A Gathering of Twine

by Martin Adil-Smith

  John did not turn but barrelled along the darkening path, the bare branches scraping at him, clawing at his clothes and face. Harder and harder his legs pounded, lungs burning. The weight of the camera was extraordinary. And then he was at the familiar black gate. But he was not stopping. Hurdling the gate, he caught his foot.

  The camera left his grasp, smashed into the pavement, and span onto the dual carriageway. His face connected with concrete with a dull wet thump. Pain flared through him like a supernova, burning all in its path. His mouth was filled with blood and bile. He could feel a couple of teeth free and floating within his now gaping maw. His nose was nothing but a tattered mass of ruined flesh, bleeding freely over his face.

  He tried to breathe but just inhaled blood. He turned over, coughing and spluttering. The blood would not stop. His eyes were watering, trying to clear the fluid that was running into them, and he could feel grit in a cut above his eye as more of his life essence pumped out, blurring his vision.

  He tried to get up. Fire erupted in his shoulder. Broken or dislocated. His left foot was still tangled in the top of the gate’s ironwork. Dimly, he imagined this was how a cowboy felt having been thrown from his saddle, but still with a foot in the stirrup.

  Except he was no cowboy. He was a coward. High above him, in the night sky, something twinkled dimly, distantly, removed from everything else.

  And then the night swallowed him.

  *

  “He had no idea how long he laid there,” said Freeman, “but the police discovered him early in the morning. He had been missing nearly thirty-six hours. Murphy was never found.”

  “That’s some story,” said Danielle after a pause. “Total rubbish. But some story.”

  Freeman raised an eyebrow. “You think so?”

  “Come on. How does this even link to Tate? There isn’t a single thing to corroborate it. Not one piece of evidence.”

  “Isn’t there? There was an explosion. A strange light in the sky was seen by hundreds of witnesses.”

  Danielle paused. “Maybe, but the castle? The crucifixions?”

  “Don’t forget the assembled masses. Lennox’s description of their look and attire is very similar to those of Dennis King and Harry Gordon.”

  “Your Raven Men? I’m not buying it. That camera must have been smashed.”

  “It was.”

  “So all that electromagnetic interference must have wiped it. Surely?”

  Freeman slid another sheet across the table.

  “Not on your pad?” Danielle questioned.

  Freeman chose not to answer her question. “They were able to recover a single frame.”

  Danielle turned it over. The picture was slightly fuzzy, and there were occasional patches of white noise where the image had not been wholly recovered. But there, clearly against a stormy sea, was the outline of a small medieval castle that was a gateway to some architectural monstrosity of goliath proportions. The sky was a purpling bruise. In the foreground was a huge gathering of thousands, if not tens of thousands, of dark clad figures.

  Danielle was incredulous. “It was real?”

  “It is real.” Freeman pulled out a framed canvas and put it on the desk.

  “One of Kandian’s?” Danielle asked examining the grotesque cityscape she had just heard about. She did not need Freeman to point the similarity between the still and the painting. The two were as identical as they could be. “Where did you get it? From the daughter?”

  “Actually no. It turns out that having her father in that nursing home had put her massively into debt. She sold them to Doctor Cotrahens.”

  “Cotrahens? How on earth did those two meet?”

  “He was the second man that Doctor Cullum saw Tate with. He would come by from time to time to see his one-time colleague. He met Amy Kandian the night her father died.”

  “And you got this from him?”

  “Well, no. Cotrahens is a long time dead. His estate sold off most of his possessions – what was left anyway. The collection of Kandian’s artwork was split up. Some went to museums. Others were bought by private individuals. This one,” he tapped the frame, “was loaned to me by The Accipiter Corporation.”

  Danielle’s eyes narrowed. “The charity that helped fund George’s dig at Maiden Castle?”

  “They’re not a charity. Walsh got that detail wrong. But yes. Accipiter and Tate have a great shared history. But these are spoilers – we’ll come back to Cotrahens later.”

  Danielle looked at the painting closely. It was both exquisitely beautiful and utterly hideous at the same time. She shivered. “So what are you telling me? John Lennox and Murphy King stumbled on... hang on.”

  Freeman smiled. “Go on.”

  “Who was Murphy King’s father?”

  “Who do you think?”

  Danielle felt goosebumps rise on her arms again. “Dennis? The cadet from…”

  Freeman just nodded.

  “Ok,” said Danielle. “This is starting to get better. Do you think it was a coincidence that Dennis was involved with the Falkland incident and his son with the Paternoster explosion?”

  “I don’t think that there are any coincidences in this story. I think that once someone gets involved, be it through chance or conscious intent, not only do they stay involved, but I think their descendants get caught in the wake too. It runs with the blood – like strands of a twine. Once you’re in, there is no way out.”

  “In? In what? I still don’t really understand what this is.”

  Freeman held up the photo. “The Land of Sumer.”

  “You think that John and Murphy found George’s magic kingdom? Come on!”

  Freeman’s expression had become earnest. “Tate translated the steles at Maiden Castle, probably with the help of Tuther. They speak of a Goddess binding The Land of Sumer after it was corrupted.”

  “You mean like Eden? And the banishment?”

  “Along those lines, yes.”

  “Ok, but I thought that George’s work was shown to be a forgery.”

  “No.”

  Danielle was confused. “What do you mean no?”

  “It was shown to be plagiarised. It was not shown to be a forgery.”

  “So you think his shipmate wrote a translation of the steles, and when he died George stole it? How did Jim Latter even know about them?”

  “You’re jumping ahead. But just think; what if both Tate and Latter were right? What if there was some sort of first land, but Man got expelled?”

  “That’s what you think this is? It’s pretty similar to your other theories of a mother civilisation.”

  “True. But I think that with the help of Tuther, Tate was able to open a window or a doorway or something to Sumer.”

  “Ok. I’ll suspend disbelief. What if Tate did open a doorway?”

  “Don’t you understand?”

  Danielle shook her head.

  “That’s what the explosion was. The door swings both ways.”

  Danielle still looked blank.

  “There is something on the other side. Something that knows about us. Something that does not want us to see. And It slammed the door.”

  “The door that George was opening?”

  “The chanting that Cullum heard… that was the door being opened. Tate found a way to open it, and Kandian, with his grip on our reality slipping, was able to see it too. But he could only see it when Tate called it. When Tate was not invoking it, Kandian could not see it. He said to Cullum that it was behind a curtain. There but unseen.”

  “And the music Kandian heard was Tate’s little mystic ceremony?”

  Freeman nodded. “Something like that.”

  “And this Thing that closed Tate’s door – what is it?”

  “I’m not completely certain. But I think it’s the Creator.”

  “Right… Danu?”

  “DON’T SAY THAT!” Freeman had nearly lunged across the desk.

  Danielle flinched, recoiling. “What? Why?”r />
  Freeman seemed to struggle for a moment to find the right phrase. “Words are power. I’ll explain more later. But remember what Kandian said – you must never, never say her name.”

  Danielle was bewildered. “Ok,” she said slowly. “Why do you think the Creator slammed George’s door shut?”

  “Because in the Maiden Castle texts, it was Her that bound Sumer.”

  “Right, by turning three stars. I still don’t understand the connection you have made.”

  Freeman handed Danielle a thick pile of papers.

  “It’s the same picture. From the camera still,” said Danielle, shuffling through them.

  “Is it? Look again.”

  Danielle shuffled through them again. “Yes. Same picture.”

  “I’ve used the same still, but each print is over consecutive days. Each printed at exactly three in the afternoon, for the last hundred and fifty days.”

  Danielle still looked baffled.

  “Flick them. You know, like the old flip books when you were a kid.”

  Danielle knew the flips books well. She had made a great one when she was seven, of a stick-rocket flying. She half smiled at the memory. She flicked the pile and stopped suddenly half way through.

  “You’ve done something to these,” she accused.

  Freeman laughed and held his hands up. “I promise you I have not done a single thing.”

  Danielle flicked them again, all the way through this time.

  “How is this possible?”

  Freeman shrugged. “Time and its effects are different in Sumer. I don’t really understand it myself. I think that the moment that camera caught changes. It’s not fixed. It’s fluid. Time changes.”

  “Time changes?”

  “Maybe not here, but in the Land of Sumer it does.”

  Danielle flicked the stack of paper a third time. All the figures remained static, yet overhead there was some movement in the cloud, and in the top right corner was a brightening that became three stars, before fading again, and the clouds swirled jerkily some more.

  “What are the stars?” she asked.

  “That’s why I think the Creator is involved. The castle texts say that She bound the Land of Sumer by turning three stars. I think Kandian saw it too. He said ‘three stars turn, she will come’. There are your three stars.”

  Danielle checked Kandian’s painting. The stars were an exact match for the camera still.

  “I don’t understand this at all. A still frame moving? An impossible print. Is this why the image is not on your Pad?”

  Freeman said nothing, but let the young woman flounder in her own bewilderment. There was more to that story, but it would be told later.

  Danielle flicked through the prints again. And again. “Are they a constellation?” she asked.

  “Not one that is easily recognised. There are plenty of three-star constellations, and even more that have that configuration somewhere within them.”

  Danielle flicked through them again. Outside of the three stars fading in and out, there were lots of little movements. Now that she was looking for them, she could see them. Small formations within the blanket of cloud seemed to swirl a little. Some of the tree branches swayed as if in a breeze or light wind. A few of the figures looked as if they were shifting their weight almost imperceptibly.

  And still, she felt as if she was missing something.

  She pulled the first two frames and the last two from the pile. It was like playing a game of Spot The Difference.

  She stared at the images. Something was wrong. Outside of the obvious, there was something very, very wrong.

  “What do you see?” asked Freeman after several minutes.

  Danielle did not lift her head but resolutely continued to examine the images. “I don’t know,” she said. “There is something, but I cannot put my finger on it. It’s like part of the image is repeating, in a loop. Like the stars. They fade in and out a few times. But there are other parts that seem linear. This figure here,” she pointed to one of the many dark clad soldiers in the foreground. “He sways a little, from left to right. Not back again. Just starting on the left, he shifts his weight to the right. And that’s it. But his movement does not correspond to the same as...”

  And then she saw it. The discrepancy that had been niggling away at her. She put the stills back into order and flicked through them again.

  She inhaled sharply. And flicked through again.

  There, right at the edge of the frame was half… no less than half of someone’s back, walking away until it was completely off the page.

  “There was someone else there!”

  Freeman said nothing.

  “On the hillside. There was someone else there. Look. You can see him. He could only have been ten yards from where John was...”

  Freeman spoke quietly, almost mournfully. “It’s not a him.”

  “But, you can see...”

  “It’s a her.”

  Danielle was shocked. “You knew?”

  Freeman nodded grimly. “Her name was Anna Hyde. And she is very likely lost to us forever.”

  CHAPTER 7

  Excerpt of a letter from Cardinal Muninn to Excellency Fürstenberg, Wewelsburg Castle, dated February 1798

  Excellency. I leave Bern tonight by your command. The French will surely be within the walls by the end of the month. I have pleaded with Gottfried to come with me, but he resists. I fear we will lose him should the town fall. His paintings are something to behold. It is what he sees that no-one else does; he claims that the animals live of their own accord, and at times he even plays with and talks to them. I have witnessed paintings that were not as they were the evening previous. This is some new magic; something dwells within his brush.

  My name is Ben Buckley. In 2006 I was a trainee Data Retrieval Specialist with Magnetic Information Systems, where I was briefly mentored by Anna Hyde.

  Thursday 7th December 2006

  Anna stirred, her eyes fluttering open. The alarm clock read six-sixteen and her baby laughed again. He was standing in his cot, blankie clutched in one hand, and, with the other was, trying to lever himself up and over the rail. And apparently he found this hilarious.

  The Escape Artist Extraordinaire strikes again.

  “Ryan.”

  Her sleeping husband remained in his comatose state.

  “Ryan!”

  Nothing.

  “RYAN!” An elbow found his ribs.

  “Wha...?” He sat bolt upright. “Is Chris ok?” He was still groggy.

  Anna got up. She did not know why she even bothered. She crossed to the cot and picked Christopher up.

  “Is it time for a feed and a change Little Man?” she whispered to her child.

  “I’ll do it,” said Ryan blearily.

  Anna just looked at him. Like you did the five times last night?

  She wanted to be fair to her husband. Parenting had not come as easy to him as it had to her; not that ‘easy’ is a word that she would use. Maybe ‘natural.’

  But either way, these days he was barely making an effort.

  They had been together since the end of university and married six years. Christopher had not exactly been planned, although they had talked casually about having kids one day.

  Ryan had worked in The City for the last eight years as back-office support to a commodities trading company. He did not carry out the trades himself but had checked those that were made for any irregularities. He had never enjoyed the job per se and, after a few drinks, would become increasingly vocal about it.

  But it paid the bills. It had paid the bills.

  Ryan had suspected it for a while. Things were hotting up in the financial markets, and not just in the UK, but in America and Europe and Asia-Pacific. Prime yields had compressed from six percent, down to four, and then to three-point-five, all in a matter of two years. He would have liked to have said that he saw it coming, but the truth was that when he saw a flurry of three percent yields,
all he could think about was how much money the company was making, and how big his bonus would be. It would be a lot. A helluva lot.

  And then the engine seized. Somebody somewhere had forgotten to check the oil. Lending started to dry up. Bond rates moved out. LIBOR began to go crazy. Somebody somewhere was getting very rich by sucking all the capital out of the system, and it was not him.

  But it was a blip, they had all been told. A correction in market values.

  Ryan thought he had seen an opportunity. Take a whacking great redundancy pay out now, and in six months time, when the crisis is over, be gainfully reemployed somewhere else. He would be ahead of the curve by an extra year or two.

  Except that it had not worked out like that.

  Values had not corrected. Their angle of descent had increased. Net Asset Values began to stumble. EBITDAs fell through the floor. Two thousand and seven was not looking clever, but that was not what worried him. Two-thousand and three had seen some of the lowest ever rates for debt, and all those commercial loans were due to be repaid in o-eight. Just over twelve months away.

  There were whispers of a bank or two going under. And not one of the tiddlers. One of the big American boys. Lehmans and Goldmans were probably insulated, but Merrill Lynch? They had heavy debt exposure. Very heavy.

  This was arse-puckering time. Unless a shed load of equity came back on to the market, a lot of people were going to get shafted. An awful lot of people.

  So where did that leave him? Sitting on a stack of slowly dwindling money, with little chance of getting a job in the next few years. And so Ryan had come to an agreement with his wife. She would go back to work, Chris would go to nursery, and Ryan would stay at home, do the chores, and write that book he had always been threatening.

  Except Ryan had found out he was not really motivated. In his head, he knew how the story ended. And that was where his enthusiasm had run out. In the last six months, he had barely written ten thousand words and most of those he was not that impressed with. For the first few weeks he had stuck to the agreement with Anna, and he had cooked and cleaned and washed. But that was boring.

  And he was boring. Maybe he was just tense. That was it. The future had become dangerously uncertain, and he was just a little bit stressed.