by Peter James
‘Yes, my love, tell me?’
‘Outside it has gone dark, completely dark. But it is not even half past twelve. Like it is a total eclipse of the sun! People are all out in the street, watching. Every car has stopped, all the drivers are out, watching. People are taking photographs with their phones, cameras, tablets!’
Udin tapped the phone he wore on his wrist, which spoke the time to him.
‘Twelve twenty-seven,’ it announced.
‘Up in the sky, Hassam,’ she said. ‘There is a rainbow shining across the entire sky!’
Very quietly, he replied. ‘I’m seeing it too, my love. Inside my head. But tell me, am I right, that the colours are all wrong?’
144
Friday, 24 March
Brother Pete’s return to Mount Athos had not been easy. God had tested him, he knew. Tested his faith.
For two days, he had frantically searched the railway line north of East Croydon, looking for his bag. He finally found it, nestling sodden among weeds in a ditch. Sodden and empty.
It had contained everything – his meagre savings, which he had brought with him as part of his plan to start a new life in England, and his passport. And the precious items he had been entrusted with, by Angus.
All gone.
He had fallen to his knees in despair, and did the only thing he knew, which was to pray for help.
Then, as he had grown increasingly desperate, hitch-hiking at the roadside, God had answered his prayers. Wet, cold, thirsty and hungry, he had found a saviour who had driven him to the Greek Embassy in London.
Now, finally, at 2.25 p.m., he was on the ferry from Thessaloniki back to Athos. Moments earlier it had been a fine, sunny day. But now the sky was darkening strangely, ominously.
Could it be an eclipse?
Within minutes it was like night-time.
A rainbow, its colours inverted, appeared in the sky above him. Radiating light. Radiating warmth. Radiating love.
A sign.
Like all the other monks and the pilgrims around him on the open deck, he fell to his knees.
145
Friday, 24 March
Ainsley’s bloody monkeys! Cilla Bloor thought.
Shortly after 1 p.m., as the strangely coloured arc faded in the returning sunlight and lightening sky, it sounded like there was bedlam in the cages.
Grief-stricken, and still in shock following the phone call from Los Angeles, informing her that her husband’s jet had crashed shortly after take-off, she had barely left the house all week. Both their children had come home, their nineteen-year-old daughter, Lucy, who had been backpacking in Europe in her gap year, and their son, Jake, who was reading biology at Oxford. The two of them had gone out earlier today to the American Embassy to discuss the return of the remains of their father, once his body had been released by the Los Angeles Coroner.
Cilla had been too distraught to go. Had Lucy and Jake both seen it, she wondered? The extraordinary, unpredicted eclipse, or whatever phenomenon it was, and that incredible coloured arc in the sky? She had not yet phoned them.
The screeching became louder.
Shut up, monkeys, for Heaven’s sake!
It sounded like they were killing each other. The most terrible sounds. Where was Frank, their head gardener? Why wasn’t he dealing with them?
She still had not bathed or dressed yet today. She left the house, aware she looked a mess, and beyond caring, and walked in her velvet slippers and housecoat across the damp grass towards the orangery.
The screeching was even louder as she neared it.
Just as soon as the funeral was over, she had decided, she would get rid of the lot of them. Send them to a zoo or to some monkey sanctuary or whatever organization would be happy to have six noisy monkeys with poor typing skills.
She opened the door of the pretty Victorian red-brick orangery and stepped inside, trying to breathe in as little as possible of the smell. The screeching was piercing her ears.
She passed the first five cages. To her surprise, each occupant was subdued. One, Jefferson, cupped a peanut in his little hands and eyed her, disinterestedly. The next, Gwendolyn – where had her husband got these ridiculous names from? – was sitting on a perch high up, looking slightly traumatized, her laptop almost buried in excrement.
It was Boris, at the far end, who was making all the noise. He was leaping around his cage, almost dementedly, from perch to floor, to the desk on which his computer lay, to the cage bars, shaking them, screeching, screeching, screeching.
When he saw her, he opened his tiny jaws, baring his teeth, screeched again, then leaped a seemingly impossibly high jump up to the perch ten foot in the air.
‘What is it, Boris?’ she said.
He screeched again, jumped down on the desk, bounded onto the keypad, then leaped back up onto the high perch.
He was trying to show her something, she understood.
Then she noticed that a sheet of the perpetual paper feed that was sticking out of the printer had typing on it.
She entered the cage, warily, and walked over to it.
Stared at it.
Looked up at Boris then back at the single sheet of paper.
She had to look again, twice, to make sure her eyes were not deceiving her. She peered up at the monkey, and could have sworn he was grinning at her.
On the sheet of A4 paper, in large letters, was typed, in bold, one word, with an exclamation mark at the end:
RAINBOW!
146
Sunday, 26 March
The media had been full of little else for the past two days. Astronomers and meteorologists were all pontificating. Some newspaper headlines were predicting Armageddon. Just what was it that had occurred at 12.25 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time and, simultaneously, in every time zone of the world?
How could a rainbow occur in a sky in which there had been no rain? How could it occur in a pitch-dark night sky?
And the colours inverted?
Social media was agog with theories and speculations. Every channel on television carried interviews with eyewitnesses. Ross had seen two young backpackers standing outside Sydney Opera House, talking almost breathlessly about the extraordinary shimmering rainbow, with its colours the wrong way round, in the night sky. Something quite mystical about it, they were saying.
He’d seen a shepherd on a remote plain of the Andes trying to describe what he had seen. An oilman at an Arctic drilling station confirming the phenomenon. A Japanese whaler crew. A soldier outside the Kremlin. People lying prostrate in St Peter’s Square in front of the Vatican. Market traders in Iraq. An imam in Baghdad. A meteorologist in Hawaii, saying that what he and his colleagues had witnessed was just not possible. Some kind of interference from an unpredicted galactic electrical storm was the best he could come up with.
What was equally extraordinary was that not a single photograph or video image of the rainbow, out of all the millions taken around the world, appeared to have survived. In every instance, the image had either simply failed to record or had somehow, subsequently, been erased.
It seemed that every scientist in the world, in China, Russia, the USA, Africa, Australia, New Zealand, China, Japan, Europe, Scandinavia, India and elsewhere, was stumped.
The world’s faith leaders had put forward their own views. The Pope had declared it a miracle, a sign from God. The Archbishop of Canterbury was more circumspect. He had issued a press statement saying that something defying all our scientific knowledge had occurred. He called on scientists around the globe to come together to provide an explanation that was better than his own view, that it was divine intervention in our physical world.
On Saturday, Ross had driven to Monmouth to tell his friend, Benedict Carmichael, the background he had to the phenomenon. And to remind Benedict of his earlier words, about proof of God requiring something that defied the laws of physics of the universe.
‘Let’s see what the scientists come up with,’ Carmichael had replied, tactfu
lly, and a little too evasively for Ross’s comfort.
Lying in the spare room in Sally’s comfortable flat, Ross barely slept all Saturday night in the hard, single bed. He watched the clock ticking away the hours. 3 a.m. 4 a.m. 5 a.m. 6 a.m. 6.15 a.m.
Newsagents opened early. How early? 6.30 a.m.?
Then, when he next looked, it was 7.20 a.m.
He slipped out of bed, narrowly missing stepping on Monty, who was asleep on the floor beside him, enjoying the white rug on the polished wood floor.
Ross threw some water on his face, brushed his teeth, then dressed in a T-shirt and tracksuit, pulled on his trainers and zipped his wallet into his pocket.
The dog jumped up and whined.
‘Ssssshhhh!’
He heard Sally call out from her room.
Opening her door a crack, he said, ‘Just going to get the papers.’
‘Hurry back!’ she murmured.
‘Go back to sleep, I won’t be long.’
He was anxious to get a copy of the Sunday Times, to see his story. He always looked forward to seeing his work in print, but never more so than today. He could not wait to see how much space they had given him. The four pages his editor’s boss had indicated? That would be amazing!
Three flights of stairs down, he clipped on Monty’s lead, checked he had a poop bag in his pocket, and the keys, opened the front door and stepped out into the fresh, morning air of the elegant Georgian crescent in Bristol. It was nearly full light.
He broke into a run, Monty loping happily beside him for a short distance. Then the dog stopped, yanking hard on the lead, wanting to sniff a lamp post.
‘No!’ Ross said, sternly. ‘Later.’
They ran on, down a hill, and came to a parade of shops. One, to his joy, was an open newsagent. Securing Monty to a hoop outside the shop, he went in and bought a copy of all the national Sunday papers that they had.
The front-page splash of the Sunday Times was of course the story of Friday’s mysterious worldwide total eclipse and freak rainbow.
THE WORLD PLUNGED INTO DARKNESS
For added emphasis, the entire front page was black, with an artist’s depiction of the rainbow across it.
To the dog’s dismay, Ross hurried straight back to Sally’s flat.
‘Don’t worry, boy, we’ll go for a longer walk later, I promise.’
Monty gave him a look that, if he could have translated doggy language, would have said, Yeah, right, whatever.
When he arrived back, Sally was awake, with the television in her bedroom switched on to Sky News, the sound muted.
‘Hi, gorgeous!’ she said. ‘Is it in?’
‘Just about to check.’
‘Great! Let’s watch the Andrew Marr Show at nine – let’s see what he or his guests have to say. It’s bound to be his big topic.’
Dumping all the papers on the round table in the dining area adjoining Sally’s kitchen, he began to leaf through the pages of the Sunday Times. Page after page was full of the story of the darkness that engulfed the world on Friday. The shimmering, iridescent, shining, mysterious inverted rainbow.
Theories from scientists around the globe.
From bewildered politicians.
It wasn’t until twenty-three pages in that he found his own story.
It had been cut to just one short column.
He stared at it, barely able to believe his eyes.
According to our reporter, Ross Hunter, Mike Delaney, an elderly, former magician and stage illusionist, predicted that God would give the world a sign as evidence of the Second Coming of Christ.
Delaney, who claimed to be a messenger from Christ, hosted a prime-time show on ABC Television during the 1990s, Mickey Magic – Man of Mystery.
In 2014 Delaney was convicted of DUI. He was killed last week when he stepped in front of a vehicle in West Hollywood.
Fuming, barely able to contain his anger – and hurt – Ross carried the paper into the bedroom and showed Sally.
‘What?’ she said, after she had read it. ‘What are they playing at? You have the greatest story – maybe of the last two thousand years – and they print this? They can’t do this to you!’
‘They have. I told you,’ he said, feeling totally gutted as the reality sank in. ‘Bloody newspapers.’
Then he had a thought. Had that man from MI5, Stuart Ivens, who had accosted him in the motorway cafe two weeks ago, had something to do with this? He’d never got back to him on his request to see his article before publication.
He grabbed his phone and dialled his editor’s number. She answered almost immediately. He hit the hands-free button so Sally could hear, too.
‘Ross, hello?’
‘Sorry to call so early, Natalie.’
‘No, I’m up.’
‘What the hell’s happened to my piece?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You said I was getting four pages, and probably the splash!’
‘That’s right – that’s how I left it – everyone was really excited about it. We’re down in the country at the moment and the papers haven’t arrived yet.’
‘Did you or your editor get any interference from MI5?’
‘MI5?’
‘A man called Stuart Ivens.’
‘I’ve never heard of him, Ross.’
‘Are you certain?’
‘Absolutely. Why, is there a problem?’
‘A problem? Actually, yes.’
A couple of minutes later he hung up, leaving Natalie McCourt as mystified as he was. Turning to Sally, he said, ‘Something very, very strange is going on.’
‘Maybe I know what it is,’ she replied.
‘You do?’
‘All the stuff that’s happened to you. That dire warning you had from your bishop friend. That if someone had actual proof of God’s existence they would probably be murdered. Maybe Delaney intervened – to protect you.’
He gave her a strange look.
‘I mean it, Ross. What’s happened has now happened. It’s out there. So you don’t get the credit for it. But at least you’re safe. Isn’t that a pretty good trade-off?’
He stared vacantly ahead, trying to take this in. ‘I guess at least I still have the DNA safe with the monk from Mount Athos,’ he said. ‘Maybe, not now but at some point, when –’
She touched him gently, interrupting him, nodding at the screen. The Andrew Marr Show was starting. Grabbing the remote, she turned the sound up.
The renowned television interrogator, with neat short hair, a dark-grey suit and salmon-pink tie, sat against a curved backdrop of the Thames, the London Eye and the Houses of Parliament.
In front of him, splayed out on a table, were all the national Sunday newspapers.
‘And the big story this week,’ Marr said, ‘is the extraordinary global eclipse of the sun on Friday, March 24th – if indeed that’s what it was. At 12.25 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time, in every time zone of the world where it was light, it went dark and an inverted rainbow appeared. In those time zones where it was already dark, at the same moment the same rainbow appeared. Millions – billions – of people were outside in the streets witnessing the phenomenon. It has left astronomers – as well as meteorologists – totally caught on the hop and dumbfounded. What the world witnessed was not just an unpredicted total eclipse of the sun, but an impossible rainbow – at least impossible within the laws of physics as we currently know and understand them! I’ll be joined in the studio by Dr Susan Meyer, Professor of Meteorology from the University of Leeds, Professor Sir Quentin Ferlinger, Astronomer Royal, and Colonel Jeff Hawke from the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration.’
He went on to outline further guests on the show, including a folk band.
Then the news came up.
His mind in turmoil, Ross settled on the bed, beside Sally, leafing through other sections of the Sunday Times, just in case more of his story had been printed in a supplement. But he could find nothing.
/> After the news, Andrew Marr reappeared, seated on an apricot-coloured swivel chair, opposite two men and a woman on a matching sofa. One man was in his late sixties, in a grey suit, with long, straggly grey hair, the other a decade younger, with a military bearing. He had a crew cut and wore a shapeless beige jacket over a shirt and tie. The woman, in her late forties, was smartly dressed, with short, red hair, small round glasses and a rather fierce expression.
‘So, welcome Dr Susan Meyer, Professor of Meteorology at Leeds University, Professor Sir Quentin Ferlinger, Astronomer Royal, and Colonel Jeff Hawke, Director of Space Research at NASA. The first question I would like to put to the three of you, regarding the events of this past Friday, is simply this: You and countless other experts are all rushing to find a scientific theory for what happened. We’ve heard about the possibility of freak meteorological conditions. Perhaps some unforeseen astronomical occurrence. A meteor shower. Or some extra-terrestrial attempt to communicate with us. Isn’t there, possibly, a much simpler explanation for what – or who – could be responsible – that no one wants to accept?’
‘Such as?’ said Susan Meyer.
‘God?’
Epilogue
Sunday, 26 March
Later that afternoon, Ross and Sally watched the Andrew Marr Show again. As the debate on the television programme became increasingly animated, Ross punched the sofa with his fist, raging with frustration. ‘I could have told them!’ he said. ‘I should have been on the show, I could have –’
His phone rang, the number withheld. He looked at Sally.
She grabbed the remote and pressed the pause button. ‘Answer it,’ she urged.
‘Ross Hunter,’ he said.
A persuasive north-Atlantic accent replied, ‘Mr Hunter, this is Jim Owen of Owen Media, do you have a moment?’
He frowned. Owen was the most powerful publicity agent in the media world, specializing in high-profile stories.
‘Yes, OK,’ Ross said, hesitantly, wondering what was coming.
