Prehistoric Clock

by Robert Appleton

  Meanwhile, Tangeni sneaked around the back of them and wrestled Kibo.

  The two officers went at it hammer and tongs. Kibo was the bigger man but not the tougher. After he ducked a huge roundhouse punch, Tangeni leapt in and jabbed his opponent’s windpipe, crushing his airway. The traitor fell to the floor and choked slowly in the grease and grime, his waistcoat torn and soiled.

  Across the factory, the aeronauts and Miss Polperro’s cronies had each other pinned down, the latter group boasting more weapons than anyone had guessed. Kibo had to have armed them. Their bullets ricocheted off water casks and brass scaffolding. Cecil couldn’t tell who was who.

  “Professor, can you stand?” Verity knelt over Embrey.

  Cecil struggled to one knee, then braced his sore leg. His adrenaline seemed to dilute the pain. “Yes, I think so.”

  “Then here.” She threw him her pistol. “For God’s sake, shut this machine down. Kill anyone who tries to stop you.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m getting Embrey back to the Empress. He’ll die if I can’t remove this bull—”

  A tremendous crash shook the factory. The thudding of collapsed masonry and metal brought with it a plaster cloud thick enough to envelop the gunfight and obscure the opposing sides from each another. Cecil looked first to the boiler room. Had that exploded? No, there was no billowing steam. What then?

  The firing ceased. Loose bricks clinked one on top the other as they fell somewhere near the front entrance, while the hiss of settling plaster dust wrought quiet tension in this lull in the fighting.

  “Be careful, Professor. But hurry.” Verity turned from the cloud and wasted no more time in dragging Embrey over two pipes and behind the left hand piston. From there, she had a straight path to daylight. Cecil prayed she had some surgical knowledge too—removing a bullet wasn’t something one could or should muddle through.

  A queer squelching, grinding noise emerged from inside the cloud.

  “God, what’s that smell?” someone yelled.

  As the next thump, thump trembled the ground, sounding as though it was shifting piles of bricks already fallen, Cecil rolled up his sleeves. He prepared for a last desperate attempt to stop his machine. For time wasn’t just running out, it had come calling…stalking. Summoned by the gunshots.

  The baryonyx!

  Its giant snout pierced the cloud before the first screams erupted from the Whitehall posse. Its jaws gaped for a vicious lunge into the cornered men, then snapped shut upon two, hurtling them aloft for a fuller bite. The crunching and squelching resumed at a sickening volume. Gunshots from both sides, designed to ward off the baryonyx, merely enraged it further. Its crocodilian mouth beslobbered with fresh blood now thrust even lower, even quicker.

  Cecil spied the Harrison clock’s brass lid vibrating as it dripped moisture. The final accelerating process was about to begin. He climbed the first pipe, smacked his sore leg on the second. Those angry cogs and crank wheels were no longer rotating numbered dials—the machine already had her sequence, her key to unlock time. They were powering the energy transfer itself, the unleashing of built-up psammeticum into the intricate array of mirrors, and the boldest clockwork ever devised.

  He spun to make sure the dinosaur was not following.

  A sudden blow to his jaw sent him reeling. Delaney, another of the lynchers from the first night, picked him up and thumped his gut. Cecil coughed, struggled to breathe. A few feet away, Miss Polperro shook Billy by the scruff of his neck and glowered at Cecil.

  “You’re full of surprises, Reardon,” she hissed. “But I warned you what would happen. Say goodbye to this boy. It’s for all our sakes.”

  A tiny dark shape emerged from her matted hair. It rushed across her brow. She recoiled and then shook her head. It shifted again, this time with a speed and scurrying motion Cecil recalled from his recent past.

  The spider from the platform.

  It stopped on her right temple and must have bitten her, for she shrieked and let go of the boy. The baryonyx answered, its rage deafening the entire factory.

  Cecil lunged forward and knocked the revolver from her hand. Billy wriggled free and bolted for safety. Run lad, run. Delaney snatched the steam-pistol from the ground. Frantic, Cecil scrabbled for the second weapon somewhere on the floor. He found it between the bastard’s legs and immediately fired up into his groin. Click. An empty cartridge! Instead, he thumped his attacker’s kneecap with the pistol butt, felling him. He cracked the brass gun against Delaney’s forehead with all his might. The son of a bitch went out like a gaslight.

  More screams and gunshots from behind, but also from the front, as well. From outside. Verity and Embrey. He heard other voices too.

  He made straight for the clock with seconds to spare. He felt the prickly warmth caused by the hurtling, expanding energy. Every hair on his body stood up. A flicker of lilac light appeared through an old screw hole in the brass casing. He unclasped one side, reached for the other. An extraordinary wrench in his scalp pulled him back. It was as though his hair had burst into flames.

  A frightful witch clawed at him, her metal spectacles aglow with lilac light. Her shock of hair resembled a penny dreadful cartoon of Sweeny Todd he’d seen in his youth. At once, the hate broiling in her eyes seemed to encapsulate the very thing he’d railed against all these years. Death. That vicious, remorseless force behind the taking of innocent lives: Billy’s, Lisa’s, Edmond’s…

  He wrestled her to arm’s length and, summoning all his hate, delivered an uppercut to her jaw with such force it felt as though his fist was made of iron. Her head snapped back, then she flopped at his feet.

  “Cecil!” The boy ran to him, flung his arms around him.

  “Hold tight, Billy.” Cecil picked the lad up and, calmly inside a torrent of inverted lilac rain, held him like he’d once held Edmond.

  “What should I do?” Billy’s dampened words slurred with unearthly resonance, as though time itself were stretching them.

  “Think of home, son. Just think of—”

  Everything vanished in a blinding flash.

  Chapter 18

  Cause and Caprice

  The second journey through time seemed to pass through an ocean of perpetual, curdled milk. Trapped with Cecil in that timeless, soundless oyster was the sum total of all the hopes and horrors his adventure had fed into the machine: befriending and losing his two sterling companions, Embrey and Verity; saving Billy, the very boy he’d made an orphan with his first time jump; the hideous, engorged baryonyx wreaking havoc in his factory; falling victim to Miss Polperro’s treachery; but also besting those myriad prehistoric hazards to repair his great machine. When all was said and done, even if he could never fully atone for ripping the heart out of London, he’d at least kept his word and conjured this second chance for everyone.

  What happened next was out of his hands.

  As the whiteness dulled, noises around the factory staggered in repetition as though time’s needle were stuck on a glitchy gramophone disc. Billy’s arms slipped from around Cecil’s waist. A draught whistled overhead, tossing dust. He coughed, then spun at the first uninterrupted roar this side of the time jump. Whenever here was.

  Enraged, the barynoyx rampaged toward the aeronauts on the north side of the factory. It crushed one of the primary steam pipes, and backed away from the ensuing hot exhaust. Meanwhile, the aeronauts bolted for the rubble at the back of the factory, while the Whitehall posse—what was left of them—made for the front doors from whence the dinosaur had entered. It made after the latter group, probably following their coughs inside the dust cloud. But as it turned, its massive tail smashed into a primary piston shank. The impact uncoupled one of the steel scaffold supports, and the whole thing began to buckle, to topple…

  With his injured leg, Cecil could never climb the pipes in time.

  “Get away, Billy!” He grabbed the lad under his arms and hurled him sideways as far and as high as he could. Billy landed
on the nearest pipe, his momentum sliding him over the other side.

  Tonnes of brass and iron crushed Cecil’s trailing leg as he tried to escape. It hit with the pain of a thousand kiln burns all at once, and held him there, in hell, until his cry exhausted the air in his lungs. Then he cried again. The last thing he saw before he blacked out was the grim, desperate face of his African friend, Tangeni, as the redoubtable aeronaut picked his way through the twisted wreckage of the time machine.

  “Professor? Can you hear me? Professor?” A familiar voice—affected English, oddly enunciated vowels, almost amusing. “Professor Reardon?”

  “Tangeni?”

  He hadn’t been moved from the spot where he’d fallen, nor had the sweaty smell of soot and steam dissipated, nor could he yet tell to which destination the time machine had brought them. It was dark outside, beyond the mess of pipes and beams. A dozen black faces huddled in a semi-circle over him, greeting his gaze with either smiles or puzzled frowns. Tangeni’s torch flame lent the aeronauts a magnificent, mysterious air, as though they were indeed from another time, another world from Cecil’s.

  “We all glad you okay, Professor,” one of the younger men said, an apprentice in Kibo’s engine room if Cecil recalled. “Billy and me—we make you up some sarsaparilla. It no longer fizz, but it still good.” He handed Cecil the cup.

  “Thank you, young man.” When he tried to sit up, Cecil felt a tear in his right leg that knocked him sick. He yelped in pain and couldn’t stop coughing.

  “Here. You need to drink something.” Tangeni pressed the cup to his lips, poured in a mouthful of sarsaparilla. “You’re badly hurt, Professor. The piston pinned your leg to the floor, almost severed it. I tied it with a tourniquet and the bleeding has stopped. But you’re in poor shape, I’m afraid. Reba and Philomena, they have gone for help. But Eembu taught me to always be honest in times like these—I think that whatever happens, you have lost that leg, Professor. Nothing can be done.”

  Cecil shivered coldly, clasped Tangeni’s hand. Such terrible news and yet he took it well, only a vague regret of never being able to ride a penny farthing—something he’d always wanted to try but had never quite got around to—aching his heart. Punchdrunk priorities.

  “Billy? Where’s Billy?”

  “’Ere, Cecil. How are you feelin’?” The lad was watching from Cecil’s left, chin on hands atop a buckled beam.

  “Like I’ve just slid down the biggest snake on the board.”

  After a pause, “You can ’ave another throw if you like. You ’ave as many as you want.”

  “Much obliged.” Sweet boy. Saving him from the clutches of Agnes Polperro had been a proud moment, one he would never forget. Speaking of which…

  “Where is that she-devil?”

  “Gone. Soon after the baryonyx left, one of her cronies woke up. I think it was the one you knocked cold, Professor.” Delaney. Tangeni had seen a lot. “He carried Miss Polperro out, that way.” He pointed at the front entrance. “Out into the centre of London.”

  “Excuse me? Did you say—”

  “Yeah, we did it, Cecil.” A note of barely-restrained defiance lifted Billy’s voice. “We proved that old witch wrong after all. It were nothin’. I pictured Embrey runnin’ there in the rain, right before ’e got into our car. That were just before the first time jump. It were easy. I could do it again any time, no problem.”

  “So we’re back in London? The very same night?” He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. Time-wise, they’d found the correct grain of salt on a sandy beach at night…in a hurricane?

  “Not the same night, no,” Tangeni replied. “It is dry outside. No storm. And if this were even soon after the original time jump, would not the whole area be swarming with panicked people? With police? The military?”

  “You’re right there, Tangeni.”

  The African waved his torch away to the west, toward the centre of London. “It is only the factory and ourselves made it back. Eembu and Embrey, they—”

  “I know. We lost them. I lost them, my friend.”

  Tangeni held his head high, his bottom lip quivering.

  “But I can get them back too.” Cecil didn’t have an inkling of how he might accomplish that feat, but the determination felt so inviolate inside every fibre of his being that he knew he’d either achieve it or die trying. Verity and Embrey had given him his chance to make amends, to return the survivors to London. They’d granted him this victory over time and over fate. Now it was his turn to repay the debt—a debt borne deep in his heart, for they would never be nearer and farther from him than they were at this moment.

  He began to shiver uncontrollably. The faint sound of a dog barking reminded him where they were, what might be coming—the full wrath of the Leviacrum. It was time to think of the future.

  “Tangeni, will you do what I ask? We don’t have much time.”

  “Aye, Professor. Whatever you ask.”

  “Is the Harrison Clock still intact, or is it crushed?”

  “The Harris—”

  “The device inside the cylindrical casing, a few feet behind you.”

  Wavering firelight. Shuffling feet. Hushed voices. “It is still intact.”

  “Very well. Good. I need you to unclasp the lid on both sides, and then unscrew the nickel wheel casings from the device inside.”

  More whispering. A collective effort from sharp, capable minds light-years out of their milieu. Scraping, squeaking metal. “Done, Professor.”

  “Good, Tangeni, good. Now lift the device out and wrap it in a coat or something. Two coats, three, to make sure.”

  “What shall we do with it?” Concern, rather than inquisitiveness sharpened Tangeni’s question.

  Cecil’s every muscle began to tingle, to fade from his control. He knew his life was leaving him. But there was still a chance for Embrey and Verity.

  “I need you to…take it to Professor Sorensen in Tromso.” His eyes eased closed of their own accord. “Make note of the sequence of numbers on the exposed dial…the one with ten digits. Make sure Professor Sorensen gets…that number.” The last embers of his life seemed to melt into fizzy liquid and leak out from his outstretched fingertips. “For Billy,” he whispered. “Look after Billy. Always watch out for…for Billy.”

  “I will, Professor. I swear it.”

  “Go now. Protect my secret. Go and best time…one last time. Save the young heir and…and his air maiden from…”

  A dog barked again, closer this time. It sounded like Leonard, his bandy-legged bulldog he’d loved as a boy. He smiled, contented. If Leonard was there waiting for him, maybe Lisa and Edmond were waiting there too.

  Maybe…

  Chapter 19

  Phantasmagoria

  Already a pungent, scorched-earth smell spread from the factory, and the hairs on her arms and the back of her neck bristled as Verity dragged Embrey outside over the rubble. The cold and the damp mist had subsided a little. She could see the Empress clearly. Embrey stirred, groaned and then doubled up in agony, the bullet wound in his side leaking more blood than she’d like.

  “Here.” She removed her scarf and bunched it to the size of a fist. “Keep this pressed to the wound, no matter how much it hurts.” Helping him to his feet, she tried to blank his suffering and the deafening volleys of gunfire from her mind—her one concern now was to get him to her cabin and remove the bullet. But the scorched-earth smell hadn’t dissipated, and the charged air remained bristly and potent. Reardon had better get a move on. Maybe she should have stayed with him until he shut the blasted thing down after all. Maybe she should go back now and see it through…

  A gigantic, muscular bulk lumbered out of the mist ahead, as big as a tram and twice as heavy. The baryonyx positioned itself between her and the airship, its massive tail whipping the steel deck ladder, almost yanking it off its tethers. The dinosaur turned to see what had made the clanging noise, then scraped its teeth along the starboard bulwark.

  Now or
never.

  Verity made for the tri-wheel, urging Embrey to keep as quiet as he could while she supported his limp frame. Her stealth lasted but a moment. A gunshot rang out from the rubble behind, and two panicked, middle-aged Whitehall men dashed for the tri-wheel. One of them fired again at the baryonyx. Reckless, insane. The dinosaur thrust its crocodilian jaw around at forty-five degrees and unleashed a terrifying roar.

  “You bloody fools.” She hissed as they tried to toss Embrey aside from the vehicle. One of them climbed in, frantically started up the steam engine. The other yanked her hair and kicked Embrey to the ground, desperate to gain the passenger seat.

  Enough was enough.

  Furious, she jabbed the second man’s throat and pulled him out by the scruff of his neck. He coughed hard but swung even harder—his fist to Verity’s gut left her bent double. The baryonyx stalked through the mud, drawn by the frantic action. In a few moments it would be upon them, and Embrey! He’d collapsed again and was shivering on his side. Whatever happened she had to get him inside the tri-wheel.

  Luckily the first man had made a hash of operating the valves, his curses generating more heat than anything inside the steam engine. The second man did his best to fend Verity off with kicks but she seized his legs and dragged him off the passenger seat. As if to avenge his lunkheadedness at the controls, the driver immediately leapt to his colleague’s aid across the seats. He swung a vicious punch at Verity. She ducked, dealt him a quick uppercut, then planted a terrific boot on his kneecap. The bone cracked. She leapt to one side. As he bent to nurse his wound, she quickly raised her right leg as high it would go and then brought the heel down with wrecking force upon the back of his neck. A deadly blow she’d learned from Amyn’s brother in Zanzibar.