by C. R. Berry
“We found those papers during renovations of the crypt, hidden in a secret compartment in the wall. A compartment that we suspect nobody has opened since the 12th century.”
“What are they?”
“The chronicles of a Benedictine choir monk called Father Jerome. He was writing during the reign of Henry I, William II’s successor, from Canterton Priory in the New Forest, a monastery that fell victim, sadly, to Henry VIII. I’ve been studying them. They provide a fascinating insight into what life was like for monks in that period. But when you get to February 1105, that’s when things become rather more disturbing, surreal even. In fact, Father Jerome stopped writing immediately after, which is when he must’ve hidden the manuscript. I’ve bookmarked the relevant section. You said you can read Latin?”
“I can, yes.”
“Then by all means. I’m keen to hear your thoughts.”
Ferro removed the string and went to the section that was bookmarked.
This evening, after Vespers, I was called to the village to administer the Last Rites to Purkis the charcoal-burner. It was an extraordinary and deeply troubling conversation.
Purkis believed that our Lord was punishing him. That was why He saw fit to take away his wife, Cecilia, and his daughter, Eva. That was why Purkis himself now lay on his deathbed.
I asked what Purkis could have done to warrant such punishment and he confessed to being responsible for the death of King William II, brother to the present king. I asked him how. He told me that one afternoon, five years ago, he wished the king dead. That same afternoon, the king was killed.
I asked Purkis if he shot the fatal arrow himself. He said no, but that he had seen it happen. He had been collecting wood nearby and witnessed a confrontation between His Grace and a man who used a false name, ‘Walter Tyrrell’. Strangely, both spoke the common tongue and Purkis was able to understand their conversation.
According to Purkis, this man, Tyrrell, questioned His Grace about a book. The king pretended, at first, to know nothing of this book, but later admitted otherwise and said he had hidden it. Tyrrell demanded to know of the book’s location. His Grace refused and Tyrrell released his arrow, piercing the king through the breast and killing him.
Afterwards, Purkis described Tyrrell removing a flat, black, rectangular object from his tunic, placing it to his ear and talking to it, or himself, about having killed the king. What he did next was even stranger. He removed a small pot from his tunic, opened it and took out a tiny red stone, which he proceeded to swallow. A white, silent light burst from where he stood, blinding Purkis momentarily. When his eyes could see again they searched for the man who had killed the king. But he was, by some heinous spell, gone. Purkis said he would have heard footsteps if Tyrrell had walked or run away, but he did not. It is Purkis’s belief that Tyrrell used a dark and forbidden magic to make himself disappear.
Purkis is dead. I must now decide what to do with the knowledge he has bequeathed to me. My hope is that the Lord will guide me to a right and just decision.
Ferro felt a rush of adrenaline. This was huge. He knew it in his bones.
He placed the papers on the table. His throat was dry. He drained his cup of tea, the peppermint crisp and cold at the back of his throat.
“So, what do you make of it?” said Reverend Thomas. “It almost sounds like Tyrrell was talking on a phone! Which is impossible, I know.”
“Yes.” Ferro picked up the papers. “Can I borrow these?”
“What for?”
“I want to get some tests run on them to prove their age.”
“Won’t the British Library do that?”
“Yes, but I can do it faster. I have a friend who can do it.”
“Mr Ferro, these are important historical records. I’m sure you can appreciate that, being a history tutor. I’m uncomfortable handing them over to someone I just met.”
“You have my word that I’ll return them.”
“Yes, but with respect, I don’t know what your word is worth.”
Ferro sighed. “Alright. What if I made a donation to your church?”
“I’m listening.”
“Five hundred pounds, and I’ll return the manuscript to you in three weeks – maximum.”
“Make it a thousand, and you have yourself a deal.”
Ferro chewed on this, leaning back in his chair, sighing heavily. He had to walk out of there with those papers, and Reverend Thomas could tell how much he needed them. But all he kept thinking was, Beth will eat me for breakfast.
He stuck out his chin, scratched his beard and extended his hand for a handshake. “Deal.”
Ferro decided, driving home, that he wasn’t going to tell Beth. He’d transferred the money from some savings he had – she’d never know. And now, tucked up safely in his messenger bag on the passenger seat, was a manuscript that could change everything.
Stopping for a late dinner at a service station, he got home at gone eleven. Beth and his two teenagers, Maggie and Ryan, were all asleep, or at least he thought they were. Walking past his daughter’s room, floor creaking as he went, he heard Maggie say quietly, “Night, Dad.”
He whispered loudly, “Night, sweetheart,” and creaked into his bedroom.
Beth stirred as he undressed and climbed into bed. He kissed her cheek with a soft, “Goodnight, my love,” and lay down next to her. Not that he was expecting to get much sleep with the implications of Purkis’s deathbed confession turning over and over in his head.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” Beth replied sleepily.
“I think I found the first piece,” Ferro murmured.
“The first piece of what?”
“Something big.”
3
September 12th 2019
It had been a long day at Actuate Solutions, a call centre in Deepwater, Hampshire. Jennifer Larson’s bum was numb, her back ached, the ridges of her ears stung from the clumsily designed headset pressing into them, and her stomach burbled with a good six or seven mugs of coffee.
She’d spent the last hour watching the clock, which snailed painfully towards the end of her shift. Still another hour to go. Another hour of sleepwalking through scripted courtesy calls about how much the customers of car dealerships were enjoying their newly purchased vehicles.
A couple of months ago she was partying, having sex, bingeing on old Doctor Who, reading, getting high and basically making the most of her last few weeks at university. Now… this?
She looked out of the window. A grey day had become an even bleaker night, rain spitting at the glass, strong winds coursing through trees, rattling gutters and bins, and whipping up swirls of dead leaves and litter. What a perfect reflection of her mood.
“Good evening. Could I speak to…?”
Nope, she couldn’t. “Welcome to the Vodafone Voicemail Messaging Service.”
What on earth was she doing here? She had a history degree that was completely and utterly going to waste. Monkeys could do this. But then, she’d never really formed a career plan. She still hadn’t. The here and now was her speciality. The future – not so much. She’d gone to uni for the experience, studied her favourite subject from school, and the plan was – make a plan while she was there. But each time she tried, shots of tequila interfered.
And then suddenly it was all over. Over – and no plan. Her friend Martin recommended the job at Actuate Solutions and she took it because it was easy and she was bereft of other ideas.
The calls went quiet, so Jennifer did a bit of job hunting, looking for roles related in some way to her history degree. There had to be something out there better than this.
She could only do job hunting for so long, though. It was boring. After ten minutes of not getting anywhere, like always, she found herself checking her emails instead. A keen reader, she followed a lot of blogs, particularly ones related to history and her other love, sci-fi, so there was always a stack of new posts in her inbox each day.
Yay. There
was a new post from her current favourite blogger, Gregory Ferro, a former history teacher – or so he said. He didn’t post that often but it was always a treat when he did. She’d found the blog a couple of months ago, saw that he’d posted an article called William II was murdered by a time traveller. It was a thrilling read. William Rufus’s murky death in the New Forest was the highlight of her Norman England module at uni. Scores of historians were unconvinced by the official verdict – that Sir Walter Tyrrell’s arrow was intended for a deer – and Jennifer remembered learning about all the people who had motives for murdering the unpopular king. His younger brother, Henry, the French king, the Church. But she’d never heard anyone suggest that he’d been killed by a time traveller. As a Doctor Who nut she was hooked in immediately.
Apparently this time traveller was pretending to be Walter Tyrrell and was looking for an unnamed ‘book’ that the king had hidden. He then shot the king, talked to someone on what Ferro had interpreted as a mobile phone, and swallowed something that caused him to vanish into thin air. These events, purportedly witnessed by Purkis the charcoal burner who conveyed William’s body to Winchester, were detailed in the chronicles of a choir monk and secretly buried in the walls of the crypt at St Margaret’s Church in Highcliffe, Dorset, for over nine hundred years. And according to Ferro, the papers were written in authentic medieval Latin and had been carbon-dated, proving that they really did originate from the 12th century.
It was fascinating stuff, if totally bonkers. Ferro had included some rather fuzzy, low-res photos of the alleged chronicles with the article. The bits of Latin Jennifer had been able to make out looked authentic, but in all honesty it was probably just hokum cooked up by Ferro himself for shits and giggles. That was normally how these things went.
She followed the blog anyway, for entertainment value. Subsequent articles chronicled Ferro’s search for more evidence of these time travellers, as well as lots of theorising about who they were and what this mysterious book they were chasing could be.
Now there was a new one, much shorter than the previous few, published this morning and titled: Time traveller who killed William II present during the Black Death?
This was loads more fun than roboting through courtesy calls and hunting for jobs…
I’ve been meaning to write about the big discovery I made two weeks ago, but life, as it so often does, overtook me. Now that I have a spare few minutes I can reveal all. After months of having my head buried in books about William II, I came upon on a little-known 14th-century history of England written by historian and priest Simon of Stonebury, which spans the reigns of William the Conqueror through to Edward III.
Studying it, I found a description of a rumour that circulated at the time of the Black Death about a malevolent doctor who, in the autumn of 1348, interrogated plague sufferers in London about a book. Not just a book, in fact, but a ‘book with a strange title’. Stonebury writes that the doctor threatened to exacerbate people’s conditions if they failed to satisfactorily answer his questions and that, interestingly, all those he questioned shared the same surname – ‘Godfrey’. Most significantly of all, Stonebury writes that the doctor was seen sneaking into an alleyway, talking to a strange device at his ear, and disappearing into thin air shortly after. Just like the man who killed William II.
My apologies for the brevity of this blog but I have a lot of reading and cross-referencing to do. This is the first piece of new evidence I have found that William II was killed by a time traveller and my first important lead in ages. A book with a strange title? What could it be?
I will write again soon with more details.
Jennifer thought of something to challenge Ferro’s notions of time travellers talking to each other on phones in the 12th and 14th centuries, and decided to leave a comment at the bottom of the article. It looked like hers was going to be the blog’s first. None of Ferro’s previous articles had attracted any comments, likes or shares, and the Follow this blog via email widget said that Jennifer was one of just seven followers.
She wrote: Hey there Ferro! Great blog! There’s just one little problem with the idea of time travellers talking to each other on phones in the Middle Ages… I’m pretty sure there were no signal towers back then!
A sharp beeeep smacked her in the ears. After a good twenty minutes of no calls, the system had found a customer, and a new script flashed up in front of Ferro’s blog.
Jennifer switched on her telephone facade, “Good evening. Please could I speak to Mrs Winters?”
“Who is calling, please?” replied a rather posh female voice.
She continued through her script, “My name is Jennifer. I’m calling on behalf of Macey’s Motors. The reason for my call is to see –”
“Do you realise what time it is, young lady?” the woman interrupted.
Not patronising at all.
Jennifer broke script to answer matter-of-factly, “Yes, it’s 7.45pm.”
“And do you think it’s appropriate to cold call someone at this time of day?”
“This isn’t a cold call, ma’am. This is –”
“Don’t answer back, girl.”
Jennifer clenched both hands around her coffee mug and pushed through gritted teeth, “I’m just explaining –”
“What you should be doing is apologising for bringing me to the phone unnecessarily, and taking my number off your records immediately.”
“Yes, Mrs Winters, I’ll do that.”
“Good. And I have some advice for you, young lady. Why don’t you get yourself a proper job instead of annoying people with unsolicited phone calls.”
“Thank you for the advice. Mind how you go when you next sit down.”
“What? Why?”
“Because of the enormous stick up your arse.”
Mrs Winters’ voice rose like a gathering storm, “I beg your pardon – what did you just say to me?”
“Sorry, I didn’t realise you couldn’t hear me.” She scornfully upped her volume. “There seems to be an enormous stick up your arse, Mrs Winters! Best get it checked asap! Bye!”
Jennifer hung up.
Woah. Her hands were shaking.
She’d heard the gasps of her colleagues the moment she had made the stick comment, caught their shocked expressions in her periphery. Now she felt everyone’s eyes on her, and, oh dear, her manager, Melissa Jones, was standing at the end of the communal desk where Jennifer sat. Staring, wide-eyed, lips parted.
A second later, Melissa calmly approached.
“Jennifer, can I speak to you in my office for a moment, please?”
Shit, she’d done it now.
As Jennifer stood up and followed Melissa to her office, she already knew the outcome.
“Jennifer, I cannot have my staff talking to customers like that,” Melissa said immediately as they sat down.
“Do you want me to explain what happened?”
“It doesn’t matter what happened. In this business, the customer is always right. If they are rude to us, we just have to take it on the chin.”
“I don’t see why we should have to put up with being spoken to the way that woman spoke to me.”
“This is a call centre. That goes with the territory. You’ve clearly demonstrated that it’s not territory you can cope with.”
She didn’t want to sound too pathetic, but she needed the money. “Give me one more chance.”
“This is the second time this has happened in two months. I’m sorry, Jen. You’re fired.”
Jennifer sighed. She was in her probationary period – no point fighting the decision. “That’s fine. I understand. But to be honest I don’t regret what I said. That woman needed bringing down a few pegs.”
“You won’t get very far with that attitude.”
“Maybe not here. But I don’t plan to make my career working in a call centre.” Shit! As Melissa cocked her pencilled eyebrows, Jennifer realised what she’d said. “Sorry, no offence.” Melissa had been a call centre
manager for a good ten years.
Melissa stood up. “You don’t have to stay until the end of your shift. We’ll pay you for today.”
“What about my notice period?”
Melissa looked at her coldly. “Gross misconduct gives me the right to summarily dismiss you.”
“And you think that was gross misconduct?”
“You told a customer she had a stick up her arse. Yes.”
Jennifer felt like arguing further, but it was probably futile. She murmured, “Fine,” and left Melissa’s office. She gathered her things, trying to hold a dignified smile as she said goodbye to her colleagues. Her friend Martin congratulated her for having the guts to stand up to a customer.
She texted her best friend, Adam Bryant, as she left the call centre. Balls, balls, balls. Just got fired.
Why didn’t she bite her tongue? Now she was without a job, and Actuate had paid rather well. Yes, call centre work was tedious, but it was money. She didn’t want to live with her mother forever.
Getting pounded by fierce winds and rain as she walked home didn’t help matters. She did own a car, but since Actuate was a ten-minute walk from her house, she thought it best not to waste her petrol. She really wished she’d driven today, particularly as her coat wasn’t waterproof and cold wetness was seeping through to her skin.
“Fucking weather.”
A car hurtled past at sixty miles per hour through a wide, deep puddle in the road, kicking a mini tidal wave all over her. She stopped, screamed “Fuuuck!” for about five seconds and walked on.
She turned into The Birches, the cul-de-sac where she lived, named after the silver birch trees that towered over the houses. She passed beneath a short-circuiting streetlight that had turned the surrounds into a feeble, moist disco with no beats. Reaching her house, number thirty-five, she saw that her sister Jamie’s car, normally parked next to hers, was gone. She and her boyfriend Tom had recently turned into conjoined twins, so the odds were pretty solid that she was at his place.
