THE HISTORY OF THINGS TO COME: A Supernatural Thriller (The Dark Horizon Trilogy Book 1)

by Duncan Simpson

  With several rapid clicks of the mouse, the Drakon rewound the television clip and paused it, freezing the image of Blake in mid-sentence, a transparent evidence bag suspended from his hand. The pocket watch! He’s got Newton’s watch! Panicking, the Drakon picked up the silver timepiece from the jumble of objects strewn across the tabletop. A large space at the centre of the table was cleared with a sweep of an arm, sending Netwon’s walking stick clattering to the floor.

  Long bony fingers began to rotate the pocket watch under the convex lens of the magnifying glass, its burnished silver casing glinting under the ceiling strip light. The watch’s surface was perfectly smooth and unblemished. A long moment passed. Not looking up from the magnifying glass, the Drakon clicked open the front cover to expose the hands of the timepiece. After adjusting to the new focal distance of the object, the Drakon could pick out small lettering printed onto the white watch face. A second later, a dreadful cry reverberated around the subterranean strongroom. White flecks of spittle erupted from the sides of the Drakon’s mouth. The enraged figure hurled the timepiece against the wall. It exploded on impact, sending a shower of watch innards raining down onto the floor. Like a spinning coin, the white watch face finally came to rest next to a table leg. Just below the central hole where the watch hands were once attached, a single inscription was printed.

  Roma, 1993.

  Chapter 34

  From the moment his new tenant’s rent cheque had bounced, the landlord knew Blake was going to be trouble. According to his ‘golden rule,’ Blake would have until the end of week to come up with the cash voluntarily, or he would set the bailiffs on him. He would get his back rent, one way or another.

  The landlord listened intently behind the front door. He strained his ears, trying to hear for the faintest signs of life, but all was quiet. Moving back, he clenched his fist and brought it down hard onto the centre of the door. A sharp jab of pain shot across his knuckles as his three large signet rings nipped the flesh between his fingers. The pain just made him even more determined, and he started kicking the bottom of the door with his boot.

  ‘You in there, Blake? I need my rent. I need it now. Do you hear me?’ The kicking intensified for several seconds before finishing in a frustrated crescendo. ‘I’ll be back with the bailiffs if I don’t get my money!’ The landlord waited for a response, but was greeted with silence. Frustrated, he stormed off back upstairs.

  Chapter 35

  Mary looked up at the fearsome outline of the dragon against the darkening sky.

  A worker at the shelter had told her about the dragon statues when booking her in for the night. As she led Mary to the dormitory, she explained that they were located at significant places along the edge of the City, to mark its boundary with the rest of Central London. That evening, over a dinner of pasta and garlic bread, she had asked the volunteer to tell her more about the City. She listened intently as she shovelled the piping hot food into her empty stomach. The shelter worker went on to explain that the City, an area of just over a square mile, was the ancient centre from which the modern metropolis had grown. Apparently, its perimeter had remained unchanged since medieval times, and only relatively recently had the mythical creatures been installed to guard its borders.

  Mary didn’t see the volunteer again, but when she left the shelter the next morning, the man behind the reception desk presented her with an ex-army sleeping bag that had been left as a gift for her by the volunteer. The sleeping bag was now one of her only possessions, and she shared it every night with her black dog.

  Mary felt an overwhelming urge to touch the statue’s serpent-like skin, but she feared that doing so might bring it to life. Its body, dark and almost metallic, reared up on powerful hind legs, whilst upswept wings cast a terrible shadow over Mary’s face below. An arrowhead tongue darted between blackened fangs, and its nostrils flared a warning to those seeking to attack the ancient city. She moved out of its shadow and blinked up at the strong street light, half-imagining that the beast had just turned on its granite plinth.

  Passing by the sentinel, she could feel the energy of the City pulsing beneath her feet. To Mary, the City of London was a vast magnetic horizon of surging and ebbing currents. As she walked from street to street, she experienced the energy fluctuations through her body. She hunted out places where the energy seemed to surge and flow unhindered: Fountain Court in the Temple district; the yard of St Bride’s Church; or the earth surrounding Christopher Wren’s clock tower in the gardens of St Dunstan’s Church in the east.

  As she charted this invisible topography in her mind, she also became aware of many desolate places where the energy seemed to stagnate, tainted as they were with a strange sense of darkness. No matter how much the local authorities tried to regenerate these areas of permanent disharmony, the feeling of decay always seeped to the surface.

  Over time, as Mary became more attuned to the forces resonating through these places, she began to notice an odd quality to the light falling around them. To Mary’s eye, the shadows that formed in these areas—such as St Pancras Old Church, Centre Point, and Farringdon Road—all seemed to fall at curious angles, as though they were disconnected from the entity originating them. She could only stay momentarily in such places, just long enough to mark their location on her map.

  Whilst waiting to see the visiting dentist in the shelter at the back of St Leonard’s Church in Shoreditch, she had once stumbled upon a newspaper article on the numerous reports of a low-pitched background noise being heard by residents all over the capital. The article postulated that the sound was possibly a result of the ubiquitous distribution of fluorescent lighting throughout the city, or perhaps due to the great networks of coaxial cables that criss-crossed underground. But Mary knew exactly where the sound came from: the energy etched into the ground itself. With her black dog by her side, she spent her days dowsing the forces that flowed beneath the streets.

  Mary crossed the busy road and followed the line of energy that surged under her feet. Like the bow of a boat, her black dog trotted several feet in front, clearing a way through the tourists that filled Middle Temple Lane. The humming intensified in her ears as she closed in on the source. Driven by the invisible force, she quickly turned the corner and entered a wide spacious courtyard. Abruptly, she stopped walking, her gaze dropping towards the pavement under her feet. Shifting her weight from side to side, she started to pray aloud. Reaching a crescendo, she dropped to her knees and then fell silent.

  Minutes later, framed by the dark outline of Temple Church, Mary searched for the needle hidden in her shoe.

  It was the day of her twelfth birthday when Mary had first talked about the auras she could see around people. Her parents had dismissed it as mere attention-seeking, but her grandmother had taken a special interest in her ability, describing it as a gift from the spirit world. The auras usually appeared as a coloured field surrounding the head, or a haze pulsing gently from the extremities of the body. She quickly realised that far from looking upon her ability as a gift, the outside world labelled it a mental aberration at best and something bordering on possession at worst.

  Everyone possessed an aura, no matter how faint. Mary just needed to stare long enough and it would eventually become visible. At first, she thought that the colours were essentially fixed, except for some slight variations in intensity and form. But as time passed, she realised that the colours did change, albeit incredibly slowly. Only after many years did she realise that the colours of her parents’ auras moved through a definite sequence. Her earliest memories were of beautiful shimmering greens, like the waters she had seen off the Dorset coast, but as the years passed she began to perceive changes: firstly into blue, and then into a strange, almost crystalline indigo. Mary had concluded that the colour migration must occur naturally over time, like the colours turning on the leaves of a tree.

  Four years ago, on 12 September, Mary’s father had woken
earlier than usual. What Mary witnessed that morning when she met him sitting at the kitchen table had startled her so profoundly that she couldn’t speak properly for hours afterwards. Pulsing like a heartbeat around her father’s entire body was a brilliant violet luminescent glow. She circled around her father, touching the air close to his body, wondering if the aura had actually taken on a physical form. Mary’s father didn’t hide his annoyance, believing that, once again, his daughter was playing one of her imaginary games.

  Two days later, he was dead, killed at work in a machinery accident.

  As Mary began to understand the language of the colours, she withdrew inside herself and locked the door behind her.

  Chapter 36

  Saturday 28 November

  Millions of tiny ice crystals sparkled over the surface of the only car parked in the visitor bay of the Wren Library. Although the sun was still bright, it struggled to impart warmth from its low position in the winter sky. Sabatini shivered and pulled her long coat close against her body. She wondered if she would ever be truly warm again. With the key fob buried deep within her coat pocket, her fingers managed to locate the unlock button and the side lights of the vehicle flashed back a greeting in pale yellow light.

  The calls from the car hire company had been clear. If the car wasn’t returned to an allotted drop-off location in the next twenty-four hours, she would incur a significant penalty charge, and the car’s details would be given to the police and treated as stolen. In the chaos of the last few days, Sabatini had completely forgotten about returning the car that she and Brother Nathan had travelled up in from Heathrow just days before. She had started to explain her situation to the representative on the other end of the phone, but had quickly given up; it was just too painful. Now, she felt that dealing with such mundane matters, so quickly after the brutal murder of a close friend, was somehow sullying his memory. She stood over the driver’s door with tears forming in her eyes.

  She tried the door handle but the ice had frozen it shut, and the cold metal stuck to her bare fingers. Again she heaved at the handle, this time with both hands, and finally the door relented with a sharp cracking sound. The vehicle’s interior was bitterly cold, and her breath materialised in the air in front of her as she manoeuvred her body into the driver’s seat. The windscreen had frozen up on the inside, a translucent coating of ice obscuring any view outside. The car felt dark and closed-in. She hated the feeling. After mumbling several expletives in Italian, she tried the ignition key. A bank of lights blinked simultaneously from the dashboard, and the engine rattled into life. A minute later, warm air began to emerge from the air vents and, little by little, Sabatini started to feel the life return to her chilled bones.

  The representative from the car hire company had explained that the nearest drop-off point to Trinity College was the railway station, and Sabatini had arranged to hand over the car between two and three that afternoon. It was now 1.44 p.m., which left her plenty of time to make the trip across the city centre and deliver the car. Remembering the map of Cambridge that she had picked up from the car rental office at Heathrow Airport, she reached over to the glove compartment, but her attention was quickly taken by something lying in the footwell. What looked like a small red notebook was partially lodged under the passenger’s seat. Straining forwards, she scooped the object up from the floor and pulled herself upright in the seat.

  The book was quite striking in appearance with a thick red velvety cover. She examined it closely and stared at the occultist design on the exterior. It fell open in her hand to a page bookmarked by the stub of an Alitalia boarding pass. Apart from a few sheets towards the back, the gilded calligraphy on its pages was mirrored on the opposite side with Isaac Newton’s distinctive penmanship. Sabatini snapped the book shut and started to cry. She imagined Brother Nathan reading the book at his desk at the Observatory Library. Sabatini pulled the notebook close to her face and breathed in its smell, trying to detect some scent of her dear friend captured within its pages.

  It must have dropped out of his pocket when I helped him with his overcoat.

  With the back of her hand, she wiped away the tears running down her cheeks. After a series of long deep breaths, she opened the book and started to read. The words echoed in her head, as if Nathan were sitting right next to her. Sabatini’s reddened eyes darted from page to page. It was Newton’s handwriting, but she couldn’t believe what she was reading. There was no doubt that this was the Gérard de Ridefort volume from Lot 249 of the Sotheby’s sale: the one that Nathan had sworn was missing. My god, Nathan, what had you got yourself into? Sabatini quickly turned the page.

  The day before the meeting of the Royal Society at Gresham College, I took the wagon for London. On my approach to Shoreditch, there fell such a storm of rain and darkness as never I had seen before. It was as if London were drowning. Caught in the midst of it caused a great impediment to my journey, and I had to take shelter for several hours, keeping my documents and the holy relic close to my person, afraid some ruthless villain would securely rob me.

  By and by, I arrived at Gresham College and made an urgent request to see my learned friend the Architect, Dr Wren, but whilst waiting I was met by the loathsome Curator of Experiments; a man of tricking temper and smooth of tongue. He said he was much concerned with my pale and sickly countenance and wanted to take my luggage from my person, which I stoutly refused. After some discourse relating to several particulars of the Society, he gossiped about the murder of an alchemist who lodged close to Devil’s Ditch. Rumours were rife that he had determined the secret for multiplying gold and was killed for the knowledge. How he knew these things he spoke not of, nor did I make much inquiry after it, in fear of my involvement being exposed. His constant snooping and prying into my affairs were part of some bloody design, of that I am sure.

  In no time Dr Wren arrived, and after leaving the Curator to his duties, we took to the Architect’s private quarters. I wasted no time in giving him a full account of the events that had passed and warning of the grievous jeopardy that we now lived under. He sat and listened, his face wracked with a tremendous worry. I then showed him the plans for the temple that God had revealed to me through the Book of Ezekiel, and the solemn purpose that He had instructed me to follow. No sooner had his eye cast upon my work than he was profoundly moved, sensing the Almighty’s hand in its invention. I exhibited to my worthy friend the floor plan of the inner sanctuary and he did not disdain my advice on some particulars of its potential construction. After much consideration, this virtuous and excellent man had formulated a method by which he could petition the King for resources and yet keep our purpose obscured from sight. Being extremely ruined by the Great Fire, the fabric of the Cathedral had been demolished and new foundations were being readied. On that night, we sealed an earnest vow to rebuild Solomon’s inner temple under St Paul’s, and not to slacken the diligence of our endeavours until it was done.

  And so the great work began. Dr Wren directed the laying of the foundations personally, keeping the overall plans for the Cathedral secret. By this means, and by only imparting a small view of the total design to his masons, he protected the true intent of our endeavour. Though the ground was waterlogged owing to inclement weather, the work advanced quickly with innumerable hands and incomparable inventions, such as pumps and bucket pulleys, designed by the genius Architect to drain the waters out. When the Royal Society came to meet once a month at Gresham College, I would go up to Ludgate Hill to view the progress and survey the trenches, cuts and mounds of earth around the site. There were no idle hands; every man was busy in building to my secret design.

  On the 1 June 1675, Dr Wren sent word to me in Cambridge that the work had been completed, and he urgently requested my presence in London to seal the holy relic once again in the foundations of the great Cathedral of St Paul’s. I arrived the next day and, with the rod in my possession and under the darkness of night, accompanied t
he good Architect to the site of the rebuilding. Wisely, Dr Wren had placed a sentinel on the highest point of the ruins of the Cathedral with orders, if he saw any stranger approach, to fire his piece into the air and ring his bell.

  Directed by the light our torches afforded, we eventually came to the room housing the ingenious door fashioned from my design. We stepped into the chamber and set our torches next to the wall. The locking mechanism was accomplished indeed. The locking pointer was formed into the shape of a beehive which ran on a circular metal runner along the perimeter of a large flat stone, exactly as instructed in my drawings. Around the edges were a number of beautifully executed gilded bees; twelve in all. For its craftsmanship and carving, it was a masterpiece.

  Guided by our torches, we climbed through the door, entered a passageway and crept a good depth into the bowels of the earth. It was not more than the height of a man; a strange and fearful corridor indeed.

  Dr Wren had built the sanctuary room precisely to the design I had decoded from the scriptures. A large golden candlestick, projecting seven sockets from the middle stem stood in the corner, next to a gilt table, which glittered in the torchlight. The pieces were exquisitely polished, and glorious to look upon. At one end of the room hung a heavy purple curtain, its length spanning from roof to floor. In the centre of the sanctuary stood an elevated plinth mounted on three steps hewn from the finest white marble. On the mount of the plinth was carved a hexagram, representing the union of the Old and the New Jerusalem; the Old Jerusalem in the Holy Land, marked by the triangle of the Temple Mount, the Holy Sepulchre and St James Cathedral; and the New Jerusalem in London, marked by the Knights’ configuration of churches, the Temple, St Paul’s and St John’s. Two perfect triangles joined in one Holy design.