The Time Collector

by Gwendolyn Womack

  A violent tremor struck and Sun lost her balance, falling back onto a jagged bed of crystals. Her head landed on the rocks. Roan cried out and made his way to her.

  “Everyone!” Oscar yelled from the entrance, a good fifty feet away. “You need to come back! We’re having tremors.”

  “Someone’s hurt!” Roan called back to him. “Get help!”

  Oscar stepped inside the cave and saw the lights. He made the sign of the cross. “Dios mío.” He swore and hurried back to the antechamber.

  Roan yelled to Stuart over the deafening hum. “Stuart! We need to help Sun.”

  The ooparts were conjuring an electrical storm. A wild wind whipped around them. Stuart yelled back, “No! I can’t leave! You go!”

  Roan made his way over to him as carefully as he could, the ground threatening to give way. “Stuart, Nema’s gone. The ooparts can’t take you back.”

  Stuart turned to him in shock that he’d said Nema’s name—that he understood. “How can you say that? This is a portal.”

  “We don’t know what this is!” Roan tried to make him see reason.

  But Stuart was beyond it. “I don’t care! I have to try.” The entire cave was vibrating like a rocket ready for liftoff, and a crystal beam nearby fell, heavier than a tree in a forest. The ground beneath the ooparts began to crack.

  “Stuart, we have to go!” Roan tried to pull him away.

  “No!” Stuart rose up and lunged at Roan’s chest. Roan sidestepped, his body acting on instinct. Stuart charged at Roan again. Roan tried to wrestle him to the ground, but Stuart stumbled backward and the floor beneath him gave way like an avalanche.

  Roan dropped to the ground and slid forward, using a deft bouldering move to grab Stuart’s hand and keep him from falling.

  Stuart’s body dangled over the ledge. The floor had suddenly become a cliff opening to a chasm.

  When Roan held Stuart’s hand, his breath hitched inside of him. Roan’s father had always told him, You never know a man until you shake his hand. All these years Roan thought he had known Stuart. Now Stuart’s hand was showing him the past and everything that he had done.

  NORTHERN TERRITORY, AUSTRALIA

  ONE MONTH AGO

  MIGUEL WAS THE ONE WHO HAD SUGGESTED that he and Stuart visit Australia to see if the ooparts would respond. The Aborigines believed time flowed in a circle and every event left a record on the land. Miguel’s theory was that the ooparts might react to the collective imprint embedded within one of their ancient sites.

  They’d been traveling through the outback for two weeks and had journeyed to the Pinnacles, unearthly sculptures made of seashells from earlier epochs; the mysterious caves of the Blue Mountains; and Wilpena Pound, an amphitheater made of mountains that had formed a ring, creating the most magical stage on Earth.

  “It’s like tuning a radio,” Miguel explained. “When you’re in the middle of nowhere you get only static, but what if there is a certain place on Earth where these ooparts can get good reception and react?”

  Stuart had been willing to buy into the idea, but so far it had yielded no results. Uluru was their final destination. The famous monolith had been a sacred site of the Aborigines for twenty-two thousand years. The collective imprint within the stone was immense. But the red rock didn’t make the ooparts react either.

  The trip was a clear disappointment. Before heading back to Alice Springs for their flight, they decided to venture deep into the Northern Territory, where Stuart had heard there were good climbs. Bouldering always helped him to refocus. Miguel could stay at camp and read his books while Stuart went climbing and tried to clear his head. Sometimes his best ideas came during that Zen-like window when he was gripping the rock with his bare hands.

  Stuart scaled every rock face for two days without inspiration. No new thoughts or ideas were coming to him. He’d hit a dead end with the ooparts, and tomorrow they would be going home. Never had he felt so defeated. He had devoted the last three years to unraveling the ooparts’ riddle. He’d used up all his savings, mortgaged his house to the limit to find the answers. He was almost out of funds and becoming desperate.

  “There has to be a pattern that we’re missing,” Miguel said, laying out their sleeping bags at the campsite.

  Usually Miguel and Stuart would go back and forth with theories at the campfire over dinner. But tonight, for once, Stuart didn’t feel like talking. He brooded, watching the flames as he sipped his whiskey, and let Miguel ruminate on how there had to be some kind of order behind the locations where the ooparts had been discovered. He couldn’t believe the phenomenon was random.

  “We just need to figure it out.” Miguel joined him at the fire and sat down. “Early next year we can pick another place and try again. I can take time off from the university. Maybe we should go back to Wiltshire for the next season of crop circles.”

  Stuart tried to swallow his frustration. For the past two years they’d visited sacred sites, walked crop circles with their ooparts in hand, and been around the world hoping to land on the answer. What his friend was suggesting didn’t give him any hope.

  “We need to know,” Miguel said softly as he stared at the fire, “what the ooparts and crop circles are trying to tell us. They’re like a compass leading us down a path, left by someone ‘out there’”—Miguel pointed up at the stars—“or our ancient selves or our future selves. Maybe it’s all one and the same.” He went to get into his sleeping bag. “One day, Stuart, one day, my friend,” he said with a smile, “we will travel far beyond this world. The earliest known maps are of the stars, not here. Don’t give up.”

  Stuart didn’t say a word. He really didn’t give a damn about the stars or ancient maps. He was fed up with theoretical talk and whimsical ideas—what he wanted was to bend time.

  If only Roan were with them, they’d have had a better chance. Roan could return heirlooms generations removed from their descendants. No one in their group was that good at unraveling imprints. Roan could read every imprint embedded within the ooparts and find the answers they were missing. The problem was that Roan was afraid to touch anything too old and trigger another heart attack. Somehow Stuart had to convince him the risk was worth it.

  Miguel’s scream jarred him from his thoughts. Stuart jumped to his feet, spilling his whiskey into the fire. The flames shot up like a spire. In the light he could see Miguel in his sleeping bag, kicking with his legs, trying to get it off.

  Stuart ran over to him and dragged Miguel out by the armpits—an angry snake slithered away into the darkness.

  Miguel had crawled into his sleeping bag without shaking it out first. The snake had been inside, making its bed for the night.

  Terror gripped Stuart as Miguel writhed and clutched at his leg, his body suffering an anaphylactic reaction.

  Stuart ran to his bag to get the shot of antivenom. His hands were shaking so hard he had trouble opening the emergency pouch. He didn’t even know where to administer the shot—he’d never had to before.

  “Hold on, Miguel! Hold on!”

  Frantic, he rolled up Miguel’s pants. The bite was small and barely noticeable, but Miguel was already gripped with paralysis from the neurotoxins in the venom.

  He choked and grabbed at his neck as his airway closed.

  One antivenom shot wasn’t enough. Stuart ran to his bag and found the other two. He gave them both to Miguel within seconds, but it didn’t matter.

  Miguel’s heart had stopped.

  * * *

  Time seemed to stand still. The stars looked down on Stuart like thousands of unblinking eyes. He sat numb in disbelief and stared at the dwindling flames of the fire. The unforgiving wilderness surrounded the firelight’s edge, and its stark shadows echoed the violence of the night.

  Stuart didn’t know what to do. Deep shock had made his mind go blank. The thought of having to deal with the authorities and ship Miguel’s body back to Lima was so overwhelming, the whole night began to feel like a dream.

&
nbsp; Perhaps it was for this reason that a doorway in his mind opened and allowed a thought to slither in, just like the snake who had been waiting to strike. And by dawn’s first light, Stuart had a plan and had convinced himself that Miguel’s death would not be in vain.

  Wrapping Miguel’s body in his sleeping bag, Stuart dragged him from their campsite. Stuart had explored all the deep canyons and crevasses on the mountain for the past two days, and he knew the perfect burial place for his friend.

  A three-foot crack in the rock face led to a hidden cavern below. He lowered Miguel’s body through the opening and winced when it landed. He threw Miguel’s gear into the crevasse too, keeping only Miguel’s oopart.

  Stuart crawled into the tight space and climbed down without a rope. It took three hours to shovel the dirt and bury Miguel’s body and his things. Then Stuart slept beside the grave and rested his arms. He’d need all his strength to boulder back up.

  It would be weeks until anyone realized Miguel was missing. Before that, Stuart would contact François in the guise of enlisting the psychometrist’s help with their research. Earlier in the year François had shared that he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer that was inoperable. Stuart’s mind began working through all the scenarios of how he could speed the poor man’s death without causing any pain. The key was to make the suicide look suspicious to the group. He’d be doing François a favor by ending his suffering early, a euthanasia of sorts. Then Stuart needed to disappear, stage his own kidnapping, and send an SOS to Roan. If Roan believed every psychometrist was at risk, including himself, then Roan would help him without question.

  As the plan took shape a strong sense of purpose filled him. If finding the source of the ooparts’ power gave him the ability to return to the past and save Nema from dying, he was willing to pay any price.

  * * *

  By the time Stuart arrived at François’s house in Avignon, he had cycled through countless excuses for what he was about to do, but none of them gave him absolution: he would be killing a man. He’d done an anonymous internet search on a library computer to find the best poisons and had one of them in his pocket, ethylene glycol.

  François spent a day going over Stuart’s research. He held Hanus’s key and Descartes’s ring multiple times. Stuart also showed him Miguel’s crop circles file.

  “How is Miguel?” François asked.

  The question was innocent, but Stuart felt the blood rush to his head. Stuart couldn’t hear the words he was speaking as he said Miguel was fine and busy in Lima—Miguel wished he could have joined them and sent his best.

  When François touched the key and the ring, Stuart held his breath, hoping François would summon the answer to the whole riddle and save Stuart from having to carry out his plan. But the poor man was in such pain, his shaking hands could barely discern an imprint. He was too weak from the cancer.

  “I’m sorry, Stuart, I cannot be of more help,” François said with regret, handing the ooparts back. “Has Sun looked at these? She’s better than any of us.”

  “Not yet.” Stuart gave a tight smile, knowing he would have to contact the Korean woman soon. He’d never been comfortable around Sun and was afraid she would see right through him. He’d have to tread carefully with her.

  That evening Stuart snuck the powerful tincture into François’s cognac. When Stuart went to hand him his drink, he hesitated. “If you could go back in time and save the love of your life from dying, would you risk everything to do it?”

  The Frenchman smiled, a gleam of his younger self in his eyes. “Absolutely.” Then he took his glass, raised it in the air, and drank.

  38. THE CRYSTAL

  STUART DANGLED FROM THE LEDGE, his hand in Roan’s. He looked up at Roan, his eyes begging for forgiveness that wasn’t Roan’s to give.

  “Only you could get us here,” Stuart pleaded. “The others couldn’t. I couldn’t. I knew you wouldn’t try unless the threat was real. It was the only way.” He choked on the words.

  Roan couldn’t fathom what Stuart had done. Roan had witnessed the darkest imprints through history, left by those who were willing to sacrifice others to achieve their gain. Now he was holding the hand of such a man, a man who had been his friend.

  There was no time to process the shock. Above them the electromagnetic storm was narrowing into a single point like a vacuum, forming a vortex of energy.

  They had to get out. Whatever crimes Stuart may have committed, Roan wasn’t willing to let him die.

  “Hang on!” He tried to pull Stuart up, but he didn’t have enough leverage.

  The only thing Roan could grab on to was a crystal.

  He made a split-second decision—he grabbed on to the crystal and used his strength to hoist Stuart up. How many times had they helped each other reach a summit?

  Stuart crawled away from the ledge, gasping, and rolled onto his back. The crystal Roan was holding anchored him to it like a weight, its energy a magnet he couldn’t let go of. Within the crystal an endless imprint stretched out before him, a strata of time hundreds of thousands of years old. It began pulling him like the powerful tide of an ocean.

  “Can’t … I can’t,” Roan whispered, trying to resist, but his body was frozen.

  Stuart stood up, riveted by the vortex forming out of midair behind them. A pinwheel of energy was sparking like a Tesla coil. Stuart began to climb the nearest crystal pillar to reach it.

  Roan struggled to stay conscious, knowing what Stuart was about to do. “Don’t.”

  Stuart looked down at Roan and gave him a sad smile. “Sorry, mate. I’ve got to. Maybe you’ll find where I’ve gone in an imprint someday.” Then he jumped.

  The vortex closed like a wink with a brilliant flash, and Stuart vanished. The cave plunged into darkness.

  Roan couldn’t hang on any longer. The imprint within the crystal was overtaking him as the cavern’s heat pressed on his chest in a vise, making it harder and harder for him to breathe.

  “Roan.” Sun had regained consciousness. She called to him but her voice sounded muted to his ears.

  Inside his brain ninety billion nerve cells with their trillion synaptic connections were all firing at once like a solar storm, and a light within his mind’s eye opened. The last thing he felt before he stepped through its door was Sun’s hand in his. She’d crawled over to him and taken it.

  Sun had made the journey to the other side once before with her grandmother. Like Princess Bari, the first shaman who guided souls to the otherworld, she was coming with him. They were dying.

  39. THE MOUNTAIN

  MELICENT LOOKED OUT THE WINDOW of the passenger van, unable to see a thing. The Earth was swallowing them whole.

  The ground beneath them began to shake. They’d been feeling the vibrations for most of the drive, but this tremor was the worst yet. Their driver and guide, Elias, swore and pulled over. The shaking lasted almost a minute.

  Melicent and Parker were in the back of the van. Holly was up front with Elias, and Jocelyn was in the seat behind them. They had rushed through putting on their ice suits and were on the way to the Crystal Cave with less than five minutes to go.

  “I thought there weren’t earthquakes this far north,” Holly said.

  Elias shook his head. “There aren’t.”

  “Then what is it? An explosion in the mine?”

  Elias didn’t know and seemed reluctant to put the car back into gear.

  Jocelyn prompted him, “We need to keep going.”

  When another tremor didn’t follow, he muttered “Mierda” and started driving again.

  Parker leaned over to Melicent and whispered, “I don’t want to die down here.”

  “We won’t,” Melicent tried to reassure him.

  “I love you,” Parker said. “In case we do die.”

  “We won’t,” she said again, her stress levels soaring when another tremor hit and they had to pull over. Rocks rained down, rattling the van. Parker shouldn’t have come with her. What
was she thinking bringing him along? Her mother would never forgive her if something happened to him.

  When they started driving again the lights on their ice suits came to life. Parker held his arm out. “My suit is glowing like a superhero.”

  “Parker, can we be quiet until we get there?” Melicent was about to lose her mind with worry.

  The radio crackled in the silence. A man was speaking in Spanish and sounded distraught. Melicent only understood a smattering of what he was saying from the classes she’d taken in high school Spanish: someone was hurt and needed help.

  Her hands went to her mouth. Roan.

  Elias radioed back telling him he was almost there.

  “What’s going on?” Holly demanded.

  “We have a situation from the tremors,” Elias said, tight-lipped. “Oscar said one person’s hurt, possibly two.”

  “How many people are down there?” Holly asked sharply. “There’s only supposed to be two.”

  “The man’s brother joined them.”

  “Oh my God,” Jocelyn said, sounding dazed. There was only one person Roan would call his brother.

  Stuart was with them.

  Melicent gripped her middle, on the verge of being sick. She didn’t know if she could meet the person who had tried to kill her. It was more than a nightmare—now he was with Roan. Had Stuart hurt him?

  Parker put his arm around her. No one said a word the final minute of the drive.

  When they arrived, Oscar ran toward them in a panic, launching into an outburst in Spanish.

  “What’s he saying?” Holly jumped in. “What’s happened?”

  “There’s some kind of geomagnetic activity in the cavern.”

  Melicent’s and Parker’s eyes met, both thinking the same thing. The ooparts.