‘Just who do you think you are, Mr V. A. Bassianus? A ghost, a reincarnation or a god?’
He recalled the old box the stone had been delivered in and reached out for it. The label that had been glued on the lid was tantalizing. The words were in English, but an old form of it, and broken up by the missing pieces of paper that had been shed like dry skin. He pored over it, and slowly he began to piece it together. He noted down what he could decipher, then interpolated some possible words into the text. What emerged was startling.
With this sky-st[one] comes a legend. It is [said] to be a force for great good, and a cure. But ev[il?] is drawn to it also. It has travelled through m[any h]ands [or maybe many lands], but its origin is thought to be Greenland [ . . .] where the evil began. HT, 16[??].
Could it be? Was the missing place name Brattahli∂? Greg’s mind reeled. It was only a week since he had first had sight of Brattahli∂ on Google Earth. Before then, he was unaware of the ancient site. And maybe that was the rational answer – he was making an incorrect jump based on limited knowledge. How many places in Greenland started with those three letters? On Google, he did a place names search. It didn’t take long, and showed him that no modern town at least had a name beginning with the letters ‘Bra’. Nor were there any other ancient sites so entitled. It was not conclusive, but it was disturbing nevertheless. He lifted the stone from his lap and stared at it. It felt hot, and he could feel it pulsing in his grip. Hastily, he put it down on the workbench top. He tried to clear his head, rationalizing that he had just felt his own pulse. But the thought kept returning to him that this very stone could have been the meteorite that had impacted in the crater he had discovered last week. Or at least part of the original meteor, because the crater was larger than this small stone could have made. He began again searching Google Earth for smaller impact craters in the vicinity of the larger one. And on the same side of the fjord as the ancient settlement of Brattahli∂.
It was the early hours of the morning before he took a break and rolled his wheelchair into the kitchen. He needed coffee to keep him awake. The last time he pulled an overnighter, he had been drinking red wine, and it didn’t help his powers of concentration. He made some of the real stuff in a cafetière, balanced the hot jug between his insensitive thighs and rolled back to the computer. He depressed the plunger, poured the hot coffee into his mug and took a sip. The phone rang jarringly in the deep silence, and he almost spilled the mug into his lap. He wondered who was calling him in the depths of the night. Picking the cordless up, he heard the voice of June Piper, and she was excited. Before he could say anything about the meteorite, which sat, dark and mysterious, in front of him, she babbled out her news.
‘We’ve found something. It’s from your new impact crater site. Well, not exactly from that but around it. There are the fingers of some glaciers running down the valleys quite close, and Don sashayed down there on to the surface.’
Greg felt a pang of jealousy. Don Tremlett was the mountain goat who had replaced him after his accident. He did all the risky manoeuvres that had been Greg’s forte. He could just imagine him scrambling down on to the uneven and no doubt fissured surface of the glacier. As June pressed on, he idly moved his cursor hand on Google Earth, grasping the image and sliding it east, back over the fjord. One stretch of the satellite image had been taken in winter, and Greg could see a grey river snaking through ice just below where he had identified the crater. He followed it up and found the glacier terminus – a mass of shattered ice. Above it he could almost picture Don walking on the crumpled surface and finding a good point at which to bore down with his core sampler. June’s sharp tones alerted him to the fact that she didn’t know if he was still on the line.
‘Yes, I’m here, June. Just looking at the Google image. What did you find?’
‘That’s what I’ve been telling you. We found microbes – a species of bacterium in a spore-like state. They must have been under the ice for a long time, moving very slowly towards the terminus. Whether they are associated with your impact crater we aren’t sure yet. But we’re going to thaw them out in the lab and coax them back to life.’
‘Isn’t that a little dangerous? It sounds like the sort of doomsday scenario Michael Crichton would conjure up.’
June snorted. ‘You’ve been reading too much science fiction, and anyway Crichton’s dead. As for thawing out bugs, it’s been done before at Penn State, and nobody’s died yet. Look, I’ve got to go. We’re celebrating here, and Alicia has just waved a bottle of beer in my face.’
Greg pictured the gorgeous Alicia in his mind and wondered if June had got her into bed yet. He had tried and failed. He wished the team good luck and rang off. Greg felt totally dissociated from that world out there, where at this very moment scientists were getting paralytic because they had found a bacterium. All he had was a mug of rapidly cooling coffee and an empty room. Tired of looking for craters, and depressed at being in London when all the action was in Greenland, he returned to Googling Sol Invictus, Bassianus and Elagabal. He flipped from site to site, and after a while the information began to repeat itself, as it frequently did on the net with one site pirating another. Then something caught his eye. A site describing the sun god Elagabal said he was the ‘god of the black stone’. He clicked on this highlighted text and found himself reading about the Baetyl – a black stone venerated as the house of God. There was a quote from the historian Herodian suggesting the stone came down from Zeus. The clincher was the final sentence, which Greg read out loud.
‘In the third century, the stone was believed to be a meteorite.’
Greg knew that the stone lying on the bench in front of him couldn’t be that very stone, if it had come down in Greenland. But if the original stone was lost, who’s to say that some crank wasn’t seeking a suitable substitute? A crank like V. A. Bassianus, for example. It was a little scary that, since the man’s email and Greg’s rebuff, Bassianus had gone silent. Suddenly, the warehouse conversion didn’t feel so safe. A wave of exhaustion rolled over Greg, and he hunched over in his chair. He felt a tingling sensation in his left toes and sighed, reaching out to close Google Earth. Before he managed to hit the keyboard, though, he suddenly pushed himself upright. How could he have had any sensation in his toes? He was a T2 paraplegic. He shook his head, guessing he was more tired than he thought. He was having delusions now. The meteorite still lay on his workbench, and he picked it up, hefting the weight in his hands.
Then it happened again. He felt something in his right foot this time. It was like weak radio signals beaming in from outer space, almost lost in the background wash of white noise. But this time he knew it was real. He needed something stronger than coffee to deal with this, so he tucked the meteorite down between his thigh and the side of the wheelchair and flicked the switch to motor into the kitchen and get a bottle of wine. When he returned, there was a man standing in the middle of the room. He was tall, well muscled and looked quite at ease. His hair was thick and dark, slicked back from a bronzed forehead. His eyes were pale blue and steady.
‘Who the hell . . .?’ Greg stopped his wheelchair abruptly, and the tyres squeaked on the wooden surface. The man smiled with a lopsided grin that had no doubt charmed many a woman and held out his hand.
‘Greg Janic? My name’s Bassianus.’
Greg’s mind was racing. He couldn’t figure out how the man had got in, and done it so quietly. Then he felt a draught on his neck. Half turning in the chair, he saw that one of the windows that looked out on to the street was open. If Bassianus had come in that way, he was as good a climber as himself. As he once had been. Greg’s apartment was three floors up. He went to move the switch on the arm of his chair so that he could swing out of the room and escape. Maybe he could barricade himself in the bedroom. But the man was too quick for him. Bassianus strode over to him, reached behind the chair and pulled the battery leads free. Greg was disabled all over again. He thought briefly of the bottle that was nestled in his lap, b
ut Bassianus must have thought of it, too, and he gently lifted the wine away from Greg and placed it safely on the workbench.
‘Now, Mr Janic, please may I have what I have come for? Just give me the stone, and I will be on my way. No harm done.’
Greg waved a hand at the shelves on the other side of the room, where his display of meteorites was arranged. ‘Help yourself.’
Bassianus sniggered and shook his head. ‘I’ve already had a look, Mr Janic. The one I want is not there. I want the sacred stone you stole from me on eBay.’
Suddenly, the man surged forward and pushed Greg’s wheelchair roughly back until it was under the open window. Greg felt his legs tense even as the air whooshed out of his lungs with the force of the crash against the wall. His head pitched forward on to Bassianus’s chest. The man grabbed him by his hair and pulled his head cruelly back. He thrust his contorted, red face into Greg’s, all appearance of the urbane man draining away from his features to be replaced by a wild and uncontrollable beast.
‘Where the fuck is it, you miserable cripple? Tell me before you go out that window.’
Greg kept his mouth shut, even as he felt the back of his neck forced over the sill of the window. His head sang as the blood rushed to it, and the night sky hung above him, the stars mocking his terror. The struggle was all too brief and one-sided.
DS Dave Skye leaned out of the window and looked at the body of the man that lay sprawled out on the pavement below. He called down to the police surgeon, who was examining the corpse.
‘Cause of death?’
Andy Topley, who was used to this question from detectives at the scene of a crime, gave a deep sigh. Why did they all think it was like on the TV? The DS would be asking for a time of death next, which in reality was often impossible to specify even after a post-mortem. He looked up to where the red-haired Scot hung out of the window three floors up.
‘How about multiple injuries, consistent with a fall from three storeys up?’
Skye’s head disappeared. No doubt the DS was moaning to someone about the doctor having got out of bed on the wrong side. He thought he had seen DC Harry Parris trailing upstairs after the DS. Perhaps he could deal with him. At least he was a sensible older cop, who would not bother the doctor too much. Then Skye’s head appeared again, and Dr Topley just knew it was the next inevitable question coming, so he pre-empted it with a comment of his own.
‘There is an unusual depressed fracture on his forehead. Dish-shaped. As though he has been hit with something rounded. Of course, there may be something down here that caused it. There is an iron bollard over there.’ He pointed to the old-fashioned cannon-shaped black object by the pavement edge. ‘It’s near the body, but your forensics team will have to check it out first.’
The red-headed policeman waved at the doctor and disappeared yet again.
‘Wanker,’ muttered Topley.
‘What’s up with him?’ said Skye. ‘Male PMT, or something?’
Parris, stolid as ever, ignored the unnecessary comment. He was used to his boss, university educated and a high flier, behaving like a prat. He just shrugged his shoulders non-committally. Never take sides, was his guiding principle in life. The DS carried on his musings.
‘Still, it’s interesting what he was saying about the skull fracture. A blow to the head makes this an interesting case after all.’
When he had got the call about the dead body lying in the street in what was now a fashionable part of London that used to be warehouse land, his ears had pricked up. A murder in yuppie-dom would do his career no harm at all. Then he had learned that the apartment the body appeared to have flown out of was owned by someone called Greg Janic. And that the guy was wheelchair-bound. It suddenly looked like Janic must have accidentally fallen out of the window, or maybe thrown himself out. Suicide or accidental death loomed large, and a celebrity murder case dissipated like ice cream in hot sunshine. But with the doctor’s observation, things were looking up again.
Harry Parris wasn’t convinced. Gloomily, the DC looked out of the window for himself.
‘That bollard looks awfully close to the body.’
‘What? No, it can’t be the cause of the guy’s fracture. He would have had to have flown to hit it. And if it’s not the bollard that caused the injury, what was it?’
The sound of rubber tyres squeaking on the woodblock floor of the apartment’s living room caused both policemen to turn away from the window and plaster unconvincing smiles on their faces. It was Skye who spoke first. ‘Mr Janic, are you OK now?’
Greg nodded and waved to the long sofa that ran down the centre of the room facing the big TV screen on the wall.
‘Thank you for letting me dress. I didn’t really want to entertain you in just my boxer shorts.’
The policemen sat down and watched as Greg Janic expertly manoeuvred the motorized wheelchair around the coffee table to stop opposite them.
‘You were asking me when I first became suspicious there was someone in the apartment.’
Skye nodded. ‘Yes. You said you had gone to bed early, undressed, and had been reading.’
‘That’s right. One of those historical crime novels that seem so popular now. By . . . Sorry, I’ve forgotten the author already.’
‘No matter. I wasn’t looking for a recommendation. I can’t stand the things myself. And then you heard a noise, you say?’
‘Yes. I thought at first it was the window making a noise. I had recalled leaving it open as soon as I had got into bed. But I didn’t feel like doing something about it.’ By way of explanation, he pointed down to his useless legs and the chair. ‘It takes so long to get back up again, once I’ve settled down.’
Skye smiled sympathetically. ‘Quite. But then . . .?’
‘Then I definitely heard something else. Footsteps, and a bleep from my laptop.’
He pointed at the bank of equipment that was arrayed down the far side of the room, surmounted by the shelf full of meteorites.
‘Someone had to be playing with it. It took a little while to get in my chair, and I could hear whoever it was moving things around. Maybe he was looking for money or valuables. But he was disappointed, I suppose. All I have is a collection of stones.’
‘Meteorites, you say?’
‘That’s right. Curiosities, but not worth a lot. I came into the room as quietly as I could. But I suppose my tyres must have squeaked on the wooden floor, and alerted him – the burglar – to my presence. Just like they did with you.’
‘You say the burglar.’
Greg looked a little puzzled. ‘What else could he have been? He must have seen my window open and thought he would take a chance. When he heard me, he made a dash for the window and must have slipped. He went out of the window without a sound.’ Greg looked down into his lap, as if recalling the terrible event. ‘I called the police and ambulance straight away.’
‘You did all you could, sir.’
Skye leaned over and patted Greg consolingly on the thigh. The sensation Greg felt was something he had not experienced in two years, and he had to stop his leg from twitching. Skye sat back and looked Greg solemnly in the face. ‘After all, in your condition you could hardly leap down the stairs and offer the kiss of life. Or have beaten the intruder to death yourself.’
As Skye laughed at his own tasteless joke, Greg smiled thinly and thought of the last moments of life of the mysterious V. A. Bassianus. Sure he had the poor cripple at his mercy, Bassianus had been astonished when Greg had heaved himself out of his chair, the sky-stone in his right hand. He had lurched sideways across the window sill. Greg, standing on his feet for the first time since his accident, swung the precious meteorite hard against Bassianus’s forehead. The man’s eyes went blank, as though his life was snuffed out instantly. He pitched backwards out of the window, carried off by the weight of Greg’s blow. Greg, his legs trembling, leaned out and looked down at the street below. Bassianus was surely dead. If the blow hadn’t killed him, the fall must
have done. He fell back in his wheelchair and tucked the murder weapon down beside his thigh again. It nestled there now, and he reckoned he could feel its warmth against his legs, a sensation he should not have. Whether it was the effect of the stone, or a spontaneous return of sensation, Greg didn’t know. But he was no longer inclined to total scepticism about the supernatural. Making sure he didn’t move his newly restored legs, he smiled sadly at the red-haired policeman.
‘No, detective sergeant, I’m afraid I’m stuck in this wheelchair for life.’
Table of Contents
Prologue
Act One
Act Two
Act Three
Act Four
Act Five
Epilogue
The Sacred Stone Page 37