The Merlin Chronicles: Box Set (All Three Novels)

by Daniel Diehl

  “Yeah.” Having no idea where this was going, Jason knitted his brow and tilted his head to one side in confusion. “So?”

  “And I told you that you just imagined it.”

  Jason may have had no idea where this was leading, but he had already made up his mind to enjoy the moment. “Actually, if I remember correctly, you told me I was full of shite and I was cracking up from lack of sleep.”

  “I’m serious, Jason.”

  “Ok, sorry Babe. So what about it?”

  “Now I believe you. I believe you saw him because I just saw him, too.”

  Jason jerked his head back in stunned amazement. “What? In the shower?”

  “Yep. I was in the shower and all of a sudden he was just there. He looked like a ghost. I could see right through him, and the steam made the image really hard to pick out, but it was definitely him.”

  “So what happened? What did he do? I mean, did he talk to you or anything?”

  Beverley shook her head in vehement denial, almost dislodging the towel. “No, nothing like that. He was just there one minute and gone the next. But I swear we made eye contact for a split second before he vanished. He saw me and he recognized me, I know he did.”

  “I don’t know what the hell is going on, here, but something definitely isn’t right.” Jason wrapped his fingers around Beverley’s upper arms, gently pulling her to her feet as he rose from the chair. “Look, you go dry off and get dressed and we’ll talk about this later. Maybe we can figure this thing out, or at least make some sense out of it, or something.”

  They did talk about it later. Endlessly. They reviewed their individual encounters with the vague, fleeting image of Merlin. They talked about their experiences that evening, the next day and for weeks thereafter, trying to figure out exactly what had actually happened and what it meant. Was Merlin’s spirit trying to contact them from beyond the grave? Had he somehow escaped death and was trying desperately to contact them from some bizarre alternate dimension ruled by the dragons? There was no end to the strange, weird and improbable theories they concocted to account for his ghostly reappearances more than five years after they had watched him die. But none of their suggestions made any kind of sense, and both Jason and Beverley had to constantly remind themselves that this was Merlin they were talking about, and no explanation of his ghostly manifestation was any more insane than the simple fact that Merlin was – or, at least until recently, had been – real.

  Over the month leading up to Christmas, and for weeks thereafter, Jason ploughed through one ancient folio, book and scroll after another, looking for any reference to spirit manifestations, how a wizard might return from the dead, inter-dimensional contact, astral projection and a hundred, hundred other possibilities. No matter how crazy an idea seemed, Jason plunged into the scrolls, looking for some reference or passage that might enlighten him as to why the ghostly image of Merlin had suddenly begun to haunt them. By spring he was no closer to finding an answer than he had been on the evening seven months earlier when the sorcerer’s face first stared at him through a broken piece of two-thousand-year-old window glass.

  * * * *

  The old man had been sitting quietly in the wheelchair in one corner of his private room at the St James Extended Care Home, staring out the window, watching a pair of sleek, black crows scream at each other, playing hide-and-seek among the spring-green branches of a tree located just outside his room on the building’s second floor. He had been relatively calm and quiet all day, but calm days were becoming rarer lately. Now he shifted his gaze away from the window, running a palsied hand across his bald, liver-spotted head. Had he heard something or was it just his imagination again? Curious, he struggled to turn the wheelchair around far enough to look past the foot of his bed toward the wide door leading into the hallway beyond.

  Sure enough, he had not been dreaming or hearing things. Something was happening a few feet away but he could not quite make out what it was. As he squinted to focus his red-rimmed eyes, across the room a figure stepped into view, apparently from nowhere. It was a tall, elderly man with long gray hair and a beard reaching nearly to his waist. He was dressed in a tacky old gray gown and a long, furry waistcoat that reached past his rump. At his belt hung a small purse of soft leather. He knew this man, he had destroyed his life. He also knew that the figure could not possibly be real, so he must be hallucinating again. Frantically, he flailed his hands helplessly in the general direction of the figure, his fingers opening and closing like the legs of a dying spider, his breath coming in short, panicked gasps.

  “Go away. Go away, Goddamn it. You’re not real.”

  “Jason? Is that you, boy?” Merlin peered hard at the withered figure in the wheelchair, trying to see some remnant of the tall, handsome youth he had known only a short time earlier. Finally, he took a few steps toward the man by the window. “Is that you, Jason?”

  “You know perfectly well it’s me. And I know you, and I know you’re dead. So you’re just another damn hallucination. I should have known you weren’t real when I saw you in that chunk of glass…what, it must be sixty years ago now. Now get the hell out of here before I call the nurse. She’ll give me something that’ll make you go away.”

  Merlin took a few more small steps toward Jason, kneeling down so he was eye-to-eye with his old friend. When he spoke, he kept his voice calm, even and very soft.

  “Jason, I’m so sorry. Look, you have to believe me; I’ve been trying to get back to you at the right point in history but I just haven’t got the process perfected yet.”

  “Nurse. NURSE!” Jason was becoming excited, anxious and frightened, his frail voice strident with the effort of shouting.

  “Look, Jason. I’ll go now. But I want you to know that you are not crazy. I didn’t die that day in the cave, and I promise I will come back for you. I’ll return in the past. Your past.”

  “NURSE!”

  As the door opened and the young woman in the crisply starched white uniform stepped through, Merlin beat a hasty retreat through the doorway in time and disappeared from view. When her calm, businesslike manner failed to quiet Jason, she left the room momentarily, returning with a single, small white tablet held in a tiny paper cup. After helping him raise the cup to his lips she offered him a sip of water to wash it down, and then wheeled him across the room and helped him move from the chair to the bed where she pulled a light blanket over him.

  “Now you just have a nice rest, Dr Carpenter. I’ll be back in to check on you in a bit to make sure everything is alright.”

  Outside the door she rested her back against the wall and let out a small sigh as one of the staff physicians wandered down the hall toward her.

  “You alright, Janie?”

  “Oh, I’m fine, doctor.”

  “Dr Carpenter, again?”

  “Yes. Poor old guy. He’s back on his Merlin the magician story again. This time he insists Merlin was just in his room talking to him. Can you believe it?”

  “We have to make allowances; he is over ninety.”

  “Usually he’s such an old love, too, bless him. It’s just when he gets to talking about his wife or when he starts imagining he knows Merlin that he comes over all excited and we have to sedate him.”

  “I know. Try not to let it get to you. We all get old and I know he misses his wife terribly. I dare say, however, that this persistent delusion he has about being friends with Merlin the magician…well, that’s one I’ve never encountered before.”

  “He was an archaeologist, you know. They say he was quite well known for doing something or other.”

  “I know, but still. It is a bloody odd delusion - wizards and all that.”

  Shaking his head in wonder, the doctor moved off down the hall in one direction, leaving the nurse to collect herself and return to her station at the main desk.

  * * * *

  Merlin sat in the wide circle of grass surrounding Vivian’s house, his back pressed against the tower’s sun-warmed s
tones. As a short respite from contemplating more serious matters, he considered the odd fact that if he turned around there would be no building behind him, just an empty plot of land. And yet he knew the tower was there - he could feel the uneven surface of the rough stones pressing comfortably against his spine. Despite his impressive skills as a wizard, Vivian’s magic not only far surpassed his, but any real understanding of the time gates – which came so naturally to the immortals – continued to elude him. As his mind returned to the problem of cross-calculating the coordinates of a specific point in time and its exact geographic location, he was again distracted when Vivian’s spritely figure came skipping into view, wending its way through the maze of boxwood hedges.

  Drawing closer, navigating cautiously from one pathway to another, she waved enthusiastically. But as she inched ever closer to the invisible tower house and studied his face, her expression grew serious.

  “You look sad, my love. Why do you look so sad?”

  Merlin stood up, dusting bits of grass from his rump, smiled wanly and wandered to the innermost edge of the maze where he waited for her to join him before answering. As she stepped through the opening in the hedge he offered a courtly bow.

  “You have bested me, my good lady. I fear I’m no match for your magic.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Study and practice as I might I just can’t seem to navigate the time gates with any success. I always seem to end up either too far in the past, or too far in the future or on the wrong continent, or…I don’t know.” Obviously frustrated, he waved his hands in helpless circles in the air.

  “Come join me. I picked a whole basket of fruit and berries.”

  Stepping around Merlin she headed toward the door, motioning for him to follow her with a small gesture and a wide smile. Inside the house, seated at the big table in the great hall, she placed a variety of succulently ripe fruits on a small plate and passed it, along with a thick slice of bread and a cup of wine, to Merlin before serving herself. Taking a seat across from him, she sighed and smiled sympathetically while tracing the grain of the wood on the table top with one delicate fingernail.

  “You did say that you made it back to Arthur; you said you heard him talking in the next room but you just weren’t ready to step through. Isn’t that where you want to go?”

  “Yes, ultimately, but first I have to go back.”

  “Back where?”

  “Back to the future. I have a plan and I have to find my friends in the twenty-first century if it’s going to work. And moving into the future completely eludes me.” He ran his fingers through his shaggy hair and shook his head in frustration. “I just don’t know. Maybe I’m not up to it anymore.”

  “You are still the greatest wizard there has ever been, my love, but you must consider the possibility that there are some forms of magic which are just not suited to humans. We all have our limits, even Merlin.”

  Merlin studied a deep red cherry before pulling off the stem and popping it in his mouth, talking around it as he chewed. “I don’t mind having limits. I’ve always tried to accept my short-comings with as much grace as possible.”

  “But?”

  “But it’s imperative that I find a way to do this.”

  “I think I can help you, but…”

  “But what?” Merlin’s intense blue gaze locked on the sprite’s tiny face.

  “But you’re not going to like it.”

  “Tell me.”

  Vivian rolled her wine goblet between the palms of her hands, staring into its depths. “You can always go back the way you came.”

  Instantly Merlin’s eyes grew large and round. “You mean go back through the dragons’ realm? Through hell?”

  Vivian looked up from her goblet, smiled and nodded. “You see, the permanent gates are much easier to access than the ones you shape yourself. They are…well, they are always there - in the same place. You never have to look for them and you never have to create them.”

  Merlin drew his mouth into a tight line and nodded. “My friend Jason would have a phrase which would, I think, describe this situation admirably.” Vivian shifted her eyes to his and raised her eyebrows questioningly. “The phrase is: Oh, fuck.”

  She smiled and blushed before she answered. “Take heart, my love. I believe I can arrange it so your journey through anwyn will be relatively painless. Although I cannot go with you, I can open a gate for you on this end. You can leave from right here in my garden.”

  “But how will I know where to go once I get on the other side?”

  The naiad wrinkled her tiny forehead in thought; trying to explain a concept which she understood instinctively but which she was nearly incapable of putting into words.

  “It’s all just a projected image.”

  “What is?”

  “Everything.”

  Merlin scowled, trying to understand what she was telling him; knowing that Vivian’s explanations were often so vague as to be indecipherable. “What do you mean by ‘everything’?”

  “You know, everything. Anwyn, the world, the universe, you, me. Everything.”

  “You’re telling me that nothing is real?”

  “Kind of. But yet it is.” As though this somehow explained the hard part, she brightened, smiled and pressed on. “The point is; you can cut through it the same way you can cut a beam of light with your hand. It’s the quickest way to get from one place to another.”

  “And you can show me how to do this?”

  “Yes. And for the time it will take you to pass through anwyn, everything will look as insubstantial as it did when you peeked around the corner into other places and times.”

  Merlin contemplated this for a long moment before replying, collecting his thoughts and arranging them into a coherent, long-term plan.

  “And if I do this, I can get to the right place at the right period of time?”

  “You will definitely come out in the cave, the door there is permanent, and you will just need to open the door with the other stone. You do still have it, don’t you?”

  Merlin patted the soft leather pouch hanging from his belt, feeling for the remaining stone; one of a pair known as the Urim and Thummim that he had used to lock the dragon gate when he was pulled through by Morgana le Fay. It was there just as it should be and he nodded his acknowledgement.

  “I can get you close to the time you left.”

  “How close is ‘close’?”

  Vivian twisted her face awkwardly and offered a small shrug of uncertainty.

  “No more than five or six years from the time you left?”

  “I think that should work admirably, my dear. But do, please try to get me there after I left and not before. I wouldn’t want to meet myself in the twenty-first century.” After a pause to absorb his situation and analyze it, he spoke again. “I just have one more question, if I might, lady?” Accepting Vivian’s nod, he forged ahead. “How will I get back?”

  “But you don’t seem to have any problem moving backward in time, my love. Just open a gate like you did the last time you peeked at Arthur and step through.”

  A short time later they were again standing at the edge of the grassy area where it abutted the maze. Clutched tight beneath one arm Merlin held a scroll containing instructions on operating the small, portable gates which Vivian had offered to him should he need help finding his way back to his own time. Stretching up on her toes, the tiny girl-thing kissed his whiskery cheek and took one of his hands in hers.

  “Are you ready, my love?”

  Jerking his head awkwardly to one side, Merlin offered a lop-sided grin. “I guess I’m as ready as I’m ever likely to be.”

  Pulling him forward, past the point where she stood, she muttered, “Then all you have to do is take a step into the maze and…”

  Without even realizing she had let go of his hand, Merlin found himself far away from the garden and back in the realm of malignant darkness. Taking a minute for his eyes to adjust to
the sudden loss of light, when he could refocus he discovered he was standing in the midst of a nightmarish, alien landscape populated by multitudes of the damned; pathetic apparitions writhing in agony across the dead, barren ground amid piles of indescribable filth and a scattering of gelatinous, liquefying human remains. The repulsive scene’s sole source of illumination was the glowing magma oozing up through ragged tears in the shattered ground. Above him spread a midnight black sky bereft of light from either the moon or stars. Now and again, a clutch of dragons sailed through the air like ghosts, screaming as they passed, adding their voices to the groans of the damned, who clutched at his feet, begging for mercy or a sip of water or some other small kindness which he was unable to offer in his insubstantial form. Walking through their spectral bodies as though they were made of mist, he fumbled his way into the darkness, across the blasted landscape, following the cryptic instructions Vivian had provided.

  How long it took him to find the gateway he had no idea; in a place where time and space had no meaning and even his senses betrayed him at every turn, concepts like ‘where’, ‘which direction’ and ‘how long’ were completely meaningless. All he knew was that after some indefinite period his outstretched hand, which had been leading him blindly through the nothingness, encountered a firm resistance. Moving his fingers outward, he placed the flat of his palm against what felt like a solid surface, although no wall was visible in the gloom. Turning his body sideways, he leaned his shoulder against the rigid nothingness to confirm its existence. There was no doubt. He was leaning against a door. Feeling their way across a surface which he could not see, his fingers finally encountered a small depression in the invisible barrier. Fumbling with his free hand, he extracted the stone from his purse and pressed it against the keyhole. To his amazement, a small, shimmering spot began to manifest itself in the blackness in front of him. Twisting and growing, the portal opened until it was large enough for him to step through. Glancing over his shoulder to confirm that none of the dragons were watching, Merlin stepped out of the realm of darkness into a dimly lit cavern.