Split Second

by Garry Kilworth

Genres: Horror; Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure

Synopsis

When a young boy, Richard, goes too close to a Wiederhaus Repeater ("greatest archaeological break-through ever. Expose any prehistoric remains to it and it creates, briefly, complete hologrammatic images of the people who were in contact with them and the scenes in which they existed."), he finds himself sharing a body with Esk, a boy from the Palaeolithic era.

Release date: September 29, 2011

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 188

Sample

Richard was aware of a darkness around him that seemed a physical presence, not just an absence of light: darkness that had a consistency like thick fog, dense enough to obliterate even the brightest sun’s rays.

He struggled to see through the opaqueness that filmed his vision and gradually the blackness turned to grey mist. He could sense something close to his head. A breathing, like that of a pet dog waking him from a heavy sleep? His head? He was inside something; of that he was certain. A container. A tank of some kind, perhaps? Or a windowless room? No, he knew it was a head, and he, Richard, was on the inside.

Panic rushed through his mind like a strong wind. A boy, shrunk to the size of a mouse and squeezed through an eye-socket – imprisoned in a fossil! One of his father’s ancient skulls, that was it! He tried to scream, but could make no sound. He had lost control of his body. The mouth would not open. The eyes would not see.

After a period of terrifying mind-screams he began to regain sanity. Richard was a loner, always had been. Rosemary was his one occasional companion. His own company was often enough and when younger the invented companions were usually more exciting than the real ones. Slowly he came to realize he was trapped somewhere. He could escape only by using his ingenuity; running down the corridors of insanity wouldn’t help him.

He struggled with his limbless, eyeless, mouthless, earless – earless? He could hear. He concentrated on the sound, a rhythmic grunted breathing.

“Uhuh! Uhuh! Uhuh!”

At least he was not deaf. And the darkness was clearing; drifting away. He forced his mind forward, trying to penetrate the fog before it.

The eyes are for seeing,

The ears for hearing,

The mouth for …

Someone was there beside him, in the head. That was his, the Other’s breath, heaving in and out of the mouth below the mind. Richard wanted to ask a name, then realized he was being sidetracked. Forget the other mind, use your own! Wait. Why bypass? Why not connect? It was possible, he could feel the pressure of the other person against himself. Open out. Let him in.

Suddenly, Richard could see.

The granite moved in the near dawn: an igneous rock stirring from an ageless sleep. It lifted its head to the skyline, as yet only a red grimace separating the dark air from the darker sea. Below the head the rock took on the tense form and shape of a man’s torso, limbs appeared, and hair was shaken around the heavy shoulders.

The granite man then rose on colonnade legs, moving towards the growing mouth of the morning, out of the shrinking throat of the cave.

Granla, Shaman of the Gren, went to greet the Mother, Her belly as silent as it had been on the third day of the creation.

“Mother of the wind,” he began. “Of the trees like hair upon your form; of the lesser sea mother; the ice-eye and the fire-eye that give us light, and all the beasts that run across your back like the fleas of my head – give a good hunt today. Your children need food.” He moved his hands with the eloquence of the words, shaping the trees and the animals in the air, running extended fingers over his forearm to show the Mother he knew the rippling beauty of life-sustaining water.

Returning to the rock shelter, which was almost a cave in its depth, he found his deerskins and pulled them on. Outside the small circle of night fires the world was a peninsula of ice and snow – at the top was the snow, and low down, around the beaches, a frost waxed and waned depending upon the time of day. The Great Ice Age encompassed Granla and his group like a cold ring of stone. It tightened around the big man’s chest as he went out in the half-darkness, towards the place where a thin rope of water fell twisting from the rocks above.

As he walked he kicked bodies awake. Some, lumps of clay that merely groaned and rolled – others, the young ones, lithe saplings that sprang back into place after a night’s enforcement into unnatural postures. They rose and moved with the Shaman towards the water. Mnemonic mountains grew before their eyes as they shambled, and grass and trees they had known before their sleep reminded them that they were men, spawned by the Mother. Each one mumbled his own individual orisons as he walked, the journey ending in a sweet drink of freezing water.

As they drank in turns and took away the slime or roughness from their throats they started to chatter. The birds had already begun their oral demarcation and, while some beasts rose from warm beds of leaves to enter the day, others were exiting to artificial nights in woodwork, earthwork or stone hollow.

“The women should have the morning food ready by now,” said Berfas. Someone replied, “If you could throw a spear as well as you do your tongue, none of us would want for food.”

“None but you,” Berfas snapped back, “for if the meat fell under my spear, your share would be the hoofs.”

“Listen to the great rabbit hunter – you would think by now he would know his prey had paws.”

The men laughed and Berfas spat disgustedly.

Spasmodic sounds of chinking stone, activity and hissing wood found their ears as they returned. Granla returned to the mouth of the rock shelter, to where his own fire blew out its white breath into the chill air.

“Some meat,” he ordered of his two women. “Meat and the juice of fruits.”

He looked with pride over his kingdom – the thickly forested slopes below the mountains, that fell onto a rocky shoreline and thence into the sea. There were rare clearings in the forest where whalebacks of gneiss broke the surface of the dew-decked world to slide, black and shining, slowly down into earth again. Streams turned over onto their dorsal humps to reveal white vulnerable bellies of foam, and fell with opened legs from high cliffs into the sea. Birds drew spirals, beasts crawled along crooked paths of their own making. This was his kingdom – not perfect, for there was a lack of flint, though some could be found, and chalcedony and malachite served almost as well – but as near to perfect as the sea was to the sky. It was difficult not to acknowledge the pride of ownership filling his chest.

Suddenly, out of the corner of his eyes, Granla caught sight of a single sleeping form.

Esk was awakened after the sun. Where as the fire-eye had a slow, gentle rising, Esk was lifted violently by his hair and set jarringly on his feet. At sixteen – almost middle age – he was unused to such indignities.

“Arghh!” he yelled, more in anger than in pain. Being fresh from sleep his anger was naturally instantaneous and more vehement than was normal for him, and he swung to bite the wrist above his long black mane. Granla cuffed him heavily as his teeth snapped at thin air.

“Ungrateful youth,” growled the broad-chested giant. “It’s your food-hunting day. Why didn’t you rise with the fire-eye and speak to the Mother of all things for a good hunt?”

Esk’s anger waned swiftly. He was lucky that it had not been Reng that had found him. Reng Was his half-brother – older and stronger. He would have driven his heel into Esk’s soft-asleep stomach.

“I’m going, Granla. I’m going. I was whispering to the grass.”

“Lying youth,” said Granla, but Esk was one of his favourites and he did not strike him a second time.

Esk took up his spear, muttering in an aggrieved tone, “I was speaking with the Mother, in my sleep. I heard Her talking back to my ears in the dark.”

The night before he had lain in the entrance to the rock shelter listening to the grasses sighing and calling his name. He had fallen asleep, answering them softly. Esk was convinced he was a special youth, chosen by the Mother to perform great deeds. One day he would move the world with his strength.

He slipped away from the shelf and down the worn path into the undergrowth, hastily chanting the prayers he should have said just before the dawn.

“… may the Mother be childful,” he finished, coming out of the trees at the edge of the beach. The other youths would already be out and perhaps had made their kills. Some of them, the ones that disliked hunting, would be climbing for birds’ eggs. It was the job of the youths to supply certain midday meals. Each had to bring home enough to feed the women, the infirm and the very young attached to him by his birth. Esk had two young sisters and his mother and grandmother to feed. His younger and older brothers would have to find their own food. Tomorrow it would be his younger brother, Slek, that would feed the women and sisters and Esk would only need to feed himself.

Running along the beach, his feet making deep prints in the sand at the waterline, Esk’s intention was to try for a large wading bird with his spear. The birds were quick to sense a man and he would need a place where the edge of the trees grew close to the sea mother. Within a spear’s throw if possible. Such a spot was a good long run along the flat beach but it was a cold morning and the youth was glad to have exercise which would warm him. Clad in a loose singlet and shorts of deerskin the breeze found the most intimate parts of his body with its icy fingers.

When he reached his hideout Esk settled down for a long wait amongst the wet fronds of a forest floor fern. Joined with the dark woods again he felt secure and peaceful. The earth was his Mother, the trees and the plants Her fond arms and hands wrapping themselves around his boulder-hard body. In Her were all the creatures of the world, from the tiniest beetle to the great spear-toothed giants that sometimes came in from the outside. (Granla said the giants slid down from the sky on the shining paths of the ice-eye at night, for why would the Mother Herself make creatures She could not hide in Her clothes. They were easy to find because they stood tall above the bushes – but they fought and killed in madness, crushing men to death with one stamp of a foot.)

Esk was close to the Mother. She had never tried to hurt him. One of the other youths had been the target for Her displeasure and was now under a rockfall.

As he lay in his warm nest of leaves, waiting for the shore birds to move nearer to the trees, Esk suddenly sensed danger nearby. Or was it? Possibly a wolf or savage cat had wandered by earlier and left its scent near the ferns. The youth sniffed. Not the scent of a dangerous beast. Certainly smells were there. They always hung lightly in the breeze or were strong amongst the roots of the grasses. But each one could be identified individually and none seemed bad to him Why then his uneasiness?

There! Strong. A fire-smoke scent. Not really near, perhaps some several runs distant. Not the camp. That was down-wind. Coming from the thin land that went out like a woman’s arm into the sea mother?

Esk forgot his hunt and began running for high ground, wanting to see where the smoke was coming from. Perhaps some of the other youths had run away and were making fire a long way off? They would be beaten if they were caught because Granla would only allow a fire at the entrance to the shelter, well away from the trees. Fires were ordered to life, or extinguished, by Granla and no one else. They killed swiftly if allowed to roam free and scarred the Mother’s face.

He reached rocks above the trees and stared for a long time over the milk-mistiness of the forest roof. No smoke could be seen rising from the thinner vapour and Esk began to feel he might have been mistaken. A trick by the Mother, perhaps, to test Her offspring. Not all things were explained by the senses. Some things were unreal. They came and went, like ghosts with no substance. Esk’s eyes were for seeing and true to him.

The Mother turned Her belly slowly under the fire-eye, like a giant spear-tooth rolling over in death, but the young ones would be getting hungry. Esk crouched, ready to slide down the slope into the trees again when something caught his eye. A thin wisp of smoke, thinner than a thread, a long way off.

Immediately he saw, his legs began to move, running him in the direction of the rock shelter. The Mother aided his progress, throwing his feet forward from Her sponge-moss belly.

On reaching the rock shelter he shouted for the Shaman. Women crowded round him as he strode breathless to Granla’s place. His woman said, “Hunting. My man is hunting.”

Reng stamped up to his half-brother, loudly demanding to know the news.

“Take me to Granla,” was all Esk would say. “Take me to the Shaman.” He would not hand over his precious news to Reng no matter what happened.

For once Reng would have to take a share of any glory that was available, and not steal it all for himself.

“Follow me,” he said, snatching an available antler-tipped spear, and began trotting up the slope behind the rock shelf with Esk on his heels. One or two of the men followed the youths.

Reng was the best tracker in the group and he paused only for a second at each fork or crosspath before moving on. A sniff, a touch, and Granla’s track was known to Reng. The boys were fast and before long had left the two men behind. Finally, they broke into a clearing where Granla and the rest of the hunters were standing and conversing after failing to kill their quarry.

“Granla,” shouted Esk. “Someone comes from the Far Place.”

The search for the blame for losing the deer ceased abruptly.

“Who comes?” asked Granla.

“I do not know. I saw the smoke of their fire.”

They clustered around Esk and Reng, quest-killing both youths until it was obvious that only conjecture could follow Esk’s first statement. A fast runner was then despatched towards the newcomers’ camp with instructions to return unseen by them.

The next morning the runner returned, exhausted. A new group was coming, he said, but not like the men of the Gren. They were small, square people with heavy faces and there were many of them, said the runner – a great many.

Paul Levan carefully brushed the sandy soil away from the object with trembling fingers, his heavy-boned hand inept at a task which required a more delicate touch. He could have used the blower, or even the soft lens brush, but he had yearned so long for this moment that he was not going to be robbed of the sensation of uncovering the beautiful lines with his own fingertips.

“Beautiful” was not an adjective everyone would have used to describe the piece of bone resting in his palm, but Levan was an amateur archaeologist, and this particular strip of dead human tissue represented a rise in the ranks of that select band of men who are rich enough to be able to dabble in such time-consuming pursuits. He had found his first human.

Possibly he was excited for no reason. The two inches of lower jawbone in his fingers might have come from a relatively recent occupant of the Earth. He would soon know. If it was human, what then? What, he thought, what kind of human? Homo sapiens sapiens? Homo sapiens neanderthalensis? He did not mind which, so long – just so long – as it was over 30,000 years old. The “dawn of man”, Homo erectus, was too much to hope for. God no, he would be too tempted to use the cliché in his paper. Better the “dusk of man”. Or some such phrase. A tinge of humour, yet serious. A confirmation of his earlier findings in the same location: the flint tools, already layer-dated at around 35,000 years, give or take a few thousand.

Placing the mandible carefully in a plastic bag he then folded a neckerchief around the package. He should have brought a box, he thought, but then how did he know he would find anything today? And what size of box? He had not, in fact, intended to dig today. Richard had wanted a swim and he had brought the boy here, below the site in the Kyrenia mountains. “Don’t fool yourself Levan,” he said quietly. “You knew you’d dig if you came within a thousand yards of the place.”

No box then. He slipped it into the pocket of his safari jacket. The mark of the professional was to be poorly equipped anyway. Only rich amateurs loaded themselves and their hired help with expensive instruments, analysing rods and velvet-lined carrying baskets. Paul Levan hated being taken for what he was. He liked being the small boy fishing with a stick and bent pin.

Levan looked down the wooded slopes to the beach by Snake Island. The boy was still swimming with seemingly limitless energy; practising for a school gala. Paul Levan called to his son.

“Rick! … Richard,” he bawled the second time.

No answer. The wind was against him. An onshore breeze. He had wanted to show the boy the exact spot. Arouse some interest for the father’s hobby in the son. It would have to be later, though, and Richard had not yet been bitten by the bug. He was polite enough, but it was the distant politeness of a fourteen-year-old, wanting to please, yet desperate to be with his peers. Since there was no longer. . .