James Palmer - Shadows Through Time

“You would doom us all? Doom me? Just to escape?” said Herbert. His voice was soft, almost pleading.

“I would do anything to be free of you, Time Traveler, with your grand, socialist visions and your naive outlook. Every place—every time—man plants his foot turns to dust. You will be nothing without me, but I will be everything without you.”

“But where will you go?” asked Herbert. “What will you do?”

“Why, whatever I want,” said Nebogipfel. “Whenever I please. Maybe I’ll go back to the start of it all, the dawn of human civilization. You went to humanity’s end to try to fix things, poor fellow. I will start at its beginning. With my hand to guide them they may just get it right this time.”

Nebogipfel leapt from the platform, staring at his outstretched hands. “It’s starting! I can feel it.”

“I feel something too,” said Herbert. “The hairs on the back of my neck are standing up. It’s—”

Herbert doubled over and fell to his knees. Burton flew to his side.

Nebogipfel became translucent. Burton could see through the top of his head to the throbbing Wold-Newton stones vibrating in their wire framework behind him.

“Yes. It’s working!” Nebogipfel declared. “Oh, it’s wonderful. I can see the Void, Captain Burton. And the Gate beyond.”

The room filled with Morlocks, sidling in silently behind the three as they watched Nebogipfel flicker from ghostly translucence to stark solidity and back again. A few of them removed their goggles, but they made no move to assault Burton and the others.

“My children,” Nebogipfel said to them. “It is almost time for us to go.”

“It will be too late once he is split from Herbert,” Burton whispered to Miss Hemlock. “His Morlocks will easily overpower us.”

“So much for my plan,” she said.

“Maybe not. Nebogipfel showed me the point in the future he is currently in resonance with, and I changed the outcome.”

Miss Hemlock stared at him. “What?”

Burton grinned. “I stopped Crowley’s ritual and, per Mycroft’s request, destroyed his consciousness by grinding the Wold-Newton stones to dust.”

“Oh my,” said Miss Hemlock. “And Nebogipfel doesn’t know?”

“Apparently not. He wanted me to see what he has wrought in order to gloat. I didn’t tell him what transpired when he put me there.”

“Then it appears we have an ace up our sleeve after all.”

Herbert shuddered. Nebogipfel screamed, falling to the floor. He was solid again.

“What’s happening?” he said. “Something’s wrong. It isn’t working.”

“I forgot to mention,” said Burton, “when you sent me to your warped future, I destroyed what was left of Mycroft Holmes and stopped Crowley from completing his ritual.”

“What? No! The Wold-Newton stones?”

“Destroyed,” said the explorer. “They no longer resonate with the versions of themselves here in our time. It’s over, Nebogipfel.”

The Time Traveler’s doppelganger climbed to his feet. “No! I am the Master of Time! It is never over. I shall simply have to go back and try again. Find another iteration of the Wold-Newton stones. I can outlast empires, Burton. Watch the sun blaze to life and die, all in the same afternoon. I am Chronos incarnate, God of Time.”

“No,” said a syrupy voice behind Burton. The explorer turned as one of the Morlocks, this one still dressed in modern finery, approached, passing Burton, Herbert, and Miss Hemlock and addressing Nebogipfel. “It is over.”

“You can speak?” said Nebogipfel.

“Of course,” the Morlock said. “We could always speak. We just didn’t know your language. Until now. We just needed time, which you provided via your wondrous and terrible machine. You have shown us much. We wish to be more than toilers in the dark, feeding off the gentle Eloi. We want what you offered us. A chance to begin again. To be something more. The Time Ship is waiting.”

“But he tricked you,” said Miss Hemlock. “Used you. All of you. And you want to take him with you?”

The Morlock turned to her. “He is broken. Like all of us. We will fix each other. Nebogipfel and we Morlocks have much in common. We are tinkerers at heart.”

“Wait,” said Herbert, rising to his feet, the fugue that had overcome him abating. “What of me? Nebogipfel and I are still the same person.”

“No,” said the Morlock. “The timestream Nebogipfel comes from no longer exists.” It climbed up the scaffold and wrenched the Wold-Newton stones from their wire housing, dashing all but one to the floor before climbing back down. Burton took it upon himself to smash these to dust beneath his boots.

The Morlock glanced at what Burton had done and nodded. “Now they will not exist in 1945,” he explained to the Time Traveler. “You last drank your elixir after sending Burton to see the version of 1945 you created through your meddling here. Since that future has now been undone, you are cut off from the path that would have allowed you to wake up as Herbert when the elixir wore off, in the far future, which means the two of you now exist as separate entities.”

“No!” cried Nebogipfel. “It can’t end this way! Not like this. Not when I was so close.”

“But you got what you wanted,” said the Time Traveler. “You are free of me.” He sounded hurt.

“Yes,” said Nebogipfel. “But at the cost of the glorious, chaotic future Mycroft Holmes and I would create together.”

“Bismillah!” Burton swore. “The eldritch things Crowley attempted to summon would have destroyed that future. Like everyone else who has dabbled in such things, he failed to realize the true nature of the entities he was asking for help. They do not do man’s bidding.”

“Not only that,” said Miss Hemlock, “but Mycroft Holmes cannot remain in power behind the scenes, or give Crowley the incantation to put the stones in resonance back here. Why didn’t I think of that?”

“Because you are now cut off from that timestream as well,” said the Morlock.

Miss Hemlock opened her mouth to say something, but no words came out. Finally, she said, “Bloody hell. You’re right. My version of 1945 no longer exists. Why, I might not even exist there at all.”

“Unlikely,” said Herbert. “You’re still here with us, after all. Your life might be very different, I grant you that.”

“But I can’t go back,” she said tearfully. “Where I came from no longer exists. My Time Device doesn’t have a point to return to.”

“Time will return to its original track from this point forward,” said Burton. “Without Mycroft’s meddling, Aleister Crowley will never become Occult Minister and never attempt to summon eldritch horrors to assist with the war effort and doom mankind as a result.”

Miss Hemlock activated her miniature Time Machine. The tiny components whirred, and she appeared to flicker for a moment before returning to full solidity. “I’m stuck. I can’t return to the moment I left, because that precise moment no longer exists. Even if I could go back, I’d be a stranger. No family. No birth records. I’d be a temporal ghost. Or, perhaps even worse, there would be two of me. That would certainly be hard to explain to my—our—parents.”

“Be not disheartened,” said the Morlock, handing her the last Wold Newton stone. “You have a greater purpose.”

“What am I supposed to do with this?” She held the glittering black stone between her thumb and index finger, its natural facets catching the light.

“The stone is compatible with your Time Machine apparatus,” said the Morlock. “Please. Allow me.”

The creature helped Miss Hemlock remove the leather gauntlet from her wrist and open the Time Machine’s casing, exposing the device’s internal mechanism. His long, hairy fingers were surprisingly adept at working with the minute components of the mechanism, and in a moment he had affixed the remaining Wold-Newton stone to the interior of the device. He secured everything back together and returned the Time Machine to Miss Hemlock.