Diamond Sky Trilogy Box Set: Books 1-3

by David Clarkson

  She looked into his black eyes, searching for any hint of compassion, any trace of humanity. There was none. His pupils were widened with lust. He was beyond reason. Nothing could penetrate his thoughts until he had satisfied his depraved hunger. Nothing that is, except for a cricket bat striking the back of his calves, sweeping his legs out from under him.

  Emmy had been too scared to fully take in the sequence of events that had followed the first time she experienced them, but in this echo she was able to process everything much more clearly. As the man holding her down let go his grip to engage the vigilante, his efforts were met only with a blow to his side, knocking the knife from his hand and cracking three ribs in the process. A sharp prod to the chest was all it took to put him on the ground.

  Emmy’s saviour then spun back around to deliver a second hit on the first guy. This time the scumbag was ready for it and caught the bat with both hands mid swing. He did not let this hinder him. He twisted his grip on the handle and used it to leverage himself into the creep’s instep, where he led with a strong elbow to the stomach quickly followed by a backhanded catapult punch to the man’s face.

  The cricket bat fell to the ground and he kicked it away before grabbing Emmy’s attacker by the hair, forcing his head back in order to look him in the eye and gauge what, if any, fight was left in him. He figured that just one more punch would be enough to knock the guy out cold, and it was.

  Emmy scrambled to her feet.

  ‘Lucas, what are you doing?’ she asked, her fear still potent enough to override her will and push her towards following her lines from years earlier.

  ‘I’m just responding to a disturbance,’ he told her. ‘These two drunks were staggering home when they began to argue. It soon turned nasty and if I hadn’t been here to intervene they might’ve killed each other. I’ll be filing a report in the morning.’

  ‘And you expect these creeps to go along with that?’

  ‘What else are they going to do – call the police?’

  She caught the glint of the blade in the corner of her eye. She crouched down and picked it up before walking over to one of the unconscious men. He was completely out of it. Helpless. She could run the knife along his neck and he would be dead before his brain even registered what was happening.

  How different her life would have turned out if she had given in to her anger that night. Beating up a couple of potential sex offenders was one thing, but there was no way that Lucas would cover up a murder for her. She wondered if she would even have gone through with it had he not stopped her. Not that it really mattered. The attackers left town shortly after the events of that night. They no longer had any influence or hold over her after that.

  ‘Do it,’ urged Lucas. ‘The blade won’t actually kill him, but you might feel better regardless.’

  His deviation from the script caught her completely by surprise.

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘It doesn’t really matter. I always wondered when you would come. What made you choose this, by the way? Not the finest night of your life.’

  This time when she looked at him she could see a change in his demeanour. He seemed less rigid. Her uptight friend carried himself as if he no longer had a care in the world.

  ‘I didn’t choose it,’ she told him. ‘I came to find Sammy. He contacted me and told me about the townspeople. When I got here, I couldn’t find him. My father said I should look for you.’

  ‘You’ve spoken to Davo?’

  ‘Briefly. Charlie was with us too. He’s gone back to prepare for the evacuation.’

  ‘Evacuation?’

  ‘Yes. I’m getting everybody out of here. We have all of their bodies back at the institute. The journey home will cure them of the radiation. They’ll be able to return to their lives.’

  ‘Just like that?’

  She noted that he exhibited shock rather than relief. He had clearly been expecting her, but the encounter had shaken him.

  ‘How long have you been here, Lucas?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘It might do. My father said that he regularly erases his memory. Just keeps living the same day over and over as if it were for the first time.’

  ‘So what’s your point?’

  ‘As a species, we’ve evolved to live for 80 to 100 years give or take. It’s possible to push it a little further, but any major leap and we’re not built to cope either intellectually or emotionally. The only thing worse than having too little time, would be having too much of it.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me, Em. Let’s just concentrate on getting everyone out of here. Come on, we can catch up back at the station.’

  He offered her his hand and the moment she took it she found herself sitting opposite him in his office. She looked around for any clues, but there were none to be found. There was neither a calendar nor even a clock. He could have taken her to any point in their shared memories.

  Or maybe not.

  ‘Is this live?’ she asked.

  ‘What do you mean by live?’ he replied.

  ‘Are we outside of past memories? I’m assuming the town functions as normal. Well, as normal as can be given the circumstances. With so many conscious people to interact with, you can’t all spend your time reliving the past. I mean, that would be crazy – right?’

  Lucas smiled, but his eyes told a different story. They were tinged with sadness.

  ‘I’ve gone to great lengths to avoid crazy,’ he told her. ‘Unfortunately, you weren’t too far wrong when you said that people would not be able to cope with the prospect of living forever. The more people there are, the greater the problem it creates. Do you have any idea how difficult it is trying to keep the peace in a town where actions no longer have consequences?’

  Emmy thought back to what her father had earlier told her about Lucas.

  ‘Dad said you’ll have a scenario in place to get the people out. What did he mean by that?’

  ‘It’ll be easier if I show you. Let’s you and me take a little walk into town. Maybe we’ll meet a friend of yours on the way.’

  ‘I don’t think so. The local community never really warmed to me. You were my only friend, remember?’

  ‘Oh, I think you had maybe one other. Come on, we don’t want to be late.’

  ‘Late for what?’

  ‘For the party. The whole town will be celebrating.’

  ‘Celebrating what?’

  ‘Didn’t you know?’ Lucas asked, mischief curling his lips. ‘You’ve just won the Nobel Prize.’

  ***

  Charlie called in all of the lab techs and then set them to work immediately. He had them install astral monitors in the hospital and then began prepping the patients for the reintegration of their consciousness. Compared to what he and his team had previously been working on, the operation was relatively elementary. There were still potential dangers awaiting them, however.

  The most immediate risk was that a random newly deceased spirit could be drawn to either Charlie or the townsperson in his charge. If this happened and an interaction occurred, the patient would instantly be propelled back through the wormhole. Whilst not fatal, it could leave the patient disorientated and difficult to bring under control for a second attempt.

  Then there was the greatest danger to the patients. If they were successful, the patient would instantly wake up back inside their terrestrial body. In doing so they would be subjecting themselves to an enormous amount of stress and the risk of cardiac arrest would be significant. By piggybacking on Charlie’s consciousness, the radiation would have been expunged from their energy by the same process that provides the astral travellers with immunity from its effects. Therefore, should they die a second time they would be subjected to the same fate as everybody else. Their memories would be preserved on that distant star, but their consciousness would come to an end. They would be dead in the truest sense of the word.

  Once everything was in place, Charlie returned to his projection p
od. It was time to meet back up with Emmy and to put their plan into action. After nearly four years, the terrible legacy of Jackson Fox would finally be overturned...or fulfilled. Many lives depended on the action he was about to undertake.

  ***

  ‘You’re throwing me a party,’ said Emmy. ‘You do realise that I haven’t actually won a Nobel Prize, don’t you? Well, not yet anyway.’

  ‘It’s just the scenario I’m using,’ replied Lucas. ‘One of many, actually. We discovered quite early on that in order to successfully control the population we had to build a focal point into each deceit. They need a distraction to keep them from questioning their reality. Once they begin to suspect that things are not quite right, the cards quickly come tumbling down.’

  ‘You’re talking about hypnosis, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes. It was actually your idea.’

  He led her out onto Main Street and she noticed the public address system straight away.

  ‘We have to leave before the band play their final song,’ she said, more to herself than to Lucas.

  ‘Excuse me?’ he replied.

  ‘Oh, it’s just something my father said. You control the townsfolk by playing music through those speakers. Ingenious, but I fail to see how it could possibly be my idea.’

  ‘Hold out your hands.’

  She thought it a peculiar request, but complied regardless. She raised her arms until they were at a ninety degree angle to her body. Lucas gently took hold of her wrists and turned them so that her palms were facing upwards.

  Then the impossible happened.

  As if from nowhere, a book appeared on her hands. It was the book on hypnosis from her childhood. The one she had shown Lucas all those years ago when she had been just a frightened four year old searching for a way to banish the monsters from the dark.

  ‘How did you do that?’ she asked.

  ‘When you’ve been here for as long as I have, you pick up a few tricks. In this place we have complete access to all of our memories. We can return to them at will or we can bring parts of them to us.’

  She flicked through the pages. It was indeed the same book.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ she told him. ‘Books don’t have souls. How could your memory have recreated this in full? You never looked at the contents during your life. From your perspective it should just be a series of blank pages.’

  ‘You forget that this is a shared dream. In here, all of our memories are connected. It only takes for one person to have read the book for it to be reproduced in full.’

  She did not need to ask to whom he was referring. Her grandfather had read every one of the six thousand books in his personal collection from cover to cover.

  ‘How do you control it?’

  She nodded towards the nearest speaker, which was mounted on a telegraph pole. In response, Lucas reached into his inside jacket pocket and took out a smartphone. He handed the device to Emmy.

  ‘It turns out the afterlife has free wi-fi. Who would’ve guessed?’

  She looked over the phone. It was an old model. At least four years out of date, which meant it would have been state of the art when Lucas died. Her friend had never been quick on the uptake when it came to technology so she guessed that like the book, it was a product of somebody else’s imagination.

  The handset was not password protected, but even if it was it would not matter. She knew Lucas too well. Any code he came up with, she would second guess with ease. The menu had only basic applications and one of them was for music. She opened up the program and it brought up a selection of playlists.

  Bank Robbery

  Birthday

  Christmas

  Date Night

  Emmy’s Homecoming

  She noticed the fourth option on the list had a sub folder linked to it. Rather than scroll further, she tapped the icon to bring up a list of every female in town above the age of sixteen.

  ‘Is this what I think it is?’ she asked.

  ‘What do you expect me to do? Eternity can get lonely, you know.’

  ‘This is just creepy.’

  ‘Don’t be so quick to judge. Do you really think your mother is the only one of your father’s past conquests that he’s revisited?’

  ‘That’s different. It’s not actually real, and even if it was, it would be consensual. Have you slept with every woman in town?’

  Lucas shrugged.

  ‘Not yet. Old Mrs Coppersmith is still holding out on me.’

  ‘She’s 102!’

  ‘Actually, if you add on all the years after her death, she would be old enough to regard Methuselah as a toy boy by now. Who, may I add, is a hell of a lot younger than I am.’

  ‘You read the bible too? Don’t tell me the afterlife has given you faith.’

  ‘I’ve read every book I could get my hands on. And no, I haven’t found faith. Not in God anyway.’

  ‘So what do you believe in?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious? I believe in you, Emmy. I’ve waited a long time for you to come here. If anybody can get us out of this nightmare, it’s you.’

  For the first time since her arrival she could see her friend staring back at her. Beneath the cynicism of extreme longevity he had retained the same earnestness bordering on naiveté he always had.

  ‘You do realise that I can take the townspeople back, but you can’t make that journey yourself. You’re dead. You no longer have a body to go back to.’

  Lucas smiled, unfazed by Emmy’s revelation.

  ‘I don’t want to go back,’ he told her. ‘All I want is peace. I want this to end.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I’ve never been more certain about anything. Besides, once the town goes, I’ll lose all of my dates.’

  Emmy failed to see the funny side, but just up ahead was a sight that would put a smile on her face. Jimmy was standing outside of the Sly Fox, and like Lucas, he appeared to have been expecting her arrival.

  Chapter 38

  It was unlike Sammy to completely fall off the radar. There were ways, but he would be the last to take them. Out of the four originals he was the one who was the most finely tuned to their ethereal environment. Back when they first arrived it had been Sammy who was the first to offer up any kind of explanation for their situation. He had been the one to find them. To unite them. And ultimately...to divide them.

  Davo’s death had been a long time coming. So long, that he had the time to die twice. His first death was the result of a bullet to the back. The man who pulled the trigger had himself just died only moments before murdering Davo. It was the same man who pulled the trigger days later when Davo had become inexplicably linked to the Aboriginal man who would eventually guide him through their unnatural afterlife.

  The transition was not what he could have expected. When he felt the pull of the wormhole he knew it would take him further than he was capable of imagining. Yet there was no interval between places. One moment he was with his daughter and the next he was staring down the barrel of a shotgun.

  It has often been said that upon death a person’s entire life flashes before their eyes. This was not an entire life and nor did it come and go in a flash. To Davo, it seemed real. So real that he thought it may actually be happening in that moment. That it was the twenty years of memories following it that were fake.

  ‘You leave me with no choice,’ Fox said. His tone was more appropriate to that of a school teacher about to hand out a detention than a man brandishing a gun. ‘Let it be some consolation for you that what I must now do is in Felicity’s best interests.’

  When Fox took out the shotgun it had caught Davo completely by surprise. To try and pay off an unwanted suitor was callous, but to commit murder was outright psychotic. His initial assessment was that the professor had to be bluffing. If Fox thought he could get away with murder he would have done it from the start instead of summoning Davo to the observatory in order to try and buy him off.

  He decided to stand his groun
d. Call the other man’s bluff.

  Bad move.

  Fox lowered the gun and took a step towards Davo. Once the younger man took his eyes off the weapon, Fox raised it back up and rammed the stock into his stomach. This caused Davo to double forward in a mixture of shock and agony only for his attacker to catch hold of his face and push him out through the door and into the corridor.

  ‘You ignorant fool,’ said the professor. ‘Do you really think this pathetic act of devotion to my daughter will sway my opinion of you? Convince me to change my mind and grant my blessing? You will not take money for her but you will take a bullet – is that it?’

  ‘I love Flick,’ replied Davo. ‘That is something you’re incapable of. If you were, you would understand that by trying to keep us apart you only cause her pain.’

  Fox laughed. It was a cruel, patronising sneer.

  ‘From where I am standing it is you who are receiving the pain. Fear not, however. It will soon be over. You came here tonight in order to steal from me. I caught you attempting to break into my safe. When I disturbed you, you pulled a knife. It was self defence.’

  ‘That’s insane. You’ll never get away with it. The police won’t believe you.’

  ‘Perhaps. Doug is a fine cop. The finest this town has ever had. But he is also a good friend. I’ve done a lot for him and his boy, Lucas, since his wife died. He owes me. He’ll understand.’

  Davo was dead no matter what he did, but instinct told him to run anyway. When it came to it – he would rather be shot in the back chasing hope than have to look that bastard in the eyes and face despair. Jackson Fox would not be the last thing he saw on this Earth. Without further hesitation, he made his move.

  The professor was still standing in the doorway and this allowed Davo the opportunity to slam the door in his face, buying a little time in the process.

  It took him just seconds to reach the end of the corridor where he quickly turned into the reception area and pulled open the outer doors.

  The night was pitch black. Not even the stars were visible, but he knew there was no cover for him to run towards. His car was parked about twenty feet away and in the best lit area. There was no chance of him getting to it in time.