Shadows Out of Time

“Well…yes, you could say that. It’s not every day I talk to…something like you.” Sean said nothing. Now I felt stupid. I thought, Is this even happening outside my own mind? “You…you’ve also said you’re tormenting Sean like this to learn more about our time period. You’re a historian, in a sense?”

He nodded again. In a sense.

“Then why did it have to be Sean?”

Because he opened himself up to me. He was a willing vessel, nothing more.

“But he had no idea what he was doing.”

That is not our concern. The boy is actually quite fortunate. My intention was to inhabit his body for a greater length of time. But his mind…though primitive…is unusually strong.

I leaned forward, staring into his night-filled eyes. “Take me instead. Let Sean go. I’ll record all the information you need on that…backwater planet of yours.” Sean uttered a word I couldn’t understand, presumably the name of the planet. I said, “I’m afraid I can never pronounce that damn thing.”

Sean laughed. You still do not understand. It is your planet, about four hundred million years ago. We are not bound to any one particular time. The bodies we inhabit in the past are native to your world, but are wholly unlike the species that happens to reign during this era. Your era. He stroked his neck as if fascinated by its texture. Why would you do this for the boy?

“Because I’d rather feel the pain than him.”

Masochism? An emotion unique to your species. An underrated delicacy, I might add. He sighed. Very well, I will do as you request. Your body or the boy’s…it makes very little difference to me.

I suddenly realized I had been holding my breath. “Thank you.”

No need to thank me, my dear lady. Do what you must to release me.

I blew out the candles one by one. In darkness, I reached out and ran my fingertip through the barrier of sea salt. The break was barely half an inch, but that was enough. Possession was immediate.

At first I felt nothing at all. Then: a piercing headache in the exact center of my brain. Something squirmed and kicked like a fetus swimming around inside my skull. I felt myself being pushed out of my body. No, I thought. It’s not supposed to happen this way.

For a moment two minds merged into one. I wasn’t sure if I was human or a strange mixture of plant and insect. I felt the phantom presence of claw-tipped tentacles on either side of my cone-shaped body and four slender stalks on my globular head from which sprouted writhing, flower-like appendages. I watched through a trio of eyes as Sean collapsed onto his back. “Sean!” I yelled, but the name didn’t sound quite right. It didn’t sound English. It didn’t even sound human. It was merely a dissonant series of whistles, like a madman playing a dozen flutes at once.

Then Sean and the room and the Earth itself rippled and melted away. I found myself standing in the midst of a vast vaulted chamber without a ceiling. Or rather, the chamber was so huge the ceiling couldn’t be seen. Above my head hovered a gray mist through which a sea of lights winked intermittently. They could have been artificial lights or distant stars. An onyx obelisk as tall as a three-story building stood upon a granite pedestal with strange symbols carved upon its uneven surface. The obelisk was featureless except for a massive sigil inscribed just below the pointed top. The sigil consisted of thin squiggles in the vague shape of a bee with its wings outspread.

On the far side of the chamber a circular window latticed with iron bars looked out upon an overgrown garden bathed in spectral moonlight. Cyclopean fernlike growths of a sickly, fungoid pallor swayed in the low breeze like nightmarish claws waving at me in a mocking fashion. All the windows and doors resembled Roman arches and were blocked by stout-looking bars. I knew those bars were meant to keep me in. Massive bookshelves filled with ancient tomes lined the basalt walls. Scattered papers and open books lay strewn on a series of pedestals that seemed to be beckoning to me, waiting for me to begin my work.