Hole in the Sky -3- Through the Hole (Patreon)

We talked some more but not to any good purpose. Dunn put out the fire and he and Doc crawled under the SUV to go to sleep. We didn’t actually agree to keep a watch but the General and I elected to stay up for a bit. We had no real idea what time it was, the transition through the black diamond had destroyed any trust in our wristwatches which showed the time as 8:15 p.m., more or less.

We sipped the last of the cold coffee and nibbled on the remains of a canned cake I had opened. There didn’t seem a lot left to say, speculation had gotten us nowhere and we had worried our few facts into unrecognizable rags.

Hatton stood near the front of the SUV, restlessly moving from one side of the track to the other, and back again. I stepped into the edge of the forest to take a piss. “Don’t go too far in the dark,” he warned and I grunted agreement.

With the fire out, our night vision came back. The fat shaggy pines around us prevented any long vision lines and with no moon, it got very dark indeed. The pines bothered me, so unlike the upland firs and valley floor mixed oak forest of Lost Frenchman Valley. They were big trees, not as large as the lodgepole pines of Montana but bigger than the scrubby woods of the Texas hills they somehow reminded me of.

And mixed in here and there were obvious oak trees, again unlike any I had ever seen in North America. They were entirely the wrong kind of oak for our original forest, with narrow toothy leaves like Southern California live oak instead of the wide, multi-lobed leaves of cold-country trees. Not that oaks had been at all common in the Lost Frenchman Valley.

I pulled a cluster of fruit off a branch and examined it with a flashlight. The acorns had shaggy gray caps and the fat, cylinder-shaped nuts were burgundy tinged with green. I had seen such trees somewhere but could not remember where. The silver-gray bark lacked the deep fissures I expected, but teased at a memory I couldn’t pin down.

We were well and truly lost and it was a painful admission for someone who made his living by finding the way for other people. Had this ever happened to anyone else? And how would anyone know?

I moved back toward what passed for our campground. Hatton was nothing more than a moveable shadow, but in an eerie echo of my own thoughts he asked, "You suppose this is what happened to that Frenchy they named the valley after?"

We both laughed softly without much humor.

"You read much science fiction, Pete?" he asked. I didn't remember him ever calling me Pete before but we'd never been alone together before either.

"Some," I admitted. "I'll read almost anything."

I had the sense of him grinning. "Me, too. It's about the only way I can slow myself down. Otherwise, I'm always thinking, moving, doing something."

I nodded then grunted since there was no way for him to see a nod. "Me, too," I said. "At least, when I'm in a city. Out in the wilderness, I can sit for hours just being."

Hatton's grunt sounded doubtful. "The only other thing that works for me is sex," he said.

"Not tonight," I said, deadpan.

Hatton's single, sharp, barking laugh startled some night prowling animal that scurried away through the dry needles.

The scuttling sound made me think of something, and I picked up a handful of the needles Dunn had swept aside while building a fire. The dryness felt familiar, "Maybe we're in California," I said out loud. But I knew of no forest of quite this sort in California.

"Maybe we're in a movie," suggested Hatton.

"No," I said. "If we were in a movie, one of you would be Catherine Zeta-Jones."

"Charlize Theron," he countered.

"Too bony," I said.

He laughed softly then stopped. He stood up, I could see his shadowy shape against the background of starry sky. He peered at a misty shape on the horizon. "Tell me I'm not seeing what I think I'm seeing," he said.

I turned for a better look and felt an echo of his disbelief. I shook my head. “No," I said. "I think it's just what it looks like, the lights of a town reflecting off the clouds."

We decided to wait till morning before doing anything about the lights. After letting Doc and Dunn sleep another couple of hours, we woke them up to "stand watch" while we got some sleep. No one argued about the need, which almost surprised me. We told them what we'd seen and pointed it out then crawled under the bulk of the SUV and fell almost instantly asleep, at least I did.

When I woke up a few hours later, my watch claimed it was half past one in the morning but dawn had clearly already happened. I left Hatton under the truck still snoring while I crawled out. Doc handed me a cup of hot instant coffee.

"That town or whatever it was stayed lit up pretty much all night. I drew a mark on the ground pointin' at it," said Dunn. "Figured we could take a compass reading from the one in the truck, come daylight."

"Good idea," I said, a little annoyed that I hadn't thought of that myself. The arrow-mark near the front of the SUV measured at least ten feet long and two feet wide. "Thanks for the coffee, Doc," I added.

"Jet lag," yawned Doc. "We've lost about six hours, apparently."

"Mebbe longer," said Dunn. "I think it's winter, or early spring."

Doc nodded. "I set my watch to 6 a.m. when the sun came up. When we have an idea how long the day is at sunset, we may be able to use the information." He frowned. "Though, I'm not sure how."

"Still, good thinking," I said. The whole idea of being somewhere else, somewhen else seemed less frightening in the morning with a cup of coffee in my hand. Perhaps as a corollary, none of us had put our orange caps back on. Those were intended to make you more visible to other humans and some paranoia seemed to have crept into our thinking.

I followed Dunn to the top of the rocks that had stopped our progress last night. In some directions, a view over the treetops gave a little more information about our location. The shaggy pines seemed to stretch for miles with a few breaks for what might be meadows, rivers or paths. The occasional oak or other tree made made a recurrent, fractal pattern of different shades of green.

There were mountains on three sides but much further away than the ones surrounding our lost valley and they somehow looked neither so tall nor so rugged as the Rockies. The fourth side was the direction of the lights we had seen but a range of low hills concealed whatever might lie in that direction.

"South," I said pointing roughly in the direction where we had seen the lights. "If the compass hasn't gone crazy, too."

"I can see a track off there, headin' in the right direction--if that is the right direction, toward the town or whatever," Dunn said. "I walked back along the way we come, and apparently you lost the track we were followin' in the dark; this is more of a dry crick. Still, that path over there," he waved to show which one he meant, "looks wider than the one we were on."

"Um-hmm," I grunted.

"Hey!" Hatton called from the bottom of the rock pile.

"Morning, General," I said, causing Dunn to frown then grin.

"Did neither of you idiots think to take a pair of binoculars with you up there?" asked Hatton.

"Nope," I admitted. "Why don't you bring a set?"

He waved at us in disgust and headed toward the pile of equipment.

"General George Hatton? And Abrough is Doc and you're Pete."

I nodded. "Haven't thought of a nickname for you yet."

"Not even the obvious one?" he asked.

"What? Josie? Too obvious," I said. "Still I guess you are a pussycat."

He snorted. "Had some fights about that name when I was a kid. Don't bother me none now; Josie is just about the nicest thing they call me in the Senate." He grinned again.

"Funny how big a deal that sort of thing is when you're twelve."

"Uh-huh. Now it don't matter, long as they know how to spell my last name on election day."

"You married?" I asked.

"Was. You?"

"Same," I said. I wouldn't volunteer details if he didn't.

"Why'd you ask?"

"Curious what your wife might have called you."

"Joe," he said. "She called me Joe and her lawyer called me Mr. Dunn." He chuckled as if remembering something unpleasant long past.

Hatton scrambled up the rocks, carrying a rifle and with two pairs of binoculars around his neck. "See anything?" he asked.

"Trees," Dunn and I said simultaneously.

"Smartasses," Hatton grumbled. It got a little crowded up there with three of us, especially since the rocks were not at all level but we managed to get settled into comfortable positions, passing the binoculars back and forth and peering at interesting sights. There weren't many of them.

Dunn spotted the most interesting one. "Sheee-iiit!" he exclaimed. I turned my binoculars in the direction he was looking and Hatton grabbed up the rifle and used its telescopic sight to locate what had drawn such an exclamation from the Senator.

"Elephants," I said.

"Yep," said Dunn.

"African elephants," Hatton added.

"You sure?" asked Dunn, still looking.

"Uh huh," I agreed. "Big ears, round skulls, longer tusks, taller in front than in back." I used to have a hundred animal books as a kid; I wanted to be a veterinarian until I found out it meant learning to cut up the animals I loved. I outgrew that enough to be willing to shoot something that I intended to eat, but I still had no use for trophy hunters. But then, we hadn't come to the Northwoods looking for trophies to hang on the wall.

Of course, this didn't look at all like the Northwoods.

We'd all seen the detail none of us mentioned at first. Finally Dunn said, "I didn't think anyone rode African elephants, not since Hannibal, anyways."

“Circuses?” Hatton mused. “But those are mostly Indian elephants.”

I nodded and the others may have too, but all of us kept our eyes glued to our ‘scopes.

There were at least eight elephants partly hidden in the dust they kicked up, maybe ten, and each one visible had an open-topped, box-like structure behind the shoulders; a howdah, it would be called in India, I thought. The lead beast had five or six men in the box. Some of the other boxes had women apparently. They were more than a mile away and we couldn't tell for sure but they looked like women to me.

"Not a war party," suggested the General.

I'd had the same thought, despite the spears and bows and arrows we could see. Hunting maybe, but not war. Both the men and women wore robes, despite what felt like a warm day developing. We didn't see any armor.

"Well," said Dunn, "We are definitely not in Montana, Idaho, Alberta or even Kansas but we may be in Oz."

"I was thinking more of Ophir," said Hatton. "And they're white men. What are white men doing riding African elephants and carrying primitive weapons?" The rest of us had not really noticed the skin color of the elephant riders. Being white ourselves, it had been invisible to us.

"What are we doing here with modern weapons in a modern vehicle, more importantly," I said.

Doc called up to us from our little camp behind and below. "What the hoo-hah has got you three all prickled up like tomcats?" Sometimes he and Dunn had surreptitious contests for who sounded most like a backwoods sage.

I hadn't realized it but he was right; all three of us looked tense enough that our fright and worry could be read in our positions and movements. "Visitors," I said. "Or more accurately, locals, since we're the visitors."

"They've changed directions," said Hatton.

"The Pachyderm Posse is headed right for us," added Dunn.

And they were. I took a moment to tell myself they had no idea we were actually here. Then I had to tell myself, that yes, they might know someone was here by the behavior of birds -- assuming they knew only the sort of things that I knew about finding people in wild areas.

But the elephants had distracted us from something else. They weren't the only thing coming our way.

On parallel tracks to either side of the elephants, we could see men on foot walking through knee-high scrub, most of them carrying spears and some wearing what might be armor. They were accompanied by men on horseback, about one horseman for every ten or twenty foot soldiers.

Because that's what they looked like, warriors from out of some Biblical epic. If the people in the howdahs had not looked like soldiers, these did. The men on horseback wore helmets and what might be breastplates and a few of the men on foot had armor on their shoulders.

And they were all darker skinned than the howdah riders, too. Mediterranean-looking at the lightest, with a few dark enough to be sub-Saharan Africans. Our earlier thought that this was not a war party might have been wrong.

"They can't see us," I said.

"How do you know that?" asked Dunn.

"No one is pointing or staring at us. You get that many people seeing something odd and there would be someone telling his neighbor about it. I think they are headed our way just by coincidence."

Doc had climbed up beside us at this point and Dunn handed him a pair of binoculars. The older man took it all in without saying anything for awhile. Hatton pointed out the different groups, seemingly making their way toward the hill our little group stood on but still most of a mile away.

"Elephants," Doc finally said. "But they aren't the big Savannah elephants."

"Say what?" Dunn asked.

"Too small," I agreed. "They're no bigger than circus elephants, and those are usually Indian."

Doc nodded. "Berber elephants, like Hannibal rode, an extinct species."

"Goldurn," said Dunn. "Are we in North Africa then?"

Doc nodded again. "I think so. I dug into the bark of one of those oak trees; it's cork, about five inches thick. Those grow in North Africa, too."

Hatton humphed. "So the question isn't where are we, but…when?"

None of us said anything while that thought soaked in.

Hatton stared through the binoculars after grabbing a pair back. "When did those elephants go extinct?"

"No one can be quite sure," I said. "Sometime in Roman Empire days, I guess."

He took the binoculars away from his face. "The guys riding the elephants look like Swedes and the ones on the ground all look like the sort of people you might find in North Africa or around the Mediterranean. It makes no sense."

"Tourists?" suggested Dunn. Hatton glared at him and the senator's eyes twinkled.

"Wasn't there a Vandal empire in Africa at one time? And those guys came from Germany?" Doc said.

"I think so. When would that be?" I asked but no one had a clue.

"Later. I think. Maybe," Dunn said, obviously guessing. None of us had been history majors, worse luck.

"Are we all accepting that we may have traveled in time?" Hatton asked.

It turned out that all of us had read enough science fiction to wrap our heads around the idea but it still didn't make it pleasant to contemplate.

About that time the strange caravan approaching made a sixty degree turn away from us right when they reached an edge of the particularly heavy growth. Now they seemed to be heading toward the town.

We all made random relieved noises until the third element in the parade came into view through the trees and underbrush.

Prisoners.

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