by Iain Scarrow
“He?”
“Yes, Parker, yet another he. But it does seem that some of the doctors way back then got things right when they used maggots and blow-flies to drain the puss out of gangrenous wounds. So they do have their purposes, blow-flies that is. And, more importantly, this particular one still contains those very same cells of this particular troublesome priest. The selfsame priest I suspect whom Hendry the eighth found so bothersome at Agincourt. No wonder Hendry tried to have him bumped off.”
“I thought he was bumped off, sir.”
“Body double, Parker. King Hendry knew, of course, but everyone else was fooled enough to think that the real priest got his head chopped off. Nothing of the kind though. The real one ran away and disappeared, as he is usually wont to do, be it from Egypt to Agincourt or anywhere else time after time, whilst some other poor slob had his head chopped off in his place. We are talking about a very slippery character here, Parker. I doubt he even knows who he is himself by now, which makes identifying him all the harder. God only knows how many incarnations he’s gone through since then. But be that as it may, he is still alive. And because he is still alive, he is creating disruption just by being here.
“But like attracts like, Parker. And if I’m right, then this parasitic little monster will home right in on its original host, the man we are looking for. And that way we can smoke the right one out into the open and nab the swine. Well, that’s the theory anyway.”
“I thought it was mummified, sir.”
Gatling closed his eyes and shook his head.
“Please don’t go looking for faults in my plans, Parker. It doesn’t make you sound intelligent, you know.”
“Sorry, sir.”
Gatling sighed again.
“Think of mummification as suspended animation.”
“Okay, sir.”
“And with this little fly, bloated with the life everlasting puss of the pest we are seeking out, it itself has been imbued, somehow, with the selfsame life everlasting properties of its host. Therefore, once out of this cube, it shall merely fly away and seek out the swine out for us, one way or another.
“What we have here are past misdeeds connecting with present misdeeds, every one of them created each time by the selfsame troublesome soul, here, now, in our present. He might have reincarnated in one form or another, but he’s still who he is, Parker. And by his very presence he’s still causing trouble. And unless he repents … Oh, don’t get me started. He has to be made to face up to his crimes, and that’s that. After that it’s up to him to make amends.
“And if he doesn’t sir.”
“Don’t even go there, Parker. I am not listening.”
“Understand, sir. Is there anything else, sir?”
“Yes,” Gatling said. “Stop calling me sir. It’s irritating. You might be on war reparations but I am not you jailer.”
And with that Gatling jabbed at blue red button on his arm rest again before Parker could say yes, sir, that is if Parker were about to say yes, sir. But Gatling didn’t want to take the chance, and so he stabbed at the blue button whereby the partition shut faster than a greased guillotine on an obese Marie Antoinette neck before she could chomp down on the last bite of a fairy cake.
Partition now closed Gatling rested back and observed that the outside of the Daimler had begun to glow a rather pleasing magenta as the atmospheric pressure outside dropped, and watched a dense mist pour down the sloping fields on either side and into the road where it was whipped into violet spirals trailing the car’s lilac taillights.
It felt to Gatling as if the car was floating along on a warm cushion of air, which it now quite literally was.
Not like airplanes at all, he thought.
Much too primitive to contemplate.
His slender fingers clasped the leather smoothness of the portmanteau in his lap as he gazed out over the tumbling mist and up into a moonless night of a billion stars as Parker swerved the Daimler into a deserted street that even the great mapmaking avionics pioneer Piri Reis could never have dreamt of, and to where Parker brought the car to a purring halt under a miniature of the Jovian moon Callisto slowly revolving inside a globe of fractured rose quartz suspended from a flickering gas lamp.
Parker climbed out and opened the back door and Dr. Gatling stepped out into an atmosphere heavy with pine musk. He placed the snap-band hat on his head and in so doing turned his face into a black shadow in a land where no cricket chirped and no bird dared open its eyes after dark.
Reaching into his inside pocket he withdrew an envelope and held it to his Parker.
“Please see that this gets into the right hands, won’t you?” he said. “The estate agent chap sounds like a good bet.”
Parker took the envelope.
“What if he isn’t the right one?” Parker asked. “What if I’m wrong about him?”
“Then we’ll all be blown to kingdom come then, won’t we, Parker, and there will be no end to your penance either, will there?”
“Understood, s— eh, friend?”
Gatling raised an eyebrow.
“Right,” Parker said, “Dr. Gatling.”
Parker bowed, clicked his heels together, and re-entered the car.
And as the sound of the Daimler’s engine faded into the distance the old man turned and walked along the street, his heels clipping on the cobblestone of the pavement as he disappeared into a sea fog heavy with the essence of iodine and bladderwrack weaving through the weeping branches of the nootka pines distilling droplets of syrupy dew onto the laurel bushes below, each droplet ringing like a faint little tinker bell, and exploding on impact with a spark of aquamarine. Further into the fog Gatling let himself be guided by the miniature moons of Miranda, Ariel spinning laconically inside orbs of crystal that illuminated the pathway for him in a cold dead light.
After a few moments he came to wrought iron gates that swung wide at his approach welcoming him into a sacred garden of incandescent hawthorns bleeding scarlet light from their yellow flowers walking along the path between them until the final uphill slope where the last of the lights now behind him blinked out completely thus allowing the house itself to loom into view.
Gatling gripped the handle of his portmanteau tighter as he looked up at the house’s turrets that seemed to stretch ever upwards in thin black spikes set against the constellations of Lyra and Virgo.
Another step towards the house and a dull thud sounded within the stone walls as internal locks disengaged and the door swung wide as if by the hand of an invisible butler.
Once inside he waited until the door closed itself behind him, the locks re-engaging and sealing the outside world from the world within, leaving Gatling isolated in the entrance hall where his own breathing echoed back at him as his eyes accommodated to the gelid darkness closing in to cover him.
He dropped his hat on the African Blackwood newel post of the spiral staircase and stepped into the archway leading to the front room.
The fingers of one hand touched the back of his other holding the portmanteau and he frowned at the youthfulness of his skin.
Too young too soon, he thought.
But there would be time enough for such anachronistic mis-fitments later, but not now, for there was too much to do, too much at stake.
Raising his arm as if welcoming an old friend disembarking from a train after a long journey gaslights around the walls puffed into life inside orange chalices illuminating a large room with a polished eagle-wood floor, upon which stood a mahogany-backed chaise longue facing the open grate of a fireplace big enough for a man to stand up in, and where flames the color of sunrise flittered over a cedar wood log.
Along the back wall of the room stood bullet-proof cases of uranium glass radiating a dullish yellow-green. Display cases stuffed with the doctor’s collection of rocks and metals and fossilized artifacts; geodes of purple and glittering lime set alongside lumps of malachite and the jagged blood-red spines of orthoclase feldspar. Another case held j
et and jasper, and the orange tetragonal crystals of wulfenite abutting clusters of corundum in blue, pink and yellow, insects trapped in amber, and a fractionated sheet of sandstone revealing the wing of a fossilized meganeura, the largest dragonfly that ever lived on earth; an insect with a wingspan in excess of two feet, standing next to a chunk of anthracite that had been cleft in two exposing the imprint of a human foot. Yet another case held livery of ermine and astrakhan, magnesium flash bars and snap-brim hats of brown, black and gray, shiny black tripods and nickel cameras with chunky glass lenses, and the as yet undeveloped photographic plates of ghosts trapped in glass.
At the side of the bay window opposite grew a species of Calamities cistiformes, a saprophyte of the Upper Devonian, an ancestor of the modern riverbank equisetum; a plant that once grew to one hundred feet or more.
This one, however, was a fine living specimen, as yet only an eighth of its fully grown height, giving off the sweet woody aroma of the Carboniferous swamplands from where it had been taken and extinct since the Triassic.
Gatling walked across the room and placed his portmanteau upon a rosewood table, opened it, reached inside and took out a new specimen; a lump of anthracite from the Ruhr Valley from where the other with the foot imprint in it had been discovered. It too had been cracked open, but this time revealing only the partial imprint of a human foot, possibly from the same individual, but this time with something new. The imprint of a thin delicate chain set alongside the mammalian paw print of a tiny animal.
Gatling took the specimen over to the display case containing the sandstone sheets. The door slid wide and for a moment he stopped in front of it.
Of all the keys this has to be it, he thought as he placed the new specimen on the shelf knowing that somewhere within them all was the strand that could reweave destiny into its rightful tapestry; many locks missing only one key.
He reached out and touched them.
And when he took his hand away the glass doors slid closed again and he felt the radiation from the uranium glass prickle his skin with a pleasing warmth as they sealed their precious specimens safely inside.
He turned and looked around the room, at chintz curtains and hanging tapestries, mahogany chairs and a davenport of red damask, a table of ebony stacked with blue-crystal vases from the Ming Dynasty, willow seats, and deer horns above the fireplace with its copper fire-irons on either side, Indian mats and the rosewood inlaid table upon which his portmanteau sat.
All of this will soon be gone, he realized with some sadness.
He stepped up to the lead-beaded doors set in the far wall, reached out and turned the key. And as he pulled the doors of the conservatory open the humidity trapped inside swept over him.
He stepped inside and walked through tree ferns exuding the sweetest scent reminiscent of mango pulp and fermenting crab apples, their fenestrated leaves heavy with droplets of the purest mineral water, each droplet a glinting prism of yellow and blue as an orange sun rose in the far distance of a new dawn edging its way over the lazy revenants of slowly rising mist.
Stepping to the very edge of the precipice on a towering cliff a quarter of a mile high, he resisted the pull of the land far below, as he gazed out over the endless green forests of the supercontinent of proto-Gondwana.
2
Early Monday morning, Glen Collins, erstwhile estate agent, neé con merchant, opened the door to his office.
Glen Collins wasn’t his real name, just his current name.
He’d had maybe thirty or forty names, hell maybe even a hundred throughout his adult life. So many names, in fact, he had trouble remembering his own birth name.
But that isn’t worth writing about, because currently, his name is Glen Collins.
And Glen Collins’s heart sank when he saw the white envelope lying there like a tombstone just behind the front door.
He reached down and picked it up.
It felt thick, heavy, official.
Maybe it was more debts. Maybe it was the moaning mob of creditors catching up with him.
Never catch up. Never catch up with me.
He would be free soon anyhow.
What did he care?
Besides he already had enough in diamonds and religious icons, never mind gold candlesticks melted down from some such no name Mexican church, to last him what was left of his lifetime. Not to mention the platinum he’d had turned into nuggets from the wedding rings he’d ripped from the fingers of weeping widows of the ancient half-dead-already and withering on the vine variety. Yep, Glen had enough bling for him to be someone else now, anyone else but the real him. Someone with a slate so squeaky clean it would enable him to live out the rest of his lard-ass, fat-gut, past it, mid-life-crisis of an existence with tons of sun, yachts, and girls, girls girls.
Besides, Glen had already managed to have most of his little peccadilloes erased, such as fraud, burglary and attempted murder to name but a few from the spying eyes of injustice.
Money talks and only money.
What was a man like him supposed to do in this day and age for Christ’s sake?
Grow old and pay taxes all the way to his grave?
Yeah, that’ll be right.
He waddled into his back office. There were stacks of papers everywhere.
He dropped the large white envelope he’d picked up onto his FUCK OFF pile.
He would be free soon anyway.
They’ll get over it.
He made himself coffee, lit a fat cigar the size of a traffic cone, and blew a big puff of smoke at the NO SMOKING sign.
“Some laws are just aching to be broken.”
He sipped his coffee; nice, bitter and strong, and looked at the shredder in the corner labeled FILING CABINET.
It worked every time.
He sat down.
The chair creaked.
Now what?
In truth the man was bored. Life just wasn’t exciting enough anymore. He’d had to keep the top of his head so low for so long now that he started to feel like a cross between Herman Munster and the Hunchback of Notre-Dame. And Glen’s vision of a blissful future was becoming tarnished by the minute.
What he needed was some excitement, new excitement, something to keep him going for a bit until it was time to finally take off to Anonymity Central. Maybe one last con trick he could pull on some unsuspecting, preferably innocent (not many of them around these days though, he sighed) dumb fucker with too much money.
The pile of mail tumbled off the shelf behind him and scattered around the legs of his chair.
Choking on his cigar at the noise of it he spluttered a few times before looking down at the envelopes. He noticed that some of them had collected dust around their edges they’d been buried inside the pile for that long. But nope, wrong. The paper had turned yellow with age, never mind been stained by weeks of cigar smoke and dried out enough to crack.
Except, that is, for the brilliant white one he’d picked up this morning.
He kicked the others out of the way with a little fat foot and wheezed over his gut as he reached down for it.
What Collins didn’t notice about the envelope was that it didn’t have a postmark. And if he’d paid more attention maybe he wouldn’t have thought about touching it in the first place, never mind opening it.
But Collins was bored and needed something to read whilst he finished a good cigar, in the same way he always needed something to read whilst sitting on his reinforced toilet seat. Even if the only reading to be had was the FBI’s MOST WANTED list on his knocked off Kindle (he’d never read anything about himself so far. But then he’d used so many aliases throughout his life that even his own parents had lost track of him. And the gangland greasers didn’t believe his mother and father either when they said they didn’t know where their one and only son was. And Collins hadn’t bothered going to Mom and Pop’s funeral either after they’d been riddled with dumdum bullets, either. Fuck em).
Clamping the cigar between his big yellow t
eeth he scraped the edge of a dirty thumbnail along the flap of the envelope, opened it and peered inside with a big fat eyeball.
“Hmm, what have we here?”
He tipped it up onto his desk and out flopped the papers from inside, crispy clean and white, and covered in really dense black type.
“Mmm, at least there’s no red warning anywhere.”
If there had been he’d have posted the lot straight into his filing cabinet – the shredder, envelope and all – and recycled it as hamster bedding.
Nothing better to do as I’m having a cigar so…
Collins leaned forward, his shirt buttons straining, and picked up the first page.
3
TOP SECRET: EYES ONLY
BROCK HOUSE
The house is two hundred and seventy years old.
On the day of its completion, some would say birth - October thirty-first — others its emergence from God-knows-where midst the thorns and briars of a hellhole of a place — its owner, but not really, and mentor of its over-turreted and cankerous architectural construction, dropped dead.
Bishop Samuel Fryer had twisted the big iron thud of a key in the front door (battlement), took one step over the threshold, smiled with vicarious satisfaction under its highly ornate gargoyle infested eaves, then crashed to the decks a dead man.
And there it went the more than ample flesh of the man, felled straight and true, for his was unloved flesh, tattered flesh, loathed by most and feared by many. A man swathed in ridiculous layer upon layer of ermine and the livery fit for a king. A man laughably of the cloth and wearing too damn much of it as the skinny destitute illiterati standing before him in front of the house watched the bishop sag and sway as if smote by the invisible touch (stroke) of the evil fairies said to be furious at the Fryer’s meddling in their consecrated nature, their ground, their turf.