by Alex Scarrow
Near the end of this era, one of the five tablets, now no more than an impression on the surface of a stratum of sandstone, is lost forever when a minor earthquake fractures and grinds the strata to loose gravel. The subtle etchings of words and numbers imprinted from the long-gone clay tablet, erased.
Four companions, however, live on, still separated after so many millions of years by the same distance that existed between them the day they were buried, mere hundreds of yards apart.
Around twenty million years pass and the Palaeogene period becomes the Neogene. The world grows cooler, and for the first time, for a long time, ice-caps begin to form at the polar north and south. Species of grass colonize the land in a way that prehistoric ferns could only dream of, and small four-legged mammals that will one day look very different and be known as ‘buffaloes’ graze blissfully upon it.
Around seven million years ago, the hard-rimmed hoof of one of these small grazing creatures catches the tip of a broken slab of sandstone, and pulls it out of the ground. It lies there in the darkness of night, moonlight picking out strange and subtle patterns of raised markings on one side. But the roaring of a night predator spooks the herd. As one, they surge away from the sound, and the night is filled with the rumble of thousands of hooves on hard-baked soil.
By dawn the curious slab of sedimentary rock is no more than dust and fragments, destroyed by thousands of trampling beasts.
Three silent witnesses remain as endless aeons pass in darkness, like the soft ticking of an impatient clock. Above ground, one species of rodent that took to the trees during the early Palaeogene, has finally ventured down to the ground once more to forage for food as the Neogene era begins. It is larger, with a more muscular frame and a head larger in proportion to its tree-climbing ancestors. It’s a species that will one day, in another more million years, be known as ‘ape’.
In 11,000 BC, early one morning as warm sun spills across a plain, a young Indian brave carefully scouting the grazing buffalo ahead runs his hand over the coarse grass and dislodges the sharp corner of a stone. A chunk of flint emerges from the orange soil, a flint, he notices, with curious markings on it.
For a moment the markings incite his curiosity. They look deliberate. But then his mind moves on to the size of the flint itself. He can see how three separate tamahaken blades could be struck from it, and he thanks Great Father Sun for the find.
Now only two silent messengers remain.
In 1865, a young Confederate lieutenant on the run from Union forces, leading a ragtag band of soldiers unwilling to accept that the civil war is over, rests his aching back against a rock. With tired eyes, too old for such a young face, he watches the languid river in front of him as his fingers twist through coarse grass. And, yes, they find the sharp edge of a stone. Before the war he was a student of history, and the faint lines of writing on the stone fascinate him. He puts the curious piece of rock in his saddle-bag and resolves to take it to a professor of natural history he once knew in Charleston when he eventually can. But later that same day the Union cavalry regiment finally catches up with the lieutenant and his men. And before the sun has set they — soldiers and officer — lie in a shared unmarked grave not far away from the Paluxy River.
And so just one last tablet remains.
CHAPTER 53
2 May 1941, Somervell County, Texas
Grady Adams watched his brother goofing about in the water below with growing irritation. ‘Watch it, Saul… you gonna scare off all the fish!’ His brother ignored him and surface dived into the sedate Paluxy River.
Grady ground his teeth. His younger brother could be a complete ass at times. No, strike that… all the time. He settled back on his haunches, his toes curled over the lip of tan-coloured rock overhanging the river. The stone was hot against the bare skin of his feet, egg-frying hot, that’s what Pa would say. The sun had been beating down on it all morning, and the pool of water that had dripped off him from his last swim in the river half an hour ago had long since evaporated.
He looked up at a nearly cloudless sky and realized there wasn’t going to be any momentary respite from the heat of the sun. To his left, several dozen yards along the ledge of rock, a small, withered cypress tree was clinging to the side of a large craggy boulder. He could see it was casting a small pool of shadow, at least big enough for a part of him to keep out of the sun.
He stood, grabbed his fishing rod and walked carefully along the narrow ledge. Carefully, because from time to time, right near the edge, bits of the sandstone rock broke away and splashed into the river a yard or so below. That had happened to Grady before, scratching up his hips and chest as he’d slid into the water.
Saul came up again, noisily splashing the surface of the river, no doubt scaring any remaining fish well away from the float bobbing nearby.
‘Saul! For crying out loud!’
His brother gave him a toothy grin and paddled across to the far bank, deliberately kicking his feet on the surface and making as much of a ruckus as he could.
Grady hunkered down in the shadow, his back now against cool rock, and to his right a dried earthy wall of orange soil and gnarled roots from the small tree poking out from it. He prodded at the loose layers of soil, light and dark, like the layers of some fancy sponge cake. He’d once found a Paiute tamahaken blade among a bank of earth like this. Those layers folded away such fascinating things along this river. He remembered there was that team of men last summer, digging around along portions of the riverbank, looking for monster footprints in the rock. Dinosaur tracks, that’s what they’d said they were looking for.
Grady and Saul had seen a few in their time along here, big ones like he’d imagined an elephant might leave, and small ones too, three deeper dents and a shallow one. Saul even claimed he’d once seen a human footprint in the rock, just exactly like a shoe. Silly ass was always coming up with doofus nonsense like that.
Grady knew no cavemen wore shoes back then in dinosaur times.
The people up in Glen Rose had started calling this place Dinosaur Valley on account of the men and women from the museums and stuff who came digging for fossils last year. He smiled at that as he tugged at one of the twisted roots. It sounded kind of cool… Dinosaur Valley. He could imagine some of the gigantic beasts he’d seen in picture books striding across their Paluxy River, walking up and down the riverbanks, their long necks craning down to drink from the river…
Grit and dry soil tumbled down on to his arm. ‘Ouch!’
He let go of the root and it sprang up, releasing another small avalanche of loose clay-like earth. And then he saw it, half hanging out, and resting on a coil of tree root that looked like a pig’s tail. A palm-sized slate of shale. He reached up for it and it fell heavily into his hands.
For a moment, as he stared down at the almost triangular shape, he wondered whether it might just be another one of them tamahaken heads. But it didn’t have the telltale signs of being worked on, shaped by some skilled hand.
It was just a plain ol’ slice of rock.
He held it in his throwing hand, wondering how many bounces he’d get from skimming it across the river. It was nice and flat… a good spin on the throw and maybe he’d count seven, perhaps eight, before it settled and sank. He stood up, saw Saul on the far bank sunning himself on a dry boulder. ‘Hey! Saul!’
His brother’s head bobbed up. ‘What?’
‘I got me a skimmer. Reckon I get an eight with it?’
‘Nah,’ he called back, ‘cos you throw like a girl an’ all.’
Grady shook his head and sighed. His brother really could be annoying. ‘Well, why don’tcha just look and learn, you foo-bat!’
He cupped it in his palm, wondering which side was flatter… and then turned it over.
CHAPTER 54
2001, New York
On Sunday 9 September 2001, Lester Cartwright, a small narrow-shouldered man facing his last five desk years before his long-awaited retirement, went to bed with his pl
ump wife. A man who, if you asked him to be honest, would admit to being a little bored with his unchallenging life. His job — yes, it might sound interesting if he was allowed to talk about it — was as a projects budget assessor for a low-profile US intelligence agency. But, in actual fact, despite the intriguing sound of working for a secret service, the work simply involved crunching numbers and balancing costs and expenditures. He might as well have been doing that for Wal-Mart, or McDonald’s, or some carpet store… the job would have been exactly the same.
Not exactly where he’d hoped to end his career when he’d first joined them back in the 1960s, a young man ready to serve his country in the field. A young man ready to kill or be killed for Uncle Sam. Now he was an old man who rubber-stamped expense forms.
That night he went to bed after walking their dog, Charlie, climbed into his pyjamas and picked up a Tom Clancy spy novel, hoping to enjoy at least a few aimless thrills today before turning the light out on his bedside table.
Later, as he slept, change arrived in the form of a subtle ripple of reality. A wave of reality systematically rewriting itself, a wave of change that had started in 1941… with a young boy’s discovery of a strange rock beside a river in Texas. A boy who turned over a rock and saw something curious.
Lester’s boring life in that moment of darkness was replaced in just the blink of an eye, with a far, far more interesting one.
‘Sir! Sir!’ Knuckles rapped gently against the car’s rear passenger window. Lester Cartwright stirred, his mind had been off again, considering the incredible, the impossible.
Only, it isn’t impossible, is it, Lester?
He looked out of the window at Agent Forby, dark glasses, a suit, crew-cut hair and a face that looked like it had never told a joke while on duty. Lester wound his window down an inch. ‘Yes?’
‘Sir, it’s time,’ said Forby.
Lester looked down at his watch. Three minutes to midnight. Dammit
… he must have been napping again.
Getting too old for something like this.
‘Forby, the area’s completely secure?’
Forby nodded. ‘We have a two-block cordon set up. Police and state guard are manning those. The Williamsburg Bridge has been closed and all civilians have been evacuated from the perimeter.’
Cartwright nodded. The cover story had been an easy no-brainer to come up with: a bomb threat. American civilians seemed to react very well to that. ‘So, we’re certain we have just agency personnel within?’
Forby nodded. ‘A hundred per cent, sir. Just us guys.’
Cartwright looked out of the window past Forby’s hunched form. The Williamsburg Bridge towered over them, the nearby intersection was deserted and there, fifty yards away, was the entrance to the small backstreet running alongside the bridge’s brick support arches.
My God… finally. This is it. This is finally it.
He felt his chest tickled by butterfly wings and the short hairs on the back of his neck rise.
‘Very well.’ He opened the car door and stepped out into the warm evening. ‘Then let’s begin.’
Cartwright led the way across the quiet road, lit by several fizzing street lights and the intermittent sweep of a floodlight from a helicopter holding position high up in the sky. Apart from the far-off whup-whup-whup of its rotors, this three-block-wide area of Brooklyn was ghostly quiet.
There was a barricade across the entrance to the backstreet, manned by more of Cartwright’s men. No soldiers or police this close to the target, on Cartwright’s insistence. Only personnel he trusted within the perimeter. Only personnel he’d recruited himself into this small covert agency, an agency he and his men referred to as the Club.
He nodded at them as they raised their guns and let him through. He looked down the narrow cobbled street, littered with garbage, an abandoned skip halfway along.
Good grief, I feel… like a kid.
All of his professional life had been leading up to this one moment, ever since he’d been quietly headhunted from the FBI to come and work for the Club. Forty years of knowing.
Lester Cartwright began to make his way down the row of archways, past the first one, clearly being used by some one-man auto-repair business.
When he’d first joined, his superior had been prepared to reveal only some of the facts: an incredible find in a place called Glen Rose, Texas — a find that had major national security implications. That was all he got for quite a few years. But time passed, and Lester gradually climbed several ranks, finally becoming the senior serving officer in the Club. His departing boss had handed him the complete dossier on his very last day, handed it to him with eyes that looked like they’d been staring far too long into an abyss.
‘ Do me a favour, Lester,’ he’d said. ‘ Sit yourself down and drink a finger of bourbon before you open this file, all right? ’
‘ Sir? ’
‘ You’re about to join a very, very small group… those that know.’
And it was a small group.
Presidents had been briefed — Roosevelt, when the news of the artefact had first been unearthed. Then Truman, then Eisenhower. But they’d stopped briefing presidents when that silly fool Kennedy had threatened to go public on it. That was the year after Lester had joined the Club, the year of the Dallas incident. A very messy business. But the Club had a responsibility.
They hadn’t bothered to tell presidents since then.
Cartwright passed the third and fourth archways, both open-fronted and unoccupied. He could see needles and bottles back there in the darkness. His men had checked in there for vagrants and unearthed only one grubby, stinking and utterly bewildered alcoholic. He could feel his heart pounding in his chest as his feet slowly brought him up outside the metal roller-shutter door of the fifth archway.
Forty years he’d known of a thing called the Glen Rose artefact.
But only for the last fifteen years had he known exactly what it was.
Figuratively speaking, a message in a bottle, with a date on it. A bottle that couldn’t be opened until a certain date. He looked down at his watch and saw that that certain date was a mere forty seconds away.
There hadn’t been a single solitary night during the last fifteen years that he hadn’t lain in bed and wondered what they’d find inside this address. He’d been down this street on a number of occasions and looked at that corrugated metal; he’d even been inside and looked around on several occasions. Empty, unused.
But now, finally, there were occupants inside. Occupants from — his heart fluttered and his breath caught as he considered the phrase — another time.
Cartwright instinctively reached into his suit jacket for the service-issue firearm he kept there as he looked at his watch and realized that after forty years of waiting and preparing he was finally down to counting off the last ten seconds.
‘So… this is it,’ he uttered.
The second hand of his watch ticked past midnight and all of a sudden he thought he felt the slightest puff of displaced air against his face.
He leaned forward, balled his fist and knuckled the shutter door gently.
CHAPTER 55
2001, New York
Maddy looked at Sal. ‘Oh my God! You hear that? That was a knock, wasn’t it?’ She hadn’t fully expected to be right, that come the stroke of midnight and the reset there would actually, for real, be a knock on their door.
The roller shutter rattled again, and they heard the muffled sound of a man’s voice outside.
‘So we’re going to open it, right?’ whispered Sal.
‘I… uh… yes, I guess we’ve got no choice.’ She stepped forward towards the button at the side and pressed it. With a rattling whirr of a winch motor begging for oil, the shutter slowly rose. Both girls looked down at the ground, at the gradually widening gap, and the soft glow of the street lamp outside creeping across their stained and pitted concrete floor.
Two shoes. Two dark-suited legs. Finally the person outs
ide ducked down slightly to look in, and his wide eyes met theirs.
‘Hello there,’ said Maddy, raising a limp hand. ‘We were… kind of expecting you.’
The shutter rattled to a stop and the man stared at them for a long while in silence.
‘I…’ he started, his voice croaky with nerves. ‘You… but you’re just kids.’ He narrowed his eyes, looking past them at the dim interior. ‘Are there any others here?’
‘Just us, I’m afraid,’ said Maddy.
He looked at her; his old creased face seemed to be struggling to cope with the moment. ‘Are you two… are you f-from the future?’ he asked.
Sal looked at Maddy and she finally nodded her head. ‘You’ve got a million questions you want to ask us, I’m sure,’ Maddy addressed the old man. ‘And we’re prepared to answer some of them. But… you have something, right? Something for us?’
He eyed her cautiously. ‘Perhaps.’
‘A message?’
He ignored the question. ‘Are you time travellers?’
‘I won’t answer anything until you answer me. Do you have a message for us?’
He took a step forward, squinting at the machinery on the far side of the arch. He nodded towards it. ‘Is that some sort of time machine?’
She bit her lip. ‘I’m not saying anything until you answer me.’
‘It is, isn’t it?’ He smiled. ‘My God… this is incredible.’
‘Please!’ called out Sal. ‘Something brought you to us. It’s a message from our friend, isn’t it?’
The old man turned away from them and barked an order down along their backstreet. A moment later Maddy could hear the slap of boots on cobblestones. She retreated from the entrance and into the arch, taking several steps towards the computer desk.
‘I’m sorry,’ said the old man. He reached into his suit jacket and pulled a handgun on them. ‘Please remain perfectly still. Do not touch anything! Do not do anything!’