Shadows Out of Time

Eventually, at the heart of the wheel, they reached a curving, waist-high parapet. They leaned over, gazing at a view that punched the breath from them. Beyond was a well, seemingly miles across, though its surface was not of water, but of a night sky, as though the open heavens were mirrored here. Points of light — possibly stars, possibly something far more ominous — winked and flashed in those unfathomable deeps that would have made the oceans seem shallow. The Arabs in the party drew back in horror, their eyes brilliant with fear. Phillips glanced at the two soldiers, who seemed mesmerized.

“What the hell is this?” said O’Reilly.

Phillips looked about him. He saw the nearest spokes, arrowing back into the gargantuan chamber. “If you listen,” he said, “and if you feel the stones, you’ll know that this hub is turning, possibly in time to the Earth’s rotation about the sun, linked to the stars.”

“Yeah,” said Garner. “Vibrations. So what the hell is it?”

Phillips gazed down one of the other long stone spokes, his mind filling with churning images. He found himself looking down a telescopic tunnel, the remote images at its end brought vividly into focus. He saw cities, or strange building complexes that could have been cities, incredibly ancient places, reeking with age, bizarre architectural piles, twisted towers, monuments and blasphemous statues hundreds of feet high. Among these titanic ruins crawled beasts and beings of hideously alien aspect, wanderers from unknown stellar systems, voyagers from the uncharted depths of some other insane universe. And they could transcend time, Phillips realized. To them, time was simply another dimension, to be crossed as easily as they navigated the gulf of space.

He saw the buried citadel he had visited under the Egyptian desert, and the haunted Plateau of Leng in the Himalayas, Antarctic citadels, with their sleeping creatures, abominable but pulsing with slumbering life. He saw too a city in the deepest of African jungles, the fabled Oparra, remnant of long-lost Atlantis, where even now the warped children of its exodus crawled like lice around crumbling temples. In Australia’s Western desert, he saw aeon-old citadels deep under the world. Everywhere he looked down the spokes, he saw the seething, blasphemous life. Stirring, hungry for release — into this world, this time.

“We’re at the heart of a colossal web,” said Phillips. “The power of these spokes radiates across the entire world, linking very old centers of alien life. As this wheel turns, it moves towards a correlation point, a conjunction at which a cosmic door will unlock and open wide. If that happens, power will flood along the spokes into the old citadels, pouring energy into them. They will all come to new life. Time will become meaningless.”

“What power?” said O’Reilly.

Phillips pointed out into the depthless void. Out in its black heart, the winds of time and space whispered and swirled, masking movements beyond human understanding. Something vast and inconceivable was rising from the gulfs.

“How long have we got?” said Garner.

“I don’t know,” said Phillips. “Time enough, I think. Set your device here. We have to prevent the conjunction.”

Mamoudou, who had gathered his wits with difficulty, watched as the two soldiers unslung their packs and unwrapped the two components of the nuclear weapon. These seemed surprisingly small, each no bigger than a computer drive. The other Arabs stared, realizing at once what the device was. They murmured to each other, and Phillips wondered if they’d be prepared to allow this unholy instrument to be used, even in the face of the monstrous images they’d seen here in the lost regions of their country.

It was little more than a matter of minutes before the two engineers had connected the two sections of the bomb and undertaken the necessary checks.

“It’ll be on a timer,” said O’Reilly. “How long?” he asked Phillips.

“As long as it takes us all to get clear of the blast.”

“Maximum — twenty-four hours. What about — the things out in that gulf?”

“I don’t think they’ll be here before then. The wheel needs longer to end its cycle.” Although I’m guessing, he thought. A risk we have to take.