James Axler - Deathlands 43 - Dark Emblem Read online

  James Axler - Deathlands 43 - Dark Emblem

  Prologue

  The Beginning: Omaha, Nebraska, November, 1896

  Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner was a most striking man-not handsome, but fascinating all the same in the most abstract sense of the word. His countenance came equipped with a head of prematurely gray hair that flowed down to his shoulders, a mouthful of strong, white teeth and a long, thin face with inquisitive bright blue eyes set below an imposingly high forehead. Tall and lanky, his very being vibrated with that special inner glow that marked men of potential greatness.

  Dr. Tanner was one of those gifted few who seemed to literally shoot off sparks while thinking, and that was most of the time, since his mind was always working.

  Indeed, his most attractive attribute lay below the surface. Tanner's most notable feature was the brilliant brain encased in his skull, a mass of tissue containing more education and raw knowledge than any ten of his academic contemporaries. He held two degrees by the age of twenty-five-a doctorate of sci- ence from Harvard, and a doctorate of philosophy from Oxford University in England, along with dozens of other diplomas, honors, awards and accolades. He'd given up framing and hanging them long ago, choosing to let the proof of his many accomplishments rest unattended within a wooden cedar chest in his attic.

  A vain man could have covered four walls with the prizes of his profession, but Tanner wasn't a vain man.

  Pompous at times, but never vain. He was much too practical for vanity.

  Emily Chandler considered herself lucky to have caught him, and she loved her man with all her heart and soul. The woman was gorgeous, a vision in subtle beauty. The skin of her heart-shaped face was creamy white, her flawless complexion the perfect backdrop for her dark eyes and long auburn hair.

  And she was always smiling, a small hidden grin that played on her lips as if she were finding joy from her own private amusements. To the average man of the period, she might have come across as threatening, her shining intelligence inescapable despite her feminine beauty.

  Seen from afar while exiting a Harvard campus library one spring afternoon by a yearning Theo Tanner, she was utterly desirable. When the good Mr. Tanner had opportunity to address a gathering of female students a few weeks later, he gleefully said he opposed the idea that women should ever be allowed to vote in order to raise her ire and gain her attentions.

  He found having her spend many late hours trying to persuade him of his folly to be a much easier way of meeting her than going right up and asking her to accompany him out to dinner or a show. During his younger days of intense study and teaching, he was a gangly twenty-year-old intent on mastering the universe.

  One hour with Emily Chandler and he knew he had at last found something he coveted even more than knowledge, for Theo Tanner had never been in love before. He'd never made the time for romance, spending his years striving forward to better himself, to understand the world and its surroundings, to read, to seek, to know. His quest for knowledge was tempered with caution, hence his twin majors of study and expertise.

  Now, at the age of twenty-eight, he was perched on the cusp of true happiness. In four more years, he'd be present at the turn of the century, and he was only beginning to guess at the marvels the future would bring. Still, daring to venture beyond the mortal coils of the known into the great unknown was the mission of any worthy scientist, but having the proper moral code to know what to do with your discoveries was another matter.

  That was why he had double-majored, taking his second degree in philosophy, staying up all hours of the night and always reading, learning, cramming his already-stuffed mind with even more information. He was constantly talking out loud to himself, a habit from childhood he'd never managed to break, or repeating the words he was reading over and over, in-graining them in his memory for future use, whether on exams or in the real world. Once he learned something, Theo Tanner didn't forget.

  The family made a point of taking a daily walk, either before he left to go to his morning classes, or after Tanner returned home in the afternoon from the university. The air was good for the children, and allowed the family a chance to exercise and share pleasantries with their fellow citi/ens as they strolled the sidewalks surrounding their cozy two-story home. In these early months of winter, Emily would bundle up young Jolyon and place him inside the carriage, while Tanner assisted Rachel in buttoning her coat and wrapping the child's long red scarf around her delicate neck.

  Then the front door would be thrown open, and away the family would go.

  Tanner was wearing his long overcoat with small golden buttons, belted snugly at his waist. A high collar and a cravat were held in place by a gleaming diamond pin. He carried a handsome ebony walking stick with a gold-plated tip and handle to match the buttons of his coat.

  His right arm was linked around Emily's slender limb. She wore her own long overcoat, which came down to her knees and fastened up primly and warmly to her neck. On her head was a wide- brimmed hat with a long cluster of white and gray feathers bobbed on the left.

  "I say, Theophilus, hold up!"

  A stout man in a worn black wide hat and matching cloak was racing up behind them, calling out Tanner's name repeatedly as he came closer, the leather soles of his shoes slapping down on the wooden sidewalk.

  "Hello, Jonathan," Tanner replied easily as the man in the hat and cloak came thudding to a stop. "Glad to see you out bettering your body this brisk morning."

  "Better? My body? Huh. Don't believe so. Whew!" the man gasped back in reply, striving to catch his wind from the sprint.

  "I hope you are well, Mr. Nolan," Emily added.

  "Never better, dear Emily," Jonathan Nolan replied, and tipped his hat to Rachel. "Good morning to you, Miss Rachel."

  "H'lo," the young girl said, embarrassed at the direct attention. She turned shyly and averted her eyes to look across the street. A horse-drawn carriage clattered up and came to a stop at the curb. Rachel loved horses and she admired the creature as it waited patiently for the passenger in the carriage to step down, pay the driver's fare, and then depart.

  "What can we do for you, Jonathan?" Tanner asked. "Working on another scientific article for your newspaper? I would be glad to proof it for you this evening at home after our supper. Anything for a man trying to enlighten his readers. No time right now, I am afraid-unless you want to loan me a copy to take along."

  "No, no article this time, actually, but as always you shall be the first I contact for a quote or to check facts," the overweight man replied. "I just came from Martin's Books and he mentioned the book you ordered had arrived-a first edition of Houseman's A Shropshire Lad."

  Tanner looked puzzled. "I must confess, Jonathan, that while I have long coveted such a volume, I had placed no such order. Martin must be in error."

  "No, Theo, he is not." Emily sighed. "I placed the order. I know you frequent Pages Bookstore, and I tried another in the hopes of avoiding your discovery of my surprise. The book was to have been for Christmas."

  Nolan blushed with embarrassment. "Dash it all, I am terribly sorry. I can-"

  A shrill scream cut him off, and it took a few seconds before Tanner realized the sound was coming from his daughter. A second after his realization, the child gripped his hand with bone-crushing force. Jolyon, his sleep disrupted, also began to wail from the confines of the carriage.

  "Rachel, what is it, child? What?" Tanner thundered, kneeling to reach eye level with the girl. Her eyes were still looking out upon the empty street, the horse and carriage now long gone. He peered out, his eyes searching for what had upset her so, but saw nothing out of the ordinary.

  Nothing at a
ll.

  Tanner canceled his classes at the university for the day, choosing to stay at home with his daughter. He didn't press Rachel for an explanation, instead waiting for the gkl to speak to him when she was ready. The day passed slowly, with Tanner trying to concentrate on a book but failing miserably. Finally, much later mat night, as he tucked his older child into bed, the youngster at last described what had frightened her on the sidewalk.

  "I saw something, Father. In the air." Even at her young age, Rachel was her father's child, and her choice and usage of words were precise.

  "Saw what, dear Child? A bird? Bat? Flying squirrel? What?" Tanner asked, offering up suggestions, none of which seemed to be correct.

  "The air looked odd," Rachel continued. "Like it was hot. And there was an eye in the middle of it."

  Tanner mused over that revelation for a moment.

  "An eye belonging to whom?" he finally asked.

  Rachel was evasive. "A big eye, Father. I think it was looking at me from heaven."

  Even as his mind tried to process what his little girl was telling him. Tanner spoke in calm tones, slipping easily into the patented parental know-it-all mode. "Then, Child, if the eye was from heaven, there is no reason for you to be frightened. After all, logic dictates there is no reason for you to be scared if God is looking down at us."

  The explanation seemed to placate the gkl. "You think so, Father?"

  "I do," Tanner said firmly.

  "Very well, then, Father," Rachel replied sleepily, her memory of the magical eye apparently already vanishing into the depths of her young mind after Tanner's reassurances. "Good night."

  "Good night, Child," he replied and kissed her softly on the forehead.

  "So?" Emily asked when her husband joined her in then1 own bed.

  "We have no cause for fear, my dear one," Tanner remarked as he pulled the heavy down comforter over his body, and quickly explained Rachel's biblically tinged interpretation of what she'd seen hovering in the air.

  "That is sweet," Emily said, snuggling closer to his shoulder. "We must be truly blessed if God is watching us."

  "Aye, indeed," Tanner said sleepily as he placed a comforting arm around his wife. "Blessed."

  So why did his daughter's story nag at him so? Rachel wasn't prone to childish lies or exaggeration. Like her mother, she was quite direct and forthcoming. He found his parental concern battling his scientific curiosity, and determined he'd return tomorrow to the same spot and spend some time observing the area of air that had disturbed his child, thereby satiating both. For while Tanner was a man always fascinated by the unknown, he was a father even more interested in the well-being of his children.

  THE FRIGHT YOUNG RACHEL had suffered cast a pall over the family's usual walks, and with Emily's agreement to stay behind and watch over the children, Theo Tanner had chosen to make these daily excursions alone, always stopping at the same corner where the mysterious organ of sight had previously levitated. He would loiter there for hours, waiting. Each day, he waited longer, making his trips during the same time span in hopes of glimpsing the oculus, yet nothing happened. No shimmering of light, no blinking of an unearthly eyeball, no haze hanging in the air before his own astonished eyes-nothing.

  A week passed without further incident, and Tanner decided he was ready to try the usual daily family outing again. This time, he chose an afternoon for the walk. The air was brisk, yet warm for the climate and time of year. Emily took extra care in bundling up the baby, nonetheless, before placing little Jolyon into the carriage. Tanner placed his hand in Rachel's and down the front steps everyone went. Down and to the right, past the rainbow of color inside Bowman's Flower Shop, the sinfully good aromas emanating from Elliot's Bakery, the Boyd and Hurst and Felts' residences. Turn right again and there was the empty lot with the sign promising a new business establishment soon courtesy of one Mr. Wesley Keith Johnson, Esq., although naught had changed in the past two years since he'd staked and claimed the property.

  Across the way was Pages Bookstore, a small and intimate affair, and the Bluebird Restaurant where he'd consumed many a fine cup of dark bitter coffee. And so on and on, another block, another, and again to the right-more buildings, more homes, more pas-sersby known and unknown, most of whom couldn't resist smiling at the sight of the baby being pushed along. The sound of the baby-carriage wheels was steady on the wooden sidewalk while Rachel skipped along, excited to be out with her mother and father in the late afternoon.

  He'd planned to avoid the comer where Rachel had seen the enigmatic eye, but habit was a hard master to disobey, and since they had fallen into their traditional routine without thinking, soon they were at the same spot once more. As they waited to cross the street, Tanner felt his little girl grip his hand even more tightly.

  "We should stop at market for potatoes, Theo. I'll add them to the stew tonight," Emily remarked. "I should have brought the shopping basket along."

  Her husband didn't reply. His attention was on the spot where Rachel had seen the eye and devil take it all, but was there a strange shimmering hanging there in space and time? A sort of quivering of the air, like the haze of heat on a summer meadow in the midst of a hot July day at noon? Yet, there was no heat in the brisk Nebraska ah--only a queer dryness-a lack of moisture that seemed to be spreading in his mouth and nasal passages.

  "I say...I feel a most definite chill coming on," Tanner muttered, stomping his feet and vigorously rubbing his hands together.

  Emily's brow furrowed beneath the bangs of her auburn hair. "Nonsense, Theo, it is a beautiful af- ternoon. Are you coming down with an illness? Those students of yours. There is no telling what types of germs they bring into the classrooms on a daily basis."

  Tanner smiled at his wife, showing off his beautiful array of teeth, only to discover his intended gesture of reassurance had created the exact opposite effect.

  "Your teeth, Theo, they are chattering," his beloved wife said, a hint of worry coloring her gentle voice.

  He reached up and felt his lower jaw. "Hmm. So they are, so they are," he murmured. Again, he glanced over at the street, but the odd warping of the air was gone. He was torn between asking if Rachel had seen anything and dismissing it immediately, in order to keep from upsetting the girl yet again.

  "My delicate constitution seems to have caught a cold," he finally announced. "Yes, I do not feel all that well, I am afraid."

  "What is wrong, Father?" Rachel asked, peering at her father with the intent gaze of a child.

  "Nothing, dear little one," Tanner lied. "Nothing at all."

  Rachel turned as white as an eggshell. "You saw it, Father! You saw it! You saw it, did you not?"

  Tanner nodded. "Aye, perhaps I did see... something-"

  "More eyes from heaven?" Emily asked in a teasing tone, but before she could add another word she was interrupted by a sound unlike any that she had ever heard in her twenty-seven years; a sound that she would never be able to forget, or rid her memory of. A sound that would take up residence in her dreams; a sucking noise that was cut off by a loud, pithy pop. And then, before the waiting Tanner family, a temporal doorway was torn open, renting the very fabric of time and space.

  This was no wooden door in a frame of the type familiar to the denizens of this particular point in time, nor was it a fanciful air lock of the future, nor even a magic portal. This doorway was something else, something more precise, with accurate angles and deliberate calibrated measurements, hanging suspended in what Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner had always understood to be three-dimensional space.

  What floated within the angles was a darker kind of geometry. This was a gateway via a fourth unknown dimension.

  Later, long after the shock had faded, Tanner would find this route to be one of an infinite number along the currents and eddies swirling within the invisible dimension of time-no time.

  "The eye! God's eye! God's eye! Look, Father! Do you see it? Do you see?" Rachel screamed, a loud piercing sound that stabb
ed at Tanner's wildly pounding heart even as the scientist in his brain looked upon the sight with detached fascination. A mix of dread and fear combined with his wondering about what exactly the eye was, and what the eye had wrought.

  The sun still hung in the sky, but the color of the world changed from light to dark as the door swung open and gave a great cosmic inhalation. The world was now a reverse negative, white on black with an absence of color, the atmosphere thick and cloying.

  And damn it all, but a fog bank had somehow rolled in through the mysterious conduit, obscuring the corner from sight, obscuring those trapped within the swirling mist from even clearly seeing one another, much less the angular obscenity that had appeared in their midst.

  Terror in her throat, Emily reached down and pulled her baby from the confines of the carriage, clutching little Jolyon to her breast. Minus her grip on the handle and the baby's weight, the carriage skittered away, pulled by the suction. Her new hat flew from her head and instantly vanished in the mist. "Theo!" she screamed. "Where are you?"