Dedicated with much love
to my darling wife, Julie.
Without your unceasing faith in me,
this book may never have existed.
The countless worlds in the Universe are no worse and no less inhabited than our own Earth.
Destroy the theories that the Earth is the centre of the Universe.
Giordano Bruno
Burned at the stake 17-02-1600
Hayden Blake stumbled forward as the sun beat down on the red and rocky terrain, his throat so parched he could barely swallow.
Never before had he felt so tired. His dry eyelids closed momentarily or perhaps it was for a long time but when they did open slowly, he heard it still. The barely intelligible sound of music wafting in and out on the hot desert wind and the boy, for reasons unknown to him, was driven to follow it.
The ethereal sound echoed in the shallow ravine, serving only to confuse their origin and tease their pursuer.
Then as suddenly as they began, they stopped.
Hayden blinked and found himself looking at a stooped shadowy figure in the distance.
It seemed to be a man but he could see no face. On his knees and draped in a dusty ragged black cloak, he was scraping at the ground, pulling it toward himself as if feverishly searching.
Then they were Hayden’s hands.
His hands were plunged into the hot sand and following a few startled seconds he realised he’d taken a hold of something. Running his buried fingers slowly over a hard, dry surface he looked up and around to discover that the phantom was gone. Vanished into the heat haze as if it never was.
Pulling on the object it loosened easily and he looked around again excitedly wanting to call out that maybe he’d found what it had been searching for.
The boy’s eyes stung as he squinted through the dry, rippling emptiness. He pulled upward again then turned back to the ground just as a fleshless face loomed ominously toward his from its shallow grave.
Reeling back in horror, it took a few moments for the teenager to regain his composure but when he had, he sat up, coughed hoarsely and investigated his find.
A human skull.
Cooler sand fell from the hollow braincase in gentle sheets and washed over the loose jawbone that tapped Hayden’s palms as he inquisitively moved it from side to side.
‘Who then, are you?’ he asked himself, as one last droplet of sweat fell from his fringe only to land on the inside edge of the skull’s right eye socket.
He watched the droplet, diamond bright in the sun, course down the hard, bleached dead cheek.
It almost looked as if…
CHAPTER ONE
It was a Friday morning and Hayden waited for his school bus on the corner of Tudor Lane. New snow blanketed the ground and his nose stung from the freshness of the air as he watched his breath materialize in warm clouds of vapor at every exhalation, blooming for a moment then vanishing just in time for the next to appear.
Despite wearing the woollen jumper and heavy blazer of his school’s winter uniform, he was still cold as he kicked his polished black shoes into the icy gravel beside the road, almost willing them to get dirty. He continued to dig out shallow frozen divots until he heard the familiar sound of the old bus winding its way around the mountain. Soon the faded vehicle approached and when near, braked jerkily in front of him, letting out what sounded like a sigh of relief. The sliding bi-fold doors tore awkwardly open as they wrestled from their frosty sills. Clutching his school satchel, Hayden boarded eagerly, climbing the steps in two quick leaps he held out his transit pass with a smile.
Barry, the bus driver, there’d been no other, bowed his head courteously in greeting as he had done always.
Barry was a slightly taller than average middle aged man, with short dark hair and an intelligent face framed with thick animated eyebrows that were always quick to let people know as to what mood he was in. Hayden noticed that today, like most days when he wasn’t preoccupied with something, he seemed happy.
Looking down the aisle, the two rows of green vinyl bench seats were empty but for two halfway down.
Maddy and Monty, his only friends of his own age.
That’s how he’d met them. Eleven years prior, on the bus, going in to town. He’d struck up a conversation and ever since they’d been firm friends.
He moved quickly down the vehicle, grabbed the chrome handle protruding from the top of the seat in front of them and pushing his school bag in before himself, sat down and spun around to them.
The bus lurched and they were on their way with a belch of brown smoke as Barry carefully ground upward through the ancient gearbox.
‘Ooh, what’s that about?’ Maddy asked excitedly as soon as she spied the fat book poking out of the unzipped top of Hayden’s weathered brown school bag.
‘Paleontology,’ he answered happily, hoping that they’d talk about dinosaurs as they often did.
Chubby, bespectacled and as expected, very bullied Monty had reached across, taken the book out of the bag and was staring at the cover. On it, a very menacing theropod, leg in the air, massive claws poised was about to kick down on a spike-headed herbivorous dinosaur. Turning the book over, he flipped through the almost five hundred pages. ‘When did you start it?’ he asked, observing the rudimentary piece of ripped paper with just a bit of the word bookmark visible three quarters of the way to the end.
‘Last night when I got home and I suppose if I get the time, I’ll get through the rest today during lunch break.’
Monty handed the brick of paper back while shaking his head in amazement. ‘It would have taken me at least a month or probably even a year to maybe read half of that much.’
Gravel shot up under the wheel arches loudly as the old bus swayed off the sealed road momentarily, Barry doing his best to ensure the old girl hugged the last of the corners.
They were now heading out of the wooded area that ringed the lower half of Jagged Peak, the rocky mountain that stood like a silent sentinel over his small home town of Armadale, and onto the section of road that ran through the farms before town.
It was covered in snow and with the sun rising behind it, looked as if it were gilt in gold.
Hayden looked at the trees of the local apple orchards that in the warmer months were covered in blossom and then delicious red fruit and noticed that they were now bare and looked eerily like the giant gnarled grey hands of ancient oracles pointing to the stormy sky.
This section of the journey signaled the moment that all three friends had dreaded every morning since starting school.
The next stop.
It was that next stop that heralded the weekday’s first encounter with the school bullies.
Scott Worcester or Scotty as his caveman friends knew him, was leader of the small gang of three and the very same giant that Monty had once spilled the greasy, hot potato contents of his lunch onto in the school cafeteria.
Scott Worcester was built like a tank, and it was all muscle (or so he bragged).
The others from the gang were Cory Peterson and Shaun Brown. Cory, or ‘Red’ as he was known, on account of his orangey red hair, had red freckles that littered his rounded face, arms and legs and small brown button-like eyes that peeped from under thin, almost translucent cellophane noodle-like eyebrows.
Shaun Brown, commonly known as pinhead, was a beanpole.
He was taller than Scott but was so thin it seemed that if he ran through the rain he wouldn’t get wet.
But it wasn’t for his slight build and disproportionately small head that he was called ‘Pinhead’ Brown, it was for his quite obvious lack of intellect.
Pinhead Brown would probably think he was drowning if he fell
backward into a puddle of water a centimetre deep.
Pinhead Brown made the not too smart Scott sound like a genius.
They were all in their fifth year at secondary school whereas Hayden and his friends were in third and they sure let them know it.
The bus clanked to a stop and Hayden saw the three oafs standing at the ready and judging by Scotty’s flailing arms, as usual he was angry about something.
‘Great,’ Maddy sighed.
‘Exactly,’ the others said in automatic unison.
The doors creaked open and the bullies hauled their frames onboard. Showing their passes but not acknowledging Barry, they moved toward the back of the bus. It was as there that they would spend the rest of the trip coming up with all sorts of inane remarks aimed squarely at their three targets.
Scott stopped, leered evilly at them then moved on.
Oh, how predictable.
When they’d fallen into the rear seat and sat in their correct hierarchical positions with Scotty in the middle, Pinhead Brown to his right and Red Peterson to his left, Scotty snorted in his annoying way. Barry had barely put the bus back into first gear and was maneuvering over the curb when it started.
‘Hey! Maddy, maaad Maaaddy! Why do they call you maaad Maaaddy?’ Pinhead loudly teased, making a baaing sound in reference to her woolly hair and knowing full well why she was called that as he was the one who started it.
Madeline crossed her arms firmly to her chest; she looked at the other two and with a painfully annoyed expression, rolled her big brown eyes with exasperation.
‘Maaad Maaaddy, we’re talking to you!’ Red baa’d in an equally as annoying but weaker, more nasally almost feminine tone.
Maddy tightened her body in preparation for what was to come.
Oh, how predictable.
Just as she and her friends expected, a screwed up piece of paper landed with some force onto the back of her head and embarrassingly stopped fast, lodging in her thick hair.
Scott and his crew thought they were so clever so they laughed hard.
Seeing this in the rear view mirror Barry spoke into the bus’s croaky PA system. ‘Listen. You boys had better cut that out!’ He looked directly at Maddy in the mirror and when she saw him, she dipped her head slightly in recognition of his concern. Barry had always been a nice man to them but to Worcester and his pals, Barry’s words meant nothing. As far as they were concerned Barry had no real power over them. It was the school teachers who only sort of did. He was just a transitional blip, a conveyance to school and back.
There was only one teacher that Scotty and his cronies worried about. The headmaster, Mr. Dusting.
He had the power to cut the fun out of their day without question.
That was for later, at that moment there was teasing to do and they were going to make sure they got some in good before their arrival at the school gates.
Monty’s turn next and Red let fly first. ‘Hey, Montague,’ he said in a badly contrived snobby accent. ‘Fixed your loverly, loverly spectacles yet?’
The bullies sniggered idiotically at the word spectacles.
Shaun said ‘Good one,’ and continued to chuckle stupidly.
Monty looked to Maddy and he too crossed his arms.
‘Hey fatty, gonna’ cry? Gonna’ cry then fatty?’ Brown taunted.
‘…Fat, fat.’ Red added.
Monty wasn’t going to cry. He used to let it get to him but by now he was so fed up with the teasing and unfortunately so used to the teasing. Now he just sat there while they spewed forth their infantile verbal diarrhea.
When the idiots realised they wouldn’t get a rise out of Maddy or Monty they turned their attention naturally to their prize … Hayden.
Oh, how predictable.
Worcester saved what he thought was the best for him. And today he was going to try something he’d only tried once before.
Scotty held out his palms face down and the other two shushed obediently.
‘Hey Blake’ he started. ‘They find your daddy yet?’
The brakes squealed and the tires slipped on the icy road as the bus ground to a shuddering halt at the curb.
Barry pulled sharply on the handbrake, unbuckled his seat belt, flew out of his chair then stormed down the aisle in four long purposeful steps. ‘Listen, Worcester,’ he threatened. ‘I’ve had just about enough of you! Any more comments like that ever again and you’ll be off this bus and walking to school for good! Now shut your traps the three of you because I don’t want to hear so much as a peep until we get to school.’
With that said he stomped back to his seat, buckled his belt and muttered that he didn’t even want to hear from them then.
He released the handbrake and they continued en route.
‘Yes, captain,’ Scotty whispered sullenly, his voice nervously breaking.
Trying not to let his minions see that Barry had shaken him a bit he let out a shallow, barely convincing laugh.
Hayden caught Barry’s eye in the mirror and pursing his lips hard, dipped his head in appreciation.
Barry acknowledged with a nod, placing his hand gently across his heart as if to show Hayden he sympathised.
Barry was always the great help in those situations but Scott and his gang didn’t care as they’d try it on again and again and again.
Maddy and Monty could not believe that they would stoop so low as even for them, a comment like that, was terrible.
Hayden had never known his father Daniel. He’d disappeared whilst on a paleontological expedition in the Mongolian desert before he even knew his wife Amy was pregnant with Hayden.
His mother and his uncle Jonah, Amy’s older and only brother, had brought him up.
As the bus continued picking up other kids along the way, the bullies continued planning ways to waste the day and torture every other student.
Scotty glanced up and looked directly at the back of Hayden’s head and though extremely tempted to throw something at him, didn’t feel like another long walk to school.
Scott Worcester for some stupid reason, probably not even known to him, thought of just one thing - how to make Hayden’s life a complete misery.
The bus came uneasily to a stop, arriving in front of the old blackened iron school gates. All who boarded after the bullies, waited in fear for them to leave first. As they did so, Scotty and the others smacked the younger kids on the back of their heads quite hard, causing moans and groans in sequence as they made their way down the aisle toward a seething cross-armed Barry who jutted his chin at the opened exit then pointed with one tensed muscular arm.
Get off! He ordered without uttering a word.
Now seeing it was safe to move, the other pupils rushed off leaving only Hayden, Maddy and Monty.
After a few moments contemplation the three friends made a move. Passing their driver, they told him that they’d see him after school for the trip home.
They jumped down the steps, moved through the gates and up the long icy bitumen driveway toward the immense old building.
CHAPTER TWO
Armadale school stood atop one side of the valley on a tall, wide bald hill. Jagged Peak loomed ominously opposite.
Almost two hundred years old and built, in parts, like a medieval castle from the local bluestone, it was a formidable fortress of a building. Armadale township sat in the middle of giant bowl.
Hayden could see his house off in the distance surrounded by its circle of tall trees and the surrounding acreage.
Turrets serrated the top of the thick walls covered with ivy that grew completely over the school but for the occasional jutting buttress or where it was cut around windows. The vine’s stout origins stemmed from the garden beds on either side of a large stone arched entrance. An entrance to which all the other students were filing through noisily.
Education thesaurus est - Education is a treasure.
The school motto, was carved in grey stone above the archway keystone in a ribbon design over a shield d
ivided into four panels. In the first, a man held a pennant beside him, the second depicted a lion with an orb under one paw, the third showed three circles merging together and the fourth had a sun.
The sky darkened as Hayden and his friends passed underneath it.
Inside, the students scurried like mice through the great entrance hall to their lockers to collect books for first class, homogenizing into a brown-grey swarm as they did so. Thankfully, as they were all in group 9B they were to be together for all their classes. There were three lessons before first recess, where Monty would sometimes head up to the library to help the librarian, Miss Dearing, do sorting. Hayden and Maddy would hang there too as they’d do anything to stay away from the upper sports oval as that was where Scott and his friends had apparently made a hideout in a thick stand of Cyprus trees on the school boundary. They hadn’t actually seen it but heard some classmates talking one day about some unfortunate student who’d stumbled across it.
Hayden’s uncle Jonah was full of wise observations and he had often mentioned to his nephew that there was so much to be learned of the world and beyond that it seemed a waste not to look about and listen.
‘Words to live by,’ his mother would agree and then she’d add that ‘There was more between the heavens and the Earth than anyone could possibly ever know.’
Hayden went with that wisdom and tried to make his every day an adventure by learning about as much as he could.
Learning was infinite, there was no person alive who knew everything and a day with nothing learnt was a wasted day as far as he was concerned.
CHAPTER THREE
First was physics class and they were to start studying the solar system and gravity’s role in its formation.
That morning as he always did, their teacher, Mr. Rankin, arranged his belongings neatly on his desk and glanced up at his pupils from over his dated, thick horned rimmed glasses.
‘Good morning class,’ he greeted.
‘Good morning Mr. Rankin,’ all responded enthusiastically to the thin, orange bearded teacher.
The Blake Equation- Discovery Page 1