The Merlin Chronicles: Box Set (All Three Novels)

by Daniel Diehl

  When silence returned, Daniels continued his lecture. “Although the soil in which it was buried was several inches below the last of the Anglo-Saxon finds, we have no evidence of earlier use of the midden, either by Romanized Britons or the Romans themselves. Therefore I must conclude that this dates from after the arrival and settlement of the Anglo-Saxons in Cornwall. That would make it sometime after 700 AD.”

  No one said anything, but Dr Daniels’ leap of faith in dating an object which he admitted had been excavated from virgin soil made more than a few of the students, including Jason and all three members of his team, exchange uneasy glances. Taking no apparent note of the dissent among his audience, Daniels continued, “That is, of course, only my studied opinion at this point in time and it is still very early days yet. A much more in-depth investigation of the object will be needed before any definite conclusions are reached. Undoubtedly, the department will call in experts on Roman glass and Anglo-Saxon finds and someone from one of the museums where the Anglo-Saxon fire starters are held. Now, would any of you care to venture a guess as to what our strange little friend here might have been used for?”

  Beverley McCullough, as the most senior member of the team, was the first to venture a guess. “Doctor, I’ve been thinking about it, and it seems to me that this ball, or globe, or whatever it is, looks an awfully lot like those so-called witches’ balls that were around in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Could there be any connection here?” Most of the students looked blank at this reference to witches’ balls, but a few of them, along with Carver Daniels, obviously knew what she was referring to.

  “A very interesting thought Miss McCullough, but the concept of warding off witches does not date back earlier than the eighteenth century.”

  More to himself than to those around him, he continued. “Of course, we still have the problem as to where the Anglo-Saxons would have gotten a hollow glass ball. It had to have been blown to be hollow, and the skill of blowing glass disappeared with the Romans.” Rolling the ball around in his hands, Daniels suddenly looked up. “I have just realized something truly amazing. This ball doesn’t have a teat or pontil mark. Even today, when glass is hand blown, it has to be removed from the blow-tube either by breaking it off, leaving a rough spot known as a pontil mark, or twisting it off while the glass is still malleable leaving a little point on the end like you find on the bottom of an antique Christmas tree ornament. This has neither. How on earth did they manage that?”

  Every eye in the tent was riveted on the glass ball as Daniels continued to roll it slowly from one hand to the other. The surface was slightly wavy and scarred from untold centuries in the earth, but nowhere on its surface was there the slightest indication of the point where it had been removed from a glass blower’s tube. Eventually someone spoke, and once the silence was broken, they all talked at once. Questions, comments and suggestions from students and professor alike flowed back and forth for hours. Dinner was forgotten and by the time they began drifting off to their sleeping bags, it was well after two in the morning. In the end, only Jason Carpenter and Carver Daniels were left.

  Daniels looked up from the sphere, which had been placed back on its bed of towels, and smiling a lop-sided little smile, said, “Well, my boy, it seems like your first dig has created quite a stir. Who knows, if we can’t identify this thing properly, both of our names may make it into the history books as having discovered something truly unique. But before that happens, we should both get some sleep. There are a half-dozen trenches to be filled-in over the next two days and I need you to be well rested.”

  When Daniels left the tent, Jason remained behind to turn out the lights and shut down the generator. Taking one last look at the blue object lying on the white towels he muttered, “What in the hell are you?” and left the tent.

  Chapter Two

  The nearly four hundred mile drive from the southeast coast of Cornwall back to North Yorkshire and the university took eight hours, and the tiny interior of Beverley’s black Mini Cooper became claustrophobic after the first hour. With herself, Jason and their combined gear there was hardly room to shift position, let alone stretch out his long legs comfortably. Both of them agreed that even the sound of the CD player took up too much space; so much of the drive was spent in silence. On those occasions when they did talk, the conversation drifted inevitably toward speculation on the nature of the strange sphere.

  “Honestly, Jason, I just have no idea,” she answered a variation of the same question for the dozenth time. “I’ve never seen or read about anything even remotely like it, and if Dr Daniels is stumped, you can’t expect me to have any answers.”

  “I’m sorry, Beverley.” He said in a soft apologetic voice. “I don’t usually get fixated on things, you know, but this keeps eating at me. Maybe I’m just excited at the possibility of discovering something nobody has ever seen before.”

  “It’s ok; you’re allowed to be excited. I’m excited too, and I’m not the one who found it. But I’m sure we’ll know a lot more once we get back to the lab and Dr Daniels brings in the big guns to have a look at it. You’re really lucky, you know,” she continued “after all, it was Dr Daniels’ dig and it isn’t every professor who willingly shares a new find with one of his students.”

  “You really think he’ll give me credit?” he asked, twisting around in his seat to look directly at her.

  As she turned to meet his anxious gaze through a tangle of dark, red-brown curls pulled back and tied with a ribbon at the nape of her neck, Jason thought for the hundredth time what a really sweet person Beverley was. “Yes, I do, and he will.” she said with a reassuring smile “He’s very fair that way, and that’s really unusual in the academic world.”

  Two days after everyone had settled into their respective homes, Jason, Beverley and several other graduate students from the dig returned to the archaeology labs located in the venerable complex known as King’s Manor. Located just outside the medieval city walls of York, King’s Manor sat at the rear of a carefully manicured lawn surrounded by an imposing wrought iron fence. Behind the manor were the grounds of the public park known as Museum Gardens where the ruins of the medieval abbey attracted a constant stream of tourists. Like much of York, King’s Manor was steeped in history and as romantic looking as any one of a hundred buildings in a city known for its historic architecture. The old porter’s lodge underneath the main entrance was flanked by a pair of ancient, crumbling caryatids and had the decayed look of the centuries hanging over it. But beyond the entrance, every hall, class room and lab had been completely updated and modernized. It was an ideal setting for the department of archaeology. Unfortunately for the members of the Tintagel dig, who were now working furiously to catalog their finds, there was little time to appreciate their surroundings.

  Every item, no matter how small, had to be described in writing and given individual catalog numbers. This number was painted on the find itself as well as on the box in which it was stored. These same numbers were printed on the sketches and photographs Beverley had made at the site, and every bit of information was entered into the departmental database and backed up onto a CD. This information would be compiled into a full report which would cover every aspect of the dig and every one of the hundreds of small objects that had been unearthed. With only five members of the twenty students who had worked on the dig involved in the cataloging, the few remaining days of June, all of July and the first three weeks of August would be completely consumed with mind numbing work. There was precious little time for Jason to devote to discovering the possible origins of the sphere, now technically designated as find number 467/06/13 – the first three digits indicating that it was the four-hundred-and-sixty-seventh find of the dig and the last four being the month and year it was excavated.

  With Dr Daniels having gone off on another dig before beginning his three week vacation, Jason did not even have an opportunity to pick the old man’s brains to find out if he had come up wi
th any new theories on the strange object. By the end of the second week of August, Jason had decided that Daniels had probably not even bothered to think about the orb. But it gnawed at Jason constantly. More than once he shook his head with the thought that he was actually losing sleep over the stupid thing.

  On the Friday before classes resumed, Jason left the lab just after seven p.m. and wandered through the damp, gray evening silence of Museum Gardens, heading back to his small flat on St Mary’s Terrace three blocks away. The cataloging work was finished and, with any luck, the report would be completed by the end of the first week of classes. It had to be, it was already due and Jason and his co-workers were completely exhausted. He decided the best thing he could do right now was to stop in for a beer at the Minster Inn. The Minster was one of those fast-disappearing, traditional English pubs where even the dust didn’t seem to have changed for a century; it even retained its antiquated outside toilets, which lent it a quirky charm that had long since disappeared from the rest of the world. Members of the archaeology department and other students who lived in the area often dropped in at the Minster to unwind and have a few laughs together. Tonight, Jason went alone; he was too tired for company.

  Sitting alone at a corner table Jason stared into his pint of beer, pondering the orb. So far he had come up with a thousand theories as to what the thing might be, but none of them made any sense. He no longer cared if it had any logical explanation; he just hated not knowing. Maybe when classes began in a few days Dr Daniels would broach the subject; maybe he had even come up with a plausible explanation for finding a glass ball where no glass ball, nor anything else, should have been.

  As Jason had hoped, within the week Daniels approached him about the cataloging and made an appointment to meet privately to go over the entire project. He even mentioned what he laughingly referred to as “the mystery of the orb.” The meeting lifted Jason’s spirits but brought him no closer to any kind of an answer. After his brief meeting with Daniels, Jason had a few hours’ work to do in the lab, reviewing the report before printing it out and handing it in. By ten o’clock he was finished, but before he left, curiosity drove him to the cupboard where the sphere was stored. He took out the plastic tray, set it on the big table and stared at the ball’s swirling, oily surface for a minute. At least he thought it was only a minute. When he looked up at the clock, it was nearly eleven. He had been staring at the strange object for a solid hour. Thinking he must have dozed off, Jason shook his head, returned the tray to its place in the cabinets, shut off the lights and walked home.

  By midnight Jason was fast asleep, his oblivion hurried on by the sheer exhaustion of the past months of work and the usual tension at the beginning of a new semester. His much-needed rest was short lived. He woke up sweating, achy, disoriented and generally feeling like he had been beaten. He couldn’t detect any physical cause for the state of his body - no fever, no sore throat - and finally decided it must have been some spectacularly awful nightmare. Even though he had only been awake for a matter of minutes, he couldn’t remember dreaming anything at all, let alone a nightmare intense enough to produce the shaking sweats. The luminous dial on the clock said 2:10. God, he thought, hardly two hours of sleep. Eventually he dozed off, but again, it was only temporary. By 5:00 he was again wide-awake and in as bad a condition as he had been three hours earlier.

  The next morning was Friday and as Jason stood at the mirror running a razor over his blond stubble, he realized his eyes were horrifically bloodshot. The deep green irises looked like two olives floating in a sea of tomato juice. “Jase, my man,” he muttered to the reflection, “You look like death warmed over. You gotta’ start taking better care of yourself.” But for the moment, eyewash and a few cups of strong, black coffee would have to get him through the morning.

  All day, one class after another, it took every ounce of effort Jason could muster just to stay awake, let alone absorb all the information that was routinely dumped on grad students the first week of a new term. Reading assignments, books to buy, dates and places of seminars and, on top of it all, the usual array of lecture notes that had to be scribbled down. At least he didn’t have a class with Dr Daniels today so he could avoid going through any personal conversations with the professor. After classes were over he took a CD containing the final report on the dig to the departmental secretary, asking her to put it in Dr Daniels’ mailbox. On his way home he decided to stop at the Minster Inn for a quick pint, in the hope that a little alcohol would induce a good night’s sleep.

  Despite falling into a deep sleep before 10 pm, he was wide-awake before midnight, trembling like a frightened child. This time, there was some vague memory of a dream. It seemed as though he had been immersed in a swirling fog that was moving around him - not the way normal fog swirls and shifts in the slightest air current, but moving with purpose, touching him, like some damp, clammy living thing. And something was inside the fog, but try as he might, he couldn’t remember what it was. Not that he cared, there were plenty of real things to worry about. This was just a stupid dream. Put it out of your mind, idiot, go back to sleep. And he did, twice more, and twice more he was awakened by the nightmares. Each time, despite trying to shut the images out of his mind so he could get back to sleep, he could not keep from trying to remember the thing in the fog.

  It wasn’t until Wednesday, the sixth night in a row that his sleep was plagued by dreams whose cumulative effect left Jason in a zombie-like state of confusion, that he woke up with a start. Completely unnerved and shaking like a leaf in a high wind, he knew that this dream had been the most intense yet. His covers had been kicked into a ball on the floor, and the memory of the nightmare left him so drenched with sweat that his hair clung limply to his scalp and shoulders. Finally he could remember what was in the fog. Eyes - hot, burning eyes staring at him out of that cloying, smothering fog with an intense concentration. Human eyes, but eyes of the most penetrating, electric blue he had ever seen, the same shade of blue Catholic churches paint on the back of shrines to the Virgin Mary. But it wasn’t just the image of the dream that left him so unnerved. Somehow he knew that this was more than a dream image; those eyes were real and they were trying to see into his head.

  Jason knew there wouldn’t be any more sleep that night. Since it was already nearly six a.m., rather than lay in bed and risk falling asleep for an hour and then being groggy all day, he got up and fixed himself an early breakfast. He had to be coherent today. Professor Daniels had told him the previous day that he wanted to get together in the lab and go over Jason’s report and have their first real discussion about the globe.

  When Jason arrived at the lab minutes before five o’clock, he almost collided with Carver Daniels as he came around the corner from the opposite direction. “Ah, Mr. Carpenter. Right on time, as usual,” he said, shaking out his umbrella. The weather had been deteriorating for two days and the wet, cold, English autumn had set in with a vengeance. “Good, good.” Daniels kept up a train of friendly banter as they entered the lab, the Doctor allowing Jason to hold the door for him. “Before I forget, I just want to remind you about the departmental reception on Friday evening. You will be there, of course.”

  Announcements for the reception had been posted on the departmental bulletin board since the beginning of term and Dr Daniels had mentioned it prominently in class on more than one occasion, but this reminder was obviously meant specifically for Jason. “Of course, Doctor, I wouldn’t think of missing it.” In fact, missing the reception was exactly what Jason was thinking about. Professors, departmental heads, too many students to count, the vast majority of them were people he didn’t know and had no interest in knowing. But he also knew Daniels would be giving the evening’s key-note address and undoubtedly the Tintagel dig would be an important element of his speech. If Jason wanted to be recognized as the man who found the mysterious globe, it was an absolute necessity that he attend.

  “I should certainly hope you wouldn’t miss it, Mr. Carpe
nter.” Daniels chattered amiably. “This is your big moment. The first of many, we may hope, but without the first there cannot possibly be a second. Right?”

  “Absolutely,” replied Jason. Then, almost as an afterthought, he added, “If there’s anything special I can do to help you get ready for the big night, Doctor, just let me know.”

  “No, no, Mr. Carpenter. That’s very kind of you but the staff will soldier through. Just make sure you are there so you can meet everyone. After I address the assembly and confirm the whispers and gossip that have been flying around about the globe, everyone will undoubtedly want to get all the personal details...the first-hand story as it were. And that is what you, Miss McCullough, and myself of course, will be expected to do. Now, let’s have a look at that report of yours, shall we?”