Then his mind exploded with dark energy.
#
Lydia saw the man coming for her, ohmigod he wants to kill me, he’s crazy and she dug into her purse for the letter opener she’d kept from the office, managed to drag it out without snagging it on the cheap stitching, and brandished it just as she realized why this nut could still be moving while everyone else lay tangled in her time-web, and he managed to wrap his hands around her throat right at the moment she stabbed him deep in the side and ohgodohgodohgodwhatthehellwhatthewhat..?
Then they joined together, a closed loop.
And Time turned inside-out.
3.
Jason always felt nervous in the city. Years of living the suburban life added up to an intrinsic enjoyment of a slow-paced world -- not to mention the fact that whenever his bouts of slip-time occurred he knew his surroundings completely. He’d never wind up somewhere utterly alien, unable to enjoy the experience for fear he might end up somewhere he shouldn’t be.
Or wind up in a situation he couldn’t get out of, should his do-gooder instincts prove too strong.
Unfortunately, as a well-respected illustrator of children’s books, he found it hard to avoid the occasional trip to the nearby Megalopolis to meet a writer/agent/publisher/what-have-you. As he’d done today.
When he left the business lunch, the publisher who’d secured his agreement to illustrate a new, unexpurgated collection of ‘Grimm’s Fairy Tales’ gushed, “We’re so happy to have you on this project, Mr. Wesselman! Your work just speaks to us – every painting looks like you’ve taken a moment in time and just frozen it long enough to get all the details right. Like photo-realism, but different somehow. More real than reality.”
Jason had heard the same sentiment, many times. It never failed to amuse him.
He was still smiling about it when the wave of nausea hit him, followed by a series of cramps that threatened to drop him face first into the street.
Food poisoning?
Then the city came to a screaming stop in front of him, and he only wished for ptomaine.
This was much, much worse.
The world hung in suspension around him, but slip-time never happened this way, not painfully -- not instantaneously, either. For a moment he felt as if he, too, might grind to a halt, joining the others on the sidewalk around him. He’d never felt that way before. It was as if…
Jason started running before he even gave it conscious thought, weaving through the living statues around him. Too slow, so he finally vaulted over the hood of a yellow cab and took to the center of the street and a relatively unobscured path.
If I slip back into real-time right now, I’m meat. The thought knotted his stomach nearly as much as the fleeting cramps had moments before. Still, he kept running, circumnavigating bumpers and an occasional bike messenger.
The thought echoed in his mind. It’s as if I stepped into someone else’s slip-time. He’d always wondered if there were others out there who could do what he did, but he’d never seriously considered the idea. He liked believing he was unique.
Now, with his heart pounding and his breath coming in short gasps, he prayed he was. If the sickness he’d felt when this started gave any indication at all of way that other used slip-time...
Bad times ahead for everyone.
He knew this instinctively, just as he knew which direction he should be going, even as the maze of city streets tried to lead him off the path. He zigged and zagged through the inertia-less traffic, cutting across intersections by leaping on hoods and trunks -- leaving no dents, not even a footprint -- aiming for the unknown epicenter he sensed at nerve-level.
He felt himself slowing down, not sure if the cause was exhaustion or the actual ordeal of fighting to stay out-of-time. He was close to his goal, he knew that much, but he barely had the strength to cross the latest intersection and reach his final destination. He rested, leaning against a classic Rolls Silver Shadow for the moment.
The car shuddered under his weight and sank several inches, the air from its now-rotted tires puffing up clouds of rust.
The ancient Rolls Royce turned from collector’s item to junkyard reliquary in the space of a second, its aged driver still frozen behind the wheel, unaware of the car’s fate.
Jason stared, dumbfounded. Did I do that?
Another car, this one a late-model BMW, expired to his left without the benefit of his touch, its shiny factory-fresh paint job now dabs of fading color on a brittle fiberglass corpse. The woman behind the wheel, wizened and uncaring behind flakes of dried makeup, wore a fraying halter top and threadbare jean cutoffs.
As he stared through the yellowed safety glass, her lower jaw sagged, then dropped off into her lap.
Can’t happen. This can’t happen! She was in time, she was in the freaking loop! She can’t age!
Another wave of cramps and nausea hit him, this one powerful enough to drive him to his knees. He felt an incredible pull at the same time, so undeniable that he started dragging himself forward across the blacktop, scraping his hands and knees in the process.
Stand up, dammit, now!
He managed to force himself back to his feet and stumble along the path of least resistance. He maneuvered clumsily around the traffic until he finally reached the curb, almost tripping as he made it to the sidewalk.
Too many people. Always the trouble with the city, Jason believed. Too many bodies, too many chances for stupid mistakes, too many bad things happening around every corner.
When he finally squeezed his way past several hurried, motionless forms, he found out how bad things could really be.
Something struggled in the middle of the sidewalk. Something with two heads, each grimacing with pure malignance, and what might be two bodies, though they were locked in such a tight embrace he couldn’t tell where one began and the other ended. For a moment he thought that they, too, were frozen in time, until a single drop of blood dripped onto the pavement and splashed into a growing puddle beneath their feet.
Around them, spinning off in eddies Jason could see as shimmering waves resembling heat mirages, Time went wild.
A dreadlocked man wearing a Jimmy Cliff t-shirt aged and crumbled, his dreads littering the sidewalk like dirty grey ropes. A woman pushing a baby carriage sank into her clothing, going from mother to teen to toddler while the infant in the stroller burst through its sides in a sudden growth-spurt. One man, standing in the storm-front between two clashing time-swirls, fluttered from youth to elder and back again so quickly that he looked like a lunatic’s composite picture of the Ages of Man.
And the time-wave kept moving outward -- Jason felt the disturbance creeping further and further across the city by slow but inexorable increments.
And he had no idea how to stop it.
I’m no superhero. No guardian angel either, Grandma, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. For all he knew, this could be the end of the world.
And he could only watch it happen.
Think. You can’t do anything, you can’t just kick something and hope it helps, Superjerk, but you can still think!
He tore his attention away from the effects of Time unfettered and concentrated on the source. Two people, obviously. Male and female, he made out finally, both caught in the other’s death grip, both utterly beyond any attempt at contact. Jason saw a thickening haze around them, the center of the time-storm -- even as he watched, it grew darker, nearly obliterating the figures trapped at its heart. Energy pulsed from them in feverish waves, and yet it seemed to recycle itself as well, rushing out from them and then being sucked back in.
Like Time tried to escape their grasp, only to be pulled back by their combined gravity.
Black hole.
It just popped into his mind and sat there, refusing to go away. Jason never excelled in science, and he could barely remember the whole idea behind the concept of a black hole in the first place. He knew, though, that its gravity was so intense even light could not escape it. It sat there
in space, sucking everything in, matter, light, time...
Time? He’d read that, right? That, theoretically, even Time itself went all funny near a black hole?
What if these two, in their clash of Timeless wills, had become something like a black hole themselves? Sucking in Time, bending it into crazy shapes, spilling it out only to capture it again?
Jason remembered something else from science class, as well. If there was such a thing as a black hole, it needed an outlet somewhere else. A white hole, where all of the swallowed energy escaped.
Oh, no.
Jason strained to think of something else, a better idea, hell, this one came too quick, it must be wrong, right? I need to visit Grandma’s grave again, I need to do this Grimm’s book, I’d like to find a steady girl, if it’s not too damned much to ask, I don’t need the whole hero biz anymore, it’s not me, I live in the suburbs, for God’s sake!
Then he noticed the cracks webbing out across the sidewalk, and the chunks of plaster between the bricks of the nearest brownstone dissolving into fine powder as he watched.
No choice, no choice at all but to run away and hope for the best. Which was, as he knew, just not possible.
Let me have the strength to last long enough, that’s all I ask, and he took three final steps, one deep breath...
Then he entered the eye of the storm.
One touch:
Mineminemine/don’ttouchmequeenruler/allmineallminenotYOURSfilthybitch/nastybeggar/mytime/Mytime/ourtimenonononono --
JasonI’mJasonnotthemnotthemohgodithurtssomuchtoomuchenergytoomuchtime --
OURTIMEOURTIMEOURTIMEYOUCAN’THAVEITGETOUTGETOUT --
Jason I’m Jason not taking GIVING!
Jason let it all pass through him, all the greed and pain and hate and trapped Time and he opened his mouth to scream it all out of him, push the poisons away in one great spasm, gone, gone, let it all be gone, let Time heal all...
Energy poured through Jason, using him as an open conduit. He thought of his Grandmother and her guardian angels.
Then he surrendered himself to Time.
#
Confusion reigned in the city, or at least in a corridor that extended twenty blocks or so in every direction from the corner of Fourth and Congress. Multi-vehicle pileups occurred where traffic had been flowing fine a second earlier, babies and bodies littered the sidewalks, tripping busy pedestrians who really would have noticed those things under normal circumstances, and once-solid stone edifices groaned with the first warnings of imminent collapse.
It took nearly two hours for the harried, befuddled rescue teams to reach the center of the mess. While they organized a seat-of-the-pants version of triage, Brad Langer, a veteran EMS tech, stumbled across a scene straight out of a Bosch painting: two dead bodies, fused as one, their limbs and organs pretzled together like pipe cleaners with flesh, their mouths open past the tearing point in a mutual grimace of hatred.
Years of front-line medical duty couldn’t prepare him for this. He turned to gag, tripping on something that flinched under his heel.
Against his better instincts, he looked down to see what he’d stepped on.
A hand, pink as a newborn’s, fluttered weakly from under a pile of debris. Brad dug through what looked to be a century’s worth of dust and detritus to unearth a young man, naked and hairless, his skin unnaturally smooth, unlined. The man coughed once, croaked something out in a voice far too old for his body.
Brad leaned closer, afraid to move the man in case of any internal injuries, but the man sat up, grabbed Brad by the back of the neck, and asked one question, the demand in his voice too strong to be denied.
“It’s -- it’s five thirty-seven,” Brad said. “P.M.”
“That’s a good time to be alive, right?” the man asked.
Then he lay down and, smiling, quietly passed out.
Reviews
Doctor Who: Valhalla
Doctor Who: The Wishing Beast & The Vanity Box
Sapphire and Steel: The Mystery of the Missing Hour
Judge Dredd - Origins
All reviews by Lee Harris
Doctor Who: Valhalla
Written by Marc Platt, Directed by John Ainsworth
Starring Sylvester McCoy
Big Finish, £14.99
The Wishing Beast / The Vanity Box
Written by Paul Magrs
Starring Colin Baker, Bonny Langford
Big Finish, £14.99
The first of the Big Finish Whos this week sees the seventh Doctor visiting a planet, seemingly with the intention of finding permanent employment. Fans of the series will realise that this isn’t a terribly likely proposition, however, and it soon becomes clear that he is there to prevent a major retail conspiracy.
The entire premise of Valhalla (a giant closing down sale for the planet – catalogue stock includes all fixtures, fittings and inhabitants) is a bit daft, but it suits McCoy’s style and he appears to have fun with it. The action is directed with style, and the consistently strong performances are almost enough to distract the listener from what is arguably a fluff piece.
The Wishing Beast is curious piece. Colin Baker and Bonny Langford are wonderful (and I never thought I’d be writing that sentence). Unfortunately, the rest of the cast seem to think they are in a pantomime – performances are over-the-top and unbelievable. The Doctor and Mel land on an asteroid inhabited by two lonely old women, who seemingly just want some company for a chat over a nice cup of tea. Their real motive is revealed quite late in the story, but the plot is so predictable that the episode frequently plays catch-up with your own imagination. Thankfully, The Wishing Beast is just a three-parter, supported by a single-episode comedic story, The Vanity Box, which is almost worth the cost of purchase on its own.
Comedy Who rarely works. It takes a peculiar talent to make the Who universe both amusing while still retaining everything that we love about the franchise. In this instance, Magrs has chosen to set his tale in 1960s Salford. Regional accents abound, with folk gadding about, acting no better than they should, using fancy gadgets that aren’t for the likes of us. Eeeeee. Special mention has to go to Toby Longworth. His Monsieur Coiffure (owner of the titular beauty salon) is a genius creation – his false French accent frequently slips into his native broad Lancastrian, but the ladies of Salford don’t mind, as long as they get their extreme makeover. But how will The Doctor infiltrate this lion’s den (or “poodle parlour” as one of the locals describes it) - after all, The Vanity Box only caters to ladies? Enter the sixth Doctor in full Ena Sharples mode, the comedy old-lady accent reminiscent of Les Dawson and Roy Barraclough at their garden fence best. If only all comedy Who was this good!
Sapphire and Steel: The Mystery of the Missing Hour
Written by Joseph Lidster, Directed by Nigel Fairs
Starring David Warner, Susannah Harker, Colin Baker, Sarah Douglas
S&S:TMOTMH could not work in any other medium. Lidster has created a three-quarters perfect piece of audio drama.
When a murder takes place in The Cairo Hilton (Egypt, land of the Pharoahs), it is not long before our intrepid sleuths are on the case. Yes, Shuffle and Sixpence (the best, and most celebrated amateur detectives in all of London) are confident that they’ll solve the mystery before it’s time for a bottle of celebratory champagne. Why, though, do Shuffle and Sixpence sound so much like Sapphire and Steel? Why does everyone keep mentioning where they are? Why is the maid’s incredibly dodgy Irish accent never questioned? To be sure, so it is. And where, oh where, are Sapphire and Steel?
The first three quarters of the story are great fun, and the mystery is almost resolved by the end of the third episode. The final part, however is almost completely redundant, and would have been almost acceptable, if it were not for one particularly dreadful performance. As a three-parter, The Mystery of the Missing Hour could have been brilliant. With the inclusion of part four, it’s merely very good.
Judge Dredd – Origins
; Written by John Wagner
Artwork by Carlos Ezquerra
Published by Rebellion. RRP: £12.99
Twenty-five years after the beginning of the Dredd legend, John Wagner and Carlos Ezquerra return to tell his origin story, at last! The artwork is as detailed and evocative as we have come to expect from Ezquerra, and Wager’s script is note-perfect. Told in flashback by Dredd himself, and beginning before his “birth”, following him briefly through the Judges’ Academy, this is the quintessential Dredd story, as told by the great man himself. His final act, though completely in character, still comes as a shock, and the reader is left wondering how things might have turned out if Dredd had changed one simple decision.
If you have ever had a yearning to discover Dredd’s roots, you cannot afford to miss this volume.
Coming Next Week: Fiction: Every Odalisque Knows by Dominae Petrosini
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