The Valley of Despair Read online

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  Not yet understanding how the collar was to prevent his leaving, the handsome, young pilot also spent his next several weeks undergoing the most grueling instruction he’d ever received in any foreign language. After completing his shift in the mines his captors would then take him to an above-ground room in the city not far from the throne room. Here he would meet with Peenemünde, the girl always accompanied by a pair of the hideous and unearthly denizens of this awful place.

  That the lessons were carried out by the beautiful girl whom they assigned to stand in as translator reduced not by a sliver the unwholesome task to which his new masters put him to learn their tongue. If he did not learn a word perfectly it was not the girl, but rather these grotesque gray beasts who administered the beatings to which they daily subjected him.

  While bound in servitude, and during the administration of these beatings, he developed a massive hatred for these gaunt, gray men. In unison with his hatred, however, he discovered a well-spring of adoration for the lovely and gentle German lass. Her eyes would fill with hot tears of compassion when forced to witness his body beat black and blue if he so much as stumbled in pronunciation or the modification of a verb tense or failed to recall a word.

  Although he might have furthered his tutoring by utilizing Argos as a Rosetta Stone of sorts he steadfastly refused to do so as it would mean truncating the number of lessons with Peenemünde for whom he was fast developing an abiding affection. Not to mention, the work he and Argos performed was so physically exhausting they only barely chatted during their break, they being mostly too fatigued to speak or do other than sip their meager allotment of water and breathe. As well, it would be dangerous to do so; were they caught speaking a language other than Denebian it would not go well for either of them.

  Luckily for the German pilot he’d learned so many languages in his youth that to learn yet another he considered a trifling, although the language he studied today he considered by far to be the most bizarre and complex he’d studied to date.

  After what he guessed to be the passage of several weeks, he making the calculation based on his number of sleeps, with the passage of time being difficult to gauge in a city where one spent all one’s time either indoors or below ground, he had gained what he considered to be a moderate level in the mastering of the strange, new tongue. By now, however, in speaking the human languages with the girl and Argos, he had learned these creatures hailed not from Earth but from a world impossibly distant. Their own planet circumambulated a far star called Deneb, an astronomical body of which Erik had never heard.

  “You’re sure of this?” he asked the girl, doubtfully. “Isn’t it possible this Deneb is just some remote area here on Earth? Why, it could even be their name for this very valley.”

  She shook her head. “Do they look like they come from Earth to you? No, Erik. I’ve seen the portal chamber near Garmakalok’s throne room. It is through this they carry away the jewels and other ores you mine. At first it looks like a tunnel, a very long, dark tunnel disappearing into the ground. But you can see stars along the path, and at the other end is a sky that looks different from how I remember the sky of Earth. I haven’t seen the sky for so long!”

  She went on to inform him she’d heard Garmakalok claim that more than two thousand Earth years ago they had discovered the gateway that led from their world to this, a gateway opening into this verdant valley that lay buried in the heart of the Dark Continent. Although the distance to their world was staggering to the mind, it could, via the conduit located in this city, be traveled in a trice.

  The girl informed him the aliens believed the prehistoric peoples who builded this ancient city had somehow stumbled on the science of this hole through time and space, but that they’d long since died out before the Denebians discovered the entry on their own world. This entry was located, she said, inside a volcano on the gray-backs’ planet that only within the last few millennia had fallen dormant, allowing of its exploration. A group of Denebian scientists studying the interior of the dead volcanic mountain discovered the doorway and scried its strange properties.

  Time acted differently on the world these beings hailed from and only within the sphere of its influence might they safely exist here at all. Otherwise, she said, they would have swarmed over the Earth and brought it beneath the heel of their merciless dominion millennia ago. Since they could not leave this ancient, dead city they were forced to use technological wiles to lure people here, where they were then enslaved upon arrival.

  “When they have a need for more slaves, either here in this desolate city or on their home world, they utilize various means to lure and snare people from the outside into coming here. But they do so in such a devious manner that they come only in small numbers – numbers such that they may not be at risk of being overrun by inundation or draw attention to themselves,” she told him.

  The occasions were rare indeed where he and the girl could sit and chat, when the aliens would lock them up in a room for mysterious purposes of their own. During these times they would indulge in speaking their native tongue while he would tell her of the outside world, of the war ensnaring the nations at the time he lost his way and found this place. She seemed saddened to hear it, having been in the city for a very long time; just how long he would be shocked to learn.

  He could scarcely believe it when she informed him she’d been born in the early 1700s and had traveled into the interior of the Dark Continent with her father, an inveterate explorer and scientist. Her father had fallen victim to the many calculating means by which these creatures lured men to this dismal and remote place.

  Although the girl had been a prisoner in the city for nearly two centuries she barely looked twenty, thanks to the miraculous aura of the time differential that came from living within the sphere of influence of the space and time warping portal to Deneb – where time crawled by with infinite slowness as compared to the sprightly, riotous bounding of the pace of time on Earth. But great as her revelation had been to him the girl was equally as stunned to hear the current date of the outside world.

  “I can hardly believe it, Erik. I’ve been here for two hundred years!” she said in awe after he informed her.

  “I have no idea why it should matter,” she continued wistfully. “My mother is long dead. And my father - God rest his soul - they took him straight to Deneb the moment we arrived here to slave in Heaven alone knows what foundry or Hell hole on that forsaken place. He’s long dead by now I imagine. And there are no others. I’ve never had anyone other than Father.”

  And then, her heart breaking anew, she burst into tears. The sudden realization of the immense passage of time in the outside world had brought home how utterly alone she was in the world, and how hopeless her situation. Erik draped one arm about her quivering shoulders in sympathy, holding one of her hands with one of his own.

  “I’m sorry, Peenemünde,” he said softly. “I didn’t know. I’m all alone in the world, too. When my mother passed loneliness caused me to throw myself at every dangerous mission that came available. It must be counted a miracle I’ve survived some of the close scrapes I’ve been in. Either that, or fate ordained long ago that I come here to find you.”

  The girl looked up quickly, meeting his eyes in which she saw only earnest admiration and empathy. She smiled but looked away, embarrassed. But Erik did not. His heart pounding, he slowly turned her face back until she faced him and then he covered her mouth with a kiss.

  06: People of a Star Afar

  The man embraced the girl, holding her clasped in arms of banded iron forged in the gray-backs’ mines as if she alone in the Universe anchored him to this point in time and space, held her warm form pressed tightly against his own until rough, gray hands hauled them apart and returned him to his cell.

  From the lips of Peenemünde and his time spent in the slave pens conversing with Argos he learned more about the sphere of time influence. The
time-stopping bubble flowed through the gateway whose origin was on the world of the gray men, they indicating this to be in the vicinity of the star, Deneb.

  Via the gateway the portal extended the influence of their star to this hemmed-in valley, fashioning a sphere approximately a kilometer in diameter and enclosing virtually the entirety of the city. The population of this ancient metropolis was thereby governed by the time influence of the gray-backs’ planet where time progressed at a much slower pace than it did on Earth. As such Erik knew it to be within the realm of possibility that some of the human inhabitants had been here for millennia.

  The slow passage of time within the city Erik was able to witness whenever he glimpsed out one of the enormous gates leading from the inner city toward the outer limits of the ancient pile where he could see what appeared to be the flashing of a strobe. This effect was in fact the rising and setting of the Earth’s sun and the passing of the Earth’s moon overhead.

  Once, laboring in the outer city near a postern gate after being selected at random for a work detail as he exited the mines, a weary Erik just for a moment caught a glimpse of the nearby jungle. It lay but a couple dozen steps distant, so near he felt he might