Three Stories About Ghosts

  Chapter Five

  JOHN STEPPED FORWARD as Agatha materialised behind him in a whoosh and a snap. The scent of tombs and incense filled his head as he stepped into a wide sandstone atrium with torches everywhere, sending the golden light dancing off the strange hieroglyphs lining every wall. He levelled his branch and raised a personal ward as he craned his neck up to find the vaulted ceiling lost in shadow high above them.

  All around, depictions of what he thought was the Sky Mother, but in a style he had never seen before, loomed over and around every group of hieroglyphs. He felt the Sky Mother’s power all around him, but he kept his wards raised, eyes scanning for any hidden threat.

  “Professor Goodland,” Trish said in his mind as John walked forward to study the room. “This was his life, here, right here. He and countless others spent their careers searching for this very room.”

  “What?” John asked as he continued searching the room. It was bare except for the apparture, made of stone and filigreed strands of mana resembling the ones in ancient murals and rock paintings he had seen in Australia. As he recalled, the spirit healer there had told him they were depictions of pre-human ascendancy technology. He scoffed.

  “Yes, exactly,” Trish said.

  John froze. “Hold on; you can read my thoughts?” He loved feeling Trish’s presence in his mind now, nearly all the time, but he didn’t know she could read—

  “When we entered this room, yes.” She paused for a moment as John felt her attention turn to a particular hieroglyph of a bull’s head. “But not before.”

  He stopped, turned back, and called Agatha.

  “Trish says this is what Professor Goodland was seeking.”

  Agatha nodded slowly, studying every corner of the room. “Esoterological archaeology,” Agatha half whispered. She turned and looked at him. “The professor studied Egypt, not for Egypt’s sake, but cross-species mimicry.”

  John stared at her for a moment, trying to make sense of her words, but Trish started to fill his mind with her thoughts. He shuddered for a moment as he was filled with her warmth, her love, her kindness, and before he knew what was happening he was down on the floor with a sharp pain shooting down his hip where he had fallen, his branch behind him. He shook his head, stretched his hand out on the sandy floor to sit upright, grabbed his branch to recast his wards, and tried to concentrate.

  In the jungles of Uganda, Trish’s thoughts said, a tribe of primates live near a community of magi who perform their rites and draw power directly from the air in an inefficient process called inverse radeon saturative induction. Unlike most other communities built on the power of the Sky Mother, these sorcerers didn’t hide after the Dark Ages but still interacted with both unattuned peoples and animals living near them, providing health care, advice, and on occasion, bringing rain to farms or pasture land.

  A clear image formed in his mind, through Trish’s memories, of a giant silverback leading his tribe in imitation of the rites that greet the Sky Mother at dawn. No animal could know what those rites were, but by watching the sorcerers, the primates had learned to mimic the same rites almost exactly. This phenomenon was not unique.

  Professor Goodland had posited that Egypt and the Aboriginal tribes of Australia, as the first human civilizations to attune to the Sky Mother’s power, had followed a similar path, now lost deep within the dark web that surrounds human knowledge of its ascension to sentience. His theory supposed that humanity had once observed—and been inspired by—an older race, a pre-human civilization.

  “Professor Goodland thought we mimicked our way to sentience?”

  “No,” Trish answered. “He believed we were already mimicking another race before we were sentient, and as we ascended, we held some knowledge of the rites that empower our Sky Mother. Humanity, he posited, inherited its attunement to our Sky Mother.”

  John shook his head. “From whoever built this place?”

  “Yes,” Trish said aloud as she materialised next to him. She still wore her clay-stained field clothes, white leather boots, and white linen trousers and shirt. She took his hand, and he relished the soft feel of her fingers as she helped him up onto his feet. He stood there, staring at her for a moment, breathed in, and turned his attention back to the room.

  An upside-down-kite-shaped door stood ten meters high at the room’s far end, a gentle draft pulling them towards it. He followed the building scent of burning incense as he stalked towards the door, his branch levelled. Agatha followed to his right, her own branch held a touch higher than his in the Oxford Manual’s style. Trish had walked over to the hieroglyph of the bull’s head to peer at it more closely.

  “Go ahead,” she said. “I’m in no danger here. Neither are you.”

  John believed her, but couldn’t bring himself to let down his guard. He went through the door first, keeping his branch ready to blast anything that came at him, and emerged into a far larger room, like a cave of colossal proportions, but with marks along the bare stone walls that suggested it was excavated, rather than natural.

  He looked around to find the source of the light filling every corner of the cave, but couldn’t find any. There were no alchemical bulbs, torches, electric lights, and yet the entire chamber was as bright as sunlight.

  He looked at his watch. It was coming up on midnight of the day after he had left the East Coast, so here, it should be near nine at night. He instinctively took his phone out of his pocket and breathed a sigh of relief as Mrs. Murphy’s hourly text reassuring him that they were safe had arrived. He felt guilty for not having checked, but the message had come while they were in Bohdan’s shop and he hadn’t noticed.

  “There,” Trish said, emerging from the door and pointing to the far end of the vast room.

  John peered, making out the outlines of a cluster of tents pitched at the base of a deep, wide bowl, carved into the chamber’s floor about five hundred meters away. The walls of the cave were dark stone, but aside from a set of rough stone steps down into the bowl, the floor was sand.

  He let Trish lead the way down to the camp, but as they neared and he recognised the tents as Trish’s, his steps became heavy, the dormant grief flaring into life in his heart. He had to fight back tears from his eyes. He steadied his heavy breaths, both from the long walk and the shock of seeing Trish’s familiar gear strewn all around, and made his way to the large central tent.

  Inside, everything was as he remembered it to always be. Her red rug adorned the floor, the two-meter-high walls were decorated with fabrics from Sindhustan and Scotland, and the ceiling peaked high above their heads. The round table in the center was covered in maps, ley line readings marked with pen, and a set of Trish’s handwritten notes.

  He went to reach for them, but something else caught his eye. Professor Goodland’s tea set stood on a side table. The Sindhustani Samavar had long since turned cold in the frigid air, and two ornate glasses sat on the table holding the dregs of tea, a few loose leaves, and what looked to be sugar settled at their bottom. That was odd.

  “Wasn’t the professor on his third stroke?” John asked.

  “Yes,” Trish answered as she flicked through her own notes.

  “Wasn’t he on strict orders not to take any sugar?”

  Trish looked up for a moment and screwed her eyes. “Yes.”

  John nodded. Raghav’s short-bread biscuit tin was opened, with only a few crumbs left inside. He looked around and found every canister of power Trish normally took on expeditions present, all drained.

  Whatever happened, they had time to prepare. He glanced back to the central table and saw Professor Goodland’s leather shoulder bag lying opened, with the ornate wooden wand box he kept his good wand in empty and open on the floor. Raghav’s bag was a little farther back, but all he could make out inside was stationery, paper, and an orange drink bottle. He sighed.

  “You knew what was coming,” he said.

  Trish didn’t react at first, but slowly raised her head and nodded. She l
ooked over to him. “It was something of Egypt. The professor recognised it and knew his end had come. He took sugar, ate the biscuits; we all did.”

  Trish’s face had gone pale. She shook slightly as she stood, and a fresh terror filled her eyes, setting his gut churning.

  “We were trapped here, in its power. It didn’t attack, but we had to break free.”

  John found his legs trembling and tried to force himself to calm his nerves. He could almost taste his vengeance. “Let’s go find it,” he said as he drew more power into his branch and checked the three wands strapped to his chest, “and make the fucker bleed.”

  Agatha’s hand clasped his shoulder. He spun and despite himself, a small part of his tension fell away.

  “Relax, John,” she said as she looked into his eyes and raised her eyebrows. “When we find it, we kill it calmly, and carefully. It took down two Oxford-trained warlocks, and two witches of Preston College.”

  “I didn’t,” a metallic voice called from outside the tent.

  John spun, dropped to his knee, pulled the branch up to his shoulder and loosed one arc after another of violet power towards the voice. Agatha joined him a moment later, and by the time their branches were depleted, and they’d each dropped them to pull a fresh wand, half the tent was disintegrated, the air shimmering in a haze of smoke and the acrid stench of burnt mana. A blue figure was visible through the blasted gap in the tent, his hands outstretched, his empty palms turned towards them.

  The figure was human-like, with cobalt-blue skin. He stood roughly eight feet tall, dressed in a skirt made of black and gold metal plates in a strangely Egyptian style, with similar bracelets and anklets, and a tall conical helmet adorned with a golden emblem of the Sky Mother—a wide-branching tree with deep roots in filigree gold—on the front.

  John’s rage overpowered him. He threw the wand to the ground and pulled the two smaller branches strapped to his back, levelling them at the strange figure, but before he could loose their power, Trish’s hand gently stroked the back of his head.

  “John,” she whispered. “Don’t.”

  The figure still stood there, his palms turned towards them, and seemed to be bowing his head.

  “Please,” he said in an accent John didn’t recognise. His voice was metallic and forceful, yet restrained. His eyes were a solid blue, with narrow, angular pupils.

  John swallowed hard, kept his two minor branches trained at the figure as Agatha dropped her drained branch and drew the branches strapped to her back.

  “Mum,” Trish said, still keeping her hand on John’s head, “he’s not going to harm you.”

  John tried to stand, but found his legs were barely keeping him upright on his knees. Still, he forced every bit of strength left in him into them, and with a wobble or two, eased himself upright onto his feet. He stood before the figure, meeting those unsettling eyes, and waited, the two branches still trained at his chest.

  “You’re the demon?” John asked, cursing himself for the weak crackle in his voice.

  The figure shook his head. “I am a Hecarim, called Tamokameses.” He inclined his head in a mild bow.

  “He’s what the professor called a ‘demon of Egypt,’” Trish said.

  The being winced. “For what I’ve done to you,” it said to Trish, “I can never remedy you.” He gestured to her. “But at least I can do this much.”

  John’s mind spun again, and before he knew what was happening, he fell backward and planted himself down ass-first into the sand. His brain tried to gather its wits, but couldn’t. He fished another scholin weed bottle, downed it, and paused for the few seconds it now took for the bottle to take effect.

  He looked up, and in the naked light, he saw the being anew. Everywhere in and around him, the Sky Mother’s power saturated the air, so thick John could almost taste it. How could any being not of the Sky Mother even dare to breathe here? The emblem on the being’s helmet was strange, though still vaguely familiar. It wasn’t too dissimilar from the Warden’s insignia.

  “You serve the Sky Mother?” he asked.

  The being nodded.

  “You brought Trish back?”

  He nodded again.

  “But you also killed her?” His voice cracked again, and he had to swallow hard.

  The being sighed, looked down, but nodded. “I had not meant to.”

  “And how,” Agatha asked as she stepped forward, branches still raised, “may I ask, does one kill four people without meaning to?”

  The being seemed to swallow, or pause; John couldn’t tell, as its throat didn’t move, even as it talked, and he realised with a start that it wasn’t formed of flesh. The way the light reflected from his skin, it was made of stone.

  “The older man and young man attacked me first. I had received warning of servants of Nafarin infiltrating my charge—the world engine here.” The creature turned to gesture at a hollow crater at the cave’s far end. “I did not believe your Trisha was attempting to flee, but to flank me. I intercepted her, and by the time I realised she was trying to distract me, to draw my attention away so that the young woman could escape, it was too late.”

  The being dropped his head even lower and shook it.

  “I am so sorry,” he said.

  “And so you chased the young woman down and killed her?” Agatha hissed as she raised her branches even higher.

  “No,” the being said, his face still unmoving. “Trish’s act of self-sacrifice could never have come from a servant of Nafarin. When I confirmed that the young woman served only our Sky Mother, I transported her to her desired point.”

  “What?” John asked as he stood again.

  “She wanted to go to somewhere called ‘Preston College.’ I sent her there, and watched as she was collected by a man.”

  John and Agatha stared at each other for a moment, and neither spoke as they turned back to the being.

  “I’m sorry, what?” John asked again.

  The being cocked his head to the side, and raised his right hand; a stream of light shone from its bracelet, painting an image of Kate Hart in the air. As they watched, Kate materialized above the trees surrounding Preston College, was met by Dean Walters, enveloped in a protective ward, and led back towards the College. The recording stopped there.

  “I stopped watching when she seemed safe,” the being said.

  The implications of the vision nearly tore John’s mind apart. He found his hand shook and his heart shook with it.

  “I was deceived,” the being continued. “And now, my failure is total. Nafarin’s servants took the world engine, and as we speak, are trying to awaken their lord.”

  John took a step back but bumped into Trish. She took his hand and pulled him closer to her.

  “For two hundred millennia my servants and I have guarded the world engine from our Sky Mother’s enemies. We now disassemble our life here, piece by piece, and join our people in the stars.”

  Trish pulled him towards her. “John,” she said, but paused and seemed to struggle to frame her words. “When my life ended, I didn’t see the Sky Mother. I saw darkness. I remember now.” She looked straight into his eyes and nodded. “Tamokameses’ people left this world eons ago, their consciousness melded into a single being, looking for a world in the stars.”

  John shook his head as he tried to wrap the remaining shreds of his mind around what Trish was saying.

  “Listen,” she urged, “we don’t have time. That’s how—” She paused again. “I think that’s how our Sky Mother reproduces. By seeding life until it, ah, ascends.”

  “Yes,” the being said. “I am individual, my servants are individual, we are the last of our people outside of our collective consciousness, here to serve the Sky Mother until the time came to join with the minds of all our people, to become one with all. To our shame that time comes at our moment of failure.”

  John’s mind had started to numb, but as heretical as this sounded, he could see it, almost as though the Sky Mother was
willing him to. As the enormity of it all started to dawn for him, he felt suddenly calm. His mind grasped for more details, for the answers to a million questions, but he remained still, and listened.

  “John.” Trish pulled him even closer. “Nafarin and the Sky Mother, they are the same, the same as what I joined out in the stars. Nafarin is the collective consciousness of a deathly people, a single face, a being of evil. They fight for control of our world.”

  He slowly nodded and looked over to Agatha. For the first time in his life, he saw tears flow freely from her eyes. Thin tendrils of azure-blue mana seemed to be flowing straight into her chest from the air around her. She shuddered as her mouth stiffened into a grim line.

  “My father was right?” John asked.

  “Yes,” Trish answered. “We have suffocated her, and this world engine, large enough to sustain her, the only space She who we revere has to draw breath, is now filled with the cult of Nafarin. She is dying fast.”

  John’s heart tried to reject what he’d heard, but as the Sky Mother’s love filled him from head to toe, he knew it was true. He had known when his father had first started to talk of this madness, of galactic beings vying for power across the cosmos. For the first time since Trish’s death, he felt fatigue fall from his shoulders like lead weights. His mind emptied itself of the rushed urgency of scholin weed. He breathed in a lungful of free air, filled with the Sky Mother’s love; held it as power radiated to every part of him, and breathed out a plume of neon blue vapour.

  “John Trevelyan?” the being called. “I was the last guardian of the Sky Mother left of my people. We share a mother, you and I, and Her life is now in your hands.”

  His mind whirred into action. He took out his phone, sent a message to Dean Walters to meet for a midnight drink at the twenty-four-hour café by the waterfall outside the college, and picked his depleted branch back up. He held it to the sky to refill, gestured for Agatha to follow, and turned back towards the apparture room.