Stardust
Tales From The Edge of Time
by
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Midsummer,
It was the scent of roses.
She was sure of it.
It was the....
A loud clash echoed round the room and the girl awoke with a gasp.
A strange light was steeling across the city, accompanied by a droning, clanking sound, and another clash of thunder. Black rain, mixed with a thick kind of soot, fell against the windows of an apartment high in a ninety-storey tower block in the middle of the sprawling, never-ending city.
Screams, shouts and anguished cries rang out in the early evening, echoing down dark, grey, deserted corridors, spattered with graffiti.
In the apartment, the small girl with the pale face and the large, dark blue bespectacled eyes gazed at her homework - an essay entitled “The Economic Landscape Following the Armageddon Factor”.
She sighed, and gazed out of the window, before falling again into a doze...
She awoke again with a start.
She tapped some commands into her computer, when an equation came up: a complex, endless string of numbers and commands.
What on earth did they mean?.
Then, very, very slowly, everything seemed to make sense. She shook herself awake and squinted at the screen. Words repeated themselves like a mantra in her head: the sun, the wind, the earth, the water.....the sun, the wind, the earth, the water...
What was happening? Was she still asleep - still dreaming?
She braced herself and tapped some more commands into the computer, her eyes ablaze.
It was a rare power: something was happening...
A bright flash ricocheted through the room, knocking the girl off her chair.
She lay, dazed, on the floor, staring at the room around her.
Shimmering in front of her was a large, green circle, like a round electric current. Her equation on the computer must have conjured it up, from odds of a billion to one. She gazed at it for some moments, her heart racing.
Then suddenly, a loud siren screamed into life, causing her to put her hands over her ears to drown out the earsplitting noise. Seconds later there came the thunderous sound of heavy footsteps racing along the corridor outside, and someone banging loudly on the heavily bolted, re-enforced steel front door of the flat, ordering her to open up.
It was The Watch. They’d seen the strange green circle on their surveillance cameras and wasted no time in moving into action.
After a few moments, an electric blue laser began cutting a square through the five-inch-thick steel of the door. The metal was beginning to give way.
There was no more time. She turned, took a deep breath, and dived into
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About the Book
It's midsummer, 2020, in a nightmarish, Orwellian world, where nuclear war has reduced the world to enclaves of people living in enclosed tower blocks in a rigid police state. Life is bearable and relatively comfortable at the top of the tower blocks, but a living hell at the bottom, which can be easily reached if you flout the rules. Everything outside is a wasteland.
A studious young girl is doing her homework on this dark stormy night, half-way up one of the tower blocks, when some random calculations she enters into her computer conjure up a strange, sizzling electronic green circle in the room. The surveillance cameras in her apartment trigger an immediate police response, and just as they're breaking the door down to arrest her, she jumps headlong into the circle, which transports her through time...back to 1979, where she lands with a crash in a tree in the grounds of Oakwyk Hall, a gothic mansion set in the depths of the English countryside. Unaccustomed to the wonders of the natural world, she is astonished at the beautiful, scented, starlit world around her...and can hear the happy sounds of a wedding party in the nearby house.
She climbs down from the tree, and it is here that the battle to save humanity and planet earth itself from the horrific future she has experienced, begins...
About the Author
I left
Continuing to dabble in poetry, it hadn’t crossed my mind to write a novel, until one night on holiday in
I'm a firm believer that things happen exactly when they should, and I feel this is the perfect time for a book like this - it's subject matter has never been more urgent or more topical.