Days Gone By Chapter 6—Light from Dark
Novel Excerpt by Abram Dress
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Henry Avery’s Story
Madagascar
October, 1695
We sailed Fancy south-west with a skeleton contingent of only my most trusted crew. Besides those hearty souls, two others joined us: the Countess Ali-Mariah and the thorn in my side, Jack Langley. The Countess made space in my stateroom, while I bunked with the navigator and begrudged my decisions to ally with a woman of such fierce and undeniable needs. Jack Langley, my dear departed bride’s brother, joined us as well. I recruited him after my dear Margaret’s incident. An academic of no physical or martial prowess, he was bereft about his sister. Although there has never been a man more poorly made for life on a pirate vessel, we accepted him.
Why would I recruit such a man? “You will need him if you are to recover what you lost,” that siren song in my head had promised. So I obeyed.
The winds and weather were favorable, and the news that would turn me into one of the most hunted men in history had not yet traveled to the ears of bounty hunters. Our destination was the northwest tip of a trading colony island called Madagascar, where the Countess expected to find the first piece to our quest.
The Countess has been quite direct in her guidance, one of those first nights, as Jack and I joined her in the stateroom that had once been mine. “It will be a stone, Captain. Perhaps an obelisk. Large, immovable, marked with runes, possibly guarded.”
“What am I to do with this stone?”
“Break it. Bring the pieces to me. The largest pieces you can recover.”
Break and steal something of immeasurable value? That I could do.
Eager as she was to recover pieces of this stone, this thing she called the Stone of Recollection, she was not eager to join me for my island adventure.
And so it was, less than a month after my daring and heroic heist, I stood on a tropical beach, holding a flag of truce, while a dozen and more island warriors waved various primitive but decidedly pointy implements of murder in my direction. A dense forest of palms, banana trees, and octopus trees hindered my view into the island, while water from the Indian Ocean lapped at my boots. I could not know how many more warriors hid within that foliage, ready to murder me at the slightest provocation.
I waved the truce flag higher with one hand while beckoning my companions and guards to stand down with the other. They stood at the ready, but careful to make no dangerous movement. Jack cowered behind my men. How it irked me that the Countess had insisted I bring him.
I pleaded with the natives to show me the way to the Stone of Recollection. Although they did not speak to me in English, I was hopeful that the various traders who passed through had at least supplanted their rudimentary primitive language with a good Christian method of communication, so I tried many of them. Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French. I even attempted the distinctly non-Christian Arabic. I offered money, trinkets, and a myriad of riches.
They were uninterested, but did not attack. This dangerous impasse held for several minutes, until finally a middle-aged woman of extremely odd form and demeanor approached from the wooded edge of the beach.
She was certainly not a native, as her complexion was that of a northern European race and her hair colored closer to wheat than oak. Her Creator had harshly chiseled her facial features, and a trio of aged, jagged scars marred the left side of her face, as though from a beast’s claws.
She wore clothing that I did not recognize from any area I had visited in my many travels: a snug fitting tunic of an unusual material, shiny like silk but much more flexible. Her body-hugging trousers were or a similar material, lewd in the degree to which they did not hide her form. It would have been titillating had she not been so unappealingly lean and muscular for one of the fairer sex.
Of most importance, she carried a musket I had never seen before, of impossibly complex and detailed engineering. She did not, at least for the moment, direct the dangerous end at me, but she held the device as though familiar with its use.
A dangerous woman then. My blood heated.
She whispered a few words as she approached. The natives stepped away with their heads bowed in reverence, but their weapons held at the ready.
I hefted the truce flag higher and raised my other hand in peace.
She came to a stop about ten feet from me and assessed me stem to stern. Then she held my eyes and waited.
“Good day, my lady.”
She tilted her head curiously, then said to me in an accent I didn’t recognize, “English. Okay. Whatever.” She looked around at the sun shimmering on the ocean. “Yeah, it’s not a bad day, I guess. Who are you?”
“My name is Henry Avery. It is my greatest pleasure to meet you.”
She lowered the weapon and smiled at me with the whitest, straightest teeth I had seen on any human north of thirty years of age.
“Oh, it’s you!”
She turned to the natives and said a few more words to them. I didn’t understand the language. I had learned from a young age that native peoples were not to be respected and their primitive, guttural languages were not to be learned. How the years have proved me wrong in so many ways. Whatever she said put them at ease and they relaxed their combat stances.
Then she spoke to me again in English, “You are looking for the Stone of…” Her brow furrowed and she gnawed at her lower lip for a moment as though searching for the right word. “Memory, Recall, Recollection.” She nodded, then laughed beautifully and madly. “Funny word to have trouble remembering, am I right?” She paused as I stared in confusion. “Yes, anyway the Stone of Recollection. Come with me. I’ve been guarding it for so long. Or perhaps not … guarding. Providing company?” She harrumphed and blew a strand of dark-wheat hair from her face. “I’m Becca. Re…” Another pause. “Rebecca. Don’t bring all those people. Just you.”
I was uncomfortable with this directive, as I knew that the cutlass and pistol I carried at my waist would do little to fend off a horde of ravaging native warriors. But, with little to lose and feeling a certain affinity for this odd woman, I countered with, “Good lady, might I bring one companion? This man, Jack Langley, is also seeking the stone and will provide significant support for my investigation.”
Rebecca stared at Jack for some time. He was not an intimidating man, slight of build and sheepish of demeanor. She shrugged. “Fine. You can bring him.” She slung the musket over her shoulder and marched towards the jungle. I barely heard her add, “He doesn’t last, anyway.”
The warrior parts of my brain wanted to ask her about the odd weapon. The survival parts wisely led me to hold my tongue. Her native escorts fell in step to either side of her, and Jack and I fell in step behind.
Our group walked for about an hour on trails that I could barely perceive. We walked mostly in silence, though Rebecca occasionally spoke a handful of words to her escorts and one or two would scamper off into the jungle for some task before returning minutes later.
At one point, I spoke up, asking where we were going and how much longer until we arrived.
Rebecca halted the entire group then, looked at me with a frustrated glare that I would normally associate only with a spurned lover, unslung the rifle, and said, “We’ll get there when we get there. Stop… stop talking. I’m trying to … help.” She seemed to strain for the words, not as though she struggled with the English language, but as though she struggled to make her brain and mouth connect.
Jack and I maintained a respectful and self-preserving silence for the rest of the journey. The trails wound higher up the central mountain, possibly an old volcano, that was the primary landmark on the island. The surrounding jungle was smothering, and my aging seaman’s legs were becoming weary from the uncommon exercise.
At long last, the trail widened into a cleared bluff that overlooked the jungle and the ocean beyond. Several wood and mud huts lay in a circular pattern around a large central bonfire with numerous racks containing drying fruits and meats. Perhaps a dozen native women and children meandered about, cooking, playing, building. They stopped briefly to look at us newcomers before continuing their tasks.
To the outer edge of the circle of huts, nearest to the bluff, was a tent made of some type of odd fabric, not dissimilar to the clothing Rebecca wore. There were metallic containers in front of it, as well as containers of another substance that looked like smooth white or blue wood. A pair of wooden tables in front of the tent had various types of machinery laying on them–nothing that I had ever seen.
But all of this was tangential to the most interesting thing. On the bluff, partially obscured by the tent, loomed a tall obelisk covered in carved letters, but not in any alphabet I had ever seen. The obelisk appeared to be carved from the very stone of the bluff beneath it, but the setting sun peaked out behind the obelisk, and the rays of light reflected off metallic chunks, like polished steel seams within the stone.
“That’s your stone,” Rebecca said. “It’s … pretty, and it doesn’t work so well. And it can kind of… it can get you stuck.”
“So it begins!” I exclaimed and slapped Jack on the back.
He grinned back at me and clapped his hands together in a most effeminate way.
Rebecca stared a while at the two of us. “You’re very excited… for dumb reasons. It’s late. Go to sleep.” She struggled to speak, even worse than earlier. Was she tiring? While the hike was exhausting, it was barely early evening. My muscles were worn, but my mind was still at peak.
Rebecca wandered away from us towards the tent. When she got to the entrance she looked around, confused, then dropped the rifle, tripped into the tent, and closed the curtains. A villager jogged over and picked up the rifle, carefully setting it on a table near the tent’s entrance.
Jack was infatuated with the stone and had noted none of Rebecca’s odd behavior, but I was quite interested in the situation. What was wrong with her? She had seemed fairly lucid on the beach, but now she was a bumbling simpleton. I would speak to her in the morning–perhaps she was just of weak constitution and her brain grew tired in the evening.
For now, it seemed she was going to leave us unsupervised with the object of our quest. For that, at least, I was briefly thankful for simpletons.
The next morning I learned that it wasn’t lack of sleep that befuddled Rebecca. She barely recognized me, offered nothing but a confused “‘Sup?” by manner of greeting, then sat on the bluff staring out over the ocean, unwilling to engage.
Over the next few days, the situation was mostly the same. The natives provided us food when we were hungry and propped up a makeshift tent of branches and leaves to sleep in. In the evenings we huddled in blankets and during the day we investigated the stone and the surrounding area.
Jack perused the runes that covered the stone top to bottom, scribbling furiously in his notebook all day, occasionally offering cryptic and useless insights as to what he had discovered. I took a more mechanical review, determining the location of the stone would simply not do and trying to understand how I might remove it from this location, transport it to the ship, and bring it to a place where real scientists and arcanists could make it work.
Rebecca, for her part, was of little use, the rare times she would share even a word with me. “Do you ever get something on your hand, then try to smell it, and accidentally hit yourself in the nose?” she would say. Or, “Some people call Mary Kay a pyramid scheme, but I for one have made a lot of money selling their products… not money for myself of course…” before wandering off confused. Or, “The second amendment protects my right to use pepper spray, and you can pry that spray bottle from my cold, nicely manicured dead hands.”
I did learn some things from her, but I would always question the veracity of any of her claims. She said she was from another time and place. Through our splintered conversations I was able to extrapolate that she was from one of England’s colonies in the Americas, which somewhat explained her fractured mind.
When I asked for information about some of the odd devices and fabrics she had in and around her tent, and on her body, she answered with nonsense riddle words like “It’s plastic, but not recycled so I think that it might have been bad of me to purchase,” or “Lululemon is very expensive, but you really get what you pay for if you need something that will still make your butt pop when you travel through time and space,” or “The AR-15 seems to work well, but I really do have better luck with various models of pepper spray because it is a better seasoning than two-two-three Remington. Better mouth feel, ya know?”
Whatever had happened to her had obviously crippled her mind, even more than I would have expected from a colonist. Alas, my attempts to find out more about her by snooping around her tent were met with anger from the natives, who seemed to be very protective of the woman.
I eventually managed to convince Rebecca to help me send a note to my ship to let them know that we were safe, and to send some materials to us to help with the investigation. The next day two of the natives returned to the camp with our requested materials, academic supplies for Jack and excavation supplies for me. I was worried that as I started digging around the stone with shovel and pickaxe that Rebecca or the natives might intercede, but Rebecca just stood there watching me dig and chewing on her hair.
The digging was fruitless. No matter how deep I went the stone just kept expanding, as though it was part of the very base of the mountain itself. I couldn’t crack any part of it, or even scrape it with shovel, pick, knife, or, as I found out in a desperate attempt that made Rebecca jump and then laugh uproariously, with pistol shot.
Jack’s research and note taking also seemed fruitless. We would converse throughout the day about our discoveries, but he was no closer by the time we fell into exhausted sleep on the fifth night than he was on the first day.
The next morning, however, the world and my understanding of it changed in such a way that I could never go back.
“It’ll happen today, Mister Avery.” Rebecca’s eyes were perfectly clear. Her voice was steady and there was not a hint of frenzy or stutter. “You can tell by the way the morning light hits the series of reflecting facets at the stone’s apex. It creates a pattern. Something about that pattern indicates where and when you’ll travel, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to read it or, more importantly, how to manipulate it.”
“You seem unusually lucid, Miss Rebecca.”
“Miss Michaels. Rebecca Michaels. I think I didn’t introduce myself very well the other day.”
“You certainly seem in a stronger control of your mental faculties this morning, Miss Michaels.”
“The haze goes away for a while when this happens. It may be something to do with the connection to my home. The haze comes back quickly when it’s over, too.” Her eyes welled up. “I’ve been here a damn long time, Avery. I just want to go home, but… Come on, if you two want to see how this works then you’ll want to get set up pretty quick. Maybe you’ll figure out something I couldn’t.”
Jack and I rushed to gather our things from the leaf tent and jogged after Rebecca to the stone. The patterns she had mentioned were indeed noticeable, as though the various facets were designed to reflect light to illuminate specific letters or words on the stone.
I traced my fingers along the glowing runes and shivered as my hair and beard stood up as though I were heading bow first into an electric storm.
Meanwhile, Jack wrote furiously in his journal, diagramming the jumping of the light. He looked up at Rebecca, “While you’re able to think and speak, what do you know about those symbols?”
“Not as much as I’d like, unfortunately. Certainly not enough to read them. I had a professor in…in my previous life. My real life. He was searching for something like this and the symbols here are similar to those inscribed on an old artifact he found. He thought it was a precursor, or perhaps a branch leading from, or to, ancient Sumerian. I don’t know if that’s true, but it would track with some of his research.”
“Do you recall what the writing on your professor’s artifact meant?” Jack continued. “Were there any of the same symbols? Sometimes pictographic languages like this…”
Rebecca put her hand over Jack’s mouth. “Look, maybe we should chat later. Right now you should hold on to something.”
The refracting light illuminated the line of symbols into a continuous string of text. A jolt hit my hand and threw me back a step. I stared at the stone, but my peripheral vision was swimming.
I pulled my eyes from the stone and almost vomited as the forest and bluffs around me spun as though I had imbibed too much rum. Jack gagged beside me and his scrambling hands found my arm to steady himself. Soon, a splattering of Jack’s vomit on his boots replaced the gagging.
Rebecca held onto the edge of the stone, muttering something like, “Forward this time. Faster than normal. Maybe a hundred…”
I soon lost track of her words as my head throbbed in confusion. Seasons passed in less than a second, the village faded away to be replaced by jungle, then different, strange buildings, then wasteland, then jungle again.
In an instant, the world stopped.
I collapsed, dragging Jack down with me.
Rebecca still stood, both arms hugging the remnants of the standing stone. The top of the stone was gone, just a few feet above her head, as though someone with the same intentions as I had had with the pickaxe had been more successful.
I stumbled back to my feet and looked around.
Jack was still on the ground, emptying what little was left in his stomach.
“What in the name of our Lord and Savior has just happened, Rebecca?”
Rebecca took a couple of stumbling steps away from the stone. “After my time. Must be. The stone is broken, it wasn’t broken when I found it. Felt like a few hundred years. I was counting. One one thousand two one thousand. A few hundred years, probably 2200 or 2300. Yeah, look!” She pointed into the jungle where the remnants of a solid stone building hid beneath years of overgrowth. “Oh God, this could be it! I met the owner of that house. I think that was…” She rubbed at her temples. “See, that was maybe 2245. Nice family. They were military people. Had a shower. God, I needed that shower.”
2245? What was she talking about? “Tell me what is happening.”
Jack pulled himself up to his knees, wiping vomit from his beard. “It is time travel, Henry! This is the future!” He staggered to his feet, eyes wide as a child’s on Christmas morning. “We saw the time go by! The world changing!”
“Yeah, your friend has it. But we can’t stay long. It’s like we’re on a rubber band. Something ties us to the stone in that particular time, and when the stone decides it’s time to go back we go back, whether we’re ready to or not.” She blushed. “Even if we’re right in the middle of a really nice shower.”
“What can we do, then? How much time do we have?”
“I’m not sure, maybe five minutes, maybe a few hours. I’ve never had more than a few hours. The stone decides, based on how the light hits it, I think. Maybe based on its location relative to…some magnetic field or some angle of the sun or alignment of the planets. But I had an idea, back in 2245 when I met that family.”
“What was your idea?”
“The stone pulls us back. There’s like a… convergence of time or something, and that stone is like an anchor.” She was walking quickly towards the ruins of the house. Jack and I followed. “So, if we could move the anchor…”
“You could perhaps adjust the… convergence,” Jack said. “Maybe you could control where you went and when you came back?”
“That’s what I’m thinking. But the dang stone is immovable,” she said.
We pushed through the remains of an old door overgrown with vines. Rebecca moved as though she knew her destination, mumbling to herself about “he promised” and “could this really be happening” and “maybe the dirty old pirate really was the key.”
After a few minutes exploring the ancient rooms we discovered what Rebecca was looking for. In the floor beneath dirt and sediment and vines hid an old steel trap door. She pried it open and pulled out a small box of shining brushed metal.
“One-way communication through hundreds of years is tough, but it looks like they found my message.”
“What’s in the box?”
“He called them tactical thermal explosives.” Rebecca popped open the box and inside were a dozen metallic orbs with odd ridges and protrusions. “The husband, Major was his name or maybe rank. After I'd explained my odd predicament, and my idea for the stone, he mentioned these. Said they’d blow the shit out of anything. Promised to leave them for me somewhere safe.”
The stone walls of the house shifted and shimmered. I felt as though a strong force pulled me back towards the stone and I stumbled.
“Hold on tight,” Rebecca said. “The trip back is faster and a lot worse.”
I would have to take her at her word, because I blacked out within seconds.
“This seems like a bad idea,” Jack said.
He stood as far from the stone as possible while still being close enough to complain about the idea being a bad one. Rebecca sat on my stout shoulders so she could reach high enough on the standing stone to tie off the rope which held a dozen of those tactical thermal grenades.
We had collaborated to place them strategically, hoping to cleanly crack the top half of the stone off at a point where the remnant would be manageable by a few strong men. My knowledge of explosives was great. At least, explosives with which I’d had experience during my years at sea. But these were of a sort that were entirely new to me. I had set one off, with Rebecca’s guidance, to see what I was working with and the incredible damage potential the tiny devices held shocked and excited me.
I grunted as Rebecca swayed to her right and giggled. We needed to hurry if she was going to be of any use to us–her mind was already slipping back into the chaotic state it had been when we first met her. “If you have a better idea, then now would be the time to share it, Mister Langley.”
His passivity annoyed me. We’d discussed the plan in depth. Rebecca was desperate to escape her predicament, I was very clear that the Countess needed only some large chunks of the stone. We had explosives that would make the gods themselves piss their trousers.
The plan was so simple.
“I don’t have to have a better idea to recognize a bad one,” Jack harrumphed.
“This is the best…” Rebecca’s thighs tightened around my neck. “We’ve talked about…” Her voice was strained, as though she knew what she wanted to say but couldn’t make the words come out. Then, her thighs relaxed and she cackled, “Shit or get off the pot, Jackie-O!”.
I’d not heard that saying before, but I immediately knew it would become a new favorite.
Jack failed to come up with any new ideas, so Rebecca and I finished attaching the explosives. I gave one last review of the pulling line I had set up, which should pull the activation mechanism on all twelve explosives at the same time.
If done right, we would soon have a detached chunk of the stone which we could move, and allow for better control of the time traveling process. If we failed, then Rebecca would probably go fully insane and I would just continue my search elsewhere. The odds, while long, seemed acceptable to me.
Rebecca, for her part, was smiling and drooling, which I took to mean she also accepted the odds.
We settled ourselves a good fifty feet from the stone, with huts and trees as shelter in case the explosion was bigger than expected. Rebecca had waved the villagers away before we even began setting up the explosives, both using her words and using many frantic gestures and simulated explosion sounds.
All I had to do now was pull the cord. “Are we all ready?”
Jack nodded and scooched back a few more feet.
Rebecca grinned wider and wiped at a line of drool, a rappelling line that connected the crow’s nest of her chin to the top deck that was her shallow bosom.
“Three… two… one…”
The chain reaction created by the grenades and some nascent energy within the stone was more destructive than we had planned.
The pressure wave knocked me back several feet until I slammed into a tree trunk.
I lay there for a time, blind from the flash and deaf from the boom. My sight came back first. A field of destruction lay before me. The blast had leveled tents and huts, flattened bushes, scattered debris from all across the village.
Rebecca lay on her back beside me. Cuts and scrapes covered her face and body. Somewhere in the distance, through the buzzing of a million wasps that had set up nests in my eardrums, I could hear her giggling.
To my other side lay Jack, a broken fragment of the stone fully embedded in his face, covered in blood and brain. Some runes glowed through the gore like molten steel.
I stumbled to my feet and tore the stone fragment from Jack’s face. I didn’t let the annoying thought that might have to tell Margaret of his demise temper my joy. My plan had worked! I laughed in triumph and held the stone up as though it were the captured flag of a plundered merchant ship. I ran into the debris field, looking for more fragments. Then I saw the prize, the full top half of the stone lying beside the base in two huge pieces.
“Rebecca,” I shouted. “We did it!”
Rebecca stood, wavering like a giggling terrified baby dear. She glanced over at the ruins of Jack’s face, frowned a little.
“It is an unfortunate loss…” I began.
Rebecca shrugged. “He was never going to make it anyway. Now let’s get these things to your ship so you can figure out how to get me home.”
“Aye, milady. Let’s get you home.”
After directing the natives to deal with Jack’s corpse, Rebecca requested several of them to help carry the two shattered stone remnants down the mountain. Rebecca’s meeting with the Countess upon our return to Fancy is a story for the ages.
But perhaps a different age, for I see from your face that you and I, Mister Cole, have much to discuss.
TO BE CONTINUED… Chapter 7—Time Irritates All Wounds coming soon
Copyright 2024 Abram Dress