In 11,000 BC, early one morning as warm sun spills across a plain, a young Indian brave carefully scouting the grazing buffalo ahead runs his hand over the coarse grass and dislodges the sharp corner of a stone. A chunk of flint emerges from the orange soil, a flint, he notices, with curious markings on it.
For a moment the markings incite his curiosity. They look deliberate. But then his mind moves on to the size of the flint itself. He can see how three separate tamahaken blades could be struck from it, and he thanks Great Father Sun for the find.
Now only two silent messengers remain.
In 1865, a young Confederate lieutenant on the run from Union forces, leading a ragtag band of soldiers unwilling to accept that the civil war is over, rests his aching back against a rock. With tired eyes, too old for such a young face, he watches the languid river in front of him as his fingers twist through coarse grass. And, yes, they find the sharp edge of a stone. Before the war he was a student of history, and the faint lines of writing on the stone fascinate him. He puts the curious piece of rock in his saddle-bag and resolves to take it to a professor of natural history he once knew in Charleston when he eventually can. But later that same day the Union cavalry regiment finally catches up with the lieutenant and his men. And before the sun has set they — soldiers and officer — lie in a shared unmarked grave not far away from the Paluxy River.
And so just one last tablet remains.
CHAPTER 53
2 May 1941, Somervell County, Texas
Grady Adams watched his brother goofing about in the water below with growing irritation. ‘Watch it, Saul… you gonna scare off all the fish!’ His brother ignored him and surface dived into the sedate Paluxy River.
Grady ground his teeth. His younger brother could be a complete ass at times. No, strike that… all the time. He settled back on his haunches, his toes curled over the lip of tan-coloured rock overhanging the river. The stone was hot against the bare skin of his feet, egg-frying hot, that’s what Pa would say. The sun had been beating down on it all morning, and the pool of water that had dripped off him from his last swim in the river half an hour ago had long since evaporated.
He looked up at a nearly cloudless sky and realized there wasn’t going to be any momentary respite from the heat of the sun. To his left, several dozen yards along the ledge of rock, a small, withered cypress tree was clinging to the side of a large craggy boulder. He could see it was casting a small pool of shadow, at least big enough for a part of him to keep out of the sun.
He stood, grabbed his fishing rod and walked carefully along the narrow ledge. Carefully, because from time to time, right near the edge, bits of the sandstone rock broke away and splashed into the river a yard or so below. That had happened to Grady before, scratching up his hips and chest as he’d slid into the water.
Saul came up again, noisily splashing the surface of the river, no doubt scaring any remaining fish well away from the float bobbing nearby.
‘Saul! For crying out loud!’
His brother gave him a toothy grin and paddled across to the far bank, deliberately kicking his feet on the surface and making as much of a ruckus as he could.
Grady hunkered down in the shadow, his back now against cool rock, and to his right a dried earthy wall of orange soil and gnarled roots from the small tree poking out from it. He prodded at the loose layers of soil, light and dark, like the layers of some fancy sponge cake. He’d once found a Paiute tamahaken blade among a bank of earth like this. Those layers folded away such fascinating things along this river. He remembered there was that team of men last summer, digging around along portions of the riverbank, looking for monster footprints in the rock. Dinosaur tracks, that’s what they’d said they were looking for.
Grady and Saul had seen a few in their time along here, big ones like he’d imagined an elephant might leave, and small ones too, three deeper dents and a shallow one. Saul even claimed he’d once seen a human footprint in the rock, just exactly like a shoe. Silly ass was always coming up with doofus nonsense like that.
Grady knew no cavemen wore shoes back then in dinosaur times.
The people up in Glen Rose had started calling this place Dinosaur Valley on account of the men and women from the museums and stuff who came digging for fossils last year. He smiled at that as he tugged at one of the twisted roots. It sounded kind of cool… Dinosaur Valley. He could imagine some of the gigantic beasts he’d seen in picture books striding across their Paluxy River, walking up and down the riverbanks, their long necks craning down to drink from the river…
Grit and dry soil tumbled down on to his arm. ‘Ouch!’
He let go of the root and it sprang up, releasing another small avalanche of loose clay-like earth. And then he saw it, half hanging out, and resting on a coil of tree root that looked like a pig’s tail. A palm-sized slate of shale. He reached up for it and it fell heavily into his hands.
For a moment, as he stared down at the almost triangular shape, he wondered whether it might just be another one of them tamahaken heads. But it didn’t have the telltale signs of being worked on, shaped by some skilled hand.
It was just a plain ol’ slice of rock.
He held it in his throwing hand, wondering how many bounces he’d get from skimming it across the river. It was nice and flat… a good spin on the throw and maybe he’d count seven, perhaps eight, before it settled and sank. He stood up, saw Saul on the far bank sunning himself on a dry boulder. ‘Hey! Saul!’
His brother’s head bobbed up. ‘What?’
‘I got me a skimmer. Reckon I get an eight with it?’
‘Nah,’ he called back, ‘cos you throw like a girl an’ all.’
Grady shook his head and sighed. His brother really could be annoying. ‘Well, why don’tcha just look and learn, you foo-bat!’
He cupped it in his palm, wondering which side was flatter… and then turned it over.
CHAPTER 54
2001, New York
On Sunday 9 September 2001, Lester Cartwright, a small narrow-shouldered man facing his last five desk years before his long-awaited retirement, went to bed with his plump wife. A man who, if you asked him to be honest, would admit to being a little bored with his unchallenging life. His job — yes, it might sound interesting if he was allowed to talk about it — was as a projects budget assessor for a low-profile US intelligence agency. But, in actual fact, despite the intriguing sound of working for a secret service, the work simply involved crunching numbers and balancing costs and expenditures. He might as well have been doing that for Wal-Mart, or McDonald’s, or some carpet store… the job would have been exactly the same.
Not exactly where he’d hoped to end his career when he’d first joined them back in the 1960s, a young man ready to serve his country in the field. A young man ready to kill or be killed for Uncle Sam. Now he was an old man who rubber-stamped expense forms.
That night he went to bed after walking their dog, Charlie, climbed into his pyjamas and picked up a Tom Clancy spy novel, hoping to enjoy at least a few aimless thrills today before turning the light out on his bedside table.
Later, as he slept, change arrived in the form of a subtle ripple of reality. A wave of reality systematically rewriting itself, a wave of change that had started in 1941… with a young boy’s discovery of a strange rock beside a river in Texas. A boy who turned over a rock and saw something curious.
Lester’s boring life in that moment of darkness was replaced in just the blink of an eye, with a far, far more interesting one.
‘Sir! Sir!’ Knuckles rapped gently against the car’s rear passenger window. Lester Cartwright stirred, his mind had been off again, considering the incredible, the impossible.
