The Curious Tale of Herbert Sherbert Fizzbang and the Fingertips of the Gods

PROLOGUE

Dawn, 11th November, 1918,

Lassire, Flanders, Northern France.

The end when it came, was within sight of where it had begun, over four bloody years ago. And when it came to him, Herbert Seymour Forbes, it was the most glorious of deaths, one entirely befitting so gallant a soldier.

     It was a little after dawn, and the frost clung like diamonds to the saddles of the horses. Sweating creatures who were champing at the bit stamping impatiently into the clods of autumn grass, waiting to be away. Like their riders they wanted it to be gone, finish it for good, for those who straddled the beasts, were as tired as their mounts.  

     The remnants of two strangled armies, strung out across the remains of once fertile farmland, now a devastated salient. Looking at each other with bleary eyes, tasting a fear in their mouths that was almost soporific, for the earth was calling to them in these final moments of the war; still it wished to bury them forever.

     Had we not had enough? Surely to God, at this late hour, they were not going to attack? It was almost nine `o` clock, only two hours to go.  Futility was as futility was   bred, but this was madness. For the past ten-days it had whispered up and down the line, through the trenches and whistling in the spaces between the dead, calling to both sides like chattering monkeys.

      They had sued for peace! The Kaiser had abdicated. Germany was aflame.  Anarchy ruled the streets.  If the facts had not destroyed them, then surely the rumours would.  It was time to give up, it was time to surrender.

     They stood amongst the remains of the black spiked trees, the contortions of the rusted barbed wire stretching down to the waters-edge. Spindly branches shaking useless fists at the retreat of the dawn and the approaching sun, crawling over the tree-lined bank on the opposite side of the water.

     Somewhere in the ranks behind Herbert, someone coughed. A rasping, trench cough born out of suffering, or nervousness, or both. Probably tubercular, certainly debilitating, with only the comfort of death to follow.

     He smiled at the trooper to his left, who said something he could not hear, while at the same time his right hand instinctively reached down to caress the side arm at his thigh, his left enclosing itself tightly around the hilt of his sword. These were his passion, the means of his trinity. Body. Sword.  Pistol.  They would propel him to victory.  They would keep him alive.

     When finally, shortly before nine-thirty, the whistle blew, they spread out in formation, quickly spurring their horses into a canter. Plashing through the water as it swirled around them, whooping like a collective of banshees, so as one wall of death they surged forward.  “Tally Ho, and away we go,” Herbert   yelled as the water hit his mount, nearly unseating him, rearing up with the shock of the cold.

     The majestic black top hat he always wore knocked sideways by the force of the wind in his face. He had tied the reins of his horse to the pommel of his saddle, and so rode into the fray unencumbered by his mounts needs, which knew exactly where it was going anyway. In his left hand, the pistol expending its cartridges wilfully into the nearest body.  In his right, the heavy Wilkinson blade, cutting through flesh, like butter caressing toast.  He swung it in an endless arc from left to right, plunging it into the corn to be reaped with an abandonment that verged on recklessness.  It brought on a rush of pleasure so intense it bubbled up from his gut like an orgasmic release, and with senses reeling he plunged ahead.

     From the rise of the hill, above the river into which the horsemen plunged, he watched them with resignation and just a hint of indifference. Sitting astride a great Arab stallion, a beast of such beauty and power that awesome was an inappropriate a word for it. He was dressed all in gold. Gold robes and cloak, topped with   a golden turban, a huge ruby holding the yards of fabric together at the exact middle of its folds. He watched them, as he watched a million others over the ages, with impatience. He was here for one purpose, and one purpose only, and wished to be about his business, for he had witnessed death in all its forms a thousand times before. He watched as Herbert spurred his horse forward   through the foam, and saw as it snagged itself on barbed wire.  Saw the grey helmets of the German defenders as they swarmed over the attackers, holding their ground repulsing them. Bayonets flashing about their heads as they went about their deadly work in the frothy morning light.

     In the thick of the mêlée Herbert Seymour Forbes was lost to the moment.  His mouth wide open, lips pulled back, teeth bared in a vicious scream of release.  He heard nothing, not a sound, only the inner rhythm of his blade. Saw nothing as it cut and thrust.  Nothing but those falling to the sound and sight of it. He stood in the saddle, heels pressed down in the stirrups, and slashing right to left cut a swathe through the press of bodies.  Here someone lost an arm, there he smashed through a thigh; and everywhere around him, was the spectacle and smell of blood.

     Suddenly he was hit with a blow like Picton at Waterloo.  The bullet passing through the side of his hat, to blow away the rear portion of his head.  Leaving it a bloody mass of sinews and nerve endings that were confused for a moment, before they closed down altogether. Epiglottal stops. Unremembered dreams. Desires unfulfilled. He dropped dead in the water, reins dripping uselessly over the flanks of the exhausted beast like a child’s toy.

     On the hill the golden man on the white horse observed everything. In this current conflict he had appeared in the form of an angel at Mon’s, urging on the spirits of the bowmen of Agincourt to cover the retreat of their modern counterparts.  Afterwards he was seen on the Somme and in the mud and rain at Ypres. But in this incarnation he was Dasemanda, the forth of those Wise-Men who followed a star to honour the birth of a boy child, called to another task, before he could present the prophet ‘Exius’ with his gift. A book containing the wisdom of the ages, the child knowing nothing of the importance of its pages as he lay swaddled in a manger, in a cow-shed in the Judean town of Bethlehem.

     The town of Lassire in Northern France fell to the combined forces of the Enniskillen Dragoons and the Royal Welch Fusiliers, at approximately 10:55 am on the morning of November11 1918. Hours earlier in a cold dawn light a German politician and two generals entered a railway carriage in the forest of Compiegne and signed away their nation’s future. Whilst in the trees all around, birds were heard to chirp in relief, the shrill sounds even more deafening than the silence of those arrogant guns all around them?

     At exactly11 `o` clock a slow peal rang out from the belfry of the ruined church of the Assumption that stood nearby, announcing the stroke of the hour. In the next village another pealed out in recognition of the sound of the first. It was not one of joy. Neither was it one of exaltation, or relief.  It was born from the grief and bitterness of the millions who had simply disappeared.  Solemn and leaden like their footsteps marching into the mist of battle and on into the mouth of hell.

     Dasemanda spurred his horse forward, making his way down the incline, over to where Herbert lay, carefully picking his way amongst the cadavers. When he found him, apart from the wound to his head, he seemed peaceful enough.  It was as if he had simply slipped from his horse to lie exhausted and asleep amongst his comrades all who were in a similar condition.  But be not confused, they were dead.  Led to the cruellest of death’s by those in power who wished to push the conflict to its awful finality.  It was said that if Germany had 10 men left alive, the allied powers 15, then they would have won by sheer force of   numbers left.

     The Arab pulled his mount up at Herbert’s body and bending low picked up the top-hat, brushing the dried mud and blood from the crown and sides.  He examined it for a moment before placing it into an ornate carpet-bag on the horse’s flank.  With use the hat had changed, its once lustrous beaver-black faded through constant wear.  Changing it from a thing you would proudly wear to Parliamentary openings, or a Wedding, or perhaps even the occasional funeral where a little outward show of   dowdiness did not matter. But for now the mud, the pain, the hurt and the blood, had turned to richness, as the stains dried on the cloth.  In the distance another church let out a sigh of relief, as if gold was turning to gold, lost all amongst the glitter of gold.

Part One

And so, it goes…

 Autumn, 1922...

 Chapter One

The Gate of the bloody Pomegranates…

At first, before there was anything known to anyone, anywhere, came Nun, who swam in the dark waters of chaos. One day a hill rose up from chaos, called Ben-Ben, and on that hill stood Atum the first God. When he coughed he spat out Shu the God of the air, and Tefnut, the Goddess of moisture. In time Shu and Tefnut had two children, first was Geb, God of the earth, then Nut, sky Goddess who lifted Geb up so high that he became a canopy over her. Nut and Geb had four children, Osiris, Sis, Seth and Nephthys. Osiris was King of the earth, and Isis was Queen.

     Osiris was a good king, ruling peacefully over the earth for many years. However, within this perfection everything was not well. Seth was jealous of Osiris, because he wanted to be the ruler, becoming angrier and angrier until one day Seth killed him.

Osiris went down to the underworld and Seth remained on earth as king. Osiris and Isis had one son, Horus who battled Seth and was victorious regaining the throne, so that forever after that Horus was king of the earth, and Osiris king of the underworld.

Many centuries later, a Jackal a Hawk and a Green-Skinned-Man, were making their way through the Halls of the Dead.  It had been that way longer than either of them could remember, a ritual as old as both they and time itself. Often the Hawk accompanied the Jackal on his nightly rounds, and sometimes they would be joined by the Green-Skinned-Man.

     The dog had nothing to do until dawn, the bird had nowhere to go until dawn, and the man, well, he was in neither one state nor the other, and so, it made perfect sense for him to tag along; for no one thought that the dead in all their panoply’s of wisdom, may also become lonely.

     The Hawk’s voice was sometimes reedy like that of a flute, a tone he altered to suit his moods, yet sometimes it was like that of a piccolo, the shrill notes gliding up and down the scale like honey over bread. The Jackal carried a rough demeanour his words spat out as if they tasted sour in his mouth.  Whilst the Green-Skinned one spoke like a man, walked like a man, had the appearance of a man, but was in fact a God, as indeed they all were. The last of the great God’s of Egypt, all-but forgotten by those they had created.  

      "Have we not failed?”  said the Hawk, his piercing garnet eyes flickering in the hundreds of torches flaming all along the crumbling walls of the passageway.

     “What is failure but a new beginning, and we are about to begin again?” replied the Jackal, stopping to bite himself scratching vigorously at a portion of his exposed skin troubled by fleas. “Man is strong, for did we not make him so,” said the Green-Skinned one, a man himself, and so he understood these things well. “For will he not loose the Aton?”

     “And who will set him free,” asked the Hawk curiously!  “One who will never realise the part he plays.  He will see wealth, he will see fame, he will see nothing else,” the Jackal said, smiling to both his companions. “For indeed man is weak and so sees nothing else,” added the Hawk.  “He is blind.  For did we not make him so?”  all three said in unison, their voices singing in the spaces between the wooden rafters hanging above them.

     They each smiled together, as one, complete in the union they felt for each other, the bond they had held since man was only but a thought in their collective heads. These deities, these fragile spirits, caught in the tides flowing between the river of two deaths that flow unseen underneath us all.

     That of the physical death, the demise of the earthly body, and the symbolic death, the death of spirit and soul, resulting in the one of daily renewal and awakening, that they were about to perform  

     They walked slowly from one chamber to the next chatting as old friends do, each room the same as the one before, until they entered the once majestic confines of the embalming chamber. Now it was old, ill-kept, the high soot-blackened ceiling    supported by a selection of timber beams showing visible cracks. On the walls hung the portraits of those who were gone, the entire array of the God’s of Egypt.  No, not the representations of those deities, but the actual remains of the God’s themselves, for they had formed and fused together. Some were bas-reliefs, some decayed statues.  Some in clay, some in alabaster, some in marble, whilst some were simply faded paintings.  They and their attendant priests, warriors, scribes and hand-maiden, mere flakes of colour adhering to the slimy clay walls, coated with dust and choked with cobwebs. They each held one thing in common, all were slowly disappearing.  Bastet the cat God, his head missing, stood next to Tawaret, the protector of women    hippopotamus face intact, but his lion body gone.  

     He in turn languished against a faded painting of Hathor the Goddess of love on one side, and on the other Kephri -He who is coming into being-  the scarab beetle, and God of creation, who had somehow misplaced his claws.  On and on it went as they passed them by almost as if they no longer recognised their friends of old.

     They had begun to be dust over three thousand years ago when the people of Egypt had turned from them, forgetting the old ways and the Gods of their forefathers. Slowly they were all disappearing, becoming myth, a spent symbol of the glory they once shared; for they were the forgotten ones, these broken relics.  Here was Egypt’s past, and if these three Gods had anything to do with it, it would also be its future. “We are the last of our kind,” said the Green-Skinned-Man as they entered the Hall of Repentance, a place of bare floors and an ossuary of bones. Fleshless skulls filling the high niches carved into the mud walls, with faces, bereft of life. Eyeless sockets staring unseeing as the three Gods walked by.

     His companions were quiet before the Hawk spoke again, this time with a hint of urgency in his voice.  “It will not always be so.  These will live again,” he said waving his arms about him, as if to embrace all the representations of the dead that had confronted the three of them on their walk.  “For the more we recover, the more here will live.”

     Entering another room through a low door they walked into an oblong hall, like the others smoky and dank. In the centre of the room stood a pair of huge silver scales, almost reaching the ceiling, their stone weights pitted and worn with   use. The Jackal stopped to inspect the cups, one was black, thick with dried blood, the other gleaming, a single white feather laying at its centre.  

     Along the edges of the hall stood the occasional dusty chest with only the tools of the embalmer for company.  Hooks, spatulas and knives rough with centuries of use, lay next to towels lying in bloodied heaps the worn rush matting beneath their feet also spotted with blood.  

     “What is a century, or ten of them, a hundred or a thousand years in the affairs of man, when we ourselves are timeless,” said the Hawk?  His companions saying nothing stopped to watch as two naked priests carried in a corpse. With one swift movement they tore open its chest, retrieving the soul   of the recently deceased and placing it on the blackened cup.  

     Dropping the feather onto the other, the quill tipped the balance, sliding the body from the scales in one motion, so that the unredeemed soul tumbled into the great hole that descended to hell, lost to the light for all eternity.

     “The great war we late set amongst them did not succeed to our purpose.  Neither did the pestilence of flu,” said the Hawk, as the other two nodded in unison, recognising the meaning of the words.  “And what about Exius?” asked the Jackal.  “Yes,” replied the Green-Skinned-Man.  “What about the Exius?  Has he not raised himself above his position?”

     “No more than either those who inhabited Elysium or Valhalla,” said the Green-Skinned-Man. “We are dealing with them, in our agreed way. We have dealt with his messengers.  So shall we deal with him, once we have secured the future.  There is plenty of time.”

     “Like all things! In time, all in its good time!”  said the Jackal smiling now, sure of his words and the reception he was getting. He was thus unprepared for what the Hawk asked next. “And what about the Night-Thief, have we had word of her whereabouts…?”

     With this his two companions stopped and allowed him leave through the open door at the far end of the weighing room.  They turned to glance briefly at each other before following the shadow of the great bird, who still walking leisurely down the next corridor appeared not to have noticed their momentary absence.

     “That is not a name I have heard in the longest time,’ snarled the Jackal, his muzzle twitching showing his teeth, as if the very recollection of the forename alone was something of great disgust to him. “Nor I,” said the Green-Skinned-Man, looking across at the Jackal. “For she is the Dark Maiden, the Night Thief stealer of the seed of man and seizer of the light that shines above us all.”  The Hawk silenced both of them with his sharp words. “Come my brothers,” he said as he brushed aside a spider’s web that had come loose from the rafters above them. “You knew that one would resurrect the other, for like the serpent that she is, her fate is entwined with the heretic!”

     “So we should be on guard then,” said the Green-Skinned-Man.  “As always,” replied the Hawk, his garnet eyes shining in the torchlight.

     Now they all fell silent as they made their rounds, for there was nothing left to say, for what had not been said since the beginning of time, was not of much consequence anyway; neither here nor there in the collective scheme of things.

   The Hawks feathers glistened as they followed the course of the corridor, the Jackal stopping again to bite his troublesome flesh, unable to strike at the flea who had been persistently annoying him. They paused briefly as they passed the great Hall of Mirrors, and the Tresurarium, where was heaped all the riches they would need when they came into their own again.  Next to that the Granary was at full capacity, and even now in the ante-room between the two, the priests who served them were intoning prayers for a successful outcome to their endeavours.

     This time though they were facing a very different prospect.  One of life ever-lasting, rather than this disappearance into the vacuum of eternity, and each smiled, consumed in their own thoughts. But at least, unlike the others of their kind, they still had a purpose, that was the only reason they themselves were not in a state of disappearance, still fulfilling the role the Aton had denied them.  Ultimately they would succeed in their task, Egypt and then the world would be retaken, re-igniting the souls of those who smouldered in this place that smelt of death.

     They crossed back into the dingy corridor passing by a curtained doorway, the drapes obscuring the vision of paradise lying beyond it. If you were quick and the torches were bright enough, you could catch glimpse of what was in store for the chosen. Those who were privileged to be set high above the rest, in a place where the sick were healed, the blind could see, and the lame made whole again.

     Stopping at a great doorway they waited for it to be opened, for this was the Gate of the Bloody Pomegranate, just beyond lay the Great-Hall of the Boat itself! Once entered it was unlike all the others they had passed through that evening. Firstly, no disrepair could be seen as it was sumptuously decorated, the enormous domed ceiling rising up to the painted sky above.  It was if it were suspended in mid-air, held up on a hundred fluted columns of gold, each taller than the tallest tree known to man.  

     A coated canopy of thousands upon thousands of twinkling stars made from gold and precious stones dotted the ceiling, glittering on a background of lapis and ultramarine blue. The walls of the chamber an explosion of colour, hieroglyphs as fresh as the day they were painted, each following on from the other, telling the story of the continual journey from day to night, and night back into day again. In the centre of the ceiling was a huge hole, perhaps one hundred feet across with a rope-ladder running from floor to ceiling, and a look-out post at its top. At precisely the same 6th hour each day it was scaled by a chosen priest, to watch for the coming of another dawn, a task given only to the most exalted. To alert those gathered below that dawn was approaching and the sun should once again rise in the sky.

    The golden boat was unlike the dhow’s and barques, the fishing and merchant boats    plying their trade on the Nile, for it should have been   made of wood lashed together with rope, sealed with sheaves of woven papyrus and greased to withstand the rigours of the journey; this one was instead made of   gold.  The prow was of gold.  The stern was of gold. The planking of the deck made of gold.

     In length it was more than 10 metres, seating 15 oars each side. The double rudder’s made of ivory propelling it forward, the paddle of gold steering it on its way.  The central canopy made of elephant tusks hung heavy with a linen awning, rich with the smell of lotus blossoms.

     “In time, in the land of the German, the madman will make his move,” said the Hawk, involuntarily preening with his oily beak the arms of man he possessed instead of   wings.  “He will fail of course,” replied the Jackal?

     “Of course,” smiled the Green-Skinned-Man.  “For it is not his time. Indeed, that time may never come, for the Thrawn one is set to die, and the tomb opened. We shall make our move.  Reclaim the girdle, and it shall be ours, and ours alone.”

     “And all shall be as it once was.  Ours and ours alone,” he said, as they each nodded in agreement.

     The Hall of the Boat was where night and day collided. It was the beginning and end of the world and the time that governed it.  Where the sun, rising in the east, travelled through the sky to the west, back to the land of the dead again where it had been released that morning.  For this was the sun, that rose and fell like the pulse of a living man, one that would cease only when the world ceased.  The Hawk, known as ‘The One Far Above,’ was the God Horus. The Jackal, was God of the Dead, Anubis.

       Nodding to the Green-Skinned-Man he left them to begin his journey, as it was their way of offering a simple goodbye. It was certainly not a farewell, for this act would be played out again and again in the thousand centuries to come.  The one wearing the hat of a Pharaoh of all the domains of Egypt and a skin so green that it glowed, was the God Osiris, Lord of all the underworld. Who ascending the dais, laid down in the bottom of the boat, placing his arms across his chest, and closed his eyes.

     At the approach of the first hour of the day, the fingers of dawn clawing at the ripening sky, the boat began to glow. Rising slowly from its position on the platform it took to the air, floating in the embrace of the warm currents swirling underneath it. By the time the birds awoke and began their morning chatter, it was in its daily position above the exit to the roof.  And soon, once the greater portion of the world was half awake, rubbing sleep from its eyes, the golden craft would soar higher, turning into a speck of pure light so bright that it could accompany the sun on its elliptical journey unseen, today, as every other day.  

A voyage that would bring it back to where it started from, into the Halls of the Dead.  Leaving behind only footsteps traced in sand, and a faintness of air infused with the sweet smell of crushed pomegranates, their juices dripping like blood onto the marble floor of the temple, to be washed away by the warming rays of the morning sun. In the sky high above the Aten was rising anew. Soon his sun would never set.  

Chapter Two

Something Lost, and yet Something Found...

From far, far away, in the blueness of empty space, the earth looks like a perfect sphere. A suspended golf ball, a yolk separated from its albumen. Melded together again from the forms of many things, making it as if it were but one in an expanse of unending blackness. From the position of the two pole’s, across its line of 0degree longitude this mass of earth is some 24000 miles across the head. Around the waist, at its equator at the point of 0degrees latitude, it again measures 24000 miles. But in fact from space it appears spherical, almost egg shaped and so not really round at all.

     But something was changing, lately it was if the very fundament in the core of the heavens had shifted. Swinging away from their familiar daily focus to somewhere that was pointedly oblique, and far more frightening.  It was apparent all through the burning days of those first dry summers after the war that a volt-face was in progress far above the sound of the lark, or the darkening skies.  

     Night was now day, and day was not night, but whatever it wanted, or chose to be.  In the distance, in the space past the scattered valleys free of stubble.  Where there should have been lush grass, there was nothing but strangled blackened roots.  The mountains were taller than they should have been, and far more sinister than they actually were.  

     Then again, you will not be so lucky with evil. It is the essence of the world and not so easy to rid yourself of, it lurks unseen, unheard, and goes unrecognised.  In a land yet known to man, a storm was brewing.  Slowly it began its approach, as shapeless and unfocused as a phantom of the unknowing night.

 ‘And should in those times when a Gods face is turned from the gaze of man, and a cold wind escapes from a long closed grave.  It augers ill to all who feel its blast... Do not open the gate, for it will be an end to both it and us…’

     So read the message written on the small scrap of parchment left at his hotel in a plain manila envelope stained with sweat.  The delicate hand and elaborate calligraphy of the penmanship, belying the ugly and rather squat Egyptian who was the notes author; whose patent warning, he of course, chose to ignore.

     The sand was wet, wet that could only be found abroad in the early-morning period.  It was at that short point of the heavenly passage, when the grains had not singularly dried out. When underfoot they were still a mass of damp porridge   particles that had not yet separated into the billions of perfectly formed fragments they would later become.

     That morning Howard Carter as he had done almost every day for the last two years, trudged to the site of the dig in the Valley of the King’s near Luxor. Passing on his way clusters of bleary eyed workmen huddled over smouldering twigs, brewing tea in the weak light. By noon burnt blacker than they were now and he would be long into the excitement of the day. For it had finally arrived. This was the day the tomb was to be opened.

Obsession is a strange bedfellow.  We become obsessed with women in all their transcendent beauty, whilst some become obsessed with men.  We waste hours ruminating on so many things that are unfathomable and cannot be changed. On the irritating, unsolvable problem of the past, of the many failings of those around us in the present, and the expectations of the future.

     It was a small sound, as sounds go, imperceptible to the human ear. It was a noise such as dogs with their higher perception of sound could grasp in a moment, where as humans would think it a mere irritation.  At first he thought it was a mouse, one skittering along in the darkness, a creature whom for a hundred generations had been raised on the corn meant to feed the dead one for all eternity. Years ago Carter had been in Jerusalem at a ceremony on Easter morning, when a miraculous fire emerges from the tomb of Christ. Candles are lit from this ‘Holy-Fire,’ and taken across the city and then around the world, as proof of the resurrection.

     As he broke through the wall into the chamber beyond, there was a distinct moan, like the cry of a thing, not a person, one of flesh, blood and sinew, but a thing, a thing in pain.  It appeared as a light.  A small blue flame, although one, unlike any other he had seen.  Of varying shades of blue, shaped at the nose like a comet with a distinct tail trailing out behind.  At its centre was an eye of yellow.

With a supreme shudder, given up from the very bowels of the earth, the small blue flame so imperceptible as to be almost invisible to the naked eye, flew out from the opening.  Swiftly fluttering about him like a bird trying to escape a cage, it lashed out cutting his cheek and drawing blood. Rapidly it flew past Carter’s head and disappeared up the stairs like a herald announcing to all who had ears to hear and eyes to see, that the heretic was free and once again abroad.

-

In light of the events that followed, it was not at all surprising that Lady Hortensia Lavender, in fear of all things unknown to her, had swallowed her grand-piano. If indeed all things would have been known, then the root of their future problems lay in the misery that descended on them soon afterward.  That the piano was made of glass was of no use either, for she was henceforth terrified of riding in a carriage, or even on horseback.  It was of course in case the damned thing, now lodged so deep inside her body should shatter, and she so damaged at its demise, would be swept up with he created debris, and so forever consigned to the rubbish bin yawning in front of her.

     Those that attended her every whim and hung like limpets to her utterances were aghast.  Her numerous offspring, as indeed her husband, thus treated her with a form of kindly disdain, an act that was close to the spreading of butter on a rush mat in order to muffle the feet of your enemy.  Surely in these enlightened days things did not simply shatter or were bandaged like a swaddling child.

      They stood alone and resolute, firmly against the onslaught of an intruder. They did not explode or fade away without at least some explanation.  She would investigate these disturbances with the zeal of a detective.  She would consider them with the robustness of that of a constable upon his beat.  A sleuth who was determined to solve any crime set in front of him. She assumed it was as if you had been dismissed from the tea-table and the litter you created remained behind. The elders or the servants always cleared away your mistakes. You did not have to worry about them. The mess. The consequence.  But then again, such were the little sins caused in the sunshine of youth that caught you up in the autumnal fog of later years.

      Those small brush-away crumbs that fill the holes in an empty life, those tear-off, send-back coupons that add nothing to the quality of it, yet cheat you into buying things you did not need.  But now you had to shed tears for all the uncompleted tasks, and the countless disappeared people you left behind.  The drawings without light or shade, the empty paintings without figures, the hours and   expectant holes needing filled, the tasks left undone.  They were all the product of a life used up.

It was a Thursday, a little before tea-time, and the candles on the tree had been lit. Lady Hortensia was looking forward to light refreshment; tea, sandwiches and lemon cake.  In the instant that she reached across the table to secure her third slice, the awful truth dawned on her. She was pregnant with a child, and her grand-piano was the father of the offspring.  In that season when it was recognised that the saviour of the world was among us, and the lord of kindness ruled the air, things were not how they should be with the running of the stag, and the hunting of the deer cancelled, a pall of despair hung over everything it touched. In truth, the land that breathed uneasily below, was but a pin-prick away from the reality that lay above.

As the sun rose over the hills the boy cast his net over the side of the boat and it disappeared into a flash of blue water. Beyond his home on the island of Rapa Nui, a volcanic dust spot in the middle of the endless ocean, where the great bird-god had laid the world egg, something stirred. The beach was deserted as usual as dawn broke over the Pacific Rim, the pink sky bleaching into another perfect day. The few creatures awake who witnessed the spectacle would tell their offspring of the strange events of that morning, in the seasons to come.

     But the boy would not live to tell his version of the event’s, for he would be swept away into the boiling fury of a startled ocean. At first it came from the distance, a sound like the cracking of stone against stone. Then a frantic tearing, as if the very surface of the earth itself was complaining.  Then an enormous upsurge of air, as if a cork had been freed from the neck of a bottle.  All the effort of the ages were contained in the sounds, as from the ground the great hulks wrenched and heaved, forcing themselves out of the grass, flexing a raging power in a monumental effort to stand upright.

     The Moai were awakened from their slumbers.  The great mottled heads of the ancestors, brown bodies formed from compressed ash, weather beaten and gnarled, roughened and scarred with the seasons. This huge being weighing perhaps as much as 30 tonnes, pulled itself from the earth like a dentist extracting a rotten molar from a gum, as a deafening whoosh filled the air and soil fell into the huge hole left in the land. The boy balancing on the edge of his craft as it rocked alarmingly stared in awe at the unfolding spectacle.  The creature lumbered down to the sand, and for a moment stopped by the water’s edge.  It was as if it were frightened to enter the vast confines of the sea. But no, it was merely waiting for the others to join it.  As one by one they entered the foam, the waves parting briefly before closing over their heads, and   they were gone.

The explosion they created far underneath the whitecaps overturned the boat, pitching the boy under the surf.  The great unseen surge of water travelling below the surface, dragging his body with it. It careered through rocks and ripped through the deep canyons, gliding through the bottomless trenches that made up the oceans of the world with the ease of an escaped butterfly.

In St Petersburg, in the deserted palace of the last Tsar of all the Russia’s, Harcourt Hargreaves, His Majesty’s representative to the Commissar for Internal affairs, walked to the window overlooking the Baltic and lit a cigarette.  His morning talks with the new leaders of the Bolshevik regime had just broken, and lunch of a frugal sort was being served in the old State Banqueting rooms. He was at a loss and frustrated as usual, as progress was painfully slow. It would take all his negotiating powers to convince these chaps that European revolution was more than just a heartbeat away. Firstly, they had the task of cleaning up the bloody mess they had made of their own country.

He sighed, had barely enough time to exhale his first puff of smoke onto the frozen pane of glass, when through the misted window a huge wall of water rose from the sea like a spectre. Seconds later the glass burst inwards like a pricked balloon, engulfing both him, and half the Hermitage, which was last seen sliding into the frozen Neva river.

Later, as dawn broke over the walls of the Forbidden City, the blood red pillars and terracotta roofs complementing the golden symbols of fading imperial power.   Captain Chang Shou, sword in hand marched briskly across the small square separating the central court from the Hall of Supreme Harmony. He had important business with the ruling committee and of course, as usual he was late.

Had he lived to tell the tale he would have called it a divine-wind, sent by the Gods. The conflagration blew up from nowhere, as if conjured in honour of the ancestors of old.  A huge ball of fire crashed into the gatehouse he was passing through completely demolishing it. The fire raged through Peking, engulfing swathes of the Forbidden City and the scattering of peasant huts nestled beneath its walls. It  was  later  reported  as  unclear  the extent of  either the damage or casualties, as  China  is,  as China  was,  secretive and  silent  about  all events  taking  place  within  its  imperial   borders

At approximately the same time, in the Borough of Greenwich, South London, it was early in   the autumn of 1922.  The leaves in the great-park were fading faster than rain, leaving behind a summer full of memories, with the silver branches of winter as yet to come. Autumn had arrived with a red and gold explosion, appearing as if by magic only a few days previously, catching the children who called the area home completely unawares. A nip was in the air, and overcoats were out of the top closet, scarves and mittens now the order of the day.

     In the undulations and creases of the parkland nannies fussed over babies, wrapped like cadavers in pink or blue shawls.  Whilst their distracted mother’s, catching a few minutes for themselves smoked endless rounds of Woodbines or Senior-Service, crushing the smouldering stubs under their elegantly shod feet into the dampness of the earth. Still dreaming of the possibilities for love and adventure that lay in the curves, rooftops and distant spires of the capital city that beckoned on the misty horizon. Older siblings fretted endlessly that their younger charges, having lost their sailboats, might lose their lives likewise in the shallow depths of the boating pond, and secretly feeling they would be glad of it, just to be rid of them.

      Now the boy stamping his feet into the musty leaves stood distinctly apart from all the others, and pulled his cap down low over his brow.  Clamping it further on his head he watched the children as they played.  He did not join in their games.  Not because he did not want to, it was more that he was not asked.  It was likewise known by the few children who knew him, that he was a little peculiar. He was a watcher who said little.  Preferring to keep whatever thoughts and ideas he conjured up to himself.  Expecting that events that concerned him would unfold themselves, as and when they needed to.  

     Greenwich was his home, he had lived here all his short life, and knew every inch of the common like he knew the contents of his toy cupboard, with infinite ease and an eye for detail. From the gold of the Royal Observatory cupolas, to the huge mould covered statue of Sir Isaac Newton, that stood in the cobbled courtyard outside.  To the oak where the future Queen Bess heard the booming of the Tower guns, announcing her mother’s death.  The sweep of the green hills tumbling down to Queens House, the Dreadnought Hospital, and the river Thames lapping at its door only marginally beyond.

     During the past conflict, artillery batteries had been set up on the expanse of Blackheath, and like the Duke of York’s men, infantry marched up and down the undulations of the surrounding hills, scaring local residents as much as each other.  The closely drilled battalions of khaki looking like so many ranks of toy soldiers as they spread from the top of the hill to the bottom. 

     The flower beds had been turned over for the duration to the sustenance of the locals. Cabbages stood where once vibrant rhododendrons swayed, carrots in place of daffodils, cauliflowers instead of tulips.  But to Sam William’s the Great-War, as it recently had become known, was as distant a memory as last Christmas.  The young have a propensity to quickly forget the past, wrap it in myth, secure it with string, placing it atop a wardrobe, only to occasionally take it down, unwrap it and remember the experiences gone by.  The old are not so fortunate, the memory lingers long, sucking deep on the spirit so that eventually it cripples the very will to live. He remembered being terrified by the faraway sound of the great guns as they boomed on the Somme.  On holiday at Broadstairs on the South coast of Kent on the 31st of June 1916, the last days of life for   many a conscript and volunteer alike. And later, the audacity of a German raid into the heart of London, the huge searchlights arcing the sky. The thrum of the distant explosions as Zeppelins dropped their murderous loads on the unsuspecting folk below. To be small, frightened and fervently praying for your life was at the time no help at all, for although scaled down from its millions on the Western Front, death still ran like sand through many a civilian’s fingers.

     Still it was a small comfortable world beating to the rhythm of regularity. The carnival appeared twice a year, or sometimes the circus, with its collection of disfigured people and neglected animals. The elderly clowns and hungry beasts going through a range of perfunctory tricks.

     On November 5th fireworks lit up the sky, in a blur of excitement. It was a typical childhood, where even the coldness of his parents was typical of its time. His father had not participated in the conflict due to a case of fallen arches.  A condition known as flat-feet to those in the medical profession who diagnosed such things. This kept him somewhat unscathed, whilst the ruined appendages sat comfortably below his desk at the bank in Great Queen Street, as 2nd under-clerk to the 3rd assistant-vice-president in charge of overseas acquisitions, for, and on behalf of the compositor of finance. But, as overseas acquisitions had been severely hampered by the bother in Flanders, the revolution in Russia, the fighting in the Dolomites and Mr Churchill’s blunder in the Dardanelles; all in all, he had had a very quiet war.

     His mother on the other-hand had taken to her bed in the winter of 1915 and had yet to rise from it.  No, it was not that she had some incurable ailment that was laying her low. It was not even as if something terminal had sought her out, and was now relentlessly burrowing into her bones, or her guts or spleen.  No, she was fatigued by the constant bombardment of news so retired to bed. The only indication that she was still alive was the appearance of empty chocolate boxes and demolished food trays left like scolded children outside her room at intervals throughout the day. It was true to say that Sam William’s never saw his mother.  She was an ephemeral apparition.  A ghostly presence who flitted in and out of his life like a million dust-motes, sparkling and swirling in the air about him.

     At least he could be proud of his pedigree.  It hailed from good blood, from the pure breeding stock of the Somerset Stanhope’s, as opposed to the down-at-heel Gloucester branch of the same name.  It is a foregone conclusion, if you match a good dam, with a good sire, one can produce all the bloodstock that   could be required.  And now that the boy was of the appropriate age, and since he was considered too old for a nanny, and too young for immediate transportation to boarding school, he was altogether at a loose end until the new term began in the weeks after Christmas.  Gladsehithe was where he was bound.  A school run by gentlemen who by fair means or foul, will produce gentlemen.  

     It was his father’s ‘alma-mater’ and it obviously made a man of him, so it was there that Sam would be made a man also.  It was a matter of little concern to his parents that the establishment was now a partly derelict ruin.   Or that most of the recent intake’s of pupils and masters having been lost to the guns in the late conflict.  It ran, or rather   limped along like an injured rabbit, on half-staff, half-education and half-board.

All of a sudden it started. The rain blowing up from nowhere as if beguiled by a passing breeze.  No warning clouds. No gentle pitter-pattering approach.  Just great gusts of raging wind racing around the empty spaces playing havoc with the remaining leaves. The sky like a bright echo screaming from far away, gone like a brief farewell from the dying sun...In a matter of minutes the park was deserted.

Of all the jobs Harry Thomson had foisted on him by those at the War- Department, they who saw fit to present him with such things, this was undoubtedly one of the worst.  Here he was on his hands and knees in Greenwich Park looking for what, rabbit shit?  Oh, and of course, it was beginning to rain.

     The War Department had been made aware that fragments of shell casing had been found in the park. Obviously it was vital to the safety and security of the area, so he and his team had been sent to deal with it. He was also cynical enough to suppose that the damn thing if it was where he was now, searching, and scrabbling would probably   blow up in his face before they could diffuse it…!

     It was inevitable that he would be known as Tommy Thomson.  He served with honour and no amount of valour, taking the shilling a little after the battle of Mons in September  1914, and spent two  tours  of  front  line  duty  before  he  caught  his  first  ‘Blighty  One!,’  At  Loos  in  the  spring  of  the  following  year  a  fragment  of  shell,  exploding  over  the  parapet  of  the  forward  dug-out,  opened  his  back-bone  to  the  flesh,  and  so  sent  him  home.  He was back again for the shambles that was the  Somme, early  morning,  1st  July  1916,  and  he  should  have  been  in  bed,  making  sexual  advances  to  his  waking  wife,  his  hand  placed  on  the  hairy  mound  that  hid  her  readiness,  deaf  to  her  protests  about  washing   before  the  early  shift  at  the  mill.  

     Instead he was scrambling over-the-top, and walking, not running mind you, towards the kindly embrace of the German guns.  They had been blown to bits before they covered 100 yards. He saw the bodies of boys too young to shave, although old enough to substitute the classroom for the battlefield, replacing mills-bombs for matriculation, grammar for Gatling-Guns. He watched as pieces of them wriggled and screamed in their agonies, and the luckier ones just lay silently where they fell.      Artist’s, sculptors, writers, teachers, a whole generation of university entrants, all who should have been punting and panting on such a summers day, with their hands up their girlfriend’s skirts. Instead they all lay down together, forgetful of the times that were wasted tasting the mud-in-the-water, when it should have been the wine-in-the-glass. ‘Funny,’ Harry thought, ‘Charles Darwin believed London to be the epicentre of the world, and such a fruitful place for the ‘Centerance ‘of the globe, that only a few years after his death the line of prime meridian, O degrees’ longitude was established there.’

     As a confirmed Northerner he thought the capital city was a cesspool, although he liked Greenwich, the little he had seen of it anyway.  The rain was steadily getting heavier as his hands worked, slowly churning the mud underneath his fingers. They glopped and slopped the mixture, grinding, kneading the earth as if it were a dough that he was to make into the most perfect bread. He had been given the reference to the plot by his commanding-officer at Woolwich barracks, and on arrival had cut the ground up into workable two yard squares, which he then sectioned off with string.

     He further divided these up between the two men who were with him, and they carefully went about the task of scraping away the earth with a trowel, probing the wet surface with bare hands and hoping to find metal underneath before the cold and rain forced them to stop.

     On the hill above him the Observatory stood silhouetted in the mist, as if watching them as they worked. At least they weren’t on the opposite side of the river that way they were free from the constant groans and grumbles of the underground railway, confined to the north side only, for they had no need of it here in the South.  Rotherhithe linked them upstream near the Port Authority Docks, and the twenty-year-old foot-tunnel was the only thing linking the two parts of London at this point on the lower Thames.

     He was deep in concentration, the rain pouring down the back of his oil-skin jacket, when his right hand grasped something firm.  He was about to alert his companions to the fact when suddenly it simply eased itself free, slipping from the mud   that held it captive, as if had been waiting for him all along.

     At first it looked like a piece of bone about 12 inches long he guessed at first glance, certainly not the jagged metal he was expecting. Taking off his sodden mitts he rolled them up placing them in his jacket pocket.  Then blowing on his fingers to warm them up a little, he removed the mud and slime from the length of the object.

     He was wrong, it wasn’t bone it was ivory, what’s more it was the haft of an axe or a hammer an object covered in mud and discarded, probably a long time ago. As he peered closer he could see that it was marked in some way, and on running his thumb up its length, he could feel that it was pitted and ridged to the touch.  

     By doing this he rubbed another layer of mud from the object and saw that smeared under his fingers there was some sort of writing running along the handle.  It was in-descript, and even holding it up to the watery light, he could not read what it said.  The letters were bunched too closely together to see, instead forming one long word, or possibly separate ones, he really couldn’t tell. All he could make out were a jumble of letters,thathedid,andcouldnotunderstand,reading: OηΟ  ΡΟΦ−   ΗΕΑ− ΕΝΙΣΜΑΔΕςΜΕ. It was just nonsense to him.

     As the rain began falling in insistent sheets and he called to his companions to end the search, he did not see the man who had been watching him all afternoon turn away and make his way towards the park gates.  

     The rather dishevelled fellow in the army greatcoat, a garment that had seen much service, his oversized cap pulled down squat against the upturned collar of the coat hiding his oversized ears. He stopped briefly by the gates, looking intently back at the soldier, as if he were the lens of a camera capturing every inch of the young man’s face, especially noting what he had found, before he turned and disappeared into the downpour.

Harry turned the haft around and round in his wet hands, the rain splashing mud onto his already drenched overalls and sodden coat. Now that he studied it again he realised that it certainly was old.  Perhaps it was even worth something?  Maybe the day hadn’t been a total shambles after all. Perhaps he did not know what it was, but he knew exactly where to take it.

As the forces that guide the night slept, silence descended like a blanket on the silent park. The leaves skittered in the breeze, playing with the holes in the air the children had left unattended.  In the sleeping quiet of a still and hidden land.  

     In a place far under the earth, in the hall of glass the old man turned over in his sleep, muttering about the cold and the fact that there was not a thing his old bones could do about it.  As the blue sea lapped like a thirsty dog at the fronds of the sacred red sands the dark eyed child watched over the dying man and wept for his future.

     In a location that no human eye could see, in the dark tunnels leading to the red mountains, in the green verdant valleys of the Tishani hills, by the shores of Lake Osawa; something happened. A vibration was sent forth destroying the village of Sarab.  Breaking the temple stone in the capital city of Chatawa, felling trees in the forest of the Laga, in short; disturbing the peace of the state of Omloogo.  

In the hours before dawn, as the brightly coloured bird opened his great wings, arched his back, launching himself into the inky air, sweeping across the night sky on his rounds, eyes twinkling, talons bloody with the first kill of the day; something matching the roar of an earthquake broke the skin of the land. A sound akin to a child attacking a rice-pudding with a spoon, shaking the reality that existed both above and below it to the core. It was only a foretaste of the tremors to come.  

Chapter Three

A Curious Case of Curiousness...

The following morning shortly after dawn, Sam was awoken by the creaking of a cart.  As he lay under the covers in his bedroom he could hear the plod of a horse, its hooves dragging themselves wearily up the cobbled incline of the hill.  

     Listening carefully, he realised it had stopped outside the front gate. Sam was surprised; it had no reason to do so. It was too early for the coalman who called Thursday, and too late for the milkman, for he would be half way down Woolwich Road by now.  The baker only delivered on Monday and Friday, and today was Wednesday. His father had stopped the papers during the spring offensive of 1918, so the paper-boy could also be struck off the list. No this had to be something else altogether.

     Climbing from his bed he scurried to the window-seat and with the warmth of his open hand, wiped away the thin film of frost that had gathered overnight on the glass. His wide expressive eyes open in amazement, like islands of the deepest blue at the event outside. Slowly the frost melted and as it did the ice flowers fading into moisture, he saw at the end of the path a bedraggled grey horse and a heavily laden wagon. The driver, a man of indeterminate age, neither young nor old, but caught somewhere in the middle of the points of the compass, was certainly grubby. He wore a military greatcoat far too big for his skinny frame, old and shiny with wear.  The frayed collar turned up at the neck so that it hid the face underneath, exposed below the nose.  The expanse of his forehead down to his eyes, equally hidden by a worn cap pulled tightly down across his brow.  This allowed barely enough room for him to either see or breathe, as he gulped in bites of the morning air.

     Alighting from the driving seat the coachman stamped his feet and rubbed his   bare hands together for warmth.  Without warning the boy saw him stop, as if an idea had hit him foursquare on the nose.  Then, going to the rear of the cart he lifted up the greasy tarpaulin covering it, and lifting himself onto the tailboard, he disappeared fully underneath. Seconds later he re-appeared carrying something in his right hand.  It was brown, oblong, and opening the gate he carried it up the path with such reverence that Sam thought that it must be worth a million pounds.

     He leapt from the window, pulling on his dressing gown and raced from his bedroom, of course narrowly missing the cat asleep outside his door and clattered down the stairs, leaving prints of his feet on the wooden floor. For a moment he hesitated, almost fearful at what might await him.  Then with a thrill of excitement he threw open the front-door and looked outside.

     What awaited him he was not prepared for? On the lawn in front of the house were rabbits!  Hundreds and hundreds of   rabbits!  Sitting on the flower beds, lying on the lawn, resting under bare oak trees...Why they even sat under his favourite chestnut tree, heavy with the conkers that would soon fall, sure in the knowledge he would get a Sixer,’ with one of   them this year.

     As he stepped past them, one of the creatures spoke out. “Well...I ask you Gwendolyn!  What’s he going to do now...?”  he distinctly heard it say, as it pointed a paw in his direction. “After all he’s made us homeless you know,” it said, waving a hairy digit at him, whilst all around a mass of squeaking, complaining creatures chattered amongst themselves.

     Ignoring the voice’s, he stepped over the prone figures and stopping at the gate   he looked up the hill to see what appeared to be an apparition.  A sparkling shimmering thing, that somehow glowed and danced within a million pinpricks of phosphorescent light. Sure enough it was the horse and cart at the top of the hill, caught in a daylight fireworks display. Continuing to dazzle as rockets and Catherine-Wheels whooped and spun into the air.  It all abruptly stopped as they reached the hill’s brow, as both man and beast disappeared into the fog of it all in a basket of a million stars.

     Looking down he saw the things left at the gate, a card, a newspaper and the box itself.  He examined the business card.  It was the sort his father used at his office.  White rectangular card, with italic typeface, which read in embossed gold, the name, ‘Felix Dowdles, Friend to the Friendless.’ Before he could repeat the name, the words forming on his lips, each of the individual letters sprouted wings, and one by one flew from the card into the air.  Once the space was blank the card itself disintegrated, and all that was left was a small pile of sand in the palm of the boy’s hand.

     He then turned his attention to the newspaper.  Reading the headline quickly and with little interest he noted that one of the soldiers digging in the park was murdered last night. His body found in the early hours of the morning propped up against the park railings.  At these early stages of the investigation, it appeared the attack had no motive.  Nothing had been taken, the man’s few possessions still about his person.                         Looking back Sam could see that the creatures were still looking at him.  He thought for a moment that he should feel guilty. But guilty about what exactly?

     It was what the newspaper was resting on that attracted the boy’s attention. The Box.  A battered brown leather box.  But, to be more precise a hat-box, and one that had seen better days. Picking it up by the wooden handle he examined the scuffed covering.  Amongst the water marks and surface gouges where the material had cracked and split from the wood underneath, were inscribed the initials HF in peeled   lettering. He thought for a moment as to whom HSF could be, and why this should be delivered to him before opening the lid.  Peering inside, nestled amongst a wrapping of red velvet was a battered top-hat.  A thing gentleman wore when meeting Kings, Princes, dignitaries or suchlike. He even remembered his father wearing one to a sombre wedding towards the end of the war.  Tentatively Sam stood for a moment and touched the top of the hat. It was soft, warm and animal like, somehow   comforting.

      It had come to him for a purpose.  But what purpose was that?  It was only when he had made his way back through the maze of rabbits and closed the front-door turning to climb the stairs back to his bedroom, the hat-box firmly in his grasp, that he noticed something odd, the hall clock, an heirloom of many generations had stopped working. He went from the drawing, to the dining-room, and eventually to what his mother referred to as the parlour, but was really the sitting-room he found that all the clocks had stopped at precisely five minutes to eleven.

Returning to the drawing room he then found the most curious occurrence of all.  Over the fireplace hung a print of Big-Ben, an ugly, sepia-tinted thing, of either great draughtsmanship or any financial value. It had always hung there, but he had never noticed before. The hands of the clock pointed to exactly five minutes to eleven. At that precise time far away in the Egyptian desert, the tomb was open and the heretic loosed.

In the belly of the upper Nile at Luxor at midnight, in the stillness of the desert, the moon when full is not just huge, it is enormous.  So big that you almost believe if you stand on tip-toes you can reach up and break a chunk from it. For what purpose?  Why to find out if it is in fact really made of cheese of course, and if so, what flavour?  Would it be a smooth Brie, or a flavoursome Cambozola. Would it melt in the mouth like Oak Smoked Cheddar, or leave the compelling aftertaste of a Celtic Promise, redolent of heather covered mountains and peaty glens. Or were these thoughts not simply ones of approaching madness, that he, here today, and after all these years, had found the thing he sought.

     Howard Carter sat with his back toward the wall, laughing and shaking his head.  It was the only spot in the cramped space he could find a place to rest, and unwind like a cobra from the coils of the day.  The air swirling around him was thick, fetid almost.  The smell of death clung to the hairs on the inside of his nostrils, and the taste of it tickled from his throat all the way down to his empty stomach. Even now, some 15 hours after the breakthrough he found it hard to catch his breath.  He supposed it was shock. Perhaps like the shock one felt at the prospect of going over the top for the first time, although that had not been his experience, yet he felt it nonetheless. Bayonet fixed, thoughts distracted, eyes blank, with only thought of the task to come. They had gone with the dead, those who fussed around him all day. Like scarab beetles, scuttling to and fro, a presence that constantly disturbed him.  Now he was alone.  Now at last he could think.

     In the half light of the lamps the sarcophagus glowed like a beacon. The curves of the stone structure calling to him in the darkness.  Saying, ‘I was once alive. I lived like you.  Soon you will be as I am now. Dust calls to dust, and eventually all shall be dust.’ The tomb throbbed like a pubescent boy’s erection, straining to be released from his clothing.  To be made free, to be made the milk of life and so live again.  It glowed like a firefly, or the thing that flew past.  

He held the parchment in his hand and caressed it as rainbow of colours flew from the parchment and danced in the dimness.  In the last few hours he had not felt jubilation, he had simply felt sick. Something had happened to Carnarvon, his face within a few hours was aged, a walking dead man, sucked dry of life and the very essence of it. Earlier there was joy, when the ages were put aside and they had broken through the seal of the door. Carter, thrusting a candle into the darkness, Carnarvon asked, “What do you see?” Carter replied, as simply as he could, head splitting, voice cracked with barely contained excitement. “Many wonderful things,” and in those few words he was.  Made as vulnerable as a naked babe, and laid in a cattle stall. He had faced the truth and the pill was as bitter as he could swallow.  For in discovering the son, he had released the soul of the father.

     In the stone tomb covering the face of the boy he could see death.  But in truth it was all around him everywhere he cared to look. Caught like a moth before a flame in a celebration of death.  He was the interloper come to sit at his own table and view the masque. The maimed corpse, opening the door to its past and stinking up his parlour.  The ghost, appearing as a guest at his own wake.

Over and over he read and re-read it, and it made him laugh, over and over again.  In the past few hours he had become obsessed by the words on the note.  For in those lines and shadowy figure of the Egyptian, never out of his sight he knew he had freed the heretic.  What the armies of the European powers had recently failed to do, he accomplished with the opening of the tomb of a long dead ruler.  He had unleashed death, and brought about the end of the world.  Death, now in its turn, was coming upon him.

At the very instance the tomb of the heretic was opened, the clock that sat atop the church of St Nicholas’s on Creek Road, Deptford, stopped working. The carefully tended series of mechanisms melding together, solidifying, never to be released in the lifetime of those presently living. At the same moment both the north and south entrances to the Greenwich Foot Tunnel sealed themselves, trapping a baker and his assistant inside between the two points of exit. Cries for help going unheard until they ceased forever, with the lack of air to the lungs.

     Shortly thereafter the hospital on Woolwich Road was filled with cases of local residents consumed by hysteria. Whilst in the park itself the foxes on the hill screamed themselves hoarse in the darkness of the ‘Avenue,’ waking babies in every home in the district so that they were never able to sleep again that night.

     Taken one by one these events were enough to cause   concern. Collectively, they posed a bigger problem although it was not until the early hours of the following morning that the strangest event of all was uncovered. Bartholomew Crumnar was a sailor of the old school, wherever that establishment may be? He had served on    wooden masters, plying tea routes to India and China.  Packet steamers on the Hong Kong run, and the ocean going cities that were the Cunard Line’s finest vessels. He was an old salt, hard to shake, and even harder to impress.  In his time upon the waves he had witnessed a thousand bizarre events, seen a million wonderful things, with eyes that still craved more even at his age.  

     Porpoises dancing atop the water in the islands off the Greek coast, dragonflies mating in the swampy marshlands of Madagascar. The dragons of Komodo, and the head hunters of Fiji.  But in all the time that was allotted to him on this earth, he had never seen anything like this.

     For seven years he had been assistant caretaker at the Royal Naval Hospital. For seven years he had watched them come and go. Early mornings he mopped out. Mid-days he mopped out.  Late evenings he mopped out. That was the way of it, and so he did not complain. Through all of it, they were watching him.  In the Refectory, in the Painted-Hall, on the staircase, and in the chapel; they were his daily companions. Those great murals swathing the walls and ceilings in bursts of glorious colour.

     Queen Anne, William and Mary, late rulers of the Kingdom smiled benignly down.

Peace and liberty triumphed over tyranny.  Figurative representations of Africa, a lion, America an Indian chief, Europe, a white horse and Asia, a camel, stood proudly amongst the debris of cherubim and seraphim.  But above all stood to the forefront the proud and pictorial likeness of Great Britain. A national treasure, celebrating her many triumphs as a maritime and adversarial power without equal.

     Now, at the top step of the great-staircase leading into the Painted Hall he stood open mouthed like a gutted fish. The noise his bucket made as it crashed to the floor, tumbling down each of the marble steps, scattering water everywhere alerted those nearby, who also came to gawp at the wondrous spectacle.

They were gone! Somehow, overnight, they had all disappeared.