by F. G. Cottam
‘People thought it was the End Times,’ he said.
‘The Western world at least was on the brink,’ Juliet said. ‘There’s a tipping point. There’s a moment when people lose faith.’
‘And it’s contagious,’ he said. ‘I think we were very close to it in the autumn of 1940. I’ve never experienced it in my lifetime. But I’m feeling something of it now.’
‘There will be people who’ll think a war would be a good thing,’ Juliet said. ‘Dispel the gloom, everyone pulling together.’
‘Which is exactly how some of my Cabinet colleagues feel,’ he said. ‘Fortunately, they’re not in the majority.’
‘Not yet.’
‘No. Not yet.’
When the call ended, Juliet went back inside. The London flood images were still being televised, on what she thought must be the loop-tape from hell. She drained her by now tepid beer and apprised Paul of her conversation.
‘I know him slightly. There’s a family connection. Bit patrician, bone-dry sense of humour. Essentially a good guy.’
‘That how he knew you’d volunteer?’
‘What’s his take on all this?’
‘Holistic,’ Juliet said.
‘What does that mean?’
‘Agnostic and a believer at the same time. He doesn’t really believe a book is doing this, but still wants me to stop whoever’s using it.’
‘Well, he’s a politician,’ Paul said. ‘They like things both ways. Contradictions to them are just compromises. Paradoxes become principles.’
Juliet looked up at the screen just as a body welled to the surface somewhere she thought she recognized as Bond Street. Fenwicks department store, its glass obliterated by weight of water, window display mannequins neck deep in it, the caption crawling across the bottom of the screen saying that this was shot at just after four in the afternoon.
She’d seen enough. She grabbed Paul by the hand and hauled him outside on to the pavement.
‘What’s happening?’
‘I need to walk in the fresh air, Paul. Then we need to try to eat.’
‘Good luck with that.’
‘We can neither of us run on empty.’
‘And then what?’
‘There are two things you need to know about me. The first is that I don’t do one-night stands. The second is that I really don’t want to sleep alone tonight.’
‘You’re a Londoner, aren’t you?’
‘I was brought up in Wandsworth. Went to school there. This is all very personal to me.’
‘I had no intention of leaving you on your own tonight,’ he said. ‘It’s not in my nature to behave so callously.’
She kissed him. She didn’t know she was going to do it until it was done. She thought it took them both by surprise. And then they held one another, which seemed completely natural to Juliet. And also exactly what the moment required.
TWENTY-FOUR
Dawn Jackson awoke the following morning and, when she walked into the kitchen, became aware that the power had been restored. The fridge was humming loudly, working hard to restore its low ambient temperature, the power presumably not having been back on for all that long.
Dawn took this as a sign. It signalled that she should revive her grandfather that very day. Yes, he could grump sometimes for England. And he’d probably go bonkers about the appalling state of the fish tank. And he always smelled strongly of tobacco smoke. But she wanted company apart from that which her feral, leering, ever-hungry dead brother now provided. She wanted proper company. And maybe Grandpa would have lost his interest in smoking. Maybe old habits died hard only if the person possessing them hadn’t literally died themselves. Just a thought, thought Dawn. Just a bit of pre-breakfast philosophizing.
He’d been a bit, well, mushy, had Grandpa, when they’d carried him down the stairs. He’d been overripe, in all honesty. But Dawn believed strongly in both practice and persistence, and thought she would do a more polished job with Grandpa than she had with Pete. Pete was actually what manufacturers called a prototype. You got the kinks out with the prototype before you began the production run proper. Everyone in industry knew that.
Reviving Grandpa would probably come at a cost. But the pain from his old war wound had been chronic and the mirrored cabinets in both bathrooms were crammed with both over-the-counter and prescription painkillers. There was plentiful generic aspirin and paracetamol. Brands included extra-strength Nurofen. And for the real humdinger headaches, there was Naproxen and Diazepam. The cabinet above the sink in Grandpa’s bathroom was practically a pharmacy.
By now, Dawn considered she was all over her trickier Special Study Group test subjects. She was on top of Spanish vocab, well up on Treasure Island and Narnia. London was in such a state of ongoing chaos that she didn’t even know yet whether the tests would be staged. There was no information, which was bad. But no one was showing any curiosity about her dead brother’s whereabouts any longer, which was good. Well, nobody other than Andy Baxter. But Dawn had plans down the line for Handy Andy.
Instinct, or intuition, told Dawn that even though she knew it by heart, the revival spell would work best with the book to hand. So immediately after switching off the chest freezer containing Grandpa, she took the spade from the shed in the garden and went and dug the book up, careful to roll the turf and heap the soil and preserve the polythene wrapping intact so that she could bury it again later once her mission had been accomplished.
The revival spell required an artefact with which the subject had been physically intimate. She had used Pete’s toothbrush. Thinking along similar lines, she went and fetched her grandfather’s upper dentures from the glass on his bedside table in which both sets reposed. The water had all long evaporated and the glass was white at the bottom with residue from the dissolved tablet that cleaned the false teeth. They looked a bit dusty, so Dawn ran them under the tap.
This particular spell worked only in darkness. The sun had to have gone down. There was some explanation in the book about waking the dead from their slumber which made the night-time bit sound more symbolic than real to Dawn, but after what she considered her flawed experimentation with her brother, she was prepared to toe the line as far as the instructions were concerned. She didn’t really want another monster on her hands.
The artefact meant that she could do the spell remotely. She didn’t have to go into the garage at all. She didn’t even have to unlock the freezer’s heavy lid, since only gravity kept it closed. Presumably Grandpa would wake up, or come around, or whatever. And then he’d climb out. ‘Clamber’ might be a better word, she thought, for this part of the process. Grandpa was sort of stringy build-wise but, like most old people, a bit stiff and uncoordinated in his movement. And of course there was his dodgy knee.
Dawn performed the spell just after full dark, at almost a quarter to ten at night. Then she watched a bit of the news on the television. The crisis was worsening. Two Royal Navy fighter planes had been scrambled from the deck of the aircraft carrier HMS Nemesis. They’d been in a dogfight over the Solent with a Russian fighter-bomber and had shot it down. The Russian aircraft’s pilot had ejected and been picked up uninjured in an onion field on the Isle of Wight, but his navigator was missing presumed dead. Moscow was calling it a very grave escalation. So was the British government.
‘Handbags,’ Dawn said, flatly, to the TV screen. Her own idea of a grave escalation was a nuclear bomb levelling a city.
London didn’t need a nuclear bomb. The streets were littered with wrecked cars and black cabs going nowhere and buses on their sides. All the shop frontages were smashed in and the stock ruined. Lavatories overflowed with raw sewage when householders tried to flush them. In every London suburb the streets were a kaleidoscopic riot of pulled-up and dumped carpets. A warning about graphic content flashed on the screen before footage of flood victims being bulldozed into high piles of bodies at a junction somewhere. And there was a typhus outbreak.
A bit bored with t
he flood coverage, Dawn switched to the Pete channel.
‘Bloody hell, you must be hungry,’ she said to the screen.
Pete was seated down there in the gloom, cross-legged on the cellar floor, surrounded by empty corned beef and pilchard tins, most of his left arm now missing. He was gnawing at the stump.
He looked up sharply when she made the remark, giving a hint of the preternatural speed of reflex he now possessed in what remained of him. He grinned and winked with his one good eye. And then his tongue protruded, palely serpent-like, and he licked blood lovingly from exposed bone.
There was a feathery tap at the sitting room window. Dawn went to the front door and opened it. Her grandfather stood in front of her in striped pyjama bottoms and the white singlet soiled yellow under the armpits where he had started to ooze as he’d lain upstairs, dead in his bed in the summer heat. He’d felt gluey there, when they’d carried him down the stairs.
‘Hello, Dawn.’
His voice was an echoey rasp and when he grinned at her he looked different from how she remembered him. Wolfish, somehow. There was a proper word for that, wasn’t there? Dawn knew she’d have it in a second, and then she did. The word was ‘lupine’.
It was the teeth that were different. Grandpa had his own teeth now, and they were long and discoloured and sharp looking. He must have grown the teeth in death. Unless he’d got them as part of the revival process.
‘I’m hungry, Dawn,’ her grandpa said.
And Dawn thought, Here we go.
He walked stiffly into the house and through to the kitchen and Dawn saw with a stab of disgust that he’d soiled himself. Well, understandable. Grandpa had waited a long time for that pee, hadn’t he? Elderly men. Prostate problems. Ugh.
She followed him and opened a cupboard and perused the rations parachuted into their garden the previous day.
But when she looked, he was eying the fish tank and its energetic contents, avidly.
‘I’ll have the seafood, Dawn,’ he said. He was drooling saliva in a glistening string from his chin. And Dawn was feeling a bit regretful, thinking her brother might have some company in their cellar quite soon.
She grimaced. ‘How will you eat them?’
‘Easily. I’ll suck them from their shells,’ her grandfather said.
Two birds with one stone, Dawn thought. He’d probably lick out the tank afterwards. She could feel the thump at her temples of an oncoming humdinger of a headache. She felt more than tired, she felt suddenly bone weary. And saliva was filling her mouth, sour, like it does just before you puke. This didn’t feel, to Dawn, like a moment of triumph.
The rumble of earthquake made the surface of the green sludge filling the tank ripple and shiver as her grandfather groped through the slime for a terrapin and began his impromptu meal. It would loosen a few slates on their roof and inflict a crack in an interior wall. But Crouch End mostly got away with a tremor or two. Central London did not. In Bloomsbury and Clerkenwell, in Islington and Camden Town, it was a nine on the Richter scale. It was mass death and utter devastation.
In their shared hotel room on Park Lane, Paul Beck and Juliet Harrington rushed to the window in time to see a large floodlit statue topple opposite. Someone big and mythological, cast in bronze. Someone with a sword and shield, prone now, plucked from his plinth by the spasms jerking the earth. Achilles, Juliet remembered.
‘They’re active again, Paul,’ she said, ‘using the Almanac. This is the Auguries. This is the world out of kilter. This is the universe wronged.’
Their hotel room window juddered, panes of glass smashing one by one as though plucked from their frames. They retreated as far as the bed and held one another until the earth’s delinquent movement altogether ceased.
TWENTY-FIVE
The military base was at Paderborn, a 300-mile drive in a hire car from Berlin but the only place from which they could fly to the UK in the state of emergency that had downed all civilian flights in and out of the country. They’d set off early and reached the base at ten a.m. on Wednesday morning, Paul averaging over a hundred miles per hour at the wheel on the route. He might not have been a top-flight footballer, Juliet thought, but as far as his white-knuckled passenger was concerned, he certainly drove like one.
A Hercules aircraft was big, loud, prop-driven and, as Juliet discovered, completely free of creature comforts. It was five p.m. before they were picked up by a ministerial car at Heathrow and driven to their hotel. Juliet showered and changed, and Paul ordered a room service meal for each of them while she switched on her laptop and researched the man her Tudor specialist Oxford contact had told her was the likeliest to have commissioned Gunter Keller to mastermind the Almanac.
His name was Edmund Fleury and he was a baron. His lineage was Norman, an ancestor a knight and formidable warrior and one of the barons who had helped William the Conqueror achieve the victory at Hastings that gained him the English throne. In return for this service, Jean-Luc Fleury had been handed as his English estate a large slice of what was now Dorset. Almost 500 years later his direct descendant, Edmund, inherited as the eldest son.
Even by the standards of Tudor aristocracy, Edmund Fleury’s wealth was vast.
And he seemed to have been a true Renaissance man. He was an accomplished writer of sonnets. He’d designed buildings on his estate. He’d played and composed for the clavichord. And he’d been extremely enthusiastic about astronomy.
‘Not to mention running a variety of duellist opponents clean through with his pricey rapier,’ Paul said from behind her shoulder.
‘He didn’t need to run them through. He just needed to draw blood to settle an affair of honour. He was so handy with a sword he could apparently nick an opponent at will. Even he couldn’t have killed someone with impunity in peacetime. You needed to be the monarch to get away with that.’
‘And you needed the semblance of a trial,’ Paul said. ‘Thomas More. Anne Boleyn.’
‘You know your history.’
‘I just enjoy movies.’
Juliet read some more. Then she said, ‘Edmund Fleury isn’t quite adding up.’
‘He’s just your average clever blue-blooded psychopath,’ Paul said. ‘They were a fairly common breed, weren’t they? A bit of jousting, a bit of calculus, a dash of womanizing, some occasional warfare. I mean, there’s a theory Henry the Eighth wrote “Greensleeves”.’
‘What I mean is, he seems too rational to be the man who paid a fortune to have the Almanac compiled.’
‘I don’t know, Juliet. John Dee didn’t much differentiate between science and magic. Were there really any lines of demarcation before the Enlightenment?’
‘No. But there was an intolerance, religious and legal, of blasphemy, witchcraft and heresy. This is a cultured and intelligent man who inherited more wealth than he could ever squander. His is a very proud and profoundly Christian heritage. His younger brother renounced his own wealth and titles to become a Franciscan monk. He had ancestors who became Crusaders. One of them earned a place in the chronicles for his valour at the Siege of Jerusalem. Why does a man with his noble lineage want to create the Almanac of Forbidden Wisdom? He had a wife to whom he was devoted. He was a loving father to three children. Why take the enormous risk of dabbling in that sort of mischief? What on earth did he stand to gain from it that he didn’t already possess?’
‘Maybe he can tell you himself. He sounds like the sort of man who would have written things down. Clever people have a habit of expressing themselves. Even if they feel obliged to do it in code. Did he leave any papers?’
‘According to my Tudor authority, they’re in the Bodleian Library.’
‘Oxford. Sounds like fate to me, Juliet.’
‘They’re no likelier to tell us where the Almanac is now than the Keller archive was.’
‘Without the Keller archive you and I would never have met.’
‘That’s true. Plus, there’s the fact that we’ve nowhere else to look.’
; Juliet’s phone began to ring. She didn’t recognize the number on the display. She took the call anyway, knowing it might be important.
‘You’re back in the country. I can tell from the dial tone.’
She didn’t recognize the voice, deep and male, perhaps just the hint of an Irish brogue. ‘Who is this?’
‘My name is Thomas Gould. I’m a Catholic priest. We spoke briefly before your departure. I wanted to speak to you. I still want to speak to you.’
‘About my monograph.’
‘Specifically, about the Almanac of Forbidden Wisdom and the phenomenon of the unrestful dead. I think I may have experienced the latter.’
‘I think you’d know for certain if you had. And to experience the latter, you need to have come into contact with the former. Have you?’
‘This is completely unsatisfactory, Professor Harrington. We need to have this discussion face to face.’
‘How did you even get my mobile number?’
‘Dr Doyle gave it to me. Not everyone shares your apparent contempt for the clergy.’
‘On matters clerical, Father Gould, where do you stand on the End Times?’
‘I know from your monograph that you think the Almanac was Gunter Keller’s attempt to bring them about. I know from your university head of department that you think it’s been rediscovered by someone currently using it. I don’t think the string of catastrophes we’re enduring is either a test of faith or a coincidence. I need to see you, professor.’
Juliet took the phone from the side of her head and tapped it with her free hand, thinking. She was an Oxford-based academic with a ministerial backer. The Bodleian was a great deal easier for her to access than the Humboldt library had been. As Paul had implied, it was her home turf. But it was closed now and wouldn’t open again until the morning.
‘Where are you, Father Gould?’
‘Crouch End.’
She looked at her wristwatch. It was just after six. ‘How long would it take you to get to Park Lane?’