Sherlock Holmes: The Coils of Time & Other Stories (Sherlock Holmes Adventures Book 1) (11 page)

Holmes aimed his revolver as Kent aimed his.

“There we go, Holmes,” Kent said, jerking his head in the direction of two familiar figures some distance away, which promptly shimmered and vanished.  “Almost like déjà vu, all over again.”

Holmes and Kent both fired their weapons almost simultaneously, but neither struck the creature due to distance and motion.  Their bullets impacted the body of the Time Machine, throwing a shower of sparks over the creature, neither injuring it nor disabling the mechanism.  The beast leaped back onto the machine and fled into time.

“It now has no future, so its only avenue of escape is into the past,” Holmes said.

They activated their own machines and vanished from the future, pursuing their elusive and frantic quarry down the long corridors of time.

Chapter XV

A Fly in the Primordial Soup

Holmes and Kent pushed their machines to the limit as they followed after the luminous temporal wake of the Morlock Mother-Thing, keeping it in view within the illusion of space that existed in the timestream.  With them in such close pursuit, the creature could neither escape to some earlier period of history nor pause in its desperate flight.

Down the long ages of time they sped.

History rewound around them, the age of steam and coal giving way to less technological times, when the epitome of science was the catapult and the well-tempered sword.  London shrank before their eyes, becoming a raw-boned port upon a river of trade, then a Roman outpost beside a river of exploration; it became a camp for hunters and fishers upon the sluggish river’s swampy banks, one of the dark places of the Earth where men chanted to umbrous gods and painted themselves blue.

Down the long dark centuries they flew, into the age of unpolished stone and into that distant realm where human foot had not yet tread that blessed green isle.  Great beasts no longer extant flashed across their vision, mastodons and giant sloths, then the magnificent and terrible lizards of yore, dinosaurs of the land and leather-winged pterosaurs of the upper airs.  Even these strange beasts of legend, however, gave way to other, more remarkable beasts, whose fossil remains were only now being wrested from the chalk cliffs of England.

Inspector Kent had no eyes for the primeval pageant unfolding around them, no desire to see a creation that was not always constant and complete.  He kept his attention focused solely upon the fleeing creature.

They entered a region of time where the land was devoid of life, even the least insect or moss, and then kept on even further.

The creature finally halted in a grey, lifeless world, seeking haven among some jagged cliffs jutting from a waveless sea at low tide. Holmes and Kent paused and surveyed the beast’s refuge. There was no sound in that primal world, the silence pressing harshly against their ears, and when they spoke their voices sounded unnatural and grating.

“It stopped here.  Why?” Kent asked.

“It knows it cannot throw us off by fleeing through time,” Holmes answered.  “Its only hope is to stop us here, then move on.”

“You mean, to kill us.”

“Yes.”

“And I suspect, also, Holmes, that it can retreat no further in time,” Kent mused.  “How can it go farther back than the first day of Creation?”

Holmes held silent.

“Yes, Holmes, look about you,” Kent continued.  “Before this moment, the Earth was without form, and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.  The waters have been separated from the land, and God has said, ‘Fiat Lux!’, but has not yet created the beasts of the Earth, each to reproduce its own kind.  None of that evolutionary nonsense going on here!”

“Inspector Kent,” Holmes said, softly.

Kent uttered a deep sigh and nodded his head.  “Yes, I know what we must do, Holmes, but, still…”  He glanced around a half-formed world in the throes of creation.  “Can you see this land that is clay for the Creator’s will, and still not believe?”

“We have a task to perform,” Holmes reminded him.

Kent looked around, then at the revolver in his hand.  “We have the advantage in weapons.”

“I hope it will be enough of an advantage,” Holmes remarked.  “It has great cunning and is desperate beyond belief, which may make it more than a match for us.”

“God is on our side,” Kent announced, with conviction.

“I will approach from the right while you make your way toward the cliffs by way of the shore,” Holmes said.  “Be very cautious.”

“It’s just a beast, Holmes.”

“Many hunters, I am sure, have said something similar,” the detective said, “just before becoming the hunted themselves.”

“Very well,” Kent admitted.  “The point is taken.”

The two men made their way toward the cliffs where the fugitive Morlock had taken refuge.  Inspector Kent had at various times tramped across wood and dell, shotgun in arm, but in those instances his quarries had been nothing more dangerous than a grouse or woodcock.  The anxiety inherent in hunting something that could strike back, however, was not a new experience to him, for was that not the essential nature of his chosen profession, the stalking of society’s predators through London’s dark streets?  In all those years, he had prevailed against the criminals of London, but, sooner or later, he knew, every run came to an end, one way or another.  He glanced across at Holmes and realised in that instant they were more alike than not, separated by methods but not by goals, by authority but not by heart, each in his own way a protector of London, and now strange circumstances had set them both as protectors of humanity.

“There it is!” Kent cried, pointing.

The Morlock scrambled along the cliff-face like a pale noxious spider.

Before either man could draw a bead to fire, it had again vanished from sight.

“It’s on the run now!”

Holmes frowned doubtfully.  “There is more cunning than desperation in its movements.  It seems to have abandoned its machine.  Why?”

“If we can find its machine, we can destroy it, strand it,” Kent pointed out.  “If it cannot escape, we can hunt it down without haste, even return to the future for reinforcements.”

Kent moved forward.

“Kent!” Holmes yelled.  “Stop.”

Too late did Inspector Charles Kent realise what Holmes had seen moments earlier, that the Mother-Thing had not fled far, had not abandoned its Time Machine at all.  Something bright and silvery flashed through the dead air of the primal world, striking Kent full on.  He stopped, staggered back and fell to his knees, then pitched onto his side.  The ornate, curiously fashioned knife thrown by the Morlock was buried deep in his chest.

Holmes rushed immediately to the man’s side, but he was beyond help or hope.

“Forget me, go for the Morlock.”  Blood trickled from Kent’s mouth, and he coughed more red.  “I was such a fool.”

“If I can get you back to…” Holmes started to say.

Kent shook his head, a faint movement that seem to sap almost all his strength.  “After you kill the Morlock, destroy its machine…and mine…leave me…in the beginning…with God…I wish you…”

Inspector Kent sighed his last breath.

Holmes heard a high whining sound and knew he had failed to stop the Morlock, that it had taken advantage of its attack upon Kent to return to its machine and escape back into time, back into the future.  He destroyed the Time Machine which had carried the Scotland Yard inspector to the dawn, back to the world he believed had often read of in the first book of the Hebrew Bible.

Holmes had to resume the pursuit, that he knew beyond doubt, but there was yet time for necessities.

He was tempted for a moment to try to take Kent’s body back.  The man deserved a decent internment in some pleasant churchyard, with sincere words spoken by a man who believed almost as fervently as had Kent.

But Kent had asked to be left here, on this lifeless shore, and in the end, Holmes acceded to that wish.  He had not known the man long, but he respected him.

Holmes started for the Time Machine, then looked back.

The tide would eventually flow up the rocky shore and cover Kent’s body, perhaps pull it into the soundless deeps.  And there, in the watery darkness, the processes of decay would begin, life emerging from death.

The anti-evolutionist, Holmes reflected as he turned away, might become the basis of  all life on Earth.

Holmes returned to his machine, stirred its enigmatic engines to life, and resumed the pursuit.

Chapter XVI

The End of Time

Unable to flee any deeper into the past (Holmes wondered if Kent might possibly have been correct) the Morlock fled forward, deeper into an unknown future.

And Holmes pursued relentlessly.

So great was their temporal velocity, Holmes received only the fleetest of impressions regarding events outside the rapids of time.  Mountains rose and fell as if the very planet were alive and breathing, and the oceans flowed like rivers.  The heavenly bodies whirled along their courses, the planets and all the stars seeming to merge into one vast and shimmering canopy.

Life moved across the Earth like a formless dark wind.

Civilisations rose and fell in seconds.

The veil of stars began to darken.

The sun swelled like a child’s balloon overinflated, changing from a bright diamond to a sombre ruby.  The moon crumbled and flowed until it became a bright silver girdle for the Earth, the Earth taking the appearance of a smaller, fairer Saturn.

A sooty blackness seemed to close about Holmes, obliterating his view of the elderly Earth and the dimming stars, until it seemed that the whole of the universe consisted of him and the creature fleeing final justice.

Abruptly, the Time Machine pitched forward, spilling Holmes into a swirling maelstrom of darkness and cold.

Stunned, Holmes crawled, then forced himself to stand, prepared for an attack from the creature he must destroy if humanity was to survive.  At first, he saw nothing but shadows reaching through an endless night.  The sky was black except for a few nebulous patches that could have been clouds in space or eyes in the void; there was no indication of stars, no sign of the moon-ring he had seen form about the Earth, and the only trace of the sun was a vague dull glow in the high blackness, like the last pitiful ember in a dying campfire.

As Holmes’ vision became accustomed to the gloom, more details of the sere landscape emerged.  He seemed to be upon an ancient roadway of pitted metal that ascended a cliff-line into the sky.  Neither tree nor bush, not even the thinnest blade of grass pushed its way through the black earth, nor did the simplest moss stain any rock’s surface; not a single bird winged through the chill sky, nor did the smallest insect scuttle across the craggy inclines.

The dark hills rising away from him and the dusky mountains beyond were etched by thin rivulets of volcanic fire, indicating that the Earth was not wholly moribund, that some remnant of the planet’s internal fires yet burned, though weakly.  Among the far mountains squatted strange colossal sentinels, perhaps of stone, perhaps not, only vaguely illumed by lethargic lava rivers, immobile Watchers at the end of time.  To the left, stretched a vast glassy sea, utterly waveless,  totally unruffled, mirroring the obscure sky.

To Holmes’ right was the Time Machine, overturned, yet apparently undamaged by its abrupt halt.

The wind was chill and thin, whispering among the talon-like crags and around the Watchers in the foothills.  Holmes stood resolute and wary, the gusts whipping the hem of his overcoat as he searched for some sign of the Morlock.

Up the road and against the other side, he saw that for which he searched, the Time Machine used by the Mother-Thing.  He disabled his own machine, as Maddoc had shown them, then moved forward to examine the other.  It, too, had crashed in Earth’s midnight, unable to venture any farther forward (whether due to some mechanical limitation of the machines or to some factor of time itself, Holmes could not say), but it had not fared as well as had Holmes’, having crashed into an upthrust basaltic column. The gears were bent and broken, the wheels within wheels twisted and warped, many of the crystals shattered – it would never again venture into time.  To make sure, though, Holmes grabbed a black volcanic rock, shattering every unbroken crystal, smashing every piece of metal that would yield to his strength.  The sounds of destruction were harsh and without echo, the air being so tenuous.

It was a tempting thought, to return to his own machine and seek more familiar times, to leave the Morlock stranded as the universe’s final curtain was falling. With its Time Machine utterly destroyed, what could it do here but bring a dying brood into an already dead world, eventually to die itself?

Then Holmes saw a structure at the summit of the roadway, a sort of Temple with walls and towers of ebony stone rising against the black sky.  Holmes knelt and examined the pitted metal roadway.  The queer narrow tracks of the Morlock, outlined in its own pale blood, led up the road, toward the enigmatic Temple.

Where it might find haven, he thought, or a even path back.

He pulled his revolver from his overcoat pocket and examined the chamber.  Only two shells remained unfired, and he no longer possessed the box of ammunition he had procured in London.  But he dared not turn back now.

Following the ichor-tinged prints, he made his way up the road, always on guard lest the desperate beast try to move behind him.  It did not leave the roadway, however, but kept on for the structure at the summit.  It was hurt, but nowhere near death, Holmes realised, for although it had been injured in the crash, there was no indication in its footprints of weakness or unsteadiness, only a resolute determination to attain the walls of the Temple.

As Holmes approached the Temple he perceived no portal in the walls facing the ancient roadway.  Following the footprints, which were beginning to fade as the wounds of the Morlock ceased to ooze blood, Holmes followed the curving line of the wall, all the while keeping his distance from it lest its deeply carven baroque surface afford some point of ambush for the agile beast.

The architecture of the Temple was totally familiar and yet wholly alien, as if descended from all the building forms used by man in his long history while at the same time owing nothing to any of them.  Faces, human and otherwise, peered out from the walls.  Robed beings, thin and manlike, formed columns supporting porticoes and mansards.  Massive stone arms and sinewy metallic tentacles held against the coalish sky numberless cupolas and stupas, bartizans and deity-adorned obelisks.  Beyond the walls, rising sharply from the centre of the compound upon an ornate platform of a metal that gleamed like electrum, and was attained by a steep flight of griffin-guarded steps, was a tall tholos, its circular walls seeming to hold the glittering masses of stars and galaxies absent from Earth’s sky.

By the time Holmes came upon an entry into the wall, the Morlock’s tracks had vanished.

It could not have doubled back on him, and he was certain it could not have escaped his keen gaze as he made his way along the wall.  The Temple fronted a sheer cliff, its walls separated from the edge by the thinnest margin.  A walkway led from the yonic portal, projecting over the edge of the cliff upon a narrow basaltic spur.

Warily, revolver in hand, Holmes approached the portal.  As he did, he glanced over the cliff’s edge.  The sluggish quicksilver sea shimmered more than a thousand feet below, hard upon a shoreline mottled by pools of  stagnant lava that simmered and smoked in the cold darkness of day, proof that the Earth’s molten heart had not yet ceased to beat.

A sensation of vertigo seized Holmes as his vision conveyed his mind over the ledge, then released him just as quickly. In that instant, the pale form of the Morlock leaped from its hiding place behind the portal’s far edge.

It struck at Holmes with all the fury of a mad beast, all the anger of a mother intent upon avenging its murdered young, its broken dreams.  Its muscular limbs, which were naturally much stronger than any normal man’s, were empowered further by hot waves of bestial rage.  The rocks and walls shuddered at its insane howl.  Holmes’ revolver flew over the cliff and vanished into the darkness.

Holmes gripped its wrists, tried to hold it at bay.  He had once straightened an iron fireplace poker after it had been bent by the detestable Dr Grimesby Roylott, but that was nothing compared to the strength required to keep the Morlock’s talons from his eyes, its fangs from his throat.

“Murderer!” the Morlock hissed viciously.

“So you learned the language of your prisoners,” Holmes spat.  “What a clever animal you are.”

“You are the animals!” the Morlock growled.  “Fit only to be consumed!”

Holmes and the creature grappled on the brink of mutual destruction.  As they struggled against each other, they edged closer to the plummet, then found themselves upon the projecting stone spur.  For an instant, Holmes felt himself oddly dislocated, suspended above bubbling lava pools while simultaneously grappling above the dull roar of the Reichenbach Fall.

“You have no right!” the Morlock insisted.  “We are the superior beings, the inheritors of your own science!  All existence is the triumph of the superior over the inferior.”

“Your defeat at our hands belies your claim,” Holmes snapped.

“Defeat?” the Morlock demanded, twisting its torso, trying to throw Holmes into the void.  “We battle yet!  You will not last much longer, man!  You struggle uselessly!  You lost the fight as soon as you dropped your weapon!  Foolish tool-making animal!  Superiority is strength of muscle, quickness of motion, fire of mind!”

Suddenly Holmes threw himself back with the aplomb of an acrobat, not releasing the wrists of the startled Morlock.  He drove his boots into the creature’s midsection, using its own weight and momentum to propel it over him.  It landed in a heap on the projecting stone spur and would have tumbled over the edge had it not gripped the stone surface with unbelievable tenacity.

The Morlock stood and faced Holmes who had regained his feet.

“Fool!” the Morlock snarled.  “You are a pathetic weakling without your machines and weapons!”

“You have lost,” Holmes said calmly.  “The future does not belong to your kind.”

“I will kill you!” the Morlock screamed, stalking toward Holmes, its rows of pendulous breasts quivering with each threatening step.  “Your flesh shall be my nourishment as I prepare to breed!  I will use your machine to escape back to the light.”

“You shall not pass,” Holmes told the thing upon the spur of rock, just as, billions of years earlier, another man had stood alone upon a bridge leading into Rome and spoke those same words. Like that ancient Roman, Holmes stood against the end of civilisation, against the fall of night.

With a final savage growl, the Morlock rushed at the man standing between it and victory over humanity.

Holmes reached inside his overcoat and lashed the startled Morlock with his loaded hunting crop.  The iron weights in the whip’s handle gave it a force of impact much greater than ever used by a rider upon a horse, and Holmes was driven to strike harder than he had ever struck a criminal across the wrists.  The crop slashed the Morlock’s shoulder, unbalancing it, then struck its face.

The Morlock staggered back under the attack, but did not fall, retaining a precarious balance upon the rocky spur.  When it fully recovered, Holmes knew, the advantage would again belong to the Morlock, to its speed and strength.

Holmes threw the crop with all his strength. The heavy handle struck the Morlock full in the face, smashing through thick bone, sending it reeling.  It screamed in pain and rage, momentarily blinded.  Holmes rushed onto the projecting rock and pushed the beast over the edge.

The talons of its right hand gabbed blindly and caught Holmes’ coat.  Holmes fell, was slammed hard against the stone.  He held on for all his worth lest he also go over.  For a long instant, they hung there, Holmes gripping the stone, the suspended Morlock gripping Holmes.  Then there was the sound of ripping fabric and the sleeve came away. The Morlock plummeted into the lava pools, screaming more from rage than terror.

And then the silence of a dead world came softly surging back.

Holmes crawled to safety.

Twice now, he thought. Perhaps Colonel Moran was right after all.  Holmes was a cunning fiend indeed!

Standing now before the portal, Holmes saw the long stairway within, guarded by griffins and leading to the tholos upon the platform at the centre.  A pale light gleamed within.  He passed through the gateway and slowly mounted the stairs.  Within the tholos was a silvery sphere, apparently suspended by nothing, above an ornate bezel and lit from within by shifting pastel hues.

Holmes gazed at the sphere for long silent moments.  It was perhaps some kind of unfathomable machine, he reflected, and yet at the same time he sensed he stood in the presence of something conscious and aware, something alive.

“I exist,” declared a soft voice emanating from nowhere and everywhere.

“Yes, the caretaker of what was,” Holmes said.  “The repository of time.”

“All that will be, still is,” the orb replied.  “That which was, never shall be.”

“That future has been averted, has it not?”  Holmes asked.  “The path leading to Morlock and Eloi has been turned.”

“Has it?” the orb said.

“No, it has not,” Holmes replied after a moment.  “Not until I return to the year 1894. Logic is the one inescapable quality of the universe, that which endures even when the stars vanish; not the logic of petty philosophies, but that of time and space, all but unfathomable to those whose viewpoints are trapped by the web of time, to whom life is as unvarying as the measured beat of a metronome ticking down to silence.”