Search Results for: time-trap

Six stories from Phillip Mann, taken from his long and varied career.

Includes stories from the Out of Time Cafe, a very unusual refuge from reality. It attracts people afflicted with a deep malaise. It offers what seems from the outside to be sanctuary, but it can be subversive too, for on entering the cafe, one gives up a certain amount of independence, and before one knows it one is trapped. There is no escape… save one: the lift which services the cellars descends… but no one who has used the lift has ever returned. On a brighter note, the cafe has a will of its own, and travels different dimensions with ease and every journey is a new beginning.

Also featured are The Gospel According to Mickey Mouse, originally produced as a hugely successful radio play; Maestro;Lux in Tenebris, a cautionary tale about a medieval stonemason’s encounter with an anachronism and the effect it has on his culture; and An Old Fashioned Story, wherein Jody is having problems with his Sythno companion Elizabeth, who head butted him without warning. He is attempting to repair her. Then Elizabeth and her Sythno Joseph from next door drop in…

“If you run round the church seven times in an anti-clockwise direction, you’ll wake the Seven Sleepers. Then, if you look through the keyhole of the church door, you’ll see the Devil walking up the aisle towards you…”

When David Wisher’s mother inherits a house in the peaceful Yorkshire village of Longbarrow, David feels he is coming home. For he’s seen the house in his dreams. And when he eventually arrives in Longbarrow, he finds a place touched by the stories and beliefs of the past. There’s old Jonas Dyer, whose mystical visions have driven him to the verge of madness; Mr Toot, who uses magic to cure all ills; the little men, too small to be human, who are said to come out of the river; and Black Shuck, a ghostly dog with glowing eyes, whose appearance heralds approaching death. Most extraordinary of all, there’s the legend of the Seven Sleepers, defeated in an ancient battle and trapped throughout the centuries, their evil powers dormant.

Redcap, Uther, Vinegar Tom, Gerennius, Shuck, Pyewackett and Cullen. Together they spread terror, pestilence and destruction. And now, because of David’s unwitting actions, they are stirring once more…

The Zardalu were the greatest menace ever known to the worlds of the spiral arm, enslaving entire races and exterminating others, guided by an unswerving belief in their own supremacy. Then their slaves rose up against them, and for eleven thousand years the Zardalu had been extinct and the spiral arm had known a kind of peace.

But now the Zardalu are back . . .


The search for the Builders, the legendary alien race whose unfathomable constructs continued to perplex scholars and explorers alike, had led Builder expert Darya Lang, adventurer Hans Rebka, and treasure hunters Louis Nenda and Atvar H’sial to an unknown Builder artifact far outside the spiral arm. There they found the Zardalu – just a few who had been trapped in stasis all those millennia, held there for purposes known only to the Builders. And in the struggle that ensued the Zardalu had been set loose, transported by Builder technology to to galactic parts unknown – free to ravage any world and any race within their grasp.


The only chance to eliminate the Zardalu threat was to find them and wipe them out before they had time to breed back up to strength and once again threaten civilized beings everywhere. The problem was that no one believed the story. Only Darya Land and her companions had actually seen the aliens – and no evidence existed to support their claims. And so the course seemed clear: get a ship themselves and search out the Zardalu.


But the way would not be easy. Even once they managed to locate the Zardalu, they still had the Builders to deal with. For the closer they got to their quarry, the more clear it became that the Zardalu and their world were closely entwined with the fate – and the plans – of the Builders themselves.