The Day of the Nefilim (43 page)
When they did, they knew why he had laughed at her question.
The ship came flying in low towards the bottom of a large crater. In the cliff face ahead of them was a huge set of doors, four of them, each framed by lights that blinked in slow steady rhythms. Embossed in shining metal in the center of each door was a gigantic swastika.
The base had been there for more than sixty years, the officer explained. Our little secret, he said.
Not so little, Alexis said, admiringly.
One of the doors opened, spilling yellow light across the landscape in front of it.
“Home,” the officer said, and went to prepare for the landing.
Thead and Alexis looked at each other solemnly without saying anything. After a few seconds Thead arched an eyebrow. A thin smile curved his lips.
Alexis smirked and nodded slowly. She’d had stranger bedfellows, after all.
They contemplated the entrance to the base as the ship drifted towards it.
Home? Hardly,
thought Thead. A place to gather their strength, that was all. And then out. There must surely be some wonderful prizes hidden among the stars in this strange, weird part of the universe...
* * *
THINGS WOULD BE DIFFERENT NOW.
The water in the streams and rivers flowed with a new, vibrant energy, and the plants and trees were growing as they never had before. The bird song had a new brilliance. Even the air seemed to hum with vitality.
The only machines on the planet that were working were the few that had been adapted to the Stream. It would take time to adapt more, and many conversions would never happen. A lot of the old ways suddenly seemed silly, pointless, or both. When life settled down again, it would have little resemblance to the old ways.
Above the new world, the sky shone with its new eternal brilliance, with no night waiting in the wings to claim the light. But the photon belt had left more than just a never-ending day. Inside the body of every living creature, the DNA was rearranging itself, shaping itself to the new frequencies. In time, people would begin thinking differently. In time, there would be new races.
“So, we’ll build a new ship?” Reina asked several days later, knowing that their lives would change forever if they went ahead with it.
Bark is looking different today,
she thought
. It must be the light.
“Yes,” said Bark, who had been thinking about the future as well. “We’ll build ourselves a ship. And then I’ll show you the stars as they should be seen.”
“Cool,” said Reina, noticing for the first time that her own skin had a new tint to it. “Yeah, awesome.”
THE END
* * *
Well, that’s it. I hope you enjoyed it. I’ve been asked whether there’s likely to be a sequel, and the answer is no. Just like relationships, there are times with stories when you just need to “move on”, and this, dear reader, is one of those times.
If you thought
The Day of the Nefilim
was OK, feel free to slip me an email ([email protected]) and tell me so. And keep an eye on
osiran.com
, for any new writing, etc etc etc...
--
David L. Major
by the same author...
The Secret Weapon - Poems and Short Stories
If steampunk or mythpunk are your thing, there will be something in this collection of eight short stories and 21 poems for you. The story
Air for Fire
is going to appear in the issue #8 of Steampunk Magazine.
CONTENTS
Travel to Allahabad
All 1,000 Songs
Air for Fire
Machinist Tippit
The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street
One Falcon Wing
Twelve boats
The Flaneurism
The Party
The Great Roc
The Scythian Horse Archer
The Fundamental Question
The Monumental Lie
Berthezene
Gorgon
Static
Taniwha
8:55
Dionysus in Two Acts
Finding the Weight of the Moon
7:49
This is Port Dog
Port Dog is Flooded
Wyfurge’s Letter
The Secret Weapon
All that the Thunderer Wrung from Thee
**
For more information and links:
Plasticine.com
- publisher's site
Osiran.com
- author's site
... from
The Secret Weapon
Among the rocks,
Helen sprang to her feet
and swiftly, lithely fled.
The sun was still high then;
it was a hard blue white,
it was cold, it burned the sky.
Ice burns like that, from the inside out;
He had said to her:
“Helen! Do you not wonder about the sun?
Yellow, was it not, once?”
Helen did not want to speak of this, and they fought.
“At least, Helen,” he said,
“spend the night in the car, don’t go far.
Spend the night listening to something
reassuring — Schubert,
or grounding, like Bach.
“Do not listen to Shostakovitch —
for Shostakovitch was not known for doing favours,
and he is not going to start with you.”
The night from which the kangaroo emerged was black.
It had settled hard, like black ice on a road.
The kangaroo was six feet or more tall,
if he existed at all;
as solid as one of those Egyptian statues he was,
the way they seem to stand on the edge of everything;
in the silence he waited and did not move.
His eyes overflowed with darkness
and did not move;
Simon approached the kangaroo
where it stood and did not move;
he reached up and laid a hand upon its face.
You could ask a mountain to hear you;
or just as well this apparition / that if it were to move
would split the ground
in two without a sound
and of the witness leave no trace.
Something like Horus on a rooftop,
and he has bought infinity to the dawn,
and you are something to do with Seth, perhaps,
some lackey of mortality, the end of it all…
flee the light, for Horus is on the rooftop —
Helen arrived at dawn with the sun on her back,
back at the point from which she had fled;
music they did not discuss.
A veil had drawn behind her;
she held a book,
and she had drawn pictures, of kangaroos,
in the spaces on the pages of this book
that he had never seen before;
(it was in fact the manual,
taken from the document pocket
of the Falcon’s farside door).
Now the circumference may be small enough,
but the axle moves to a baritone,
and when the Falcon starts, its engine roars to life;
Horus leaves the roof,
and flies into the sunrise,
the golden spokes of which form chords, suspended,
that never will resolve to a tonic or to proof;
and the Falcon no longer sits upon the roof
with its gaze upon the silence
in which the kangaroo does wait
with darkness in its eyes
and does not move.
... from
The Secret Weapon
I have been told that we have been building this tower for thousands of years.
I have no direct experience; no reason to believe this—nor to doubt it—but it is what I have heard, and I can see a little way into the waters that keep rising, lapping below our feet as we keep building, board after board, nail after nail.
In the depths, dissolving into the darkness that is the limit of our vision, below which there is only falling, the faint shapes of the bulwarks that my predecessors built in defiance of the water linger—but they failed; I can see also the remnants of the sealed chambers, broken, flooded and empty, the seals torn and perished. Nothing has worked; the waters still rise, taking everything out of reach; it all becomes illusion and memory.
The Enemy who lives in the water comes without warning; I think he never really departs, he just lurks out of sight, waiting. The Enemy is clever, I think; he changes his shape from one minute to the other, but his shadow is always the same.
We build upward—spar by spar, a piece of wall here, so that we know where one room stops and the next begins, a piece of ceiling there, which will become tomorrow’s floor; ever upward. Sometimes it is tiring, but sometimes, too, it is exhilarating; on those days we have so much hope, and it is good to build, and we are sure then that when everything is said and done, as one day it surely must be, the Tower, somehow, will love us for our work, or at least will approve of it, and our hope will be vindicated—and what is hope for, if not for vindication?
I hear them being taken, sometimes, the others, while they are working, in the next room, or a few rooms down a hallway, or across a square, or off a thoroughfare (for the Tower is very, very large…).
Sometimes, when the Enemy takes one of us, he is quiet about it; they do not struggle or shout; I suppose he must come looming up out of the Darkness before they can do anything—or perhaps before they even know he is there, or upon them; he must lay his grasp around their hearts, and flood through them, and there is no mercy; and they are gone without a sound, as if they were never awake.
But I do not really know; I have never seen it. I have only heard about it.
And then there are other times, when the Enemy comes roaring, a great noise like a wind that wants to tear everything apart, and throw us over, our work and all, down into the water together, and to circle above us, whipping waves into knives that rend us into small pieces that no longer know each other; at those times, there can be a great panic that spreads, and everything is so huge, and those who the Enemy has taken into his cold embrace; they cry, and I have heard them begging, but the Enemy is implacable, if he understands us at all.
Sometimes he throws them around like dolls, breaking them, sending them down to their destruction, where we cannot see.
But I do not really know; I have never seen it.
Sometimes, the Tower shakes, the Enemy is so strong.
But we keep building, although we never draw away from the water; it keeps rising with us, always just below our feet, rising as we build, but just beyond our reach; so that even if we lie down, in a place where we might be yet to place a floorboard, or where we might even have lifted one up; pulled the nails, and prised it away (although this is frowned upon, and is not regarded as contributing to the building of the Tower; so it is not often done, or at least admitted to) — though we might lie flat and extend our arms, straining as hard as we can, or relax them, until they are like the water itself, we cannot, ever, reach the water. No-one, to tell you the truth, even knows what it feels like; there are all sorts of stories about it.