Читать книгу The Land where Time Stood Still - Arthur Leo Zagat - Страница 4
ОглавлениеInto Nothingness
Ronnie Statton, with 20th century courage, Battles the Science-Monsters of an Age Unborn!
It was, perhaps, the almost unbelievable antiquity of Silbury Hill that oppressed Ronald Stratton with a queasy premonition of disaster. He thought again of the old legend: that anyone entering the stone rings on top of Silbury Hill between dusk and dawn vanished, leaving no trace. The thought lingered.
The twilight silence, the low-lying layer of ground mist veiling his footing, the chill of evening damp striking into his very bones, combined to trouble the young American with sinister unreality. Something of that feeling had been with him all during his journey through England's South Country; had troubled him as he stood on Salisbury Plain where, twenty years before, had drilled the father he had never known, proud in the uniform of his ancestral land.
Tall and clean-limbed and lithe the American volunteer must have been then, bronze-skinned and frank-eyed as his son now was who retraced in a nostalgic memorial tour the route of his hero father's last voyage. Silbury was part of that sentimental pilgrimage—
Ron Stratton suddenly stumbled, sprawling into a grass-hidden ditch. He rolled, caught at whipping tendrils of a bush, pulled himself to his feet. He took a step forward—into the wrenching, frantic instant of sheer nothingness!
It was as if he had walked over the brink of a sheer precipice, save that, though a bottomless abyss yawned fearfully beneath him, he oddly knew no sensation of falling. The world, the universe had simply vanished from beneath him.
His foot came down on solid ground. Stratton pulled in a gasping, choked breath between his teeth. He'd never before experienced anything like that moment of terrific giddiness, of deathlike vertigo. Queer. The light seemed to have grown stronger. It filtered through the trees with a reddish grow somehow eerie....
The trees! How had he come into this forest? There hadn't been any trees at all, a moment ago! Was he dreaming?
Something scampered through the brush behind Stratton, and he whirled to the sound. A brown beastlet popped into sight between two rugged boles, a perfectly formed horse not knee-high to the man. Great, limpid eyes were startled in the miniature head—and then the creature had spun around and vanished.
Ronald Stratton stared at the spot where it had been. He managed to get himself moving, managed to get to where he could look down upon the hoof-prints. The tracks were unmistakable. Three-toed, those were the traces of an Eohippus, of that forgotten ancestor of the horse extinct before man's first anthropoid progenitor learned to swing along arboreal highways by four clutching paws and a prehensile tail.
Stratton's scalp made a tight cap for his skull. His hands were out in a peculiar, thrusting gesture, as though he were trying to push away some dreadful thing that was closing in upon him. What had happened to him? Where was he?
A scream sliced the forest stillness, a woman's scream, high and shrill and compact with terror. Stratton's head jerked up to it, to the swift threshing of someone running through the thicket. Something white flicked among the trees, took shape in the form of a running girl. Long blond braids streamed behind her, and her face was as white as the white robe fluttering about her slim form.
Her fear-dilated eyes saw him as she went past. "Help me, I prithee," she screamed; and her archaic appeal was blotted out by a horrid, bestial roar blasting from leaf-veiled aisles whence she came, by the thunder of a far heavier body pursuing her.
The underbrush tossed in the grip of a whirling tornado, parted to the plunge of a huge, hairy creature who ran half-crouched and bellowing.
The American leaped for the monster, flailed frantic fists at a brutal, leathery visage. His blows pounded against rock-hard bone, pitifully ineffectual. Something struck him, catapulted him backward. For the first time he saw clearly the thing he had attacked, and amazement seared through him.
It—it wasn't a gorilla, despite the stiff black hair covering its big-thewed haunches, despite its chinless, flat-nosed, beetling-browed countenance. A ragged pelt was slung about its waist. It clutched a wooden-handled, flint-headed axe in one spatulate-fingered hand; and in its lurid, beady eyes there was a groping, grotesque sort of intelligence not quite bestial. It was a man, a man from out the dawn of time. A Neanderthal man, whose like had vanished from the earth countless eons ago.
The ape-man's black, thick lips snarled back from yellow fangs. His neckless throat pulsated, vented a nerve-shattering, insensate roar. Threat was fierce in that horrid ululation, but underlying the menace a singular note of inquiry seemed to signal a bewilderment in the creature's small brain as great as Stratton's own. That was what had checked its charge, what held it now, momentarily hesitant.
In that instant of reprieve Stratton heard the bush rustle behind him, felt a twitch at his right hand. His fingers closed on something hard that fitted into his palm.
"Mayhap this dagger will aid thee against the ogre," a whisper came to him. "This blade, and my prayers."
The aborigine's bellow blasted again. He sprang, catapulted down upon Stratton, his flint axe arcing before him. The youth's frantic side-spring saved his skull, but the Stone Age weapon hit his left shoulder, numbing it. Stratton struck out blindly with the dagger, felt its point strike flesh and sink sickeningly into it. Then the hairy body of his antagonist bore him down. He thudded appallingly to the ground.
Harsh hands clamped his throat, cut off breath. His lungs labored, tortured by lack of air. Blood roared in his ears, and his eyes bulged from their sockets.
And suddenly air pulled in between Stratton's teeth as the strangling hold on his throat relaxed. The insupportable mass crushing him was abruptly flaccid, lifeless. Fiery stabs cut Stratton's chest as he gasped in saving breaths. Instinctively he heaved off from himself the anthropoid's limp mass.
"Marry! Thou hast slain him with a single thrust of the poniard!" The girl's voice was thrilled, applauding. "See how his black blood doth flow!"
His vision cleared. The girl stood above him, briar-tears gashing her robe to reveal tantalizing glimpses of lissome curves. Her blue eyes danced with excitement in a face small-featured, red-lipped, somehow pagan in the upthrust of high cheekbones, in the blunt modeling of its tiny chin. Even in that moment Stratton's heart skipped a beat at the elfin beauty of that countenance.
"I wouldn't have had it to thrust if it wasn't for you," he grunted, struggling erect. "You've got a lot of sand, young lady."
She looked puzzled. "Sand? Prithee, what meanest thou?"
"That's American slang for courage." Why was she talking in that confoundedly queer lingo? Even if she was dressed up for a masquerade, what had happened here should have shaken her out of it.
The girl shrugged. "Nay, but thy speech groweth ever more strange. And thy garb, too, is passing queer." She gazed about her. Her pupils widened with sudden fright. "What—what land is this, what forest?" she cried out.
His own bemusement swept back on Stratton. "I—I don't know," he faltered. "I was hoping you'd tell me that."
She stepped backward in awe. "By the Holy Rood, 'tis an enchantment some sorcerer hath cast upon us! Look you. But a moment hence I hurried with milady's message to her lover that Sir Aglavaine hath returned betimes from Arthur's court. Seeking to hasten back so that I might bend knee at vesper crisons, I dared cross the ancient mound that riseth betwixt the castle and Avebury Town. As I attained its crest some strange malaise o'ercame me; and then, and then—"
"Yes," Ron Stratton prompted. "What happened?"
"And then there were these trees about me and the fearsome face of yon ogre peered at me from among them. I fled. He pursued. I came upon thee and—and the rest thou knowest."
Stratton shook his head violently, as though to jar his brain into functioning. "Wait a minute. What's all this you're saying about Sir Aglavaine, Arthur's court, a castle? Are you kidding me?"
She looked at him dumbly, as though she did not understand. "Kidding?"
"All right. Skip it. I'm having trouble understanding you, too. What year do you think this is?"
"What year?" She backed farther, warily, as though she were about to dash away. "Forsooth, hath bemusement clouded thy accompt of time? 'Tis five hundred and a score years since Our Lord was born in Bethlehem."
Little chill prickles scampered along Stratton's spine. She believed it! She believed that she was telling the truth. But—
His eyes slitted as his gaze left her, to shift from the corpse of the Neanderthal man to the tracks of the Eohippus, and back to this girl, who seemed to have stepped out of the pages of Malory's Morte d'Arthur.
If his memory of paleontology did not fail him, at least a million years ranged between the tiny horse and himself. It was possible that the animal and the beast-man were survivals, by some inconceivable quirk of fate, from the misty ages in which they belonged. They couldn't tell him. But she could. She had. She told him that the present was to her A. D. 520. To him it was 1936. That meant—What did it mean?
"Everything's mixed up here," he groaned. "Time's all mixed up. It's as if the universe were the rim of a great wheel, whirling through Time. As if, somehow, we have left that rim, shot inward along different spokes whose outer ends are different years, far apart, and reached the wheel's axis where all the year-spokes join. The center point of the hub, that doesn't move at all through Time, because it is the center. Where there is no Time. Where the past and the present and the future are all one. A land, in some weird other dimension, where Time stands still."
