Time and history

Time and history wait for no human.

A thousand years as a second.

It was a cold still morning, no wind not even a gentle breeze to disturb the piles of fallen leaves. The world was holding its breath. Inside the ramshackle old barn all was still, not even the loose boarding over the window spaces moved, all was still and silent. This elderly wooden building had been around so long the people had forgotten who built it and why. It had looked as if it was about to fall down for as long as anyone now alive could remember. But it stood, surviving heat and drought, surviving storms and tempests, even surviving the occasional attempts by trespassing drug taking teenagers, to set it on fire. No one was sure who it belonged to. The plot of land probably once also contained a dwelling but almost all trace of this had vanished. The swathes of bramble and nettles and the rough traces of a drive way were the only signs that the barn had once had a purpose. To most even the brambles and nettles would appear to be part of the natural landscape but these tell tales of previous human activity, were clear messages to those who can recognize these things. The wooden walls had never been painted, the door hinges were hand forged in iron. Anyone making a close check would see that the wooden frame was made of oak. This and the hand forged metal work, showed that this was both a very old structure and also how costly and valuable it had been when first made. Now it looked empty and rather forlorn, as if it had given up waiting to be brought back to use and life.

There was only one way in or out, the cart width double door at the front, inside a hay loft had been built covering about half the length of the barn, making the rear ground floor too dark for clear sight. A wooden ladder leaned up against the hay loft floor, this ladder was old but not as ancient as the barn itself. In a dark corner as far from the doors as possible, and hidden in the gloom provided by the hay loft, something stirred. Just the slightest movement with no sound. Eyes opened, to humans the eyes would have seemed very strange with their roundness and sparkling appearance, they seemed to give out as much light as they took in. For several long minutes nothing more happened just the sparkling eyes searching the gloom. It was not possible to determine the color of these eyes, they seem to change both colour and intensity every few seconds. Time passed as it always does. The face and entity the eyes were part of, rose from the decaying straw. Movement was so slow that the average sloth or tortoise would appear to be galloping as fast as a race horse. The air itself seem to be undisturbed, no strand of straw fell from the emerging figure. Another hour past by before further activity and this only slight. It was now possible to see a humanoid figure about one meter tall and may be half a meter wide, as yet it was not possible to see any indication of its diameter. The head was perfectly round, those eyes set out either side from an imaginary center line, were also perfect circles. Where humans have nose and mouth this being had a circular marking. So very slowly this marking became an opening revealing a void, no teeth or gums, no tongue just a void of blackness. With infinite stealth and patience the figure slowly moved from under the hayloft. By now the sun was passed the height of noon and was descending towards darkness.

If any humans had been observing they would have needed time lapsed photography to actually detect movement. Watching a clock tick round its dial was a frenzied event compared to the movement of the alien creature. By the time it reached the doorway it had been dark and was now light again. There was no expression on the circular face, no change in those sparkling eyes. The brain inside this head moved as slowly as the body, it had only been a short nap of around two hundred earth years but now it needed food. Pigeons bustled about in the roof above the hay loft, they had nested here without disturbance for many pigeon generations. They did not detect the alien since they needed movement to set off their alarm triggers. The circular “mouth” was now open, there were no visible signs of what force was being used or how a pigeon was being drawn slowly but inevitably into the mouth, the doomed bird protested and alarmed all the other birds but slowly and surely it met its fate in that circular void. As always with pigeons they soon settled down again and time passed; the alien creature returned to its hiding place, taking 2 days to do so. The straw slowly settled over it and peace returned to the barn.

Years passed by, generations of humans were born, lived and died, the barn still stood, the mystery of its origins remained just that, mysteries. The township around the barn expanded but no one attempted to develop the barn plot. No one really understood why not but it remained an isolated bit of tangled undergrowth and very ancient wooded structure, untouched. The brambles and ivy now covered the door, it was hard to see where the barn was in all this jungle of green growth. Then came the great plague, that devastation that wiped out nearly all of human life. The town fell into ruin, the houses and the factories, the shops and the offices all fell apart and collapsed but the barn with its green mantle still stood. The alien awoke, its senses so very different from humans, its notion of time and speed almost the opposite of ours. It fed on a couple more pigeons and crept so very slowly to the door. It raised its head, knew the human race had died and now it could awake its fellows. For tens of thousands of earth years they had slept in what was to them the briefest of moments. They had been here since the first apes to stand upright, had done so. They had always been waiting for this time, their time.

So very gradually they emerged form their hibernation. They did not need cryogenics to suspend their life, This race measured lifespans in millions of earth years, they came form a civilization countless light years away and their home planet revolved around their sun only once every hundred thousand earth years, to them the earth changed from night to day at such a bewildering sped that they struggled to cope with it. Due to the slowness, relative to earth, of their metabolism and so aging, they each lived for around a hundred million earth years. They had arrived here by accident and hiden themselves away while humans evolved. The barn was a construct of their technology, engineered by breaking down the molecular structure of their crashed travel ship and reforming it into, at first, a rocky cave then, when humans started building with wood they reformed their hiding place as this old barn. If any one had studied the timber in detail it would be oak and pine but if any human had made the same checks a thousand years later, they would have been surprised at there being no change, no deterioration in the materials. The aliens had also used their mental control to ensure no detailed examination took place and no attempt was made to demolish the barn.

In all there were just five in the group. The last five of their race, although at this time they were not aware of this . They captured and swallowed, all in slow motion, the pigeons and set about transforming the interior of the barn. This took a hundred earth years, which to them was incredibly fast going. They had removed the hay loft and straw, and reformed the molecules into a communications center. They sent out their ultra low frequency signals and waited another thousand years for a reply. None came. They reformed the equipment and sent radio search signals to find their original home planet, this took another thousand earth years, then they waited again. Their sun had expanded and destroyed their home planet. The earths Teutonic plates moved as slowly as these aliens but they moved and changed the lands. The cycles of climate change carried on remorselessly, ice ages were followed by floods. The barn and its occupants disappeared under water. Evolution would have to remake life, from the birds who flew to escape this phase of the ever changing climate of planet earth. May be the barn will be brought back to the surface in another two million years and the aliens will resume their search for a home.