by John Booth
Andrew Hawks
by
John Booth
Andrew is studying to go to university. He lives in a village with no locals his age and finds it difficult to make friends with anybody who isn’t an adult. The other students hate him and the younger kids from the village are worse, treating him with open contempt.
He thinks he knows the people in his village really well, but, in fact, he knows absolutely nothing about the objectives they have built around him. As a teenager, it is easy to believe that the world is conspiring against you. Unfortunately for Andrew, in his case, it is.
A 10,000 year old prophecy is about to be played out. Powerful beings, so ancient we no longer remember their names, are set to return. If they succeed the world will change forever. Mankind will be enslaved once again.
Only Andrew can prevent that happening, with a little help from the girl he’s about to meet.
First published in February 2014
Cover Design by JBE
Copyright ©2014 John Booth All rights reserved
John Booth asserts the moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work,
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Other books by John Booth on Amazon Kindle
Wizards Series
Wizards
Jake’s War
Jake’s Justice
Jalon
Jalia on the Road
Gally Delbar
Jalia in the North
Jalia and the Slavers
Jalia at Bay
Jalia Prevails
Tom & Laura Series
The Spellbinder
Scotland Hard
Revenge of the Brotherhood
Magic Series
House of Silver Magic
Sapphire Magic: Breaking Glass
Gold Magic: Terror in Mind
The Magic Series (Anthology)
Standalone Fantasy
Andrew Hawks
London Gothic
Carlotta and the Krius Scepter
Shaddowdon
Horror
The Lost
The Inspector Monde Mysteries
Visit the author’s web page Scrawls in the Dust
Chapters
1. Journal
2. The Woman in the Woods
3. Ancient Serpents
4. Things you don’t want to know
5. Sutton College
6. The Old Man of Fell
7. Signs and Portents
8. Deeds and Demons
9. Dreams and Prophesies
10. Snakes in the Grass
11. Aftershocks
12. Spells and Associations
13. Lies and Despondency
14. Letters and Books
15. Vengeance of the Gods
16. Revelations and Returns
17. The Sisterhood Reunited
18. Death Comes Stalking
19. Kylie Takes Over
20. Knights and Deaths
21. Counting the Cost
1. Journal
My name is Andrew Hawks and I’m seventeen years old. I go to Sutton College, which is a fancy name for a school where kids aged sixteen to eighteen go to take A Levels. I am taking four; mathematics, physics, chemistry, and art. I read a lot, which is considered weird by the other students, and the other day I got into a fight with three boys who thought I shouldn’t be allowed to be me.
They started it, but I go a bit berserk when attacked and it was me that finished it. So they got excluded and I was sent to see a school counselor to sort out my unwarranted aggressive attitude. I should have let them stab me, I suppose?
The counselor’s name is Ms. June Green. She’s twenty-five years old and has a social sciences degree. She suggested I write this journal to channel my aggressive impulses into something constructive. So, if you’re reading this after the school’s Neanderthals have kicked me to death, you’ll know it has served its purpose.
I live on the edge of a small village in a valley in an English National Park. For those of you who don’t know what one of those is, it’s a bit of countryside considered so beautiful that development within it is forbidden, unless you’re rich, powerful, or run a big company. We don’t get decent roads or new housing, as such things would spoil the view and locals can’t buy the existing houses as they are becoming too expensive, and are snapped up by the rich looking for holiday homes. So I might be part of the last generation to be born and brought up in the village.
I live with my parents. Our cottage is halfway up the valley and was built a hundred and thirty years ago. A stream rushes down the hillside close by, bouncing over stones between the trees and on into the center of the village. There are about a hundred homes in the village.
There are no people my age here, the last two left last year, though there are a few younger kids around. But why would I want to spend any time with them?
Five days a week I take the school bus to Sutton and it takes forever climbing up the hills. In winter, the clouds drop onto the hills and the bus slows to a crawl in the fog. It’s lucky I’m learning from books and not from lessons at school, because otherwise I’d fail for sure, as I miss so many of them in the winter months.
I don’t know why I prefer books to video games. My parents bought me the latest box with the top ten games for Christmas, but I rarely switch it on. We only have a slow Internet connection that uses the phone line out here and Dad won’t let me use it for more than an hour at a time in case he misses someone phoning him. Not that anybody phones him, but he worries about it.
We’re in a dead zone for mobile phones. Nobody is going to build a transmitter to cover five or six houses even if they could get planning permission for a mast. So I live in the Stone Age. Even television reception is limited, unless we were willing to install a fifty-foot mast.
Still, it has made me healthy, as I walk miles every day. I need money for books, so I have a job at the village newsagent/ post office/ general store delivering newspapers. That means climbing up hill to each house, coming again, and then climbing up the hill again and so on. I think if there were an Olympic sport for endurance newspaper delivery, I’d win it hands down. My fellow villagers refer to a foot of snow as a light smattering and they don’t expect to get their papers late just because of it. They see it as my fault when the newspaper van can’t make it through the pass. I think they expect me to walk into town those days to bring them their papers.
Now, in this journal I’m going to write down the things that happen to me, but I’ve decided I’m going to censor out all the swearing that litter every sentence the kids say in school. I’m also going to translate the local dialect into English simply because when I tried writing it down as it’s said I couldn’t follow it either. “Tha gooin t’hat see t’int village ‘all t’neet.” I mean, give me a break, if I’m going to keep a journal I don’t want to spend hours trying to write down local talk as it actually sounds.
But if it’s important to the context I’ll put it in, I expect.
So, let me tell you about my parents. My father’s a solicitor who
works in Darcester, which is the nearest town. Cester is the Roman word for castle, but if you can find any Roman remains or any sign of a castle there, you’re a better man than I am. There are plenty of signs of earlier inhabitants all about us though.
I could take you to a standing stone that’s never been recorded by archaeologists’ within a twenty-minute walk if I wanted. The locals know where they all are, but we don’t talk about them. We don’t want archeologists up here, digging holes in ancient sacred sites. God knows, the tourists are bad enough.
Damn. I lost my father in all that ancient stuff, didn’t I? Dad is a bit of an ancient relic himself. Mum is a lot younger and met him when she took a job as his secretary. She was twenty-one and he was nearly fifty back then. By the time they had me, Dad was fifty-two and now he’s nearly seventy, but he acts younger than his age and he still works as a solicitor, though Mum stopped being his secretary years ago. Mum has picked all his secretaries since then, and for some strange reason they are always men.
Mum runs the local Women’s Association. She’s always putting together meetings where some D List celebrity comes around to give a lecture on knitting, or making pizza, or whatever. I’ve often thought they might be a witch’s coven in deep cover. I mean, no one would really go to meetings on such boring subjects, would they?
Since I discovered sex at thirteen, I’ve had many fantasies about the hotter women in the village, stripping naked and performing ancient rites at stone circles. These women are all in their mid-twenties and I’m beginning to wonder if I’ve got a fetish for older women. It’s probably because they’re the only females I get to talk to.
But you never know with sex, do you? Am I abnormal? I mean, who would I ask?
Still, I will keep self-sex out of this journal, as it would get boring and repetitive. Believe me, if the real sort turns up, it will be in here first before I go out and tell the whole bloody world.
So Mum and Dad are wrapped up in their own worlds and don’t bother me much. They have quite a bit of money, though I’ve no idea how much. Dad was born in the village and Mum three miles outside it on Sutter’s Farm. But the point I’m trying to make is my parents don’t travel and as a result, neither do I. I’ve never been beyond Darcester, but one day I intend to go and see the world, you just see if I don’t.
It’s a Friday night. I’m going to go for a walk through the woods and up to Long Barrow. That’s a hundred yard ridge of earth and stone at the top of the ridge. Old Mr. Kelly told me it’s the burial mound of a great king who lived before the Romans walked these lands. He says that if you go up to the mound at sunrise on midsummer’s morning, you’ll see the ghosts of the king and his followers as they carry him into the mound.
I think Mr. Kelly drinks far too much scotch and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d said pink elephants were part of the entourage. But on an evening like today in late spring, you can see for miles from the top of the barrow. When the wind blows gently, you can smell air that’s been through miles of forest, hill and heather, and the scent can almost lift you off your feet.
The only drugs you can get in the village are aspirin. Mrs. Jenks at the chemist thinks paracetamol is too new-fangled to stock. But believe me, the air in this place can be a powerful narcotic if you know exactly where and when to stand. Mr. Kelly would say I was tapping into ancient forces, but Mr. Kelly really is a silly old fool.
2. The Woman in the Woods
It’s just coming up to noon on Saturday as I write this and I’m surprised to say that something exciting has happened. Perhaps it’s a causal thing, start writing a journal and life gets interesting. But that sounds a bit unlikely, doesn’t it?
When I left you yesterday, I was just about to take a walk up to Long Barrow, which is about half an hour’s on foot. It isn’t particularly far, but there are only rabbit tracks among the trees to follow and it’s all up hill.
My dog, Shep, decided he wanted to come along. I’ve owned Shep, a Border Collie-German Shepherd cross, since I was seven and he’s ten years old. Often when it smells of rain in the air or the sky is grey, he decides it’s all too much effort and stays by the fire when I get ready to go out.
Everyone who knows about dogs knows dogs like Shep are amazingly intelligent and rather bossy because of all that sheep dog in them, so it’s not like I can order him around. We have a gentlemen’s arrangement where he pretends to be under my control when other people are near us. In return, I never put the lead on him, because he hates it.
There are places, particularly farmers’ fields when there are sheep, where he holds the handle bit of the lead in his mouth, I hold the bit that’s supposed to fasten to his collar, and we pretend he’s on the lead. When he was young, we used to get a lot of suspicious looks from farmers and they would often ‘snick’ their shotguns closed as we walked past, just to let me know what happens to sheep worrying dogs. But these days they know Shep isn’t interested in bothering their sheep and they never cause us trouble.
We put a coat on Shep in cold weather. Mum made him one that protects him from the rain as he gets rheumatics otherwise. He used to try and bite me when I put it on, but now he moves his legs apart to make it easy. As I said, he’s a smart dog.
He certainly had a lot of energy last night, bounding up the near-vertical trail with me a long way behind. He waits for me at the places I might branch off and I never worry about losing him. He still worries a little about losing me, which is exactly how it should be.
I like to think as I walk. Sometimes I make up stories in which I’m the benevolent and loved ruler of the world who solves all the problems that plague mankind. Sometimes I think about girls, but that can get uncomfortable as bits stick out in awkward places, if you know what I mean. Mostly I admire the natural world around me.
You can still see red squirrels here, despite the best efforts of the greys to compete them into extinction. Toads rustle the undergrowth when they hear you approach and there are always rabbits about if you know where to look. There are lots of birds too, but the ones that dominate the sky are the crows. There are always crows sticking their jet black bodies and nosey beaks into my business when I go for a walk.
That evening, the crows decided to be visible, but silent. I noticed as I went up the hill that three of them were following me. When I say silent, it’s a bit of an overstatement, in the quiet of the hills, it’s easy to hear them as they flap into the air or descend back into the trees. But at least they weren’t cawing at me.
Shep spotted a squirrel and followed it to a tree. He’s a big dog and can easily put his front paws on my shoulders when I’m standing and I’m over six foot. Tall and gangly, my Mother says. Anyway, he had his great mud-thumping paws on a tree trunk, laughing at the angry squirrel he’d chased up it.
The squirrel stood about a foot above his head facing down, and was giving him what for in squirrel language. Then the squirrel noticed how close I had got and vanished up the tree as though a wolf was after him. I felt slightly insulted I wasn’t important enough to have a go at, while my dog was.
We were nearly at the Long Barrow by then. The trees thinned out to grassland in the space of about twenty yards and the smooth sides of the barrow came into view. The barrow isn’t one of the local secrets. It can be seen for miles on a clear day and is something of a landmark.
English Heritage owns the land it stands on and there are signs telling people how to get up here down in the village. But the nearest place you can park a car is behind the Witches Haunt Pub and it’s a long hard walk to get to the top from there.
We get those spindly men in padded grey anoraks with tiny girlfriends up here in the summer. They always seem to be huffing and puffing at their women, complaining about their map reading and spouting nonsense about the local scenery. It’s a little early in the season for them, thank God, though Spring Bank Holiday was a few weeks ago and I couldn’t move around for them that weekend.
We had some biker types up here last year. They th
ought the trails through the woods would be great for their noisy monstrosities and caused quite a bit of damage before they tried to use the Barrow as a jump off point. Nobody ever got a meaningful account out of the survivors, but three of them died when their bikes collided in mid-air. Serves them right, the ancient dead should be allowed to rest in peace.
I climbed the slope to the top of the barrow. For some reason Shep decided he didn’t want to come. That’s unusual for him, as he likes to stand at the highest points in the landscape with his tongue lolling out and a look of possession on his face. I’ve often thought I could hear him saying ‘This is mine’.
I’m a bit fanciful that way. Mum says it’s because I was born a Pisces at noon and all such people are more than a little fey. I thought at first she was a accusing me of being homosexual, but it turns out fey is one of those words for people who can talk to spirits, not that I ever have.
From the top of the Barrow, you can see all the way across the valley. The village looks like a grey blob, nestling down at the bottom among the trees. You can see the stream that rises in the hills and splutters into the trees before heading for our house and the village below. The Barrow is a long way up the side of the pass between the hills, and you can see into the valley beyond if you look the other way.
Though I came up a slope through the trees, the land falls away quite steeply to the left of the Barrow. If you want to get down that way you need to be either a goat or a mountain climber, and need to be wary of lose rocks that give way beneath your feet. Way below and to the left is the road to Bawent, the next village along. Cars on the road look like toys from up here and it can be fun to sit on the Barrow in summer and watch an endless stream of tourists driving through.
I was looking down at the post office van on the road when I heard Shep barking. Shep’s barks are distinctive and you can tell his mood and what he is thinking just by the tone. This was his curious bark. He’d seen something and wanted me to come and have a look. I walked towards the home side of the Barrow.
