THE HISTORY OF THINGS TO COME: A Supernatural Thriller (The Dark Horizon Trilogy Book 1)

by Duncan Simpson

  The good Architect nodded his head, indicating that the time had come to perform the ceremony; the ceremony that would seal the holy relic in the foundations of the great Cathedral until the end times. From beneath my cloak I retrieved a package wrapped in crimson velvet, along with a Bible and the amulet that I had taken from Mr F’s neck. With profound reverence, I set the bundle on the plinth and unwrapped the sacred object. Standing on the elevated platform of the plinth, I read from the books of Daniel, Ezekiel and Revelation, then I anointed Dr Wren with oil, first in the palms of his hands and then across the forehead in the sign of a cross. The particulars of the ceremony I will not share here.

  After private prayer, we swore an oath to each other and then made preparations to seal the door of the chamber. The great door of stone was shut and on the very moment of setting the lock, a supernatural wind spread out from it, like the undulations of the water in a pond when a weighty stone is cast upon its surface. Dr Wren and I were thrown to the ground with such violence as to beat the breath out of our bodies, so as I could not speak nor fetch my breath for many minutes. During this instant, my senses seemed quite altered, unbounded by time, with all places lying together in one point of the compass. But it pleased God to deliver us out of this affliction, for which we rendered to Him much praise. As we passed once more down the dark passageway, our lungs became choked with smoke from our torches and we were mightily relieved to see the moon again over our heads. I heartily thanked the good Architect and we both gave praise to God for His mercy in preserving us. I came from the place with infinite satisfaction, knowing we had done God’s work.

  I heard nothing more from Dr Wren until several weeks later when a letter arrived to my quarters in Cambridge. In it he relayed the following account. Work laying the foundations of the Cathedral had progressed at speed and on the 21st of June, 1675, almost nine years after the dreadful conflagration, Dr Wren and his Master Mason undertook to mark out on the ground where the central point of the dome should be. He ordered a common labourer to search out a large stone from the piles of rubbish that lay all around and return it back to him without delay. The worker arrived back carrying a portion of a gravestone, which simply bore a single word carved in large letters, RESURGAM: ‘I will rise again’. I was heartily gladdened on hearing such a good omen.

  In the city of London, new buildings are always rising, highways repaired, churches and public buildings erected, fires and other calamites happening, but the Temple must not be disturbed until we are living through the end times and the rod is brought back to the Holy Land. When it will be so, only heaven pleases, for Christ comes as a thief in the night and it is not for us to know the times and seasons which God hath put into his own breast.

  In the narrow compass of this writing, I have set down the history of my actions. I have concealed Gérard de Ridefort’s map showing the location of the holy rod in the hope that a righteous man will use it well. Only God can search hearts of men and discover the truth, and to Him it must be left. I pray to God, that He gives you the grace to make the right use of it. It is a treasure greater than all the conquests of Alexander and the Caesars; for these are mere trifles compared to the power of the rod.

  Sabatini eagerly turned over the page in trembling expectation. On the reverse side of the next page, Newton’s final words formed the shape of a perfect equilateral triangle.

  I have taken from this book the map revealing the rod’s location in the great Cathedral of St Paul’s and hidden it until the chosen time. For the parts of Prophecy are like the separated parts of a watch. They appear confused and must be compared and put together before they can be useful. Descend the eighty-eight steps and unlock the stone door, as all will be revealed in a time, times and half a time.

  Jeova Sanctus Unus

  Sabatini quickly turned the last few pages of Gérard de Ridefort’s journal. Newton’s cryptic instructions meticulously laid out in the shape of a triangle were, indeed, his final annotation to the crimson book.

  The academic slumped back in the driver’s car seat, her brain working furiously like a revving engine slipped out of gear. Abruptly she retrieved the book from her lap and then very deliberately let the pages fall open in her outstretched hands. From the way the pages fell away from the back cover, it was obvious that something had been removed from the back of the book. Sabatini closely examined the spine. A jagged edge of parchment protruding from the book’s binding was all that remained of the last page. It had been carefully removed from the book and with it the map describing the possible location of the most important religious relic in all of history. For a long while, she stared into space feeling like the wind had been sucked out of her lungs.

  At 3.17 p.m., the vehicle returns coordinator left a message on Dr Sabatini’s mobile phone to ascertain her whereabouts and those of the bright red Volkswagen Passat. A vehicle matching that description remained parked outside the Wren Library as it had been for the previous three days. A woman sat in the driver’s seat. Her world had just been turned upside down.

  Chapter 37

  Blake finished clearing his makeshift desk on the third floor of the central Cambridge police station. After looking over his shoulder to make sure he hadn’t left something behind, he retraced his steps back down the corridor to the lift. His thoughts had turned to the train journey home and the off-licence next to Farringdon Tube Station that stocked his favourite whisky. He pressed the button next to the lift doors and waited. The winding mechanism made a strange whirring noise that seemed to intensify and wane with no predictable pattern. The doors opened to reveal a policewoman thumbing through the pages of an incident report. Without looking up, she moved to one side to make room, but Blake didn’t move. He was lost in thought.

  The doors of the lift clunked shut and it continued downwards, with the policewoman oblivious to the fact that the man in the corridor hadn’t stepped in. Blake stared blankly at the dividing line between the closed lift doors, his eyes focusing on the chipped enamel paint running down the junction.

  Even with Blake’s phone set to silent, he was all too aware of the arrival of the incoming call by the insistent vibration against his leg. He accepted the call and pressed the handset against his ear. On the other end of the line, Milton’s voice sounded serious.

  ‘Vincent, it’s Lukas. I’m with the pathologist. I’ve sent a patrol car over to collect you. You still at the police station? Good, good. It’ll be with you in fifteen minutes. You need to be here—’

  Milton’s voice was cut off mid-sentence, as for no obvious reason, Blake’s phone started to reboot itself.

  Shit!

  Blake resisted the temptation to press any buttons whilst the device performed its start-up operation. His intervention with electronic gadgets always seemed to make things worse. As he stared at the spinning wheel icon on the screen, he tried to imagine what Lukas could possibly have found that necessitated sending a car. He would know quickly enough. As soon as his phone finished booting up, it started ringing again. It was Lukas.

  ‘I’m sorry about that, Lukas. My phone just died.’

  ‘You taking the piss? Mine’s just gone as well.’ There was a brief silence; then the conversation picked up from where it had left off.

  ‘You’re sending a car to the station?’ said Blake, ‘Why, what have you found?’

  ‘It’s hard to explain,’ There was a long pause. Blake could hear Milton breathing down the receiver. ‘It looks … satanic.’

  Chapter 38

  ‘No dogs!’ The voice of the security guard patrolling the entrance to the British Library was distinctly unfriendly. The patrolman had joined Portcullis Protection Services following his discharge from the army. He had returned home from his third tour of Afghanistan in a Hercules air transport plane, lying on his back and nursing a fractured pelvis. His injury from an insurgent sniper round had been complicated by the fact that the bullet had come
to rest less than a centimetre away from his spine. After several months of convalescence at the army’s rehabilitation centre at Headley Court, it had become clear that his days of active service were well and truly over. On hearing of his condition, an ex-sergeant major, who had served with him in the bandit country of Kandahar, managed to pull a few strings and landed him the security job. He started with Portcullis the day after his official discharge from the army. The job posed its own challenges, but it certainly beat dodging bullets from the Taliban.

  The only trouble came from the undesirables who would wander the streets searching for a warm place to sleep off a belly full of strong cider, or the after-effects of a crack pipe. He would arrive at the library just before the doors opened to the public at 9.30 a.m. and leave just as the last readers left the building at about 6.00 p.m. The security guard had quickly got to know the names of the regular academics and researchers who would make their daily pilgrimage through the entrance doors of the massive red-brick building.

  He stared at the dishevelled female tramp and black stray dog standing in front of him and knew he would never have the desire to know their names. Vagrants only meant one thing: trouble. He caught a strong whiff of something unpleasant and wondered whether it was coming from the woman, the dog or both.

  ‘No dogs allowed in the library. Unless you lose the dog, you won’t be able to come in,’ said the security guard sternly.

  The woman scratched at her matted hair. The guard began to wonder if she might be stoned.

  ‘Unless you are here to use the reading facilities, I will have to move you on. Do you understand?’

  Mary tried to force a smile to placate the officious security guard in her path. She had never quite got used to people’s reaction to her. The usual combination of fear and loathing towards the homeless was never far from the surface.

  ‘You stay here, boy, Try not bite anyone while I’m gone,’ said the woman. She gave the dog a vigorous rub under its chin and shuffled past the security man and through the airport-style metal detector.

  ‘I’ll be watching you, madam. Mark my words; any trouble and your feet won’t touch the ground.’

  The entrance foyer to the library was a wide space opening out into a series of multi-layered terraces. Each terrace served a different function: some housed the astonishing collections of printed material available at the library; some were set aside as dedicated reading rooms; others were filled with computer terminals for online searches; whilst another was used as a business centre. Mary quickly located a sign of the building layout. It showed that the subject area she was interested in was located on one of the upper terraces.

  Whilst the escalator took her slowly up to the required level, she could feel the many pairs of eyes following her progress. As she approached the top, she pulled up the hem of her long threadbare skirt and gave a little hop off the moving walkway. The sign that greeted her confirmed she had arrived at the right floor: ‘Philosophy & Religion’. Four small arrows beneath the sign guided the visitor to a particular subject area: ‘Bibles, Philosophy, Theology, Jewish Studies’. Mary pondered the options for a while, and then followed the modern whitewashed corridor bending off to the right. The notice attached to the double doors at the end of the walkway pronounced that Mary had reached the reading room dedicated to Jewish Studies. Apart from the elderly woman working the desk next to the door, the room was completely empty. To avoid attracting the woman’s attention, Mary disappeared amongst the line of shelves that occupied one end of the room.

  She eventually found the section entitled ‘Non-canonical scriptures’, next to the narrow rectangular window at the end of the first line of shelves. Using her finger as a guide, she scanned the titles of the tightly packed volumes. Much to her delight, she hit upon a small scholarly commentary on the Book of Enoch within a matter of seconds. The volume had a stout leather jacket and was no more than 150 pages long. Bonded onto the inside cover was the distinctive raised profile of the computer alarm tag that would set off the metal detectors positioned at all exits of the library. She flicked through the first few blank pages before settling herself on the floor to read the introduction.

  The Book of Enoch

  Traditionally attributed to Enoch (the great-grandfather of Noah), the Book of Enoch is an important Jewish religious narrative, and it is thought to have been written somewhere between 300 and 100 BCE. Though not part of official Jewish or Christian scriptural cannons, the text has undoubtedly had an important effect on the development of both. Fragments of the Book of Enoch form part of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the book is referred to in several places in the Christian Bible.

  The first Book of Enoch, commonly known as the ‘The Book of the Watchers’, contains the unsettling account of a group of rebellious angels lusting after human women down on earth. After an unholy pact is struck between them, 200 angels descend onto Mount Hermon in order to take human wives. Rejecting heaven for the carnal delights of human women, the fallen ‘Watchers’ had crossed over a forbidden boundary. The defiled women bore monstrous children: great giants (the ‘Nephilim’) and demons of many kinds, which perpetrated despicable sins against God. Mastema, the leader of the demons, transmitted great evil across the earth (see note) …

  Mary snapped the book shut, as if trying to stop the words from escaping into the outside world. She held the book tightly to her chest. At first, Mary tried to resist the urge, but finally she relented. Still sitting cross-legged on the floor and under the cover of two long rows of shelving, she rolled up the sleeve of her coat and looked at the tattoo etched deep into her forearm. Though the lettering was crude and obviously the result of an amateurish procedure, the word was clear enough: ‘Mastema’.

  It all made sense: the lines linking the churches, the prophecies, and her part in the great unfolding. It all made dreadful sense. She had been chosen.

  Out of the blue, she heard the sound of footsteps approaching. Through a small gap between an irregular stack of books, she peered in the direction of the sound. She recognised the owner of the boots immediately. It was the same security guard who had given her a hard time at the library entrance. She guessed that he was now making his rounds and probably trying to locate her in the process. From her vantage point between the books, Mary watched the security guard stop at the librarian’s desk. Without diverting her gaze from the large computer screen, the librarian nodded and then pointed in the direction of the book racks. Seeing the approaching danger, Mary worked quickly. Using her thumbnail, she managed to unpick a corner of the inside cover of the book. With several tugs of the now separated corner, she carefully peeled off the paper lining along with the bonded security tag. Sensing that the footsteps were now nearly upon her, she placed the small book inside her coat pocket.

  As the security guard turned the corner, he was stopped in his tracks by the sight of the vagrant woman splayed out on the floor.

  ‘Ah, there you are.’ His voice managed to combine a sense of relief and disdain. ‘About to lie down and have a kip, were you? I don’t think so. I told you, any nonsense and you’d be out. Come on, up you get.’

  Against his better judgement, the security guard leant forward and offered the homeless woman his arm for support. She took it and used it as an anchor to haul herself to her feet. As the guard steadied himself against the metal shelving, he became aware of the pungent odour wafting from the filthy overcoat wrapped around her body. What he was completely oblivious to, however, was the screwed up ball of paper that had just been dropped into his jacket pocket. Not wanting to aggravate the tramp, he held his breath and corralled her first through the double doors of the reading room and then down into the lobby of the library. Mary noticed that her progress towards the main entrance doors was now being tracked by a number of additional security guards keeping a safe distance behind her.

  ‘I’m going. I’m going. You don’t need to see me out. Thank you for your hosp
itality,’ she said sarcastically.

  As Mary was about to cross the threshold into the cold air outside, she stopped and turned around. In unison the assembled security team readied themselves for trouble. Instead, the tramp raised her gaze up to the ceiling and genuflected.

  ‘Bless you all!’

  With that, she was gone.

  The security guard was late home that evening. He had been delayed for over an hour, explaining to his manager how a British Library anti-theft tag had been found in his jacket pocket. The offending tag kept setting off the library’s alarm system until a colleague made the correlation between his proximity to the entrance metal detectors and the alarms. As his manager opened the tight ball of paper, he realised that it was, in fact, the cover lining to one of the library’s books. A single footnote was printed just above the raised edge of the security device: ‘Note: Mastema, derived from the Hebrew word mastemah, meaning hatred’.

  Chapter 39

  Blake had expected to be greeted with the smell of death, but instead his nostrils were filled with a pungent cocktail of chemical disinfectant and formaldehyde. He tried not to touch anything, imagining plagues of bacteria, viruses and fungi mutating invisibly on every surface.

  ‘Vincent, this is Dr Sullivan, the forensic pathologist.’ Milton nodded in the direction of a squat man in his mid-fifties whose cheeks boasted a ruddy complexion that looked conspicuously out of place in a morgue. He and Milton stood on either side of a shiny steel autopsy table. By the shape of the large sheet that hung around its edges, Blake guessed that the table was already occupied.

  ‘I asked Dr Sullivan to delay certain aspects of Vittori’s post-mortem until you’d seen the body intact.’