Over the Darkened Landscape - By Derryl Murphy Page 0,88
the fog was rising from the bowls of stew and that it was surrounding and seemingly permeating the people who were eating. They were all making similar, strange noises, not at all simple grunts of pleasure derived from a meal well enjoyed, but primitive, angry rumbles and groans, accompanied by what he thought were words but that were beyond his comprehension.
Samuel then heard a gasp from the doors where Fanny Alice had exited, but before he could turn that way one of the diners looked up at him, and he saw that this was no longer a citizen of his town, or even a citizen of his time. This was a primitive man of some sort, complete with hair and beard and a furious, equally primitive look that announced that Samuel was no longer safe in this room.
On the other side of the tables, Ed gave a strangled cry and fell back to his rear, and for a moment the attention of the primitive man turned that way, but then his eyes were back full bore on Samuel and with a cry and a stream of unintelligible gibberish he jumped to his feet and pointed. Around him, other cavemen—Samuel knew full well they had nothing to do with caves, but this was still the term that came to his appalled and frightened mind—jumped to their feet and did the same, and then they launched themselves at him, fighting with each other to get around tables and chairs while struggling with unfamiliar clothing, all of which gave Samuel the slimmest of head starts.
Which is how he found himself running down a darkened, frozen street, being chased by primitive men from another time, beings somehow brought to life by feeding on a stew that also, at least partly, dated from their time.
*
“They think you’re the baby mammoth,” whispers Fanny Alice in the darkness of the dilapidated cabin.
Samuel nods. “They do.”
“Something must have transferred over to you when you touched the body. Some life force, still strong after centuries and centuries.”
“But why me?” He does his best to keep his voice low, although the fear and aggravation over the situation threatens to raise it to unsafe levels. “Mick and Temple must have touched the beast digging it out, and I didn’t see them getting singled out.”
“I don’t know. What makes you different?”
Samuel reaches into his pocket and pulls out the spear point, fiddles with it while he thinks. “Don’t know,” he finally answers. “As far as I know, I’m just an ordinary guy. I never claimed to have any special powers or to be able to see any spirits or ghosts or any such nonsense. But then there was the mammoth, and after that there was this.”
“That’s right, there is that.” Fanny Alice reaches out and takes the spear point, turns it over in her hands. “What happened to you when you touched the mammoth?”
“I—I became it, I was inside its body while it was running from the hunters.”
“And what happened?”
“I—um, no—it managed to get away, but then it slipped and fell, and I expect that was when it died.”
“All right, so what about when you touched the spear point?”
“Well, I wonder if it wasn’t so much that I touched it as it was that I cut the palm of my hand with it. Then I was in the body of the, uh, the shaman, the medicine man for this tribe that was hunting the mammoth. He did something special, some sort of big magic, with the spears of all the hunters.” He closes his eyes for a moment, trying to remember what it was he’d experienced. “But things didn’t work out so well. They thought they had the baby, one of them managed to stick it with his spear, but then a big adult mammoth came in with tusks and trunk and feet all going in different directions, attacking all of the hunters, and I’m pretty sure all of them were killed.”
Fanny Alice is silent for a moment, and then she says, “We have to get back to your cabin.”
Samuel doesn’t like the sound of that. Where they are feels as safe as he will ever be, and that’s good enough for him. “Why? They’ve gone running on past, I’m sure things will be just fine when morning comes around.”
“They won’t, I’m afraid. If the rest of them jumped forward in time to hunt for the baby mammoth, for you, then I would think the medicine man did as well. Whatever magic