himself.

“I can never thank you enough, young man. And now will you
please
tell me your name.”

His rescuer grinned, then gave a cheeky shrug. “’T weren’t nothin’.” The lad mimicked a Lancashire accent. The professor stood up straight, looked the young man over from head to toe, questing for further proof to support his unlikely assumption. But it couldn’t be. This stranger no more resembled the boy he’d left behind in the factory wreckage than—

“I believe I’m a few squares ahead of you this time around, Cecil.”

“Billy?”

“None other.”

“My God, you’ve grown…unrecognisably.”

“So have you.”

They inched toward each other, shook hands. A more restrained and tentative reacquaintance than he’d shared with Tangeni, but harder to grasp. More filled with questions. With wonder. The boy had become the man Cecil had always dreamed of meeting. But it was not Edmond. It was Billy, the surrogate son of time travellers.

“Join me for a brandy?” Cecil asked.

The lad saluted, then placed his arm over the old professor’s shoulders, leading him to Tangeni’s cabin. “Aye, though I have to admit, I still prefer sarsaparilla. Don’t tell anyone, though.”

Inside the cabin smelled of incense and candle wax, while two amber oil lamps hung from the low, panelled roof. Three wooden chairs with cushioned seats faced each other in the centre, around which four tables had been arranged in a semi-circle. The latter were full of boxes and folders and curious archaeological specimens.

Tangeni noticed him studying the paraphernalia. “The expedition is all but underway, my good professor. You are the last to join—if you have no objection, of course.”

He pursed his lips in mock contemplation. “Hmm, I will have to cancel my appointment with the barber first.”

His two friends laughed. Billy poured them each a brandy.

“If it be to rescue Verity and Embrey, or even to find a small piece of that puzzle, I will gladly outdistance a thousand Phileas Foggs until we achieve it. To where do we fly?” Cecil asked.

“First to Marseilles.” Billy plucked a fancy pipe from a drawer in one of the tables, packed it with rich-smelling tobacco from a leather pouch as he spoke. What an extraordinary transformation the lad had undergone. He was now an eloquent and self-sufficient young gentleman, not to mention ingenious for having orchestrated such a daring rescue. “Our sponsor awaits us there. We have over two dozen men and women ready to venture where few have ever set foot, including most of our aeronaut friends who survived the time jump.”

“Smashing. And where lies this untamed land, may I ask?”

“In a remote region of Central Africa,” Tangeni said. “That is where our next adventure begins, and a perilous one at that, if even half the legends are to be believed. It is a trail that leads into the bowels of the earth.” He handed Cecil a flat, granite rock about the size of a fist. Inscribed upon it was the Embrey family coat-of arms! “The clues all point to
Eembu
and Embrey, to something extraordinary having occurred in a world far beneath our feet.”

“McEwan’s antediluvian realm?” Breathlessly, Cecil swigged the remainder of his brandy and asked for a refill. “And time travel? Has Professor Sorensen—”

The African lifted his eyebrows. “He will have to explain that to you, I’m afraid. He has yet to emulate your great feat, but he says he is close to a breakthrough—one that could be the key to rescuing our friends marooned across time. He requires your collaboration.”

“And he shall have it.”

Tangeni raised his glass. “Cheers, Professor. Here’s to your escape, and the return of old friends.”

“Hear! Hear!” Cecil and Billy responded in chorus.

On the wall next to the starboard oil lamp hung a framed photograph. The date was marked 1907. It featured the entire crew of the
Empress Matilda,
arm in arm, forming three ranks. On the back row he recognized Kibo, the proud engine man wearing his smart waistcoat; Djimon, who had lost his life in the diving bell; and the two tall Kenyan women, Reba and Philomena. The middle row was full of faces he recognized, some of whom he might yet see again. And in the front row, centre, the unmistakable duo, whose great friendship and resourcefulness had triumphed over the direst moments of their prehistoric adventure, crouched side by side, grinning joyously. Verity’s cropped red hair and beautiful face were indelible, her spirit insuperable. And Tangeni had proven his loyalty to her across two epochs.

On the left of the photograph hung a small portrait of Lord Garrett Embrey, the most impressive man Cecil had ever had the privilege of calling friend. Despite his youth, Embrey was already worthy of his father’s title and others higher still, for he represented all that was best about the English under pressure. Despite all that had transpired to kill his compassion, he had never lost sight of the meaning of family.

He was a man after Cecil’s heart. And they would meet again soon.

Let God stop it if He must.