The Time Corps Chronicles (Complete Series)

by Heather Blackwood

  “My brother and sister will be assisting me. May I introduce April and Noel.”

  Neil heard Elliot draw in a surprised breath at the two names. These were two of March’s siblings. He and Elliot had met a few of the Twelve: Julius, September Wilde, Mr. Augustus, June Yee and Red Fawn who used to be May. They varied in ethics and personality as greatly as the humans they resembled. They were also secretive by nature, with only Julius revealing once that they were watchers of some sort.

  April and Noel dipped their head at their brother’s acknowledgment, but no one in the amphitheater made a sound. Throughout everything, no one had spoken or even coughed. The silence was unnatural.

  After a minute, during which March briefly outlined the activities of the evening, two men, both wearing black rubber aprons, pulled a gorilla into the room. Each of the men gripped a long rod with a wire loop on the end that hooked over the animal’s head. The gorilla was clearly drugged and shuffled in on all fours, staring at the floor, then gradually up at the people. He touched his lips, and then ran his paw over his face.

  “An animal of great strength and intelligence,” said Mr. March. “Of sensitivity and cunning.”

  Neil knew what was coming next and he forced himself to be still. Elliot was having more trouble, but Neil knew he wouldn’t interfere. These events had to come to pass. The two of them could not stop them. This was Neil’s conception, his birth, and if he ever wanted to understand his origins, he had to face them. Elliot knew this as well as he did.

  Mr. March injected the gorilla with another drug, as even a sedated gorilla would fight ferociously for its life. He then slit its throat, sawing at its furry neck until he broke the skin and severed the artery beneath. Noel helped him collect a bowlful of dark, thick blood. The poor animal’s heart beat for a while before he bled out and died in silence and without struggle. March then severed its right paw, splattering blood on his expensive suit. He didn’t seem to care. The two men dragged the body to one side while March set the bowl of blood and the giant curled black paw on the table beside the sheeted figure.

  Neil felt Elliot relax beside him. The worst was over. Now, they would somehow animate the body on the table.

  But the two men returned with another animal on a wide, low, rolling cart.

  “The Galapagos tortoise,” said Mr. March. “For strength, invulnerability and longevity.”

  They did not drug this animal, which blinked placidly up at March as he approached. The creature was huge and had to be very old already. Its shell was scored in places, but it looked otherwise healthy. March opened a drawer and drew out a long, heavy machete.

  April pulled a piece of sliced yam from her apron pocket and offered it to the tortoise, holding it a few inches out of reach. The creature stretched its leathery neck for it, opening its mouth and then taking a ponderous step toward her.

  March stepped up, aimed and hacked at its long neck, severing it with one brutal stroke at the base of the skull. The body collapsed on the cart and the head hit the floor with a sickening thud and rolled a few times, stopping with its small black eyes staring at the ceiling. Its mouth was still open, anticipating the piece of yam. March slipped a bowl beneath the neck and caught the blood, and April picked up the head and set it on the table. The two men rolled the cart with the headless body to sit beside the gorilla.

  “Three,” whispered Elliot, and Neil knew what he meant. These things came in threes. Or sevens. Or twelves. Whether Elliot was predicting three animals or praying that there would only be three, Neil did not know.

  The next animal was a dog. She was a pit bull, white with dark patches and a torn left ear. Under her belly, he could see that her teats were swollen. She was still nursing pups.

  Neil needed this to stop. These deaths were unbearable. But he was frozen in place. To interrupt this event would halt his own creation. He knew enough about time travel to understand that it would not create a paradox. He would still be born, but it would be in another place or another time. March would simply perform another ritual, costing the lives of other innocent creatures.

  On a more practical level, tracking down this date and location had taken almost a year of detective work, and Neil was not willing to do it all over again.

  The dog’s stump of a tail wagged, though her staggering gait told Neil that she was also drugged. The men held her with the same looped poles they had used on the gorilla.

  “A dog, for loyalty, tenacity and a ferocious heart.”

  Ah, how that had backfired on March, thought Neil, deriving a tiny shred of satisfaction from this evil ordeal. He had indeed inherited those characteristics, along with a fighting spirit. But his loyalty was not to his master, but to something else, something better.

  The dog licked March’s hand just before he injected her with something, and she dropped her head and staggered sideways. He lifted her chin, slit her throat and gathered the blood. Neil caught Elliot looking away as Mr. March rolled the dog onto her back and put his weight into sawing open her chest. Neil forced himself to watch. If the dog had died to give him life, he owed her this much.

  March removed the heart, slicing it free of the tissue that connected it to the body and then cupped it in two hands and set it on the table. A pool of blood collected under the heart, head and hand, dripping from the table onto the floor, but it was nothing compared to the great rivulets of blood that ran from the bodies to the floor grates along the edges of the room.

  The unveiling of the body on the table was, surprisingly, less traumatic. Neil already knew what to expect. His wife, Hazel, another member of the Time Corps, had already described his earthen body to him. March tore off the white sheet and tossed it aside. On the table lay a man-shaped piece of stony, crumbling earth.

  “I have used earth collected with great effort,” said March. “From three great rivers, the sources of life, from the last life blood of a priestess, a prophet and a king. I traveled far, through time and over great distance. The first portions of earth were taken from the Nile, moments after an Egyptian priestess had her throat cut. I gathered more earth from the banks of the Euphrates, where a prophet was murdered. And finally, I collected the blood-darkened earth from a king killed at the edge of the Amazon River.”

  The two men assisting March returned with a three-legged bronze brazier and lit it. It was then that Mr. March began to speak, this time in another language. Neil had encountered many languages in his years of travel, but never this one. This was an ugly language, full of brutal sounds and low, dark notes, like a piece of music in a minor key, but with long hisses and deep-throated, choked sounds.

  Thankfully, the crowd was not asked to participate, as Neil and Elliot would surely have been discovered. Mr. March waved the head, heart and hand through the fire with a few words, and then balanced the head carefully on the earthen man’s forehead, set the heart on his chest and placed the gorilla hand so it covered the figure’s right hand. He then pulled a small piece of paper from his pocket and slipped it into the man’s mouth. Neil knew what letters were on it. The letters would fuse onto the roof of his mouth where they would remain for the rest of his life. They were gone now, but it had taken his own death to remove them.

  March mixed the three bowls of blood, then spat into the bowl. April and Noel, likewise, spat into it. They poured this mixture into the stone man’s mouth, filling it until it poured down the sides of his face and pooled beneath his head.

  Then Mr. March bent down, kissed the bloody mouth and blew into the man’s nostrils.

  “It has begun,” he said and removed the heart, hand and tortoise head. He stood, gazing at the body while the two men cleared away the brazier, bowls and animal parts.

  Still, the crowd did not move.

  The stone man’s finger twitched once, then his hand curled and his leg jerked. Little by little, he came alive, but hi
s skin was still stone and his eyes blind.

  “And now, my esteemed friends, I ask you to bestow a boon upon my new son. Each of you has a gift to offer, a memory, a thought that will become his own. You will be creating him, his very self, from your words and memories.”

  Neil glanced at a teenage girl who rose. He saw her face now in his memory. A friend from high school. An older man beside her was his chemistry teacher. A couple came next, and he recognized his foster parents. His memories had always been spotty and confused, but seeing these people brought them into sharp focus.

  Elliot touched his shoulder, reminding him to rise, and they got into line. Each person bent down and whispered something into the earthen man’s ear, and the golem lay there, sometimes writhing, sometimes still, sometimes turning toward the sound.

  When Neil’s turn came, he didn’t know what to say, so he whispered softly, “Be better. Find Hazel.” He hadn’t known what else to say, nor did he know if the being on the table would understand. He certainly had no memory of it himself.

  They returned to their seats. The golem had now taken on flesh and the skin of his face and hands was softer now. Within minutes, he was fully human looking, and he opened his eyes, a simple earthen brown color. He sat up and touched his face.

  “Have you chosen a name, brother?” April asked March. She and Noel had been the last two to whisper in the golem’s ear.

  “I have. He will be called Neil. The champion. He will be my champion of the gray shadows.”

  March took the golem’s hand and helped him to rise from the table. The young man was about eighteen or nineteen and no one seemed bothered by his lack of clothing or offered him any covering. Mr. March led him away, and Neil tried to remember this event in his life, but he could not. His earliest memories, hazy as they were, were of school and foster parents. The other people rose and left, as silent as they had been throughout the evening. He and Elliot followed.

  Some of the people remained in the house, moving upstairs and helping themselves to refreshments that March had set out. Others got into their cars to leave, and Neil and Elliot followed them. Once they were far from the house, Elliot pulled a tiny electronic storage device from the glove compartment. It was only the size of a child’s finger and it received input from a removable implant Elliot wore in his eye. He took a moment to download information from his implant onto the device and handed it to Neil.

  “I don’t think that was any human language they were speaking,” said Neil.

  “No one in that room could possibly be human,” said Elliot. “No one but me, I guess.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Just a feeling. They were all so still and silent.”

  Neil didn’t know if he agreed, but he sometimes did not understand things that his friends intuitively knew.

  “I remembered many of those people from my past,” said Neil. “I think some of them gave me my memories. Even so, I don’t think I’m any closer to understanding things.”

  “I wouldn’t say that. We now know how to make a golem of our very own. We also know that he only made one of you.”

  “I’m only an amalgamation of their memories and words.”

  “Not true. You have twenty years of experiences. And when you were only one or two years old, you made your own free choice to leave March and strike out on your own. Either you’re stronger than they meant for you to be or they performed the ritual incorrectly.”

  “It was terrible to witness,” said Neil. “So unlike the joy accompanying a human birth.”

  “I’m not going to deny that. It was all I could do not to jump up myself and lop off March’s head. But it’s over now. And you’re not like them. You’re not what they created you to be. Don’t forget that. Out of all the one billion people walking this earth, you’re unique.

  They drove in silence for a while, heading back to the Time Corps safe house in Los Angeles. When they arrived two hours later, Elliot woke up Julius, the owner of the Time Corps safe house, while Neil set up the computer on the kitchen table to play the recording.

  Still in his plaid pajamas and robe, Julius came downstairs. He was heavyset with a white beard and hair, the oldest-looking of the Twelve. Julius leaned on the back of a chair as he watched. Again, the animals were killed, the blood was collected, the body parts cut off. When March began to speak in the strange language, Julius stepped back.

  “Turn it off,” he said.

  “Why? What is—”

  “Turn it off!”

  Elliot stopped the playback, and Julius pulled out a chair, the one farthest from the computer, and sat down with a sigh.

  “What is it?” asked Elliott.

  “That recording has no place in our world. Destroy it.”

  “Aren’t you going to study it? Don’t you want to translate it?” asked Elliot.

  It was a good question. Julius loved research and learning and spent most of his waking hours reading. Another thought occurred to Neil.

  “Or do you already understand it?” asked Neil. March and Julius were brothers, after all.

  “Just destroy it.”

  “Is it because someone else can use it to make a golem?” asked Neil. “All of the people there heard the words. Could they recreate the ritual?”

  “Unlikely. Months of preparation had to go into such a dark nativity. Maybe years. March would never have revealed every part of the preparation he had done to the people witnessing the event. That device needs to be destroyed. The words of that evil tongue will not be spoken under this roof.”

  Neil took the device from the computer.

  “On second thought, give it to me,” said Julius. “I’ll destroy it.”

  Neil handed over the recording. He already knew everything he was going to learn. He had been conceived in a bloody, dark ritual, and his early memories were false. There was nothing more.

  Julius shuffled out of the room, presumably to spend some time in his study or to destroy the recording.

  “I’m tired, but it’s too late to go to bed,” said Elliot, putting on a pot of coffee. After a minute, he looked up at Neil.

  “I’m all right,” said Neil, knowing what his partner was thinking. “Aside from the sacrifices, nothing about it was even very troubling. I’d like to know who all those people were, but I’m not willing to find out. They can’t be nice.”

  “As much as I hate to say this, perhaps it’s best left alone. You are who you are, regardless of how you came to be. I know you wanted to satisfy your curiosity. I hope it helped.”

  Elliot poured himself a bowl of cereal, and Neil took a coffee mug from the cupboard.

  “Elliot? What did you whisper in my ear back when I was lying on that table?”

  Elliot glanced at him sideways as he poured the milk. “I said I wanted you to have a soul.”

  Chapter 2

  The dead woman’s soul was stuck in the drain of the bathtub. Her foot was trapped up to the ankle and the poor geist stood, watching Astrid from under lank, dripping tendrils of her white hair. The shower was still running.

  “I always knew this was going to happen,” said the spirit. “Even when I was a little girl, I knew I’d go down the drain.”

  She looked to be about eighty, but Astrid knew that spirits did not always look identical to their mortal body. The woman’s corpse lay in the empty tub, presumably dead from a fall and a blow to the head or a broken neck. There was no blood, and Astrid had no inclination to examine the body. She wasn’t interested in how the woman had died, only that her spirit was stuck in this world. It was her job to free it.

  “I’m going to pull on your foot,” said Astrid. “It won’t hurt.”

  As a rule, she hated touching spirits. Under normal circumstances, the spirit would not be trapped, but would simply refuse
to go to the afterlife. It was Astrid’s job to convince it otherwise. If necessary, she could physically force a geist through the Doorway, but she disliked the practice.

  “If you pull my foot free, the rest of me will go down!” cried the woman.

  “No. No, you won’t. You’re dead, and you’re going to get free and then go where the dead souls go.” Astrid said it gently, but firmly. She had practiced the tone and delivery for more than four years, all her years as a psychopomp, an escort for the dead.

  She climbed into the tub for leverage, careful to stand without touching the corpse. She ignored the warm water that soaked her shirt and jeans and she reached around the woman’s ankle, finding it as solid as a living person’s.

  She counted to three and pulled, then tried again. No luck. She grabbed the bar of soap and showed it to the woman, then rubbed it on the ankle. The soap didn’t matter, but the woman’s perception of it did. She was only trapped because she thought she was, but often spirits reacted to physical things as if they were still affected by them. Astrid no longer tried to argue with them. She had a job to do, and she wanted it done quickly.

  She managed to pull the foot free, then made a Door at the other end of the bathroom and a misty disk appeared, growing larger and opening, an undulating mirrored surface at its center. This was the Doorway to death, what Astrid created and what she was.

  She convinced the woman’s soul to go through and the Door closed, pulling itself shut and vanishing. Astrid’s clothing was creating a dripping mess on the floor and she sighed. None of her kind left any DNA or physical evidence, which was handy when they attended a murder scene, but they could affect the physical world. A pool of water on the floor would cause questions. She left the water running, hating the waste but knowing that disturbing a death scene would look suspicious. No one turned off the water after they died.