Prehistoric Clock sc-1 Read online

  Cecil scoffed. “I think you’ll find that was Newton.”

  He shrank to nothing as soon as the words tripped from his lips. The woman sprang up and rushed around the fire, probably to confirm her suspicions. Peering over her thick-rimmed spectacles, she gave a sly smirk. “It’s Reardon. He tried to trick you all. His name is Cecil all right-Professor Cecil Reardon. He’s the one responsible for all this.”

  Another man yelled, “Quick, grab him before he gets away!”

  “Whoa! Whoa! I’m not going anywhere. What are you talking about?” He leapt to his feet and backed away from the angry mob, hands out in submission. This could easily turn ugly if he did try to escape. Every instinct tugged at him to flee, but his stubborn brain would not relent. These people needed someone to blame, that was all. After he’d explained himself, they would see reason. “Take your seats and I’ll-”

  Several furious voices erupted. “String him up!”

  “What? That’s insane. ”

  “We’re not the ones who buggered up time. Let him dangle!”

  “You idiots don’t know what you’re doing!”

  “No, leave him be.” Miss Polperro’s shrill voice barely registered through the cacophony. “We need him to undo what he’s done.”

  Their frenzy would not abate. He kicked and punched at a dozen crazies while they manhandled him off his feet and carried him like a trophy sacrifice to the nearest lamppost. “Hand me that rope-Okay, good and tight-Don’t throttle him yet, haul him up first-That’s it, round the bastard’s neck-Meddle with God’s laws? You can argue the toss with him after you swing! — Loop it over, Carswell, that’s the way-You three, help me pull on this end-Good one, Delaney, he earned that fist-Now, on three…

  “One…two… three. ”

  The coarse loop tightened, dug into his windpipe. He could neither gasp nor scream. His fingers couldn’t get between the rope and his Adam’s apple. A sickening pressure squeezed his tongue from his mouth and his eyeballs up into his brain. His head threatened to explode like an over pumped hydrogen balloon.

  Two gunshots rang out.

  His feet slapped the pavement and he crumpled in a heap, dazed.

  “Back off or we’ll see if Whig blood really does run red. That means you, Carswell.” The voice sounded like Embrey’s, but where had he A terrible roar unlike anything he’d ever heard flooded Cecil’s gasping brain. He coughed, curled himself into a ball on a scrunched tablecloth. Again the roar, this time followed by the dull clap of shoes running in every direction.

  “What the hell was that?” someone cried.

  “It came from the forest!”

  “Everyone get indoors, whatever it is.”

  Weak hands grappled with his limp shoulder, unable to lift him.

  “Ma’am, let me carry him. You’d best get inside.” Embrey’s voice again. This time, Cecil struggled onto his knees, coughing his guts up. “Easy-I’ve got you, old boy.” The young man’s frown made him look a decade older in the firelight. As he crouched, Cecil spied the two pistols steaming in Embrey’s hip holsters. “Up you go.” The lad heaved him onto his shoulder and made for the gentlemen’s club. Another roar sounded much closer this time. Half way up the steps to the front door, Embrey spun northwards, yelled, “Christ Almighty!”

  The tip of a long, crooked shadow jerked up the street after them. The ground shook in its wake, and a rampant, thumping rhythm made him fear the building itself would collapse. Embrey halted in the vestibule, lowered Cecil against a glass display cabinet that held bound books, trophies and assorted political guff.

  “Here, take this.” His young friend offered him one of the steam-pistols. “If anyone makes a try for you, put his seat up for re-election on the spot. Don’t hesitate.” He spun to the doorway and murmured, “Jesus! I’ll be a son of a…”

  “W-what is that thing?”

  “Beats me, Professor. Something gigantic.” Embrey puffed, then touched the flat of the brass barrel to his temple. He moved his lips as though miming a prayer.

  Cecil started forward, then crabbed back in horror as a huge lizard-like tail swung over the road outside, knocking the chairs and fire stack over. Sparks and cinders spilled onto the junction. A blood-curdling roar shattered the stained glass window in the reception area to their right. The beast reacted. Thump, thump. A monstrous snout poked against the gap, its nostrils as big as rugby balls. Cecil squeezed the moist pistol grip until his fingertips squeaked on the rubber. He daren’t move or make another sound. The creature’s breaths sounded like the rasps of a slow-moving steam train.

  A distant clatter drew it back across the street. The monster reacted to the thunder of falling rubble with another roar. Manmade noise-had that intrigued it? Embrey’s pistol shots? What exactly was this thing? For the sake of his experiment, he must know.

  Embrey tried to hold him back from the doorway but Cecil gained a clear, unforgettable view of the first dinosaur any human had ever seen alive.

  “My God, it’s colossal.”

  “And bent on feeding by the looks of it. Down, Professor. Keep down.”

  Cecil whispered excited mental notes between coughs, while the beast attacked a buckled lamppost in front of a terraced building in which quite a few people-too many people-had gathered. “Four-legged, walks on its rear two, forelimbs longer and more powerful than usual for a dinosaur. ” He sputtered and couldn’t quite believe he’d used that word in a bona fide naturalist endeavour. “Long, low, crocodilian snout, narrow jaws filled with serrated teeth, large, hooked claw on the thumb of each hand, over a foot long. You getting any of this, Embrey?”

  “In the seat of my britches, maybe.”

  “Skull set at an acute angle, not at ninety degrees like most dinosaur skeletons I’ve seen. I’d say it’s close to forty feet from snout to tail. Would you agree?”

  “Forty or four hundred, it’s got a taste for Londoners. Look, it’s got someone.”

  A sickening crunch curtailed the poor bastard’s scream as the monster plucked him in its jaw from the second floor of the terraced house opposite.

  “And there’s nothing we can do,” Embrey spat, baring his teeth.

  “No, not with steam-pistols.”

  “We daren’t fire a shot. That thing’d bring the roof down on us. Think, damn it, think! Some kind of diversion-lure the bugger away.”

  He had to hand it to the youngster-Embrey was a natural born leader, graceful under pressure. But there was also that halt-worthy whiff of defiance in his muttering, the noble and self-sacrificing kind beloved of Englishmen over the centuries, feared by their enemies. Personally, Cecil had never experienced it outside of his protection for Lisa and Edmond. For the life of him, he’d never been able to fathom why a man would risk his neck for complete strangers. Nonetheless, he was glad to have such a man at his side.

  They watched and waited for the best part of half an hour while the dinosaur stalked up and down Parliament Street probing open windows and doors and exposed sections where the brickwork had collapsed.

  “This is no good. It’s not giving up. We need the men from the Empress. ” Embrey tugged Cecil’s sleeve. “Come, the back of this place is wide open. Let’s not dally another minute.”

  A half dozen members of Parliament cowered in a corner of the smoking room. They watched, speechless, as Embrey and Cecil dashed out over the rubble and across the railway track. What these inebriated swine had done to him a moment ago was so unconscionable, so far outside the realm of possibility, he didn’t know whether to pinch himself awake or open fire on the Whigs. For now, he would follow Embrey’s resolute lead.

  A brigade of African men-at-arms was already piling onto the embankment from the ship. Seeing their rifles made Cecil feel a little safer. Embrey called out, “Where’s Tangeni?”

  One of the aeronauts pointed back along the embankment. Before he could explain, a terrible roar from the factories forced three of the men to swerve into the mud. A second monster burst onto the quaysi
de. It swiped its fore claw at the band of fleeing Africans, felling them like paper dolls. A few stood their ground, opened fire. Embrey’s steam-powered shots were gallant but ineffectual at that range. He quickly realised it and desisted, instead helped the men escape toward Cecil’s factory, the nearest cover.

  “Where’s Billy?” Cecil called out.

  “With Djimon in-in the fo’c’sle,” someone replied, barely hiding his terror.

  Embrey held his pistol aloft. “Follow me!” The remaining aeronauts swarmed after him and Cecil as they scampered over the collapsed wire-mesh fence. The dinosaur hadn’t finished chewing its latest victim when it lunged into a full sprint. Head low, it stalked them with a bloodlust that reeked of vengeance. It lifted its claws into a taut pianist position under its massive jaws and caught the group within several strides.

  At this rate, none of them were going to reach the roofed section in time-too much rubble lay in their path, and the monster had its pick of victims.

  “Split up,” Cecil shouted. “Some of us might make it.”

  Teeth clenched, Embrey nodded and veered northward, taking eight or nine aeronauts with him while the others quickly overtook Cecil onto the pile of bricks and twisted girders. He glanced behind him and thanked God the beast had stopped to savour its latest meal at the start of the rubble.

  A massive claw swung ahead of him and ripped the head off a screaming aeronaut. Cecil ducked, rolled away as the first dinosaur joined the hunt from the south. The combined roars of two leviathans assaulted his eardrums, blanked his mind to anything but imminent, horrific death. In the corner of his eye he glimpsed the silent cogwheels waiting like gloomy cobwebs either side of his miraculous brass machine. It had worked. He’d achieved that much, if nothing more. Edmond would forgive him, Lisa would be proud. Dying screams drowned the clacks of tumbling bricks. He closed his eyes and tucked the pistol muzzle up against his jowl. Better he take his own life than being eaten alive. No regrets to speak of…except one…

  “ Reardon, no!”

  A boy’s voice boomed through the night, wrenching Cecil back to life as though it was Edmond calling for him to stay his finger on the trigger. Again the voice climbed high, too high. “Reardon, wait.” The echo told him it had to be young Billy using a megaphone on the ship’s deck. He scanned the site of carnage around him and couldn’t believe what was happening.

  One of the dinosaurs scrabbled on its side against the hill of bricks, a harpoon cable wrapped around its rear leg. Insanely, someone was driving the tri-wheel car along the embankment. The cable was attached to it-it had dragged the monster off its feet. Cecil lowered the pistol in his trembling hand and gasped for air. The cable released. As the lizard struggled upright, the car skidded round for another run, revealing its door-less passenger side. Steam spat and columned from its boiler, shrouding the driver. But as the vehicle gathered speed, Cecil’s jaw dropped.

  The woman from the Empress, the redhead, cradled a harpoon launcher between her legs on the passenger seat. The dinosaur lunged. She fired the iron projectile at its torso, struck a glancing blow-enough for the beast to wheel sideways in agony. She lit a series of flares and tossed them at its feet, then at its monstrous partner’s. Slowly but surely, frightened by the flames, the leviathans retreated up the embankment. A last volley of gunfire from the Empress’s deck proved decisive. The beasts lumbered away toward the northern tree line, their steps shaking London less and less until only a slight quiver remained.

  He slumped with his head in his hands and felt, truly for the first time, the gravity of his blunder.

  Chapter 7

  The Heir and the Air Maiden

  Every so often during her six years in the British Air Corps stationed in West and Central Africa, Verity had found herself in a predicament of such rank absurdity, no halfpenny comic writer could have fashioned it. She cringed at the memories: airlifting a pregnant rhinoceros from a narrow gorge hours before an artificial lake burst its banks and flooded the region; singing “For He’s A Jolly Good Fellow” to Tangeni on his birthday, in the diving bell, while they suited up to retrieve gold bullion from a sunken Norwegian frigate; being maid of honour at Captain Naismith’s wedding to an exiled Congolese princess under the first heavy rainfall in eighteen months; fleeing downriver in a canoe, half-naked, from a tribe dressed up as leopards. And those were merely the ones she could remember. But tonight, she had put them all to shame. Tonight she had crossed over into the realm of the impossible.

  “ Eembu, Tangeni is right. English women crazier by far than English men.” Kibo shook his head. Her engine man, her brave and brilliant automobile driver.

  “You were no slouch yourself, Kibo.”

  He kissed her hand, nodded politely, then walked away chatting with his engine room pals, who had all come ashore to congratulate him. News of the “harpoon chase” had galvanized the camp for the time being. Tipsy Whitehall gentlemen conversed with salty, dark-skinned aeronauts perhaps for the first time in their lives, but she knew this fraternising would not last. No two peoples could be more different and she dreaded the inevitable hierarchy that would emerge.

  Suffering the after-effects of her bump on the head, Verity gave in to her weak knees and climbed back into the car. She sank into the passenger seat, ready to sleep for another day. And next time, the nightmare had better not seem quite so vivid as this one!

  No use. The back of her head throbbed, and barbed wire pressed behind her eyes whenever she closed them. Instead, she retrieved the telescope from Tangeni’s top coat he’d lent her, and scanned the survivors. Three definite groups appeared to have formed on the embankment. The first pow-wow, in front of the collapsed station house, comprised a strict-looking woman and about fifteen well-dressed gentlemen, all conversing soberly and exchanging compliant nods. They might be trouble if left unchecked. Those lordly types rarely passed up a chance to seize power from any situation.

  The second group, not far from the car, consisted of garrulous white gentlemen and black crewmen, plus Reba and Philomena, her two statuesque female riggers, who drew considerable attention from the younger English dandies. Verity raised a smile. No matter what kind of leadership prevailed within the camp, she would do her utmost to encourage both sides to congeal in this manner. On the whole, the Gannet crews she’d served with had proven Anglo-African compatibility beyond doubt. They had pulled together in times of crisis all across Africa. To survive here, in this prehistoric world, that same commitment would be vital.

  She turned her gaze to the final group that sat apart on a flat iron door amid the rubble. The small boy she’d met briefly earlier. Kibo had freed his father’s body before righting the tri-wheel car with the help of the crew. The poor lad was an orphan, then-and gap-toothed, cute as a button. But who were these other two men he’d grown close to? The older one resembled a cross between a dotty librarian and Captain Nemo, his maroon dinner jacket and shock of silver hair remarkably eccentric.

  The younger man bent sideways into the shadows, fiddling with something mechanical in his lap. She couldn’t see his face, so she twisted the knob on her spyglass to enlarge the object in his hands. Hmm, some kind of steam weapon? She raised an eyebrow when she saw how youthful and handsome he was. He possessed a sleek, distinguished quality that reminded her of a jaguar surveying the jungle from its untouchable bough. It gave him poise and grace and, even at a distance, a striking authoritative air beyond his years. She pegged him as being in his mid-twenties, a similar age to her?

  “Um, Tangeni?”

  “ Eembu? ” He was only a few feet away, whispering with Djimon.

  “Who’s the Adonis?”

  “Who?”

  “The blond man sitting with the boy.”

  “His name is Embrey.” Tangeni paused, perhaps gauging her reaction. “He reminds me of younger Captain Naismith.”

  “How so?”

  “He has that same way with him, proud and full of-what’s the wordomafimbo odula. ”

&nbsp
; “Seasons?”

  “Yes.”

  She lowered her telescope and blinked at her lieutenant. “You mean he’s mercurial? Or steadfast?”

  “Yes.”

  Verity laughed. “My dear old kaume, which one is it?”

  “He is more than meets the eye. And he will not bend from his duty. Other men follow man like that.”

  “Hmm. Interesting.” Tangeni was not wont to voice his admiration for other men freely, and something about the name-Embrey-seemed familiar. She swivelled, slid out of the car and, after composing herself, made her way over for a proper introduction. It might be forward of her but, given the situation, there wasn’t time for anything else.

  “How are you, Billy? Ready for some supper?” she asked.

  The boy flinched and shied away from her, clinging to the young man’s tail coat. The latter rose courteously to his feet, took off his coat and draped it around the lad. “It’s all right, chief, she’s a friend-an aeronaut officer. I’m Lord Garrett Embrey. Enchanted.” He offered to take her hand but when she obliged, he couldn’t decide whether to kiss it or shake it. It had to be the masculine uniform befuddling him-Tangeni had likely already explained the meaning of eembulukweya. She cringed while he glanced at her borrowed trousers and muttered something inaudible. Hell, why the deuce didn’t I change first?

  “Lieutenant Verity Champlain, acting captain.” She felt it prudent to assert her authority, if only to keep his title in check. “Nice to meet you, Mr. Embrey.” But where had she heard that name before? Lord, it was on the tip of her tongue, its import weighing heavier the longer she paused. To hide her frustration, she turned to the other man. “How do you do, sir?”

  “Professor Cecil Reardon at your service, ma’am.” He had no qualms about shaking her hand and despite his balding, odd-looking features, Reardon made a likeable first impression. His peculiar, exaggerated nod and grin suggested he was socially awkward, trying too hard to ingratiate himself, or he was an extravert who didn’t give a fig for social reserve. The only scientists she’d met were the Leviacrum dignitaries she’d ferried from London to Benguela, and they had always kept themselves to themselves. Reardon seemed to be a different fish entirely.