James Palmer - Shadows Through Time

“You’ve encountered them recently?”

The burly zoologist stared at him grimly. “Oh yes. I used to hunt them at night in the Cauldron. When it was still safe to go out at night.”

“It has never been safe in the Cauldron.”

“I mean safe from them.” Challenger jerked a thumb at the window. “At first I thought they were a holdover from our adventure stopping Bulwer-Lytton’s cult. Now I think they are part of something new and equally sinister. Now the oily blighters hunt me. I saw you running up the lane, and I knew there was only one thing upon this earth that could make Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton run with such obvious terror.” He grinned, and it looked for all the world like a sneer. Challenger looked like he hadn’t slept.

“What’s wrong, old friend?”

“Nothing is what it seems,” Challenger said, moving to a mahogany sideboard where he poured himself and Burton a brandy. He handed Burton one with a shaky hand before downing his own and pouring himself another.

“You don’t look well,” Burton said.

Challenger laughed. “Why should I? I haven’t slept in days, and those bloody things are on the march again. Something is stirring, friend Burton. I just don’t know what yet.”

“Have you read the papers?”

Challenger arched an eyebrow. Burton glanced about the cluttered room, which looked as if he had been sleeping there, and found that morning’s edition of The London Mail . “Here,” he said, shuffling pages until he saw the latest story about the Awakened. Challenger took it and read, pacing the floor slowly.

“Gads! And this is what you were doing?”

“Following my friend, the poet Algernon Swinburne, and a barrister called Harrison Goforth.”

Challenger’s eyes shifted back and forth, and he ran his sausage fingers through his thick dark beard. “And you think your friend is no longer your friend.”

“In a manner of speaking. Yes, I think so.”

“See what I meant when I said nothing is as it seems?”

“What do you know about all this?” asked Burton after a beat.

Challenger regarded the floor. “Only that I am losing my mind. I see flashes of things that cannot be. People who are not people, at least temporarily. Things in the sky. Buildings transmogrify, then return to their rightful shapes.”

“Buildings?”

“Yes. Yesterday the Westminster clock tower became a pearlescent minaret, gleaming in the morning sun. It wavered, then the familiar clock was back. I haven’t been outside since. And the dreams, Burton. Never have I had such dreams. Not since our time with Nemo in that region of the ocean nearest that blasphemous, sunken landmass.”

Burton nodded, remembering the sea of bad dreams they had passed through on their way to the Arctic Circle. “I’ve had those dreams too. Visions, like you’re someone else?”

Challenger’s eyes bulged. “Yes! You too? Perhaps I am not insane after all.”

“They’ll have to cart us both off to Bedlam if that is the case,” said Burton. “You’ve been staying here? What of your wife?”

“I thought it would be safest for her out of the city with all these bloody shoggoths about. She is with her mother in Kent. And yes, I have been staying here. No place is safe. I can defend myself up here, like a king in his castle.” He laughed at that, and Burton wondered about his sanity.

“I assume you are working on this for Mycroft Holmes?”

Burton nodded. “You assume correctly.”

“That man is going to be your ruination.”

Burton regarded his friend for a long time. “I need to go. Do you think it’s safe?”

Challenger shrugged his broad shoulders. “As safe is it can be. That shoggoth took a great risk showing itself in the daytime. You were following your friend Swinburne when it came upon you?”

“Yes. It must have been protecting them.”

“If the shoggoths are in league with them, this can’t be good,” said Challenger.

“I must go. Can you make more of those shoggoth guns?”

Challenger shot Burton another of his sneering smiles. “Of course. How many did you have in mind?”

“As many as you can.”

Burton returned to Gloucester Place wary and afraid, sticking to public places and availing himself of the city’s many carriage drivers until he was deposited safely upon his doorstep. He took one last look around to make sure no eyes—human or inhuman—were on him. Even with Challenger’s shoggoth-gun secreted beneath his coat, he felt on edge.

He took an early supper and ate ravenously, then retired upstairs to pen a letter to Isabel, telling her he thought it best if she remained at her family’s country estate until he sent for her. He hated to frighten her so, but she knew of his work with the Shadow Council and its often-sinister importance. Besides, his jangled nerves couldn’t take it if anything untoward happened to his beloved. Everything would be fine once he got to the bottom of this latest preternatural puzzle.

Burton drank and smoked, scowling as he remembered his promise to meet with his fellow Cannibals that night. He could not risk going out after dark. It wasn’t safe, at least for him. Then he thought of poor Professor Challenger, sleeping fitfully on the floor of his museum, his every thought haunted by shoggoths lurking around every corner. At some point, he dozed in his favorite chair—

—And found himself standing in the gondola of an impossible airship hovering over a vast desert, the hot wind making shifting snakes of the countless dunes. He wore a flowing white robe, wielding a spyglass with hands browned by the sun. Beside him in similar garb was his Isabel, her face as tan as the dunes hundreds of feet beneath them. She squinted into the distance, and he followed her gaze to the horizon, where a gargantuan black pyramid stood, gleaming darkly in the sun.

“Bismillah!” Burton heard himself say, but it didn’t sound like him. It was a voice made raw by hot desert winds.

“There it is, my love,” said this Isabel. She was hard and lean, wearing pants and boots like a man. A thin scimitar hung from her belt, and Burton sensed that this weapon was as lethal in this dream-Isabel’s hands as it would be in his own.

“Yes. We’ve found it. We need to tell El-Yezdi.” He pounded his booted foot on the floor of the gondola, and it rang out with a metallic echo. Burton realized then that his dream-self was not standing on a wooden platform suspended beneath the giant pale gasbag of a dirigible, but the familiar metal outline of the Nautilus !

“Captain Burton!”

Burton sat up and looking around, bleary-eyed. Someone had called his name. But who? He turned toward the door to spy Miss Angell standing there.

“I’m sorry to wake you, but Inspector Abberline is here to see you.”

Burton glanced about, saw the sunlight filtering in through the window behind him. “Of course. Send him up.”

Burton checked his pocket watch and was surprised to see it was almost nine o’clock in the morning. He flexed to crack his aching back as Abberline appeared in the doorway, removing his battered brown bowler.

“Sorry to wake you.”

“No apologies necessary. It appears I fell asleep in my favorite chair. The bloody thing is fine for sitting but atrocious for sleeping. What can I help you with this morning?”

“Well,” said Abberline. “I came round first of all to make sure you were all right. None of the men I put on the Awakened checked in last night.”

A cold chill fled up Burton’s spine. “Really? I didn’t notice the man you put on Goforth yesterday afternoon. I returned to the Theosophic Society to try and catch Swinburne and his new friend leaving their meeting.”