A Red Sun Also Rises

12. WAR

Even now, it seems absurd to me that a structure which spans the vast distances between planets is yet so sensitive that one end of it will follow a crystal no bigger in size than a cigar. Inevitably, my incredulity draws my consideration from the macroscopic to the microscopic, and I think of that which my own species has achieved, and stand aghast at the unprecedented destruction wrought two years ago by the splitting of an atom.

If something so inconceivably small can destroy Hiroshima, why not a crystal shift the end of a fold in space?

My account is almost done.

Five years have passed since my return to Earth.

With my bare hands, I buried the corpse of Yissil Froon in the Koluwaian jungle. His Mi’aata body had been as horribly distorted as his mind, due, no doubt, to his excessive drinking of Dar’sayn. In effect, he’d been consuming his own kind, so I suppose it only fitting that his remains are now rotting on an island where cannibalism was practised.

When I descended the hill and emerged from the undergrowth, I found Koluwai transformed. The tree houses were gone and the town of Kutumakau, though vastly expanded, was almost completely destroyed. What remained of its inhabitants were diseased, half-starved, and many of them badly wounded. I recognised no one, and none showed any interest in me.

After two days, during which I subsisted on fruit, nuts, and berries, I learned from an elderly man that a vicious war between Australia and Japan was raging throughout Melanesia. Koluwai had been, for the space of one catastrophic week, a battleground.

It took a further three days before I was able to persuade a fisherman to sail me to Futuna. From there I made my way with painstaking slowness northwestward past Vanuatu, through the Solomon Islands, and on to Papua New Guinea. The scars of conflict were obvious throughout the region—the smoking hulks of battleships, burning towns, ravaged farms, and, everywhere, the dead.

While approaching Port Moresby, I encountered actual combat for the first time. By now, I knew the war was global, and understood what Yissil Froon had meant when he said the world was filled with panic and antipathy. I also realised that my Germanic surname might cause me trouble, so when I chanced upon a corpse—among the many fallen—that bore some physical resemblance to me, I rather shamefacedly appropriated the young man’s uniform and identity papers and became Private Peter Edwards of the Australian Army.

If there’s such a thing as divine retribution—or karma—I felt the full force of it later that day when I found myself in the middle of an artillery strike. A Japanese shell burst beside me and I knew no more until I regained consciousness two days later in a mobile hospital. My first act was to check that the crystal was still hanging around my neck—which is when I discovered that my left hand was missing. Strangely, I was thankful. Had it been the right, I might have lost the little spirally tattoo on my inner wrist. The thing doesn’t function, of course, but it gives me comfort to speak into it each night before I sleep.

As soon as the rupture opens, I’ll come back. I’ll return to you. I promise.

The crystal was safe.

During the weeks of convalescence, I dwelled upon a fact that Private Edwards’ papers had revealed to me. The Earth I’d returned to wasn’t the one I’d left. There was a time discrepancy. Fifty-three years had passed since I was transported to Ptallaya. Certainly, I hadn’t been away for so long a period. I still have no theory to explain it.

Whether the human race has advanced during those years is a moot point. Civilisation is crumbling. Creativity is employed solely to produce ever more fearsome engines of destruction. Earth’s battle machines demonstrate that those built by Yissil Froon were, indeed, nothing but child’s play. His army wouldn’t have stood a chance.

Perhaps the shock of my injury lingered. All I know is that after I was invalided out of the Army, the next ten months passed in a blur.

I used my meagre pay to travel to Bermuda—a hazardous undertaking due to the many German U-boats that patrolled the Atlantic, and one made almost impossible by emergency restrictions. But by hook and crook I got there, and soon after my arrival, I found employment as clerk to a shipping agent. At the first opportunity, I abused my employer’s trust by offering the less than respectable skipper of a small cargo vessel certain advantages in return for him taking me a thousand miles to the east of the island. We navigated toward an area of the Atlantic that careful research on my part had revealed to be particularly deep and very seldom travelled. It was here I intended to deposit the crystal, out of harm’s way, planning to return to the spot when the rupture became active again.

Two days into the voyage, a torpedo narrowly missed us—our presence in remote waters had attracted the attention of an enemy submarine. We reversed direction and tried to steam back to Bermuda. The German vessel pursued and forced us far to the south and west of the island, until—perhaps two hundred miles north of the Bahamas—it launched another torpedo and hit us broadside. The ship went down.

I—and two crewmembers—survived. We clung to flotsam and gradually succumbed to exposure, hunger, and thirst as the hours turned into days. My companions slipped under the surface. I refused to die.

A British merchantman found me. Its crew lifted me aboard. I put my hand to my chest. The crystal was gone—on the seabed, as I’d intended, but not where I’d intended.

A few weeks later, the ship docked at Southampton. I was back in the land of my birth. Once again, I found work as a shipping clerk.

Time crawled by. The war and a lack of money prevented me from returning to Bermuda, but my job at least allowed me to monitor, to some extent, the region where I estimated the crystal lay, and fifteen months after my return to Earth, accounts of a freak storm came through. Ship captains reported that their compasses had become misaligned or spun wildly while crossing that particular expanse of ocean.

I’d missed my first opportunity to go home, to return to Clarissa.



°



The war ended.

By dint of determination and a frugal lifestyle, I’d saved enough to book passage back to Bermuda on a little independent trading vessel, The Hermes, under Captain Franklin Powell.

We are en route.

Two days ago, we heard by radio chatter that Flight 19 had inexplicably vanished. Fourteen men lost.

I know where they are.

Another fifteen months have passed.

The rupture is active again.

I have nothing more to tell.

We’ll reach Hamilton in a matter of hours.

I can’t help but consider it a figment of my imagination—all the turmoil, misery, and destruction. If I accepted it as fact, I’d lose my mind. I’d have to admit that Hell exists and I am in it. So I disengage. It’s just a nightmare. A terrible fantasy.

Clarissa is waiting.

Only Ptallaya is real.

Only Ptallaya.





Epigram

“Faith is to believe what we do not see; and the reward of this faith is to see what we believe.”

—Saint Augustine



ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mark Hodder is descended from John Angell, a pirate who sailed with Captain Kidd. According to family legend, Angell invested most of his ill-gotten gains in land, particularly in Angell Town near Brixton in London. Anyone who can provide irrefutable legal evidence that they’re descended from Angell will inherit this land, which is estimated to be worth at least 64 million pounds. Over the course of generations, members of the family, seeking to gain the fortune, have lost a fortune trying to prove the link, and hordes of people who have no connection with the family at all have adopted the name in order to make a claim. As a result, the family tree is extremely tangled and a legal connection to the pirate’s treasure is almost certainly impossible to establish.

Mark’s great-grandfather was Doctor Albert Leigh, who went to medical school with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The two men were great friends—they joined the Freemasons together—and Sir Arthur presented Albert with a complete set of Sherlock Holmes first editions, all inscribed: To dear Leigh, from your friend Doyle. They would fetch a fortune at auction today. Unfortunately, upon Leigh’s death in 1944, his housekeeper (who was also his lover and an actress) made off with the volumes and they’ve never been seen since.

Thus it is that two great fortunes have eluded Mark Hodder.

Denied money-for-nothing and the luxury, idleness, and indulgences it would bring, Mark resorted to writing novels. His first Burton & Swinburne adventure—The Strange Affair of Spring Heeled Jack—was published in 2010 and promptly won the Philip K. Dick Award. Two sequels followed, The Curious Case of the Clockwork Man, and Expedition to the Mountains of the Moon.

Mark lives in Valencia, Spain. He’s not rich, but at least he has sunshine.

His blog can be found here: http://markhodder.blogspot.com.es/. He also runs Blakiana, a site dedicated to the fictional British detective Sexton Blake: www.sextonblake.co.uk.