Kingdom Of The Nanosaurs (trilogy)

Kingdom Of The Nanosaurs - chapter 23

23. The final journey

A siren sounded somewhere outside, echoing sharply along empty village streets. It sent a chill through Morgan as he watched Tom draw the dusty print curtains to one side and glance out through the window. He stood there staring for a couple of minutes thinking and brooding. Finally, he closed the curtains and turned to face them.

He sat in one of the armchairs, the bracken yellow light from a table lamp playing on his features.

“Well,” he began. “I do owe you an explanation but it depends on how much you can remember. Morgan, I’m sure your memory is intact but you two,” he said, smiling at Winston and Lin, “you two may struggle to remember where you have been since you stood outside Buckingham Palace.”

“I remember the hippies,” said Lin. “And I remember being captured by those guards and there was that awful bear: Taurus…” She broke off and just stared in the space, remembering. “If it wasn’t for Taurus,” she started. “We were all on a train and these monster birds grabbed me and took me to a city and almost dropped me on some awful spikes. Gabriel and Regina rescued me and took me to London. After we were taken off into the Palace we met Natzler and all these famous people in a big room having their summit. Morgan’s mom and dad were there. We escaped with Taurus but then…then we were taken somewhere and it was frightening.”

“It was a world of shadows,” Winston interjected. “I can remember everything up to the point where you and Taurus had to back away from us. Then we just vanished somewhere. What is all this about the Animalistic movement?”

“Shadix,” whispered Morgan. “We were sucked into the world of the Shadix. I can remember creatures with no faces and weird spirits. We couldn’t move and they kept showing us black and white movies of our lives. Then there was this other creature. Then one who almost killed me until the angel appeared. That was you, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” said Tom softly.

The room was re-shaping itself forming into a time capsule or strange spacecraft adrift in an unknowable cosmos. Inside Morgan’s mind the Cosmic Algorithm emerged from the dark recesses of his memory to occupy his entire brain. Morgan could visualise it clearly and he knew that within its strange and celestial configurations was a key that unlocked mysteries. He was dwarfed by the enormity of it all. He was just a tiny speck in the immensity of creation and yet, here he was, harbouring within his mind some special mathematical oracle that he knew was of immense importance and of wondrous implication.

The others seemed to have been caught up and mesmerized also by the angelic atmosphere being conjured by Tom. Lin and Winston were curled up just watching him as the shadows played around his face. His body seemed to become translucent revealing an entirely different substance within. But, was it just an illusion?

He started to speak and the sound of his voice held them transfixed; they could almost pluck his words from the very air and make them real. Morgan realized he was hardly breathing and that his arm felt immensely better. Lin could not take her eyes from Tom as he painted pictures in their minds of worlds beyond worlds and of time beyond no time.

“My name is Oriel,” he said, “from the hierarchy of Thrones. I am the last of my kind sent on a mission millennia ago to find the one who holds what you, Morgan, carry in your memory; the Cosmic Algorithm. The body you see here is that of Tom Wheeler. He is sleeping in the recesses of his mind while I use his body to function in this world.” He paused as the air grew palpably warmer. “From the time you stood outside the Palace and were taken by the Shadix one year has passed.”

There was a sharp intake of breathless surprise at this news because they had simply found it hard to believe the first time. So, Eliza Limb had been right. Tom continued and his voice contained such gentle power and command that they fell silent.