And damn it all, but a fog bank had somehow rolled in through the mysterious conduit, obscuring the corner from sight, obscuring those trapped within the swirling mist from even clearly seeing one another, much less the angular obscenity that had appeared in their midst.
Terror in her throat, Emily reached down and pulled her baby from the confines of the carriage, clutching little Jolyon to her breast. Minus her grip on the handle and the baby’s weight, the carriage skittered away, pulled by the suction. Her new hat flew from her head and instantly vanished in the mist. “Theo!” she screamed. “Where are you?”
Rachel was on her feet, her hair and clothing whipping around her frail body by seemingly gale-force winds. The red scarf she wore plumed from her neck like a signal flare. “Father!” she called, but the screaming of mother and daughter was blocked, torn away, by the rift hanging near the sidewalk.
And Tanner…he was somehow suspended in midair, his frock coat flowing behind him like a cape, his shoulder-length hair streaming from his skull, each fine fiber standing up and out, crackling with static electricity.
“Thunder and damnation,” he said in an unsteady voice.
Struggling to keep her footing in the maelstrom,
Emily reached out and felt her fingers brush Tanner’s hand. “I love you,” he managed to yell above the unholy sound coming from the doorway, and then he vanished into nothingness.
Rachel Tanner wasn’t as lucky. Buffeted by the unholy winds, doomed by her very proximity to the gateway, her young body was ripped apart by the sudden closing of the rift matrix and, as it fell inward upon itself, she perished before her mother’s frightened gaze.
Her fragile corpse was shredded into wet hunks of meat. Arms, legs, fingers, toes, flesh, bone and blood spun in the air, intermingled with the mist and the bits of the blue dress the child had been wearing. The red scarf coiled like a serpent, rearing and striking at an invisible foe.
Emily vomited, one arm going to her heaving stomach in a reflex action, loosening her grip on Jol-yon and before she could react, the winds tore her other child, her baby boy, away from her, leaving nothing behind but a dismembered torso dressed in blood-soaked pajamas, a lifeless carcass that fell with a wet plop once the rift collapsed fully upon itself, sucking back the unexplained mist and vanishing as quickly as it had come. The ghastly remnants of Rachel Tanner fell like rain upon her mother, who had stumbled and landed on her knees, her chest heaving with racking sobs.
Witnesses saw the mist, heard the sounds, viewed the aftermath. One moment, a family of four was on a stroll.
The next, a lone woman remained, dressed in a tattered dress and scarf, surrounded by the gore of her murdered children and the stink of voided flesh. Her husband had vanished, spirited away by and into the very air itself.
As to be expected, Emily Tanner never was quite the same after that dark day.
“The eye,” she whispered over and over. “The eye, the eye, Satan’s unblinking eye.”
On the strength of her spouse’s estate and reputation, along with her parents’ consent, she was in-stitutionalized for a time, sedated, studied and pitied. Outlandish theories abounded about what she’d endured on that Omaha street corner, but there was no explaining the mishap using the science of the late nineteenth century.
A few suggested sorcery, which had always been the explanation given to advanced science by those who could not begin to understand what they had seen from a limited point of reference or experience. As for Dr. Theophilus Algernon Tanner, he was on his way to a new destination. “An ideal subject,” one report said, due to his intellect and where he happened to have fallen in the time stream. “The perfect candidate,” read another communique in choosing him as guinea pig. The final decision had termed him “the logical choice, ideally suited in body and spirit and, more importantly, mind.”
Out of all the other men, women and children, the madmen and the brilliant, the young and the old, the weak of mind and strong of spirit, out of all of those alive in the United States of America during that November month of 1896, Tanner had been the one chosen.