by Daniel Diehl
Between classes Jason tackled the job of repainting the new flat, obliterating the obnoxious lime colored kitchen and the equally unpleasant dark rose color in the two bedrooms, one of which they turned into a shared office space. After days of fruitless arguing and trying to decide what color to paint which room they agreed on the easiest, most practical solution; all of the walls and ceilings would be a warm white and all the trim would be a soft gray. It may not have been an inspiring decorator choice, but it was clean, fresh and bright – and bright was what they both needed at this point in their lives.
It was during Jason’s third weekend of struggling valiantly to get more paint on the walls and ceiling than on his face and hands that the battle-scarred old cat appeared. One of the other tenants had evidently left the building’s main door open and the feline had wandered in looking for food, friends or attention – all of which it obviously needed. Old, skinny and battered, the creature’s gray fur was matted and filthy and the white hair on his chin and face was splattered with what might have been clotted blood or his last meal. Jason shooed him out repeatedly, closing the outside door securely, but somehow the forlorn creature kept finding his way back inside. Out of sheer pity Jason eventually threw him a few scraps of meat from his sandwich and after that there was no getting rid of him.
When Beverley returned home from a grueling ten hour slog at the library she stopped in at the new flat to see how the work was coming along and nearly tripped over the cat as she stepped across the threshold. Squalling and scurrying to one corner after nearly being stepped on, the cat stared at Beverley with huge, round blue eyes. Dropping her books on the floor, Beverley walked to the corner, knelt down and talked to the frightened animal in low, calming tones until it allowed her to pick it up. Holding it at arm’s length for a moment, she turned it toward Jason.
“Who does it look like?”
“Babe, it doesn’t look like anybody. It looks like a poor, sad, bedraggled cat.”
Beverley sighed and shook her head. “Ratty gray clothes, white beard, big blue eyes…”
“No. It just looks like a cat.”
“Let’s keep it.”
Jason shrugged, leaned over to kiss Beverley on the cheek and whispered “Sure” into her ear.
“And we’re going to call it Merlin.”
Jason threw up his hands, let them drop to his side, shook his head and turned back to his painting.
“Whatever. But you have to clean him up. He’s filthy and I can’t stop painting right now.”
Walking toward the kitchen, murmuring comforting things to the cat, reassuring it that a bath wouldn’t kill it, she called over her shoulder “We’ll keep him at my place till we move house.”
Merlin the cat, along with its two human friends, brought the last load of clothes from Jason’s flat on St Mary’s Terrace during the third weekend of July and they only had one week to get their new digs into some semblance of order because Beverley’s parents had just called to announce that they and Beverley’s younger brother, Jonathan, were driving up to York from their home in Chester. They insisted there was no special reason for the visit but both Beverley and Jason knew it was occasioned by their daughter’s decision to move in with her American boyfriend. They had all met Jason the previous autumn and liked him immensely but now he was becoming a part of the family and they wanted spend more time getting to know him better.
Two days before Jean, Ian and Jonathan McCullough arrived in York, an exhausted Jason and Beverley realized how desperately they needed an early night and decided to go to bed and watch the dullest movie they could find in the hope that bad cinema would induce sleep sooner rather than later. Jason insisted he needed food even before he could muster the strength to take a shower, so Beverley headed to the kitchen while he finished painting the last window frame in the spare bedroom and cleaned the brushes.
Later, with Merlin the cat rubbing figure eights around his ankles, Jason set out the plates and silverware while Beverley finished making the salads and waited for the oven timer to signal that the chicken Kiev and roast potatoes were ready. With a huge, melodramatic sigh Jason flopped his long frame down onto his chair, smiled and nodded his ‘thanks’ when Beverley set the small green salad down in front of him. While she went back to the kitchen to retrieve their drinks, Jason began dribbling a trickle of vinegar and oil dressing over his salad.
After recapping the bottle and setting it next to Beverley’s plate, he stared blearily across the expanse of the table toward the salt and pepper shakers. They were absolutely miles away and he wasn’t sure whether he had the energy to reach that far. With a grunt he pulled himself erect in his chair, leaned toward the edge of the table and extended a balled fist as far as he could. The salt and pepper were now tantalizingly close, but still out of reach. He was going to have to pull his rump off of the chair. In frustration, Jason opened his fist and grunted loudly, staring at the salt shaker. Before he had a chance to surrender to reality and get up from his seat, the salt shaker shot across the five or six inches separating it from his hand, banging softly against the flesh between his thumb and forefinger. His eyes growing big with surprise, Jason had no idea how he should react. Was his mind – or his eyes – playing some bizarre trick on him? Was he so tired he was hallucinating? Pushing the salt shaker away with the tips of his fingers, he withdrew his hand until it was nearly a foot away from the little container of seasoning. Opening his hand, he thought the single word come, and without hesitation the salt obediently slid across the table and into his hand.
“Babe.” His quavering voice sounded strangled and cracked when he spoke. When Beverley failed to answer from the next room, he called again, slightly louder. “Babe. Could you come here, please?”
“What’s wrong? You sound weird. Are you alright?”
Without looking up from the table, Jason pushed the salt across the table again and murmured “Watch this.”
Again he opened his hand and thought about the salt and again it slid across the table, coming to rest neatly in his hand.
“Bloody hell. What a brilliant trick. Where’d you learn that one?”
“’S no trick and I didn’t learn it. It just happened.”
Now Beverley came into the room, crossed to the table and took her chair, her eyes never leaving Jason’s long, thin face. “You’re joking, right?”
Finally, Jason looked up, locking eyes with her. “I’m not kidding and I have no fucking idea how that happened.”
“Do it again. I want to watch this.”
Dutifully Jason pushed the shaker away, withdrew his hand, opened it and thought about the salt. Instantly it came to him as obediently as an old dog.
“Blimey. That’s not at all right.”
“No shit.”
For the next half hour they alternated between watching a variety things slide across the table and speculating on how and why Jason had acquired this strange power. Finally, when Beverley went to the kitchen in answer to the oven timer’s summons, Jason rose and followed her. Standing in the doorway while she dished out the food, when she was ready to return to the table, Jason motioned her to stand aside. Extending one hand toward the counter running along the opposite wall of the kitchen, he concentrated on an empty coffee mug resting next to the sink. Seconds later the mug rose into the air, wafted gently across the room and snuggled into his waiting hand. Without saying a word Jason set the dirty mug back on the counter, turned around and walked toward the dining table. Much of the meal passed in silence until Beverley could not stand it any longer.
“So what in the hell is happening here?”
Jason laid down his fork, flipped his hair around and began playing idly with the end of his pony tail, which had regrown over the months since he returned from Ethiopia.
He opened and closed his mouth several times before finding the words he was searching for. “I’ve been thinking about that. You remember when Morgana pulled Merlin into the hole and I tried to grab his hand?’
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Seeing the moisture of painful memory starting to collect in the corner of Jason’s eyes, Beverley reached out, laying her hand over his before answering.
“Of course I remember. What about it?”
“I just managed to brush his hand with my fingers and I swear I felt some kind of a little spark pass between us.” Again he paused and scratched his head before continuing. “I wasn’t even sure if it really happened of if I just imagined it.”
“And now you think it did happen?”
“Yeah. I do. And I think he gave me something.”
“Jason. If you’re right – and I’m not doubting you – but if you are right, what are you going to do about it?”
“I think I’d better sign up for some Latin courses so I can start deciphering Merlin’s manuscripts because I’m going to have to understand this before I can decide what the hell it all means and figure out how to deal with it.”
“Are you going to get help deciphering them?”
“I’ve already considered sharing them with Dr Daniels and Father Cunningham but, to be honest, we don’t know what all might be in there and…and I don’t know how I could explain what they were and how I got hold of them.”
Beverley could see that the thought was unfinished, and after a pause she added “And you think they might be dangerous.”
“Uh-huh. A lot of them came from Morgana’s library, after all, and we can’t risk creating another Morgana le Fay.”
For a long, long time Jason and Beverley stared at each other in silence, while in the corner Merlin the cat sat washing his face.
On the following pages is an exciting excerpt from
It’s About Time:
Book three of
The Merlin Chronicles
Available Spring 2015.
Seventy miles west of London the gentle sun that epitomizes the English summer hung in a cloudless sky, shining down on the chalky soil of the Wiltshire countryside, warming Jason Carpenter’s lean back as he squatted in one corner of a rectangular pit fourteen inches deep, twelve feet wide and slightly more than one hundred feet in length. All around the dig the low, scrubby grasses struggled valiantly to grow in the dry, inhospitable soil while small armies of wandering sheep worked with equal dedication to keep the grass trimmed to an even one inch length. In three directions from where Jason knelt the landscape was nearly flat, undulating slightly but with little variation. Slightly more than four hundred yards to the north rose a circular, manmade hillock covering more than a dozen acres and rising nearly three hundred feet above the surrounding plane. Constructed more than two and a half millennia ago, the Iron Age hill fort known as Barbury Castle was an outstanding testament to primitive technology. It was also a public park, and although the area of Jason and Beverley’s dig was clearly marked by ropes and police tape the occasional clutch of tourists was sure to gather at the edge of the cordoned area, staring inward as though the lone archaeologist might, at any moment, hold up something amazing and shout ‘Eureka’. Of course, in the real world of archaeology, amazing finds only occur on the rarest of occasions and even when they do they normally appear inordinately mundane and disappointing to the casual viewer.
Jason raised his head, pressing one hand into the small of his back to work out an annoying kink, the result of remaining twisted at an odd angle for nearly an hour. Glancing past the small spot where he was working, Jason looked across the intricately patterned section of ancient mosaic floor which ran away from him in two directions. From his low angle the design was indistinguishable but he knew virtually every inch of it by heart, having spent the better part of a month exposing it to the light of day, one painstaking inch at a time, for the first time in fifteen centuries. Viewed from above the mosaic depicted an aquatic scene richly populated by a variety of waterfowl including ducks, geese and great herons floating in and out of a stand of tall marsh grass. Compared to other Roman period floors in Italy it was slightly above average quality work, but judged against its few surviving contemporaries in Great Britain, it was not only artistically masterful but spoke of a major estate that had been owned by a family who were cultured, educated and impressively wealthy. Despite Beverley’s enthusiasm over this extraordinary find Jason’s real interest lay in the shallow trench in which he was now digging.
Leaning back to his work, Jason discarded the whisk broom he had been using to brush bits of dirt away from a small, round area of earth about the size of a dinner plate. Turning to his left and reaching for a small trowel, he spotted it resting on the white earth nearly ten feet away next to another in the series of postholes he was currently excavating. With the casualness that comes from long practice and familiarity he extended his right hand and opened his fingers. Obediently, the trowel slid effortlessly along the ground before rising slightly into the air and coming to rest in his hand. Without once considering the physical impossibility of what he had just done – or the strange gift of magic that Merlin had imparted to him during his last seconds of life - Jason turned his attention back to the indentation in the ground. The small excavation had once held an upright post – long since rotted away - which had been one in a series of more than twenty such posts that were the main support beams for a small addition to the already extensive Roman villa. Here, in the area encompassed by these postholes, he hoped to find evidence of post-Roman occupation and reconstruction dating to the period which was popularly referred to as the early Dark Ages.
As he scratched away another thin layer of accumulated sediment Jason heard his name being called from the direction of his and Beverley’s campsite. Laying down the trowel and straightening up with a grunt, he twisted around to see what she wanted. Walking toward him, dressed in a tan tee shirt and matching trousers, her ginger hair tied behind her to keep it out of her eyes while she printed the photos from yesterday’s dig and collated them with her on-site sketches, was Beverley accompanied by a slightly stooped figure that Jason did not immediately recognize. As the pair approached the trench the smiling face and shining, hairless scalp of his former professor, Dr Carver Daniels, came into focus. Wiping his dusty hands on his trouser legs, Jason stood up, smiled and waved. Picking up his pace, Daniels approached the dig and extended a hand.
“It’s good to see you Dr Daniels. What brings you all the way out here to the wilds of Wiltshire?”
They shook hands enthusiastically, grinning, before the old man answered.
“It’s good to see you, too Mr Carpenter. Although I guess I should say Dr Carpenter, now, shouldn’t I?” Turning his head and nodding toward Beverley he added “Oh, dear me, I guess we are all Doctors, aren’t we? Dr Daniels, Dr Carpenter and Dr McCullough. My goodness, that’s become quite a mouth full. I think we had best dispense with the formal titles now that we are all academic equals or we may never make any progress.”
Jason motioned toward the grassy edge of the trench, inviting their guest to have a seat. When Daniels hesitated, Beverley stepped into the trench and extended a helping hand, which the old man took gratefully, easing himself down the slope and onto the low shelf of earth. As she helped the old man find a comfortable spot, Beverley grinned and spoke. “Actually, Doctor, it’s not McCullough any more, its McCullough-Carpenter, but I think it will be a lot easier if you just call me Beverley.”
“Oh, how wonderful.” Glancing from Jason to Beverley, his lined face broke into a huge grin. “I do believe you are the first two of my students to marry. How marvelous.” Then, turning to Jason, he added “And how shall you and I address each other?”
“Well, you can call me Jason and, since you asked, I agree to dispense with the Doctor, but if you don’t mind, I’m still going to call you professor. Without your support I don’t think they would ever have let me back into grad school after I left in the middle of the semester and took the entire rest of the year off.”
“Nonsense, my boy. I just made a few small nudges and dropped the right words in the right ears. How would it have looked to have one of my mos
t promising students expelled just because he had family emergencies to deal with?” Jason nodded his thanks and waved the compliment aside as Daniels continued. “And speaking of your family, how is your grandfather? I think it was splendid the way the two of you took off together and went to all of those exotic places; Mongolia and Africa and whatnot. Is he well?”
During their time together Jason had passed Merlin off as his grandfather to divert any questions as to why he was running all over the globe with an old man with a waist length beard. Now, despite the understandable confusion about the old man’s identity, he knew exactly who Daniels was referring to and the loss of his friend and mentor still cut deeply.
“I’m afraid my granddad passed away. It’s been almost five years ago, now.”
“I am so sorry, Jason. He must have been a truly extraordinary man to have had so many wide ranging interests at his age.”
Anxious not to see the conversation turn maudlin, Beverley tried to shift the subject to something less sensitive.
“So, Professor, what brings you way out here? How did you find us?”
Cheering up immediately, Daniels smiled and answered. “As you no doubt know, my dear, the archaeological fraternity is a very small world and no one can hide effectively for very long – at least not from an old tomb raider like myself. Besides, I was attending a symposium in Oxford and since I was so close I hired a car and drove down to say hello.”
“Thirty miles is a long way to travel just to say hello.”
“Nonsense. Since I retired my time is my own and I rather miss staring down into holes in the ground. So tell me, what sorts of finds is this little dig producing for you other than that most impressive mosaic?”
“It is brilliant, isn’t it, Professor? I keep telling Jason how outstanding it is but he’s only interested in post-Roman reoccupation of old Roman sites.”