Jacobs ran out of the gallery and hurried to the lobby. There were more dinosaurs there: the museum’s rotunda was dominated by a giant Barosaurus, rearing up on its hind legs to defend its baby from two marauding allosaurs. Jacobs rushed to the information desk. “I need to see a paleontologist,” he panted, gripping the sides of the desk with both arms.
“Sir,” said the young woman sitting behind the desk, “if you’ll just calm down, I’ll—”
Jacobs fumbled for his hospital ID and dropped it on the desktop. “I’m a doctor,” he said. “It’s—it’s a medical emergency. Please hurry. I need to talk to a dinosaur specialist.”
A security guard had moved closer to the desk, but the young woman held him at bay with her eyes. She picked up a black telephone handset and dialed an extension.
Piezoelectricity.
It had to be the answer, thought Ludlam, as he watched the pale green light pulsate in front of him.
Piezoelectricity was the generation of electricity in crystals that have been subjected to stress. He’d read a geological paper about it once—the densely packed skyscrapers in New York are among the biggest in the world. They weigh tens of thousands of tons, and all of that weight is taken by girders sunk into the ground, transferring the stress to the rocks beneath. The piezoelectric discharges caused the flashes of light—
—and maybe, just maybe, caused a whole lot more.
Son of a gun,” said David Ludlam, the paleontologist who agreed to speak to Dr. Jacobs. “Son of a gun.”
“It’s a dinosaur tooth, isn’t it?” asked the surgeon.
Ludlam was quiet for a moment, turning the tooth over and over while he stared at it. “Definitely a theropod tooth, yes—but it’s not exactly a tyrannosaur, or anything else I’ve ever seen. Where on Earth did you get it?”
“Out of a man’s leg. He’d been bitten.”
Ludlam considered this. “The bite—was it a great scooping out, like this?” He gestured with a cupped hand.
“Yes! That’s it exactly.”
“That’s how a tyrannosaur kills, all right. We figure they just did one massive bite, scooping out a huge hunk of flesh, then waited patiently for the prey animal to bleed to death. But—but—”
“Yes?”
“Well, the last tyrannosaur died sixty-five million years ago; all the non-avian dinosaurs have been extinct since the end of the Cretaceous.”
“But this tooth appears fresh to me,” said Jacobs.
Ludlam nodded slowly. “It does seem to be, yes.” He looked at Jacobs. “I’d like to meet your patient.”
Ludlam ran toward the green light.
His feet went out from under him. He fell down with a great splash, brown liquid going everywhere. The terminals on his flashlight’s giant battery hissed as water rained down on them.
Ludlam scrambled to his feet.
The green light was still there.
He hurled himself toward it.
The light flickered and disappeared.
And Ludlam slammed hard against the slimy concrete wall of the sewer.
Hello, Paul,” said Dr. Jacobs. “This is David Ludlam. He’s a paleontologist.”
“A what?” said Paul Kowalski. He was seated in a wheelchair. His leg was still bandaged, and a brace made sure he couldn’t move his knee while the tendons were still healing.
“A dinosaur specialist,” said Ludlam. He was sitting in one of the two chairs in Jacobs’s office. “I’m with the American Museum of Natural History.”
“Oh, yeah. You got great sewers there.”
“Umm, thanks. Look, I want to ask you about the animal that attacked you.”
“It was a gator,” said Kowalski.
“Why do you say that?”
Kowalski spread his hands. “ ’Cause it was big and, well, not scaly, exactly, but covered with those little plates you see on gators at the zoo.”
“You could see it clearly?”
“Well, not that clearly. I was underground, after all. But I had my flashlight.”
“Was there anything unusual about the creature?”
“Yeah—it was some sort of cripple.”
“Cripple?”
“It had no arms.”
Ludlam looked at Jacobs, then back at the injured man. Jacobs lifted his hands, palms up, in a this-is-news-to-me gesture. “No arms at all?”
“None,” said Kowalski. “It had kind of reared up on its legs, and was holding its body like this.” He held an arm straight out, parallel to the floor.
“Did you see its eyes?”
“Christ, yes. I’ll never forget ’em.”
“What did they look like?”
“They were yellow, and—”
“No, no. The pupils. What shape were they?”
“Round. Round and black.”
Ludlam leaned back in his chair.
“What’s significant about that?” asked Jacobs.
“Alligators have vertical pupils; so do most snakes. But not theropod dinosaurs.”
“How do you possibly know that?” said Jacobs. “I thought soft tissues don’t fossilize.”
“They don’t. But dinosaurs had tiny bones inside their eyes; you can tell from them what shape their pupils had been.”
“And?”
“Round. But it’s something most people don’t know.”
“You think I’m lying?” said Kowalski, growing angry. “Is that what you think?”
“On the contrary,” said Ludlam, his voice full of wonder. “I think you’re telling the truth.”
“ ’Course I am,” said Kowalski. “I been with the city for eighteen years, and I never took a sick day—you can check on that. I’m a hard worker, and I didn’t just imagine this bite.” He gestured dramatically at his bandaged leg. But then he paused, as if everything had finally sunk in. He looked from one man to the other. “You guys saying I was attacked by a dinosaur?”
Ludlam lifted his shoulders. “Well, all dinosaurs had four limbs. As you say, the one you saw must have been injured. Was there scarring where its forearms should have been?”
“No. None. Its chest was pretty smooth. I think maybe it was a birth defect—living down in the sewer, and all.”
Ludlam exhaled noisily. “There’s no way dinosaurs could have survived for sixty-five million years in North America without us knowing it. But …” He trailed off.
“Yes?” said Jacobs.
“Well, the lack of arms. You saw the T. rex skeleton we’ve got at the AMNH. What did you notice about its arms?”
The surgeon frowned. “They were tiny, almost useless.”
“That’s right,” said Ludlam. “Tyrannosaur arms had been growing smaller and smaller as time went by—more-ancient theropods had much bigger arms, and, of course, the distant ancestors of T. rex had walked around on all fours. If they hadn’t gone extinct, it’s quite conceivable that tyrannosaurs would have eventually lost their arms altogether.”
“But they did go extinct,” said Jacobs.
Ludlam locked eyes with the surgeon. “I’ve got to go down there,” he said.
Ludlam kept searching, night after night, week after week.
And finally, on a rainy April Tuesday a little after 1:00 a.m., he encountered another piezoelectric phenomenon.
The green light shimmered before his eyes.
It grew brighter.
And then—and then—an outline started to appear.
Something big.
Reptilian.
Three meters long, with a horizontally held back, and a stiff tail sticking out to the rear.
Ludlam could see through it—see right through it to the slick wall beyond.
Growing more solid now …
The chest was smooth. The thing lacked arms, just as Kowalski had s
aid. But that wasn’t what startled Ludlam most.
The head was definitely tyrannosaurid—loaf-shaped, with ridges of bone above the eyes. But the top of the head rose up in a high dome. Tyrannosaurs hadn’t just lost their arms over tens of millions of years of additional evolution. They’d apparently also become more intelligent. The domed skull could have housed a sizable brain.
The creature looked at Ludlam with round pupils. Ludlam’s flashlight was shaking violently in his hand, causing mad shadows to dance behind the dinosaur.
The dinosaur had faded in.
What if the dinosaurs hadn’t become extinct? It was a question Ludlam had pondered for years. Yes, in this reality, they had succumbed. But in another reality—in another timeline—perhaps they hadn’t.
And here, in the sewers of New York, piezoelectric discharges were causing the timelines to merge.
The creature began moving. It was clearly solid now, clearly here. Its footfalls sent up great splashes of water.
Ludlam froze. His head wanted to move forward, to approach the creature. His heart wanted to run as fast as he possibly could in the other direction.
His head won.
The dinosaur’s mouth hung open, showing white conical teeth. There were some gaps—this might indeed have been the same individual that attacked Kowalski. But Kowalski had been a fool—doubtless he’d tried to run, or to ward off the approaching beast.
Ludlam walked slowly toward the dinosaur. The creature tilted its head to one side, as if puzzled. It could have decapitated Ludlam with a single bite, but for the moment it seemed merely curious. Ludlam reached up gently, placing his flat palm softly against the beast’s rough, warm hide.
The dinosaur’s chest puffed out, and it let loose a great roar. The sound started long and loud, but soon it was attenuating, growing fainter—
—as was the beast itself.
Ludlam felt a tingling over his entire body, and then pain shooting up into his brain, and then a shiver that ran down his spine as though a cold hand were touching each vertebra in turn, and then he was completely blind, and then there was a flash of absolutely pure, white light, and then—
—and then, he was there.
On the other side.
In the other timeline.
Ludlam had been in physical contact with the dinosaur as it had returned home, and he’d been swept back to the other side with it.
It had been nighttime in New York, and, of course, it was nighttime here. But the sky was crystal clear, with, just as it had been back in the other timeline, the moon perfectly full. Ludlam saw stars twinkling overhead—in precisely the patterns he was used to seeing whenever he got away from the city’s lights.
This was the present day, and it was Manhattan Island—but devoid of skyscrapers, devoid of streets. They were at the bank of a river—a river long ago buried in the other timeline as part of New York’s sanitation system.
The tyrannosaur was standing next to Ludlam. It looked disoriented, and was rocking back and forth on its two legs, its stiff tail almost touching the ground at the end of each arc.
The creature eyed Ludlam.
It had no arms; therefore, it had no technology. But Ludlam felt sure there must be a large brain beneath that domed skull. Surely it would recognize that Ludlam meant it no harm—and that his scrawny frame would hardly constitute a decent meal.
The dinosaur stood motionless. Ludlam opened his mouth in a wide, toothy grin—
—and the great beast did the same thing—
—and Ludlam realized his mistake—
A territorial challenge.
He ran as fast as he could.
Thank God for arms. He managed to clamber up a tree, out of reach of the tyrannosaur’s snapping jaws.
He looked up. A pterosaur with giant furry wings moved across the face of the moon. Glorious.
He would have to be careful here.
But he couldn’t imagine any place he’d rather be.
Sixty-five million years of additional evolution! And not the boring, base evolution of mice and moles and monkeys. No, this was dinosaurian evolution. The ruling reptiles, the terrible lizards—the greatest creatures the Earth had ever known, their tenure uninterrupted; this was the way the story of life was really meant to unfold. Ludlam’s heart was pounding, but with excitement, not fear, as he looked down from his branch at the tyrannosaur-like being, its lean, muscled form stark in the moonlight.
He’d wait until morning, and then he’d try again to make friends with the dinosaur.
But—hot damn!—he was so pleased to be here, it was going to be a real struggle to keep from grinning.
A Glowing Heart
written by
Anton Rose
illustrated by
Anthony Moravian
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Anton Rose lives in Durham, England with his wife, Beth, and their very fluffy dog. Having completed a PhD in theology in 2015, he now works as a communications analyst and a theology tutor, as well as reading for Firewords Quarterly and co-editing Unlost, an online journal for found poetry. He spends much of his time dreaming of the ocean.
Anton has embarked on a number of writing projects over the years, including a couple of novels in his late teens which—thankfully—never saw the light of day. His short stories and poems have been published in several print and online journals, and he is currently working on a post-apocalyptic alternative-history fantasy novel set in the first century.
The elevator pitch is going to be … interesting.
ABOUT THE ILLUSTRATOR
Anthony Moravian is an illustrator that uses classical techniques to create realistic fantasy themes. He specializes in charcoal drawings and oil paintings. Anthony was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York and began drawing at the age of three.
Ever since Anthony was a child, he would draw from the collection of comics he had in his basement. He also admired the creativity in fantasy and science fiction stories, and he works to capture some of their creativity in his paintings. He really began taking an interest in drawing fantasy art when he began playing fantasy-based video games.
Anthony graduated magna cum laude from the Associate’s program at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Upon recommendation from a professor, he worked sketch nights and events at the New York Society of Illustrators. It was there he began to take a great interest in realistic painting.
As a result, he began to work to capture some qualities that were often featured in classical realistic paintings while maintaining his interest in fantasy concepts. He currently hones his craft at the Art Students League of New York.
A Glowing Heart
I’ve seen men die here, up on the cloud-cliffs. I’ve seen them come with their bags and binoculars, their books and charts, chatting away like it’s all a bit of leisure, like it’s all a show. I used to come up here with Dad when he led the tours, showing people the best spots to see the birds. He never said so, but I knew he hated it, hated taking their money and leading them along the ridges, from clouded peak to peak. You could see it in his face, a torn-up kind of sadness, as if he were selling secrets.
I’ve seen men jump from one peak to another as if it’s a joke, like it’s not a sheer drop down to the bottom, all three, four, five thousand feet. I’ve seen the shock on their faces when they lose their footing and realize what they’ve done, when they realize it’s too late.
“People think they’re bigger than this place, you see.” That’s what Dad used to say. “They think it’s there for their own sake, but it’s not. It’s bigger than that, bigger than us.”
I never really knew what he meant by that, but I think I know now. Now, while I lie watching the cliffs and the sky, waiting for a light-hawk to emerge, waiting to shoot it out the air and steal its heart. Waiting to die a little bit myself, too.
&nb
sp; I don’t want to kill the bird. I can think of very few things I’d want to do less. But I don’t want Mam to die either.
After five hours of hunkering in the same place, chewing on grass, I still haven’t seen it. Part of me is glad, because if I see the hawk, it means I’ll have to do something awful. But part of me thinks of Mam at home, lying in her bed, the sweat on her face and the confusion in her eyes, as if she can’t recognize me anymore through the pain. And I think of my brother, Nevan, what he’ll say if I come home empty-handed again.
We’ll get decent money for the feathers, for rich people in the city to use as ornaments. But the heart is the real prize. Even after the bird is dead, it keeps going, pulsing light like a miniature sun. Nevan knows someone who’ll pay us well for it, enough to buy the medicine we need for Mam. Enough to save her.
When I’ve finished all my grass, sucked the flavor from it and spat it out, and after the day has begun to dissolve away into evening, a light-hawk appears. With the sun drooping below the horizon, the bird is the brightest thing in the sky, and when the arc of its flight crosses in front of my binoculars, I have to close my eyes.
The light-hawk hangs in the air, watching, trying to find muckle jays out looking for mates, or young fleet-tits yelping in their nests, waiting for their mam and dad to come back with food. I lie there watching it, forgetting for a few moments the reason I’m here.
Each of her feathers is like a leaf of glass, her beak and talons like precious metals, molded and refined through fire. And she glows from within.
The light-hawk spots something, and moves. She plummets through the air, almost vertically, and when she hairpins back skywards, perfectly parallel with the wall of one of the cloud-cliffs, she has a young muckle jay in her beak, already dead. When she’s back up to height, she tosses the little bird and catches it again, as if she’s celebrating. Spots of blood careen through the air, glistening, reflecting the hawk’s light back at it.
I draw the arrow already nocked in my bow. I wait until she’s in range, and above land, and I fire. It’s a bad shot, lacking conviction. The light-hawk doesn’t even flinch, but before I can nock another arrow and steady myself, she’s veered again, arcing through the sky, and then she’s gone.