Robert Appleton - Prehistoric Clock

“Forget that,” Verity yelled. “Turn her completely around. Full starboard engines.”

Tangeni relayed the command, adding something terse in Ovambo. He removed his slicker and threw it around Verity’s shoulders. She shrugged it off-the ship wasn’t going to turn in time either. “Emergency separation now, ” she cried. “It’s our only-”

The night and London vanished in a brilliant purple flash. She blinked and rubbed her eyes furiously. The Empress plummeted as though her balloons had cut loose. Verity’s stomach leapt into her throat. But the separation couldn’t have caused this-she was on A-deck.

The hull splashed down with a thump that threw her onto her back. Her head smacked the deck. After a few seconds, the Empress’s taut rigging and bullet-shaped, dark blue envelopes scrawled back into vision and she frowned. For instead of storm clouds, a bright turquoise light filled the sky. Yet thunder growled all about. She had to squint to adjust to what appeared a cloudless summer’s day, but it was no use. Her crown throbbed, sending her further and further into a daze. The Empress groaned and listed badly to starboard. The last thing she saw before blacking out was the skewed edifice of Big Ben.

It appeared to have been sliced in half, vertically.

A ten-foot surge of Thames water swept the getaway car onto its side, crashing it through the factory’s wire-mesh fence. Freezing water gushed over Embrey from the driver’s shattered window and kept piling in. Trapped between his buckled door and the twisted brass dash, he struggled to crouch upright until his forearms and hip bled. No use. The water level rose to his chin but he could not budge. Red drops peppered his face…

Above him, a tiny limb stirred from beneath the driver’s shredded white coat. The crash had hurled the man part-way through the windscreen, cutting him to ribbons. Trembling fingers pushed their way between his thigh and the broken seat. The driver’s body flopped loose, now hanging only by glass edges skewering his chest and neck.

“Boy, I need your help,” Embrey said. “I know you don’t want to, but listen… Look at me. I’m drowning. I have moments left.”

The youngster gibbered half syllables and gazed at Embrey with eyes the size of saucers. He shook his head.

“It’s all right, son. I’m frightened too. But if you help me out this once, I promise I’ll put everything right.” God forgive me. “Those steam-pistols I showed you-one of them is lodged right here under my leg. I can’t reach it. It’s loaded and I need you to fetch it and shoot out the window. Can you do that for me?” The lad clung to his dead father’s trouser legs, quivering, not crying. “What’s your name, chief?”

No response. Still the Thames water trickled in, and Embrey raised his mouth another inch, barely above it. “You sell ice creams with your father? Well, my daughter loves ice creams. If you don’t fetch my gun right now, she’s never going to see me again. Son, I’m going to die. I’ve got one breath left. If you don’t help me by the time it runs out, I’ll be dead. And you’ll have-” No, he couldn’t lay that on the boy. “Look at me, son. Look-”

His elbow slipped and he went under before he’d saved a breath. Oh, Christ, please don’t let this be the end. I’m not ready A deep rumble, dark slipstreams and the rush of bubbles up his nostrils answered his prayer. The boy rummaged frantically underwater. His boots whacked Embrey’s chin again and again, making him grimace. Embrey knew his lungs held reserves of oxygen beyond his brain’s estimation, but not much. On the verge of panic, he shut his eyes and focused on the reflection he’d seen in the painting earlier that evening. He was the son of a proud and noble family. He had his mother’s looks and his father’s stubborn resolve. The might of the empire wanted him dead but…the young son of an ice-cream seller would get to make that call. A broiling anti-breath choked him from inside. It thickened like soot clogging a chimney. The bitter temptation to breathe water for the first time since the womb subsumed him and spread wide. He gave a silent scream.

A muffled thud answered.

The water emptied from the car in moments as if it had been sucked out. Embrey gasped for life and found that he could move freely. The shattered window had released the twisted dash from his hip. He coughed until his heart burned, then he slowly crawled free from the wreckage.

It was a brilliant summer’s day…in a world he no longer recognised.

The boy scampered out after him, thrusting the steam-pistol hither and thither as ungodly sounds haunted the derelict remains of Whitehall and Westminster. Embrey pried the gun from the lad’s hands, scooped him up and held him tight. “I’ve got you, chief. Don’t worry, I’ve got you. It’s all over now. We’re safe, you and I. Safe as can be.” The boy clung to his neck, sobbing.

They were standing at the epicentre of a cataclysmic event. For roughly two hundred yards ahead and to his left, London appeared more or less as it should be, geographically. Westminster station house, the gentleman’s club behind that, the row of factories lining Victoria Embankment-all had partially collapsed but were at least recognisable. Behind him to the south, across Bridge Street, filthy Thames water swamped Speaker’s Green at the foot of Big Ben, while the rear section of the clock tower itself appeared to be missing! Its roof and spire had crumbled away and it was a miracle the edifice stood at all. Worse still, Westminster Palace had vanished completely. In its place, a fifty-foot-wide gorge swallowed the last of the Thames-that-was.

To his right, Westminster Pier and a fraction of Westminster Bridge were raised against a shallow rocky escarpment. A crashed airship lay listed to one side against Victoria Embankment, its two giant blue, bullet-shaped balloons trying to tug it upright. Beyond the bounds of this city slice, grassland and a peculiar forest formed a kind of circumjacent barrier, about three miles in diameter, from the rest of the world. The only gap in the tree line occurred beyond the airship to the northeast, where the escarpment fell away to a sloping valley. As his nostrils cleared, Embrey reckoned he could smell a strange sea air.

He put the boy down while he took off his tail coat and threw it over the poor driver’s lacerated body. The lad shouldn’t have to see that. He hooked his arm around the youngster as they walked back toward Bridge Street, where a half dozen policeman and horses-his pursuers-lay crushed under rubble from the collapsed station house wall. Distant shouts and screams seemed to be coming from the ruins beyond. Though his brow and hip were cut and his clothes sopping, there might be others in far worse shape, trapped, in need of rescue. He would do all he could.

“W-where are we?” the boy murmured.

“I don’t know, chief. I just…don’t know. But wherever it is, it ain’t quite London.”

While he traversed Bridge Street, wandering through a mist no doubt caused by the sudden meeting of cold and warm air from different times, theories explaining this startling phenomenon jostled in his mind. Rumblings of advanced science, no, meta- science being enacted in the Leviacrum tower had been rife since he was a boy. Scaremongering, he’d always thought. The tabloids and penny dreadfuls had so exhaustively exploited those rumours for ghoulish readers that the ideas themselves-reanimating corpses, the hybridization of man and animal species, eternal youth, invisibility-had long become jaded urban myths. No one took them for real any more than they did the gods of Mount Olympus.

Yet, at least one of them had just reached forth from the margins of cheap fiction and, without warning, smote the doubting heart of London.