Order of the Black Sun Box Set 6

by Preston William Child

  After the gravel and thorns of their path over the past few months since their horrible encounter in Chernobyl, she welcomed their rekindled closeness. The latter was something she would never have imagined could ever be ransomed from oblivion, and it only taught her to never make assumptions about the scathing events in life; that everything can be more or less restored. In her case, it came at the right time, this chummy thing with Purdue.

  For some inexplicable reason Nina had been swimming in a tar pit of despair since her return from the Vault of Hercules. Even the revelation that her beloved Sam was not, in fact, a murdering son of a bitch who had killed their mutual friend, could not effectively hold up her cheer. She’d really needed last night and she regretted nothing, at first, but as Nina locked her door and stepped out onto her porch to brave the wicked weather for grocery shopping, the black hand of despondency caressed her once again. It affected her so strongly that she struggled to remove her key from the lock of the front door, having no idea that a figure was gliding over her small walkway from the roadside.

  Nina cussed under her breath as the headache persisted maliciously, the only pain that combated her mental anguish enough to make a war of it inside her head. Fumbling clumsily, Nina's fingers couldn’t grip the key in the right way to pull it free until she took a deep breath and paused before trying again. Still the shape came closer, soundlessly under the veil of the gray sheets of fog so prevalent in Oban during such days.

  Just as the figure reached Nina, the key came free and with an annoyed scoff she turned to leave, slamming right into the silent visitor.

  “Geezuss Christ!” she growled as the sudden dark presence appeared before her, startling her half to death. By reflex Nina's hands shot out and she shoved the black-clothed man backward with virtually no effect. He was bulky and heavy against her slight frame and her strength diminished against his. Fortunately for Nina, her visitor was benevolent. Unfortunately, however, he was not one who appreciated the glib blasphemy she so easily uttered.

  “My goodness, Dr. Gould,” he said, “that is indeed a long distance call you are making.”

  Nina straightened up and collected her purse from where it had fallen on the wooden boards, still wheezing from the fright. “Well, Father Harper, that just proves your sermons impotent and untrue, then. It would seem the good Lord is not inside us after all, I presume?”

  “T-That’s not what I meant,” he stammered firmly, feeling embarrassed by the feisty academic's rather valid retort, mentally reminding himself to find another simile from now on. Again, her continual questioning reminded him of the old days when she had been a mere high school girl jousting with him about religion versus the remnants of ancient history. Seeing that Nina was in a hurry and quite indifferent to his presence, he knew he had to say what he had come to say.

  “Just a second, please, Nina,” he implored as gently as he could, knowing how she was when confronted. “I have a favor to ask.”

  Nina raised an eyebrow. “Father, I'm not going back into the house for this. I just went through a gauntlet of troubles getting the bloody key…”

  “No, no,” he smiled, holding up an open palm in polite protest, “you don't have to go back in the house. I shall be brief.”

  She folded her arms and sighed, waiting for him to state his business. The wind rearranged the strands of hair she could not tuck in under her beanie, irritating her eyes with the whipping ends. Her incessant blinking made her appear even more irate than she was.

  “I know you don't see eye to eye with the church anymore, but we were hoping that you could attend this coming Sunday. Mrs. Langley has fallen ill suddenly and we need an organist,” he said hastily, as if delivering the request faster would more likely lighten the blow. “And, well, you being the only person I know who can play well enough…” The clergyman humbly folded his strong hands across his abdomen, trying to look her in the eye. He’d run out of fitting words with which to ask and just waited, while Nina did the same. For a small eternity, the two of them simply stood staring at one another.

  Father Harper could feel her dismissal on his skin and waited for something like 'when Hell freezes over.' In turn, the historian was bewildered, to say the least. It showed in the deepening scowl forming between her eyes. In truth, she was a little flattered that this stuck-up community of Catholics would even condescend to ask her, the black sheep of the land. Now would be the perfect time to get back at them with equal disdain, with similar deference as they’d shown her when she’d first moved into the historical residence she now occupied. They’d been just a few pitchforks short of a mob and now they needed her help?

  “Are you serious?” was all she could utter without thinking. It left her old schoolmaster much in the way he’d expected – disappointed.

  “Aye, but if you have other things to do we’ll, of course, understand,” he shrugged and started down the steps with a polite wave. “I'll try Henry over on Cruachan!” he hollered through the wailing wind, his voice arrested by its low howl as he walked away.

  Inside, though, Nina Gould was honestly considering it. Her more civilized decorum came to the fore, forcing her to choose the path of humility – a far more humiliating punishment for her detractors. Not long after she found herself going over her weekend plans in her head, actually checking if she had time to accommodate them.

  “Father Harper!” she shouted after him, instantly seizing his attention as if he’d been hoping for her summons. He turned, seemingly unperturbed by the wild gusts that rampaged through the seam-tongues and lapels of his blazer and pants. Father Harper was huge by comparison to the average man, like a Scottish lumberjack with Jesus-eyes. Nina could clearly see the hope shining on his docile face and for a moment she almost felt sorry for him.

  “Hang on!” she called, collecting her car keys and walking towards the place where he stood like a raven beacon in the fog. “Let me drive you back to the church and we can talk.”

  “I'm not going to the church, Nina,” he explained. “I was heading for Kimberly Atkins' home. She’s very ill and couldn’t find anyone to take care of her daughter this morning.”

  “Alright, then. I'll drive you to her house,” Nina offered as she made for her car, “before the bloody wind carries me off to sea!”

  “That would be very Christian of you,” he replied, dreading his involuntary words as he spoke them. “I mean, that would be great. Thanks, Nina.”

  Father Harper knew well that his margin for pushing Dr. Nina Gould away was non-existent. Her lack of faith was not the problem. To him, the problem was what she put her faith in. What little he could gather about the relatively well-known woman who’d grown up right in front of him was that she’d abandoned her Christian upbringing as many others did. But the murky part of the strange river he was paddling down was what exactly she meant when she said she believed, but not in the way he did.

  “Next road left, correct?” she asked.

  “Aye, next one,” he replied gratefully, ducking his head somewhat under the roof of her car. The Tucson was quite a beast of a car, even more so with petite Nina behind the wheel. But it only proved why Father Harper walked or used his motorcycle to get between points. They drove up to the sick congregant's house, a small and modest little place. The garden looked recently neglected, with the grass of the lawn just a little too long and the little green gate swinging away from its lock and slamming back into the posts.

  “Many thanks, Dr. Gould,” Father Harper said as he opened the door to get out. “Will you give it some thought, then?”

  “Aye, I’ll let you know by tomorrow,” she nodded cordially, smiling, to his surprise.

  “Good! Good,” he muttered as he gathered his blazer and held it taut to get through the flailing gate. Nina let the car idle while she waited for him to get to the front door, as courtesy dictated. He looked at something quite acutely, away from the house he was visiting. Even as he progressed, the preacher faced something past the boundary of the residen
ce, as if his attention was utterly engaged by it. As the lace curtain of one of the front windows twitched, Father Harper held up his hand to the occupant, gesturing for them to wait a moment.

  He turned and fiddled about in his pockets, pretending to have misplaced something in Nina's car. A lady opened the front door of the house, while the preacher cried back to her, “Be there in just a moment, Kim!”

  “What the hell?” Nina asked to herself as he opened the door, looking befuddled.

  “What did you lose, Father?” she asked as he leaned in.

  Under his breath he replied sincerely, “I don't want to alarm you, my dear child, but…just take heed.”

  “Of what?” she frowned.

  He sighed laboriously. “I could be wrong and I hope to God I am, but I think you’re being watched. Nina, I think someone might be following you.”

  4

  Miss Earle's Bus Ride

  Joanne hated these mornings. Much as she adored the children she educated, having to leave her classroom made her feel like a hermit crab after a vicious current. She felt exposed and homesick for the comforts of that which she loved. This was precisely why she’d become a teacher. As far as she was concerned, staying in one solitary class room suited her just fine.

  Just adorning her wooden throne in the front of the class, speaking her wisdom and being appeased by young peasants with sacrifices of flash drives and cheap bead bracelets was just dandy. And no, in junior high there were no such gifts as apples on her desk. First off, those were reserved for primary school teachers – a lesser species – and secondly, the only apple she was interested in was one she used to surf the Net with at night.

  “Miss Earle?” a shrill voice called from her door while she arranged her desk neatly in the empty classroom.

  “Tell them I'm sick,” she mumbled without looking at her skinny colleague and friend, Miss Parsons from down the hallway. The gaunt woman with the messy ponytail entered, pursing her lips playfully as she moved towards her reclusive friend.

  “How can you not enjoy road trips? I think it's great to get out of this correctional facility for a while, don't you?” she nudged Joanne. “What's keeping you here?”

  Joanne looked up irritably. “The food is great and the warden promised me a conjugal.”

  Pamela Parsons couldn’t help but chuckle. “You can’t stall forever. All the kids are on the bus already and the clock is ticking closer to ten, babe. Let's go! Come! Get some fresh air.”

  “Fresh air? Arctic acne, you mean?” Joanne moaned with a heavy sigh. “Here. Take my bag and make yourself useful. I can’t count on you to fill in for me, lie for me, or feed me, so you can be my porter.”

  She flung the large sports bag at Miss Parsons, nearly knocking the hyperactive anorexic off her feet in the process. Reluctantly she left the sanctuary of her throne room, glancing back with every other stride to make sure it had been left in order. She imagined how quiet and lifeless it was going to be for the next few days and she longed to be right there, immersed in that quiet peace instead of sitting on a bus full of noisy children on her way to some godforsaken patch in north-eastern Canada.

  “Jo! Pronto!” Pam urged, virtually pulling the door against Joanne to shut her out of the classroom. “Now lock it and let's go. Please don't be one of those people everyone always has to wait for. There is no such thing as fashionably late, you know, just fucking tardy and that’s it.”

  “Okay, alright, I'm coming!” Joanne pouted, shoving Miss Parsons away to lock the orange door in the short hallway that led out onto the south side lawn. The sun was bland above them, hardly warming anything. Here in Newfoundland it had been reduced to an impotent ornament in the sky, a mere bulb of light shining bleakly until the long darkness would eat it up again. As the two teachers hurried over the green mound of the lawn towards the gate, Joanne Earle glanced up at the sky with a wince and sighed, “A whole long weekend wasted in the middle of nowhere. Oh joy.”

  “Oh shut up,” Pam said. “You're going to love the woodlands. The natural beauty is breathtaking up there and at night…”

  “I don't even want to hear about the night,” Joanne pouted. “Good God, couldn't Harold arrange this little trip over the summer, at least? We’re going to freeze up there!”

  “Freeze?” Pam said incredulously as she motioned to the bus driver to start the engine. “Jo, we’re staying at a camp with cabins, fireplaces, and a mess hall. Nobody is going to freeze to death. They even have a communications tower with access to,” she sucked in a heavy breath with over-dramatic pause, “…the outside world! Can you believe that?”

  “Your sarcasm sucks,” Joanne replied wryly. “So we won't be sleeping outside, but hey, at least we’ll be snugly accommodated at Camp Crystal Lake.”

  “Oh, for fuck's sake,” Pam groaned. “Just get on the goddamn bus.”

  When Joanne boarded the already occupied bus she received a jovial applause from the handful of tenth graders, forcing her to smile, something she dreaded for Pam to see and shoot that I-told-you-so-face.

  “Come on, Miss Earle! We have a lot of ground to cover!” shouted the burly Nathan Hughes, one of her more robust students who could have been a prize quarterback had he not been so disinterested in sports altogether.

  “You already cover a lot of ground, fat ass!” one of his classmates exclaimed, bearing the reprimand of Miss Parsons almost immediately.

  “Sit right here,” Pam told Joanne, pointing to the two front seats that had been reserved for the two of them. “I'll take the other seat.”

  “Listen, are we the only two chaperons? What if something happens up there? You know, what if something happens that we need a more…male…person for?” Joanne asked Pam in a loud whisper to manage speaking over the rowdy lot on the bus.

  “Oh, don't worry. We have Mr. Spence coming with us,” Pam replied as the bus pulled away, evoking a roaring cheer from the high school students.

  “The new guy?” Joanne asked. Pam nodded cheerfully with the cacophony of the group drowning out any possible discussion about the new teacher and ex-Olympic swimmer, Jacques Spence.

  The din did not bother the two women much. They knew from experience that, as soon as the excitement had dwindled and the road side scenery became monotonous, all the kids would be on their phones anyway. Soon they would become quiet, wasted young zombies in the thrall of boredom thanks to the over-stimulation of media they’d been raised in.

  Pam found it sad, really, that potentially brilliant minds were going to waste on selfies, duck-faces, and ignorance most of the time. However, there were a few among them who gave her some hope. Those who bothered to evolve, those who bothered to punctuate and indulge in the more thoughtful subjects of the education system; they were strangely somewhat immune to the snares of modern intellectual regression and entertainment enslavement.

  “So where is The Rock?” Joanne asked, taking a hearty chunk of oatmeal cookie into her mouth. Since she’d first laid eyes on the male Physical Education teacher she’d nicknamed him thus because of his dark resemblance to the celebrity. Of course, he was not half as big, but his face was almost a dead ringer.

  “He’s driving behind the bus in his Land Rover. Says if something happens to the bus there will be another vehicle to go and look for help,” Pam explained. Her response seemed to please Joanne, surprisingly, because usually she would have a thousand counter questions.

  Joanne was a history teacher, but after school each Wednesday she accepted the duties of tennis coach. This was why she’d been asked by the principal to accompany Miss Parsons, the gym teacher and Mr. Spence, the swimming coach on the trip. Although it was not a sports camp in name, the principal wanted the young people to experience the fresh air fitness of mountain hiking without feeling like they needed to excel in sports. In fact, it was just a reason to use Education Board funding in a proactive and beneficial manner.

  As the journey progressed, Joanne had to admit to herself that it was not altogether nig
htmarish. As a matter of fact, the kids were behaving most of the time and the scenery that paced by her window was quite beautiful. She would never admit this to Pam and make her right again, but Joanne was enjoying being out of the confinement of the cube she taught history in all day. It felt good to see other places for a change. Her hands clutched her cookie tin as she watched the road gradually abduct them from the comforts of civilization and farther into the unknown.

  Heading in the direction of Churchill Falls, the bus hummed incessantly for hours; before long practically everyone was asleep. It would be another three hours of driving before they would reach their first destination, close to Goose Bay. There they would spend the night before going on to the camp. Joanne couldn’t join the others in a good bus nap for reasons she could not explain. After all, she wasn’t agoraphobic or anything. Yet for some reason the wide expanse of alien terrain kept her vigilant. She’d always been that way – intuitive – but always about the wrong things. Tapping the back of her pen against her lips rhythmically had a hypnotic effect on her and she slowly sank into another world of thought, abandoning the trappings of reality even while wide awake.

  The passing shrubs, hills, and power lines pulsed along with her pen, but she didn’t feel at all sleepy. All she felt was a veil of emotion that came from nowhere in particular, a sense of warning about their destination. Joanne had often learned that these feelings led to nothing prevalent to her own circumstances, but it always manifested in the fate of others – strangers. That was a small consolation. Still, she hated this sense of apprehension she harbored which grew stronger and more urgent with every mile they traveled.

  “Hey, Miss Earle, would you like some apple crumble?” Lisa, one of her students, asked from the seat behind her in a considerate whisper. The girl's offer gently alleviated Joanne's growing concerns for the outcome of the trip by distracting her from her lonely vigil.