The Thomb Outside Time
A violent storm rolled through London one night.
The wind howled through the city like a living thing, rattling windows and tearing through branches with reckless force. Rain poured in relentless sheets, soaking the cobblestones in minutes, drumming like war on the rooftops. Thunder cracked the sky open again and again, a rhythm of chaos and power.
Warner knew no one would hear or see what was about to happen.
Fear and excitement warred within him, equal parts dread and thrill. His hands trembled slightly, not from cold but from anticipation. He was about to do what no one else dared. Not just build the impossible, but use it. There were so many questions. What lay beyond the moment the machine activated? Would it work? Would he return? Would he want to? He had packed a small satchel with paper, ink, his journal, a pocket compass, and his pocket watch, the one thing he never left behind.
He knew Bonomi would never understand. That’s why he didn’t tell him.
Cloaked in darkness and soaked by the storm.
The mausoleum rose before him—ancient in style, impossible in purpose. It had been meant as a tomb. A cover. A monument to a dead woman and a machine not meant for this world.
But Warner wasn’t here to mourn. He was here to cross a threshold.
He approached with quiet determination, the roar of wind and water masking every step. The iron door groaned open against the push of his hand. No hinges, no handle, only that one key.
He stepped inside. What happened next, no one could say.
The next morning, Bonomi looked for him. He had wanted to speak with Warner, to make one final plea. In truth, he had feared that Warner would get ideas. He knew his nature: restless, brilliant, defiant. And he had suspected that his partner might one day take matters into his own hands. Still, he hoped he was wrong.
But Warner’s house was empty. His tools undisturbed. No note.
Bonomi thought Warner might be at one of his usual haunts, perhaps by the river, or lost in thought at one of the secluded gardens he favored.
A day passed. Then two. A week.
Still, no sign of Warner.
Dread began to sink in.
Bonomi returned to the cemetery. The mausoleum still bore the muddy scars of the heavy storm. The door, once sealed, stood open. Bonomi’s heart pounded as he stepped inside.
Nothing.
Only silence, and Warner’s old pocket watch, the one he always carried, resting on the stone floor beside the key.
Bonomi fell to his knees.
The realization hit him like a hammer. Warner had used the machine.
Hope flickered for a long time. Maybe he had made it. Maybe he had chosen to stay in another time.
But deep down, Bonomi knew that if Warner had survived, if he were safe, he would have come back.
He never did.
Bonomi’s mind wandered back to the beginning, to how it all started.
Three visionaries in the Victorian era: Joseph Bonomi, the Egyptologist, Samuel Alfred Warner, the inventor, and Hannah Courtoy, the woman who made it all possible.
Joseph Bonomi had been a scholar, deeply immersed in the mysteries of ancient Egypt. His studies had taken him to the Valley of the Kings, where he had deciphered hieroglyphic texts, unraveling secrets that had been lost to time. It was there that he discovered a strange transcript, full of cryptic references to continuity, time, and mechanical symbolism—something he would later recognize as the conceptual foundation for the device.
Bonomi was not just a historian. He had a pragmatic mind, always calculating the risks and the potential dangers of what they were attempting.
There was a reason the ancient Egyptians had buried their knowledge so carefully, and Bonomi understood it better than anyone.
Samuel Alfred Warner, on the other hand, had no such caution. Warner was an inventor—an eccentric with wild ideas and a mind that refused to be restrained by the conventional limits of reality. He had claimed to develop a telepathic missile guidance system, a device that stirred equal parts fascination and skepticism.
But it wasn’t just the missiles that fascinated him.
Warner’s true obsession was the mausoleum they had built together. He called it a gateway. An entry into another world, another time. A way to manipulate the very fabric of reality.
His eyes glimmered with feverish excitement as he spoke of nations bowing before the power they could unlock—of wealth, influence, and the legends they would become.
And then there was Hannah Courtoy.
She had been the one to bring them all together. A woman of great wealth and even greater ambition, she had inherited her fortune from the elderly merchant John Courtoy, whose death had secured her a position in the world of men, even though the world often refused to acknowledge her influence.
Hannah was a woman who knew how to turn her wealth into power, but she had also been driven by an insatiable thirst for knowledge.
It was her fascination with Egypt and its iconography that had led her to Bonomi and Warner, uniting them in a vision that, in hindsight, should never have been realized.
But Hannah died before the project was completed.
Her passing was sudden and shrouded in mystery, but it gave the two men a renewed sense of urgency. They honored her by continuing the work, dedicating the structure to her memory. Her tomb became the perfect cover for the device they were building.
The mausoleum in Brompton Cemetery, built under the guise of a funerary monument, was never meant to be just a tomb.
Beneath its Egyptian-style façade and enigmatic carvings, it held something far more dangerous: a machine meant to bend time itself.
They had done it. Against all reason, all scientific law, they had succeeded.
The impossible had been made real.
Grief turned to purpose.
Bonomi knew what he had to do. He took the key, the only means of accessing the machine again, and made it vanish.
Some say he destroyed it. Others claim he hid it in a place no one would dare to look.
Only one thing is certain: the key was never found again.
Before his death, Bonomi commissioned his own modest headstone to be placed near the Courtoy Mausoleum.
On it, he had Anubis, the Egyptian god of the dead, etched so that it faced the tomb, ever watchful. Some believe it was a warning. Others think it was a memorial, a tribute to a friend lost in time.
