by J. C. Hanna
She had only just settled long enough to enjoy the full warmth of the sun when a gentle splash, a short distance away, initiated a reflex that instantly pulled her forwards into an alert sitting position. She frantically scanned the surface of the water for a few tense moments. She willed whatever made the sound to act again. The source of the disturbance remained motionless. Amy grew frustrated—she could not act until she knew against what it was that she was acting.
"Turtle soup it is then," she hissed, through her thin, black lips.
A second, slightly louder splash compelled her to withdraw her feet from the relief of the cool water. The third splash arrived with such force that if left Amy terrified and frozen to the spot. Some twenty feet from the edge of the water, something began to rise—quickly. The disturbance spiralled six feet or more into the air. The displaced water fell away from the emerging object in tiny droplets that caught the sunlight and cast the object in a momentary, rainbow-like, halo, that dissolved in an instant to reveal an old man. Dressed in a heavy black robe, he carried a long, crooked staff. Clinging to his face, like an attacking animal, was the bushiest beard that she had ever seen—it was beyond hipster. Amy remained perfectly still as the man walked towards her. The man was ancient, but he moved with surprising speed and grace. Although he had appeared some distance from the edge of the pond, he moved without the expected restraint that wading through water should have caused. Amy swallowed hard as he quickly approached her and the reason behind his ease of movement became apparent. He was walking on the surface of the pond. His footsteps barely troubled the water's delicate skin.
As he neared her, Amy finally stirred to action. She turned to scramble away. It was too late. The old man grabbed her by the left ankle. He held onto her with an effortless strength that lacked aggression. She twisted her body sharply, and then she swung her right leg around to defend herself. The arc traced out by her foot missed the old man completely—a numbing pain raced up her leg as her foot impacted the concrete at full speed. She turned to the old man. Desperation overcame her. He casually studied the foot that he held firmly in his bony hand. With his unoccupied hand, he pointed at a small tattoo on her ankle. His silence demanded an explanation.
"It's..." she stumbled. "It's..."
"The Sigil of Gabriel," said the old man, with cheerful recognition.
Amy had been trying to say, it's just a doodle, but the absurdity of explaining herself to the stranger prevented the words from forming. She saw the pretty little pattern in the window of a tattoo parlour on 67th Street, and she simply had to have it. But that was her business, not his. The old man released her. Amy began to move away—an undignified, crawling, clambering affair. The old man also moved; back towards the water. Reaching down, he picked up her boots with one hand—the theft was effortless, and in motion, and had it not been for the trauma of the scene, Amy might have been impressed.
Amy glanced back towards the ancient stranger as she struggled to flee with some dignity. She suddenly stopped. In defiance of the strangeness of the occasion, and of the peril that she might yet have to face, the New Yorker in Amy got the better of her. Explaining why she shouldn't be the victim of the crime was just as absurd as explaining the tattoo.
"Hey!" she yelled. "What the hell are you doing? I need those! How am I supposed to get back to work?"
He stopped. He slowly turned to face Amy.
"I would suggest that you step very carefully," said the old man, simply, and without malice.
He turned and continued to walk away. The encounter, so strange and terrifying, and so utterly captivating to Amy, meant nothing to him. It was all so matter-of-fact to the stranger, and his calmness brought her rage to the boil. She struggled for the words with which to halt his retreat. Nothing came to her. She had words for every occasion. Words were her thing. Smartass and sassy. Without her words, she had nothing.
He walked across the surface of the pond. As before, his footsteps barely caused a ripple. Amy looked on in stunned amazement. He stopped in the general area where he had first emerged from the water. He turned towards her. His crumpled face and plump nose appeared for a moment stone-like in the bright sunlight. The face looked as if it had lived many lifetimes. His eyes, by contrast, were bright and so full of youth and hope; the gatekeepers to many dark secrets, to be sure, but also guardians to wonder and joy.
"We will meet again, Amy," he said. "One day. Soon. I will send someone to fetch you. She will be your guide."
He raised his staff and a thin tendril of golden light raced out from its tip and touched Amy on the forehead. The mysterious energy caused her skin to tingle for a moment. It was not an altogether disagreeable sensation.
Before she had a chance to ask how he knew her name, the old man slipped through, and then beneath, the surface. The water around where he had vanished fell still in an instant.
Amy mumbled to herself. "What the..."
Her legs grew weak and the world around her began to fade. She fell back onto the ground with a rush of strange and terrifying images flooding her mind. None of what she saw in her mind's eye made sense, yet somehow all of what she saw was familiar and true. There was a Saint of Ireland, and he was powerful and magical. There was a dark and dangerous figure lurking in the court of an English Queen. There was a young witch, relentlessly, ruthlessly pursued by evil across many epochs. There was a putrid black forest of phantoms, and there was a shining city of light. There was a demon, as old as creation, and it led an army of death and destruction. And there was her; Amy Coren, protecting and destroying in equal measure until finally, she stood in the smouldering ruins of New York City.
As she slipped into unconsciousness she knew that her story would end in death and devastation, no matter what she did. It was an oddly comforting sense of fatalism. Just as certain was the feeling that she had to try to change that which could never be changed—as if salvation could be attained through futile effort alone. Forces of light and darkness pulled at her—back through the ages to where it all began, and a few steps forward to where it would end. Her blood ran cold as the world around her faded to an empty black.
Chapter Four: Good Queen Bess
Hatfield Palace, 17th November 1558
Princess Elizabeth sat beneath an ancient oak in the deer park of the palace. She was struggling doggedly with a thick book on the law. Her fingers were red and stiff from the cold, and they fumbled painfully with the crumbling pages of the book.
It was late afternoon. The weak winter sun, hanging low in the sky, had failed to soften the frost from the night before. In the shade of the tree, the frost had set the ground as hard as stone. On that cold, hard, patch of earth, the princess rested—the layers of her dress and undergarments insulated the royal seat from the penetrating cold with satisfying effectiveness.
As she sat underneath the tree, lazily scanning the unfathomable text that rested on her lap, she dreamed. Once she was Queen she would restore England to greatness. She would unite the kingdom and bring her peace and justice to all Englishmen. Her plan was simple; where her father and sister had tried to win the people over through indoctrination and violence, she would use soft words and a gentle touch. Two of her closest advisors, Robert Dudley and Robert Cecil, had counselled her to take control with force as her reign commenced; but the only man that she listened to on such matters, and indeed, on all matters, urged restraint. John Dee was never wrong.
Elizabeth glanced up idly from her book to witness a figure walking along the front of the palace. She sat up sharply and gasped. There was no mistaking the spectral form of her dead mother, Anne Boleyn. The ghostly image turned to Elizabeth, and it smiled contentedly. And then it was gone. As Elizabeth stared at the spot that the phantom had occupied, four men on horseback rode into the space. They dismounted and immediately made their way towards her.
With grace and elegance, Elizabeth got to her feet as the men closed in on her. She glanced past them. Three horses and John Dee stood next to the pa
lace. She flashed a brief smile in Dee’s direction.
The four men of the Privy Council stood in respectful formation in front of Elizabeth. They then knelt before the new Queen. After a deferential pause, the men stood up.
“The Queen is dead, Majesty,” said the lead councillor.
The simple sentence changed everything. She remained speechless for several minutes. The men exchanged confused glances as each, in turn, wondered if the princess had heard the words. It was her moment and she intended to take her time to glory in it. Elizabeth had often rehearsed how she would respond when the wonderful instant finally arrived. She did not stick to her script.
“This is the Lord’s doing. It is marvellous in our eyes,” she said, in flawless Latin.
The four men and their new Queen walked back towards the palace. They passed three horses as they went inside the ancient building. John Dee had vanished.
In a small cluster of rooms, in the highest and least often visited part of the palace, Dee was hard at work.
Dee’s rooms were stuffed from floor to ceiling with books, mystical objects, holy relics, and potion bottles. Astrological charts, cast by Dee, were scattered everywhere. It was a mess that only Dee and his princess witnessed. Orbs of glass floated unsupported in the air and illuminated the room with a warm light. Some of the orbs remained static, while others followed Dee as he moved with un-patterned restlessness about the space.
The dead Queen had ordered the palace searched for evidence of sedition many times, but when the soldiers got to the door to Dee’s rooms they saw nothing more than the sparsely populated living space of a poor servant. Nothing interesting or suspicious came to light because that was what Dee and his magic willed. The spell of concealment was no longer necessary.
His Queen would be busy with the Privy Council for much of the evening, and none of the men of the council would have appreciated his presence during the intense discussions. Dee busied himself with wooden chests filled with books and manuscripts that had once belonged to another Queen of England; Elizabeth’s mother. The collection, long sought after by Elizabeth, had been kept from her on Mary’s instructions. They had been secretly brought to Hatfield a few days past when it was clear that Mary’s power and influence were fading.
Dee carefully removed the fragile scrolls from the top of the first chest. He set them down gently on his reading table. The leather-clad books that he next removed were thick and heavy, and they smelled of neglectful decay. He came across a black glass among the volumes. It was rectangular, and thin, with a silver back, and a highly polished, black front. Elizabeth’s mother had obviously used the glass for scrying, Dee conjectured. As he examined the glass he wondered if there might have been a little truth in some of the allegations of witchcraft that were used against Anne in the days leading up to her execution.
On the black side of the object, a small circle had been etched. Dee ran a careful finger across the circle. The black glass suddenly shone brightly. Setting the object down on the table, he instantly retreated by a good pace. After a few moments, his curiosity got the better of his alarm. He moved cautiously towards the glass. Dee picked up the object. The surface of the glass began to move. An image appeared. It was Dee, but it was not a reflection in the glass. It was Dee, as a much older man. The older Dee began to instruct his younger self.
Chapter Five: Fairy-folk and the Face of Evil
Tara: Seat of the High Kings of Ireland, 441 AD
In a great hall of wood and stone, the King sat passively as he listened to news from across the island; as told to him by the magical creatures. At his feet, there rested two small, wooden chests, filled to overflowing with silver coins. On either side of his seat, high up on two thick pillars, hewed from mountain ash, sat two golden eagles. They were the spoils of a battle fought against the Romans many years before the King was born.
Despite their reputation as master thieves and hoarders of all things shiny, the Old Ones lacked all desire for the materials so prized by men. The king knew as much, and so he felt no need to keep a watchful eye on his treasure. It was yet another reason why the monarch trusted them above even his most loyal advisors. They caused him little trouble. They caused him no fear. The fairies, especially, caused little fear in his subjects. They brought him much valuable news; no one noticed when a fairy was close by, and it was easy to betray even the darkest secret unbeknownst to the little flying things.
As the day wore on, and darkness settled over Tara, the more fearsome races began to congregate in the hall. The king was duty bound to host even the vilest of beings, but he struggled to hide the mild disgust that some of them induced. The banshee and bean sldhe were harbingers of death. They were a necessary part of nature’s great cycle, but the king felt that the creatures relished in their death-role to the point of malevolence.
As King Loegaire sat back on his ornately carved throne to listen to the fairy on his shoulder, a sense of unfocused dread came upon him. There were two other humans in the hall. His two most powerful magicians and wise men, Ronal and Lochra, who sat on lesser seats of unadorned ash on either side of the king. There was yet another, merely in human form, hiding in the shadows. The creature had slipped in unnoticed before the other guests. It had positioned itself at the back of the hall, behind a stone pillar. The creature waited. It knew well of the death that would descend over Tara on that night before even the banshee and their kin had a sense of it.
The ceiling-high doors at the front of the hall burst open and two tiny men-shaped beings spilled into the building in a drunken state. One of the beings collided with, and upended, a dressed table, knocking goblets of ale and plates of fruits and nuts onto the earthen floor.
“Cluichaun,” growled the king, with stifled frustration.
“I would suffer a leprechaun over them any day,” said Ronal.
“Unfortunately, we must suffer them all,” said Loegaire. “Clean up the mess.”
Without pause, Ronal raised a hand and the table righted itself. The plates, and food, and drinking vessels lifted off the ground, and they quickly settled back in place on the table. The second cluichaun staggered towards the king. He nodded simply, as a full and reverent bow was beyond the awkward little man-thing’s drunken capabilities.
“Majesty,” began the creature. “We have come for the food, and for the burning.”
“Burning?” quizzed the king.
“Sure didn’t himself and me-self pass a fire on our way to your door? A burning of the guilty swine is the righteous punishment, is it not? And on such a chill night as this… A fire would be grand?”
“Fire? Here? In the valley?” demanded the king, with mild outrage.
“Sure am I only after saying as much?” said the creature, with annoyance, to no-one in particular.
The king jumped to his feet and he rushed to the doorway. The two wise men quickly followed their master. All three looked out across the still valley. In the distance, small but quite distinct, a fire was indeed burning. The flames were in no way common. Against the ominous black of the mountain backdrop, the fire flickered and danced with a flame of purest blue.
“Put it out, and bring those responsible to me,” ordered the king.
The wise men silently moved out onto the treacherous terrain towards the fire. A small complement of armed men on horseback fell in behind the sorcerers.
At the back of the hall, the creature in human form smiled with tainted delight. The creature’s war was about to begin. It could almost taste the pain, and the suffering, and the death. It was a rare moment of pure pleasure for a being that had lived for an eternity in the misery of shadows. The world gifted to men would burn, and it would play in the ashes.
Chapter Six: The Uninvited
Hatfield Palace, 17th November 1558
Dee listened intently to the frantic revelations from his older self for almost two hours, until finally, suddenly, the glass went dark—the other Dee was mid-sentence when the image vanished. Try as he mi
ght he could not get his aged double to reappear. He quietly cursed himself. He had been so caught up with the marvel of what he was witnessing that he had not paid proper attention to what he was being told—the danger and treachery to come. When he had finished chiding himself he set the glass down carefully on the table. John Dee processed the material as quickly as his delirious mind would permit. He hastily sorted the information into a chronology of urgency. There was one name that struck him as being of particular, timely importance—Nicholas Heath.
His older incarnation had warned of many dangers that the new queen was going to face during her reign. The elder Dee also spoke of the great danger that all of humanity was to confront; an ancient evil that would destroy Elizabeth and the hope that she might bring to the world. The old man had mused wistfully about a sacred mountain in Ireland where the forces of light were gathering to do battle against the forces of darkness. Of a young witch, lost to time, and of a girl from the new world who had yet to make it onto the pages of history. There was only one unfaithful name of any consequence to John Dee as he hurried down the narrow wooden staircase that led to the Queen’s Chambers—Nicholas Heath.
Dee burst in on the queen as she was instructing the solemn men of the Privy Council.
“Highness, I must speak with you, alone. It is a matter of great urgency,” Dee announced.
The men of the council looked at him with alarm, disgust, annoyance, and hatred. They were all in agreement on the plain fact that Dee had no right to interrupt the important business of the state. They turned to the queen in silent protest at the magician’s presence. She stood up promptly.