[Sequoia]

by Adrian Dawson

  “So… can these monitor traffic cameras?” I asked. It was the only thing I could think of to explain how she had somehow guided me away from potential or, more likely, probable death.

  She glanced at me, then to the TVs. Then she turned away again, disinterestedly. “Why would I watch traffic cameras? People? Doing things? Boring things. All because they don’t know anything? I don’t want to watch people who don’t know anything. That’s what Game Show TV is for. They don’t get that, neither.”

  I looked puzzled. I felt it. “So how the hell did you bring me here?”

  “Er… the note?” she said, as though this seemed obvious. She shrugged, still fussing around, but she didn’t stop there. Here, worryingly, is where a little of who she was started to come through. “And that’s good,” she said, thinking - and seemingly talking - to herself. “It’s good he got the note because I didn’t know if he would. You know? Get the note.” She nodded to herself repeatedly. “He got the note.”

  “You mean the messages?”

  She looked at me sternly, beetle-browed. “I mean the note.”

  “What note?” I asked.

  She stopped for a moment and turned, puzzled. “You did get the note..?” I looked blankly back. “The note. Pink paper. Sticky at the top. I gave it to your neighbour this morning. So the people who are trying to kill you didn’t know where to find you.” She tapped her temple knowingly, like she had somehow thought this through. “Your neighbour? Mister Jenks? He has cats. One is called Tibbles. Or Tiddles. Or Barry. Something like that. I think he wanted to kill me. He didn’t, though. And that’s good too.” She thought for a moment. “But he didn’t give you the note. And that’s not good. That’s bad. See? I knew he wanted to kill me.”

  She nodded knowingly.

  Barry is the neighbour and ‘Kibbles’, as I understand it, is what he feeds his dog. It’s a Rottweiler called Felix. At which point I started to realise that I was now a good many miles from civilisation, out of earshot of any human presence whatsoever, without a car, a phone or any real money and holed up in a cabin in the woods with a clinically mental old lady who had a penchant for antique guns and a sharply defined sense of paranoia.

  There really isn’t much can go wrong in a scenario like that, is there?

  “I haven’t been home since this morning,” I said, still puzzled. “I’ve been at a… I’ve been out. All morning.”

  “Then you should go home. You have a note. Your neighbour has it, I think. Mr. Tibbles. Nice man. Wanted to kill me.”

  I dipped my head slightly and looked at her expectantly. “And… this ‘note’…?” I said. “What does it say exactly?”

  “You were supposed to meet me,” she said. “Twelve o’clock. At the café. Tomorrow.”

  “What café?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said, clearly thinking. “It was on the note.”

  There’s not much you can say to that.

  “OK… so why did you want to meet me?”

  “Rachael,” she said, like I should know. “Your Rachael, though. Not any Rachael. There’s lots, you know?” She’d found the kettle now and was busying herself filling it from the tap before commencing the bi-annual stove-hunt. She turned briefly and pointed toward the wall behind my right shoulder.

  I turned to look. It took my eyes a few moments to sift through the crap, but I found it eventually. A picture of Rachael. My Rachael because, apparently, there are lots. And yes, I’m using possessive adjectives for my girlfriend. Don’t judge me; she started it. It was an old shot too and one very much ‘out of school’. Gothic make-up, jet black bob and dark brown eyes. She looked exactly like I remembered her, and like I would always like to remember her. Beautiful. Happy. Alive.

  I walked toward the picture. Stunned.

  “What about Rachael?” I asked.

  “You do know she’s not dead?” she said, losing the manic edge in an instant. In fact, she said it quite calmly. Matter-of-fact. Like the whole world knew this. My heart leapt for a moment. Or sank. I’m not quite sure. It certainly moved. “Well, she is dead…” she continued, still very matter-of-fact, “…obviously…” (she stressed that) “…but then she’s not. Is she? I mean…. not really?”

  “Rachael is dead.” I said. Rachael was… is… dead. People don’t walk away from explosions that completely eradicate the building they were in at the time. Not even in movies.

  “Well, yes,” she said. “She is now, but she wasn’t then. She was alive then. So, if you’re not here now… if you’re here then… then she’s still alive, isn’t she? Not now, though. Then. My dad taught me that. He’s dead. But he wasn’t. Not then.”

  My mind was all-but ready to explode. “When..?” I asked.

  “When he was alive.” She narrowed her eyes in clear disdain and almost pouted, like I had gone mad. “Obviously.”

  “OK…” Think, Strauss, think. I started again. “Who is… was… is… your dad?”

  She stopped what she was doing and, without putting the kettle down, hurried over to the wall. She walked straight to the mass of images and lifted one, a black and white of what looked like some European fields. Beneath, exactly where she had known it would be, was another picture. She carefully removed the pin and brought it over. She stood by my side as I looked at it, ogling it like some love-struck teenager.

  The picture was an LAPD personnel-file shot. Old, back in the days when the L.A.P.D. still existed. A simple head and shoulder shot of a young, bright-eyed and reasonably fresh-faced recruit with just enough of the chest area showing to see the gold-coloured name badge. It had one word engraved upon it: Lambert.

  Detective Nick Lambert. Pre-detective I suspected and, from what I had heard before Alison’s trip, pre-resignation. And I don’t mean from the force, because he was still very much in the force when they met, that was the point. No, I mean from life as a whole.

  Like father, like…

  “Nick Lambert is your father?”

  “Was my father,” she corrected, lifting her arms and shrugging; back to manic. “We covered that. He’s dead. Keep up.” She went back to kitchen, back to digging for precious stoves.

  “You’re…” I had to think. Harder than I had anticipated when I’d started the sentence. Back to Alison’s file. Back to the bits I was supposed to have read in detail. The bits I skim-read. “…Vicki?” I still wasn’t sure.

  “Victoria,” she said, feigning a uptown accent. “We’re all grown ups here, my dear.”

  For a moment I couldn’t speak. Part of that was thinking, part was confusion, but the overriding reason was I was completely running out of things to say. It happens. See, Vicki Lambert was twenty-five, at most. At least she was… it clicked… back then.

  “So you met… Alison?”

  She nodded as she worked, still with her back to me. “I did. Lovely, lovely little girl. Fair hair and did very well at school. A lot of the fair haired ones don’t, you see. I was fair haired child. Didn’t do so well. She was a bit odd though, Alison. Raggy uniform. Funny eyes. Kind of piercing.” She smiled. “Kept her shoes clean, though. Dad liked that.”

  “Alison was a grown woman,” I said. I know she was a grown woman, even when she went back. Alison was a grown woman and Lambert had a daughter who was about twenty-five. These were facts. Hell, I’d chatted Alison up (just for kicks) before she went, so I knew exactly how old she was.

  She kept on working. “Yes she was, of course she was, before I met her, but that was before. That was then. When I met her that was after. That was now, but back then. When she was a little girl.”

  The penny was starting to drop. It was a grubby little penny and it really didn’t want to glint much, but it was dropping. I started to look around, taking in what I saw around me in a little more detail, focusing in. There were clippings on KRT, on Josef Klein himself and on the rest of his team, pictures of old paintings and historical documents from the middle ages and even before. There was what appeared to be a
‘before’ shot of the Cardou site and detailed drawings and equations. There were pictures of Alison, a couple of me, more of Lambert and copies upon copies of seemingly complete police reports. It was a minefield of information crammed into one tiny building, like a class action lawsuit on acid stretching across hundreds of years.

  So if this woman had compiled and read all this shit (which I was guessing she had) then she knew all about Sequence. She knew exactly who Alison was and how it all worked. OK, ‘worked’ is perhaps the wrong word, but she knew about it all the same. And, if she was indeed Lambert’s daughter, that meant that there was every chance that she had met Alison as a young girl, in the years after her father had met her as a grown woman. Which meant that, in truth, a lot of what she was saying might actually make perfect sense. At least, to her.

  As I believe I mentioned, I had a dog when I was kid. A dog I found abandoned outside the house. It was a Labrador cross and I called it Joopy because it had one extra droopy ear. Alison mentioned Joopy to me before she left, and I’m pretty sure that it was she who rescued him from the pound and brought him to my life when I was a child. So, if Alison and I had not discussed a dog I’d already owned, then I would never have owned the dog in the first place and there would have been nothing for us to discuss. So which came first? The dog or the discussion? Because, if Alison really did get me that dog, then neither one could truly exist without the other.

  It actually started to make a little bit of sense to me when I viewed it with that kind of madness attached.

  Which meant…

  My eyes creased. “So when exactly was Rachael alive?” I asked.

  “1600, maybe. 1620. Or 30.” she said. Again, very matter-of-factly. She placed the kettle firmly on the stove. Apparently, it had been in the kitchen the whole time. “Thereabouts.”

  “On the day of the explosion?” That seemed obvious. Too obvious.

  She turned and looked at me like I had gone mad. Because, apparently, I’m the crazy one in this little therapy session…

  “In the year of our Lord.”

  She lit the gas.

  NINE

  Tuesday, October 25, 1644.

  Serres, Perpignan, France.

  “It is perhaps no more than age and wear,” Eli offered, maintaining the best air of respect he could muster, given the hour and the circumstances.

  Hercule, running his slender fingers along the base of the altar, shook his head. “I think not. I am convinced that this stone has been inserted, or moved, since the altar was constructed. And I see no reason for that to be.”

  Eli crouched low so that he might look closer for himself. He too ran his finger along the top of the heavy slab upon which the recessed stone sat. With only three torches in total, two held in high wall-mounted frames aside the darkened windows and one held by Eli himself, the shadows were dark and the scratches indiscernible to the naked eye, but they could certainly be felt by touch. He could not escape the fact that there was at least a possibility, albeit slight, that the recessed stone had indeed been inserted, or removed and replaced, at some point in the distant past.

  Eli stood again and stroked the matted hair of his long beard, running his fingers slowly down its length. For a time he simply pondered; both the feasibility of Hercule’s supposition and the feasibility of getting the damned thing out if his master’s mind was as fixed as the stone itself appeared to be.

  “If it is the prize you seek,” Eli asked. “What shall you do with it?”

  “With them,” Hercule corrected, “for I still believe there to be two.” He thought for a moment. “I shall place them in a location known only to me. When I return from fighting in the Dutch lands I shall consider again. What I do know is that, if they are indeed set within this altar, then there will be others who know this. I could be gone for many months and, upon my return, so could they.”

  Eli knew little of the tables, save what Hercule had loosely explained on the dark and windy journey here, quoting Exodus 31:18 along the journey. “And he gave unto Moses… two Tables of Testimony, tables of stone, written with the hand of God.” This was before God dictated the Ten Commandments to Moses apparently and they were, according to Hercule, something very different and far more precious indeed.

  Which meant, of course, that if Hercule and the bible itself were correct, then these tables were not dictated by God, as the Commandments had been, but written by God himself. By his own divine hand. If the legends on which Hercule based his theories were correct then they contained not just answers upon their surface, but the answers. Answers to everything that was, is and would ever be.

  “If they are truly of God,” Eli said, “then I do not feel such things should be moved from a holy resting place. I feel they should continue to reside here.”

  “I do not,” Hercule replied bluntly.

  Eli thought. Out loud. “They could be gone already?”

  Hercule took a breath. “There is only one way for us to find out,” he said, “And that is to remove this stone.”

  With a clock somewhere preparing to herald 3am, for Serres had not one clock of its own, and the moon well beyond the reach of the stained glass, the inside of the church was a thick black, save for this one corner; the flames flickering restlessly in draughts which danced along the nave. As there were only six other properties to be found in Serres proper and all inhabitants would be sound asleep, the silence which now surrounded them seemed to last an age, shielded as they were from the strong winds. Even their breaths seem to echo.

  The world outside was a different story, however, with clattering to be heard throughout the village as every structure fought a good fight to remain upright. One thing was clear: however much noise they might make in this church tonight, few would hear it.

  “And how do you propose to do that?” Eli asked.

  Hercule removed his tunic, laying it on one of the pews,. He kneeled in front of the stone and crouched his head low, scouring it in detail. He smiled. “Brute force,” he said.

  Eli smiled, gently. And ignorance, he mused.

  * * * * *

  With dawn starting to break over the horizon and Eli and Hercule still in the church, eight weary hooves ground the track to the fairly modest De Montmorency residence into thick mud. The mists which hugged the fields were illuminated a bright orange-yellow as the gentle breeze wisped them in gentle swirls of iridescent colour. Cutting through these mists, astride the steam-huffing horses, were seated two of the six year old Louis XIV’s own guard, summoned at Mazarin’s request from their posts at Palais des Archevêques in Narbonne to escort Hercule north to Valenciennes to command his army. Today, it seemed, was the day that Hercule had been waiting twelve long years for.

  Today was Hercule’s new dawn.

  TEN

  Tuesday, October 25, 1644.

  Manningtree, Essex, England.

  “Good morning to you, Mrs. Banks.”

  Florence Banks was mere resting her legs in the scullery (and her eyes too, it would seem) when Clopton swept briskly in. It was not often that he ventured this far below stairs and he was filling her view before she had time to prepare his coming. Instantly, she pulled herself to her feet, though with every day that passed it was clear that it took more effort to do so. She noted that he was wearing his finest jacket and boots today, fit for walking, and she should have long heard his footsteps on the tiles of the corridor beyond had her ears not been as closed as her eyes.

  The scullery was located directly next to the kitchens in the cellars, which themselves were granted small windows with limited views of the lawns and orchards which lay behind the manor. It was not a huge building, though by far the largest in the vicinity and, therefore, it was still perceived as somewhat out of the ordinary to see the young Master venture so far from the more comfortable rooms which nestled above.

  Lawford Manor had been constructed in the Tudor style in the latter part of the 16th Century at the behest of William’s Great Great Grandfather, Edwar
d Waldegrave; unfortunate namesake of ‘Sir Edward’. Sir Edward had died in the Tower of London in 1561 following his refusal to carry out the Privy’s Council ban on Princess Mary having Mass spoken in her house. When the less reviled Edward Waldegrave’s grand-daughter Margery had married a man also by the name of William Clopton (the young Master’s Grandfather), so the family name had changed along this particular branch of the family tree. The first William Clopton, with his son Walter, had made substantial improvements and extensions to the manor along the way, along with the construction of a fine new stable block, and the building maintained the air of a very fine residence indeed. As Squires of Lawford, Manningtree, Mistley and the surrounding areas the Waldegrave/Clopton family line commanded a great deal of respect locally, being not only landlords to many of the villagers but also employers as well. William’s descendants, including his father who was now almost permanently confined to his bedchamber, had always endeavoured to treat all those in their care with a fair hand and it was something that William himself was keen to do as he took up the mantle so graciously handed down to him.

  He waved his hand dismissively. “Do not trouble yourself. Those legs have never feared work in many a year serving me or my father, so I doubt that they would be taking a break now had it not been hard earned.”

  The room was piled high with the laundry of the day and the air hung heavy with the rich olive scent of Castile soap and barilla, brought from Europe by William himself. Many of the garments were already pressed and folded or hanging ready to be returned. In the far corner a slow dripping from fresh wet clothes added a gentle beat to the silence which, when Florence were not of a mind to hum a tune, often inhabited the furthest reaches of the cellars.