The Time Traveller, Smith Read online

Part 7

  I grabbed blindly for a handhold, a foothold, any prop that might check the inevitable as I tumbled prone and helpless, flailing towards the dipping bow of the gyro-plane. By hap I felt my fingers brush against Gordon’s ankles. The despicable Scot had managed to maintain his balance in all this, though he struggled still, and all the more successfully, with the woefully weakening stranglehold of my brave K.

  There was no hope! The slippery material of the Scotsman’s pevecy suit repelled my grip. But as I slid further, afeared I might slide past him entirely, I found frantic purchase by hooking an elbow around his lower leg. I hugged myself around his feet. I felt him totter. I squeezed and clawed at his calves with what seemed the very last of my strength. He emitted a pained and despairing groan. And then, he fell. His forehead cracked against some gauge or instrument jutting sharply from the pilot’s array, his neck whipping back with a cruel snap audible even above the whine of the plummeting gyro-plane.

  K had dropped from Gordon’s back as he toppled and she now lay crumpled, tucked awkwardly against a strut in the aircraft’s frame. Her eyelids fluttered with every shudder of the plunging gyro-plane. She raised a hand with quivering urgency, gesturing limply to the craft’s controls. Her lips trembled instructions I could not hear.

  I unwound myself from around the feet of the fallen Scot and pulled myself clumsily over his lumpy, lifeless body. With the floor pitched so gravely, the judder, shake and roar threatening to rip the craft and us apart at any moment, I believe I would have more easily surmounted some Himalayan pinnacle.

  Somehow I had raised myself to my knees, my hands wrapped like pincers around the pilot’s seat. Yet the controls remained frustratingly just out of my reach. I wrenched forwards, twisting one arm around the base of the seat and made a tentative grasp at the steering column, the thrashing stick knocking against my finger tips before jogging away again. I cursed. I threw my hand forward as the stick bounced back once more, felt the ends of my fingers curl around the juddering column. My hands slippery with perspiration, the stick quickly made to slide from my grip. I groaned and strained with all my will, felt my thumb meet my slipping fingers around the end of the stick. I had ahold!

  “Now, pull it back, Max!”

  K’s voice was close to my ears. She must have pulled herself towards me as I fumbled for the controls. I braced myself against the pilot’s seat as the still struggling lever began to yield to my grasp and the angle of our descent eased somewhat. I felt the touch of K’s hand on my shoulder.

  “Slowly now, Max. Don’t stall it.”

  Now under my control, no longer threatening to shake from my grasp, I secured my grip around the stick. Then I drew it towards me as smoothly as my pounding heart and aching muscles would allow. The vibrations that shook the ‘plane began to abate as its nose gradually nudged level.

  “Good boy,” said K. “Now hold steady as I take over.”

  K pulled her battered body around me and used my arm as a prop to reach the controls. A trickle of blood oozed from a deep gash on her brow and snaked over her ruddy grazed cheek. She dragged her left leg behind her, the ankle twisted unnaturally.

  As K took hold of the steering column, my body sagged involuntarily from the pilot’s seat to the floor. I sat hunched, gasping short and painful breaths that rattled in my dry throat and stuck there like sharp pins, tacking good nurse air’s progress to my covetous, fickle lungs. Sticky perspiration dribbled from my forehead and clung in tingling globules from the end of my nose. But I was too weak to wipe them away. I convulsed forward onto clammy palms, my whole wretched body ashiver, and I heft hollowly, without issue, my belly twisted and knotted doubly by emptiness and anxiety too lately fled.

  As we gained altitude, K twisted the steering column around and set our course back towards the north.

  “It’s time to finish this, my dear,” she said flatly, “and perhaps start something anew. If a demonstration is what Ben Landon wants it is only fitting he observe it closely.

  “The Texians promise so much in the name of peace and freedom. They offer a seductive manifestation of civilisation. But that’s all it is, all it was. A most singular and fragile illusion.

  “In Cornwall we escaped the worst ravages of the war. We built a community there. It may not have been much, but it was our own. We were simple farmers, living our lives by the code of the seasons, much as people had done for centuries in that part of the world. And I, as lady of the manor, was guardian of all that.

  “The Texians came from the west carrying the banner of liberty. But what they truly wanted were our meagre resources. In Cornwall there was precious silver and tin. In England there is coal and good farmland. In Scotland there is even said to be mineral oil, that sticky commodity, lifeblood to their wicked machines, with which the Texians are so enamoured. And even when there are few other resources there are always men, women and children to be enslaved and to be put to work in building the Texian’s so-called civilisation.

  “When we said that theirs was not the civilisation we wanted they branded us trouble makers, at first, then, when we refused to put-up, insurrectionists; terrorists; traitors. It is always the way of the conqueror. And mine, always the way of the vanquished.

  “It doesn’t matter,” K said, before adding, obliquely. “My Camelford; my Cornwall is gone. Lost like old Lyonesse. Drowned. I am a womanly Trevilian.”

  I must admit to having no clue as to her references then. It was only later when I would realise their import in relation to my own, so called, life.

  “Are you ready?” she asked. “It has to be you, Max. Conel was quite specific. You are an innocent, I think, and not only in this.”

  How could she know? Certainly not from Conel. He himself had, in those fourteen years I had known him, paid only professional attention to creatures of the fairer sex. In any case I thought it no slight on my manhood that I had never lain with a woman. Was it so unusual to find oneself a bachelor still at twenty eight years of age?

  K turned to me, smiling gently, no hint of judgment in the sweet set of her lips.

  “It is, quite literally, my dear, time,” she said.

  I held her eyes for several moments, not in hesitation but in a frisson of companionship.

  “Look at The Eye, Max,” she said, finally. “Look at the Universal Egg.”

  The Eye had begun to glow. It seemed somehow lighter in its cage, no longer fallen and dull, but aglow and risen to hover eagerly pressed against the filigreed gold bars.

  Now I sensed why it was so called The Eye, as it peered at me enquiringly from between the bars of its cage. I recalled Conel’s words on our reunion. You must trust her, he had said. Trust Her. Could it be that it was not K to whom he had referred but to The Eye Herself?

  Now, Max, now is the time, She seemed to be saying to me. Now I am yours. But first you must free me. Free me…

  With no further thought, as if I were simply drawing water from a pump, or performing some other natural workaday action, calmed by the gazed instruction of The Eye, I pulled the lever to open the hatch in the aft of the gyro-plane. Then, as if I had done this a thousand times, pulled the second lever to release the cloud-filled Eye from Her cantilevered cage.

  The Eye of Time dropped quickly from Her confinement and then, just as swiftly, stopped, hanging in the air above the open hatch as if supported by an invisible hand. Slowly She turned her gaze to peer briefly back at us, and then She turned faster, spinning, quicker, quicker, until Her swirling contents became a glowing blur.

  Together, K and I watched The Eye of Time fall unhurriedly through the hatch, fall towards the ruins of London, fall to where, K assured me, was buried the palace of Beau Riche and its terrible guest, the would-be world-conqueror, Ben Landon of the Texian Republic.

  K banked the gyro-plane around so as to better observe what further destruction The Eye would cause on that already devastated city, once my L
ondon.

  At first we could see nothing. Just the blasted rubble field we had but shortly left below, crumbling and ash charred in the twilight gloam, with the black and oily tear of the Thames running to our starboard side.

  Then something glinted amidst the ruins, something like the bright blink of an Eye. It flared. A hundred coloured ribbons burst from the ruins, a thousand ethereal strands streamed over the desolate surrounds, a million diaphanous strips curled and wrapped around the fallen bricks and shattered stones that had once been London, reaching their multi-hued tips exploratively skywards, flowing upwards and outwards in an ever shifting dance of twisting iridescence. All this in the blink of an Eye.

  “Oh, Max, it’s – it’s –“

  “Shh, my dear. Shh, my love.” And I put my arm around her.

  And I was full of love then, wide-eyed witness to God’s creation wrought by man. My only regret that the man who had so wrought it, my master and mentor, old man Conel, was not there to witness it also. But perhaps somewhere down below He was there in the midst of His creation and, I hoped, He revelled in it.

  The ribbons of coloured ether curled ever higher until they threatened to wrap around the gyro-plane itself. But rather than take us up away from them, K maintained altitude, circling the spreading wonder below in a wide arc, as the rising coils began to lick around the belly of our craft.

  I glanced at K, concentrating so intently on the controls of the gyro-plane, her bottom lip bitten, her cheeks wet with tears. I felt my own cheeks. They were wet too. But they were elated tears we cried.

  “Oh, Max look!”

  I leaned forward to peer over the nose of the gyro-plane.

  There below, through the tangling colours, shapes formed and dissipated above the ruins. I could not make them out at first, so quick were they made and broken. But slowly they began to take on firmer outlines, did not dissolve so readily. And gradually shapes formed far below which did not dissolve at all, but coalesced into solid seeming structures, buildings and houses, great towers and columns, steeples, domed minarets, mighty arches and high spanning bridges.

  “It is Camelford,” K said. “It is my Camelford, lost and reborn!”

  The iridescent streamers now coiled over the wings and around the nose of the gyro-plane. They wrapped around the forward air-screw. It squealed and sputtered in their entwining. They dabbed at the window panes and portholes, climbed and spread over them, until the only view we had was of their mesmerising colour-shift. The gyro-plane slowed in their easy embrace. The roar of her air-screws quieted and ceased. The gyro-plane hung there in mid-air, supported by those inquisitive tendrils which continued to grow, merge and split over the air-craft’s body, holding our awed attention with their scintillating colour-play.

  K let go of the useless control stick and stood. As one we moved to the window.

  “Is this it?” she wondered.

  I had no answer for her. I felt no threat of imminent doom. Awful death, from which I had been snatched so often in the past few days, did not seem so close at hand. There was an otherworldly calmness in the silent cabin of the gyro-plane, broken only by the regular exhalations of our enthralled breaths.

  I reached out my hand and lay my palm against the window glass. The colours on the outer side seemed to throb around it, pulsating out from my hand in chromatic waves. K lay her hand on top of mine.

  There was a dull tap-tap-tap from the other side of the window. And then the glass dissipated beneath my palm, splitting into a thousand shimmering particles that swirled around my fingertips and dissolved into the ribbons even now beginning to coil over my hand.

  What a thrill it was to feel the fondling touch of the time streams for the first time!

  “Oh, Max,” K gasped.

  The many coloured strands pushed her hand away from mine as they continued to twist over my wrist and up my arm. They flicked over my shoulder, shooing K further from me. They did not want her. She stumbled backwards on her twisted ankle, her eyes wide in sudden wondrous terror, her lips trembling frightedly. K stretched her hand out to me once more, her face lined with concerned horror. She was pleading to me, I think, but her words were fanned away from my ears by the swirling play of the time streams as they teased over my cheeksbones. My attention was elsewhere, my mind abliss with the fond touch of wild time. I could hear another voice calling to me. Somewhere in the swirling ether The Eye of Time was searching for me.

  I am coming, my dear. I have found you.

  Distractedly, I reached my free hand back towards K’s outstretched fingers and for one brief and final moment our fingertips met.

  Then I was outside the gyro-plane, wrapped needily in the eager embrace of the time strands, looking back at K’s worried face as it pressed up against the reformed window, her palms striking against the glass, her lips formed in an imploring ‘o’.

  It is my last and enduring vision of that brave and lovely girl, my saviour and protectoress, the Lady K, both she and the gyro-plane soon lost from my sight amidst the million twirling streams. Oh, I am a fool! To be so simply led by time’s fickle sensation!

  The Eye was near me now. I felt Her gaze observing me minutely, felt Her touch in the tightening grasp of the tendrils which enveloped me.

  She rose up from the iridescent mist below, brighter now than I had seen Her before, aglow like a miniature sun, spinning off strand after strand of pearlescent time-stuff. I wanted to twist my head away from her blinding glare but I was held tight in Her grip, the ribbons curling yet around my eyelids so I could not even close my eyes.

  I am yours now.

  Then She was propelling Herself towards me. My eyes burnt in Her searing incandescence. Her scorching light consumed me. The socket of my right eye exploded in bone twisting agony.

  I am yours forever.

  *

  Smith’s mind had become befuddled once more as his unlikely tale reached its climax. His features had dissolved into the unformed mess they had been when I had first encountered him. His head lolled back onto the arm of the chaise.

  I lay my black laced palms on his shoulders and shook him as forcibly as I could, for a woman.

  “Mr Smith,” I hissed. “Mr Smith! It’s perfectly all right now. It’s 1908. You’re back. See?”

  His head rolled limply. His single eye flitted around the room but found no purchase. The tick-tock of the unseen clock amplified, quickened, louder, faster.

  “No. NO!”

  He gasped. One hand snatched to his face and clawed at the skin around his patched eye.

  “You see. You see!” He screamed. “You think it is the poppy that has made me so… It is not! Opium is not my drug, Miss Brown, just as this is not my world. This is not my Nineteen Hundred and Eight. I am lost. Like Lyonesse. Drowned. Time’s Trevilian….”

  He twisted painfully into a sitting position, trembling, forehead specked with beads of perspiration, rasping lungfuls of air. Then, fixing me glaringly with his one twitching eye, he removed his tremorous hand from the patched other. Slowly, shakingly, he lifted the canvas patch.

  *

  A quick glance each way from the top step up from the cellar and I slipped further along the gloomy Limehouse alley into darker shadows, loosening the drawstrings on my black beaded reticule as I moved. I removed the portable telephony machine stowed there. After carefully unfolding the machine’s net of transmitting antennae, I rang up a ten-digit code on the illuminated dial, lifted my veil and clipped the earpiece around my ear. A strand of hair fell across my face. I brushed the errant scarlet lock behind the earpiece.

  There was a whirring as the call connected and then a chime as the connection was made. A woman’s voice, crackly and distant, greeted me.

  “Good evening,” I replied. “I would like to hire an excavating machine. The corner of St John Street and Clerkenwell Road at ten o’clock tomorrow morning. Miss Karensa Brown. The account of Lady Camelford, yes.
”

  THE END

  ###

  About the author:

  By day JC McLaughlin is a lowly web editor. By night (and sometimes in his lunch hour) he is a creator of the fantastical, the historical, the romantic, the psychedelic (!), the literary and the, er, rock'n'roll.... He is currently working on a full-length, traditional(ish) heroic swords and sorcery adventure which should be published in early 2011. JC McLaughlin really is the great, great grandson of Vane Ireton Shaftesbury St John.

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