Copyright © 2016 by Brent J. Griffiths
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
First Edition, 2016
brentjgriffiths.com
For Mary. Always.
Table of Contents
Prologue
St. Andrews, Scotland, 1994
Edinburgh, Scotland, 2015
Northern Frontier, Year 7875 in the Reign of Enki II
Chapter 1
Edinburgh, Scotland, 2015
St. Andrews, Scotland, 1994
The City, Year 7867 in the Reign of Enki II
Chapter 2
Edinburgh, Scotland, 2015
St. Andrews, Scotland, 1994
The City, Year 7869 in the Reign of Enki II
Chapter 3
Edinburgh, Scotland, 2015
St. Andrews, Scotland, 1994
The City, Year 7870 in the Reign of Enki II
Chapter 4
Edinburgh, Scotland, 2015
St. Andrews, Scotland, 1994
The City, Year 7872 in the Reign of Enki II
Chapter 5
Edinburgh, Scotland, 2015
St. Andrews, Scotland, 1994
The City, Year 7873 in the Reign of Enki II
Chapter 6
Edinburgh, Scotland, 2015
St. Andrews, Scotland, 1994
The City, Year 7874 in the Reign of Enki II
Chapter 7
Edinburgh, Scotland, 2015
St. Andrews, Scotland, 1994
The City, Year 7875 in the Reign of Enki II
Chapter 8
Edinburgh, Scotland, 2015
St. Andrews, Scotland, 1994
The City, Year 7875 in the Reign of Enki II
Chapter 9
Edinburgh, Scotland, 2015
St. Andrews, Scotland, 1994
Northern Frontier, Year 7875 in the Reign of Enki II
Chapter 10
Edinburgh, Scotland, 2015
St. Andrews, Scotland, 1994
Northern Frontier, Year 7875 in the Reign of Enki II
Chapter 11
Edinburgh, Scotland, 2015
The City, Year 7875 in the Reign of Enki II
Epilogue
Edinburgh, Scotland, 2015
150 Million Kilometers from Earth, the Outer Darkness
Prologue
St. Andrews, Scotland, 1994
The rook sitting on a branch of the Queen’s tree took flight, flew over the aged university town, and landed on the wall of the bishop’s ruined castle. From its vantage on the castle wall, the large black bird could see the very spot where its ancestors had witnessed the death of a student five hundred years earlier. If rooks could talk they would have passed down the story of how the student had been tied to a stake, set alight and been rendered down into ashes, smoke and blackened bones. The student’s crime was difficult to understand for both rooks and people. He had believed that you could teach people how to be good without having to build a church. For this mortal sin he had died in agony.
Although the rooks had forgotten him, the students of the town still had a vague recollection of him, more myth than historical fact. The cobblestones outside the castle had been arranged to spell out the unlucky student’s initials. Student superstition said that the initials were cursed. Any student who stepped on them would not obtain a degree from the university.
The legend was, of course, untrue. The initials did not cause failure, they merely predicted it. Bad students usually managed to step on the initials at some stage of their academic career. It attracted their wayward feet like bees to honey. Or should that be bears to honey or possibly bees to pollen?
The ruined castle with the initials in the cobbles sat on the edge of the sea in an ancient town that should be known across the globe for its superb university. However, this is not the case. The town was better known for being the birthplace of a sport that ruined the family lives of minor executives and salesmen across the globe as they dedicated their weekends to attempting to get a small white ball into a marginally larger hole in the grass.
The sea was cold, even in the summer. This was a tragedy because the beach was superb. In a warmer climate, tourists would flock to its powdery, yellow-white sands to spend their time flirting with melanoma. Although the beach was often sunny, it was more likely that they would flirt with pneumonia and hypothermia — conditions that are slightly more benign than melanoma, but without the pleasing side effects of giving one a tan or, more importantly, exposing vast amounts of well-toned flesh. The normal result of frolicking on this northern beach was hacking coughs and copious amounts of phlegm. Those brave souls who did expose their flesh were not what one would call well-toned but more, shall we say, well-padded.
The cobble initials outside the castle, the lodestone of failure, are at this very moment attracting a student. They are pulling him in. Finn is not unintelligent — the very opposite — he could very well be the brightest person in the town. He is, however, extremely focused on a particular endeavor.
He walks with purpose, not looking where he is going. Some of his fellow students see him and wave. Finn walks past without noticing. He is working on a problem whose solution had eluded him for weeks.
As he steps on the initials, his frowning visage is transformed. He has an idea. “Scrotal warts,” he mutters and hurries off to his flat without noticing that he has stepped on the initials.
Finn is destined to fail at this university.
The rooks observe this occurrence, as they observe all such occurrences, without comment.
Andy was having a blast at the beach party. He was drunk enough to not feel the cold and the foul shroom tea he had choked down an hour before he hit the beach made the jewel-like stars throb to the beat of the Stone Roses.
Everything would have been perfect except for the fact that Kirsty, his girlfriend, was there. Recently he had been resisting the urge to use air quotes when he introduced her as his girlfriend. He didn’t hate her — he just didn’t like her all that much.
They had been going out since they had met on Raisin Sunday the year earlier. A night of drunken passion had been converted into a long-term relationship through her neediness and his apathy. This year, he promised himself, he would find some way to get her to dump him. There was no way he would dump her; the thought of her tears and pleading were too much to bear.
He wrenched his thoughts from Kirsty. If he kept thinking of her he would have a bad trip. He needed to think of something more pleasant, like a beach party in Scotland in October. He pushed his way into the crowd gathered in front of the DJ. He would lose himself in dance. If that didn’t work, he had a flask of the “water of life” in a backpack.
That was another thing about Kirsty; she would roll her eyes when he called whisky the “water of life.” That’s what the word meant in Gaelic, so he could fucking well call it the “water of life” if he wanted to. In fact, since he had noticed her rolling her eyes, he refused to call whisky anything else, even if it meant that he needed to explain what he meant to every barman in town when he ordered a dram.
His train of thought screeched to a halt as he noticed a petite tanned girl with brown eyes looking over her shoulder at him as she danced. He locked eyes with her and could not look away. She turned to face him and he saw the rather impressive cleavage that she sported. Then, he had trouble returning his gaze to her eyes.
She danced over to him and pressed her body against his. He wrenched his gaze to her face. S
he was smiling. “Bonjour,” she said. He could hear her clearly in spite of the pounding waves of sound radiating from the six foot tall speakers flanking the DJ.
He groaned a little. She was petite, buxom and French. He knew from a school trip to France in sixth form how hot the French could be. He started to get hard as she ground herself against him. She noticed and her smile got wider.
He cleared his throat and then spoke. “I’m Andy from Madchester and I’m mad for it. Who are you?”
An image of Kirsty rolling her eyes flashed through his head when he said “Madchester.”
The little French honey shook her head and did not answer as she backed away. She turned and walked off the sand dance floor. He stood watching her, not moving and not dancing. She looked over her shoulder again and blew him a kiss.
He shook his head and followed her off into the darkness.
Andy died screaming a few days later.
Edinburgh, Scotland, 2015
He only went out in the rain and usually at night. In the rain, no one paid attention to his hunched, lumbering gait. In the rain, his large rain hat obscured the horror of his face.
When the weather was poor, as it often was, he would emerge from his stone clad home just off the Royal Mile, walk up to the courtyard in front of the castle and look out over the city. He became anxious if a rare, extended period of fine weather kept him bottled up in his large home. He wouldn’t get anxious enough to go out without rain, unless the Festival was on. Nothing seemed out of place during the Festival, not even a hunched, one-eyed, one-legged, one-armed wreck of a man. Half of a man.
He pulled on his boots, his hat, and his heavy rain slicker. He called it a slicker even though the Burberry label claimed it was a vintage rain cloak. In any case, it covered him, comprehensively obscuring his most obvious flaws and irregularities.
He quickly patted his pockets with his remaining right hand to confirm that he had his custom-built phone and his plain leather wallet. He then grabbed his umbrella with his left hand, a prosthetic that he had designed and his company had constructed. The few people who got close enough to examine the hand usually assumed he was wearing a flesh toned rubber glove, so well-made was the prosthetic.
He passed through the heavy inner door of his abode. It was a door that would not have looked out of place sealing a bank vault. It closed with a meaty thunk behind him, followed by the whir of servos as the inch-thick bolts slid home. He moved down a short hallway and opened the ordinary-appearing outer door and looked outside. It was lashing down, lovely.
In spite of the rain, there were a few pedestrians outside. It rained too often for the residents of the city to stay indoors merely due to bad weather, though the rain did keep their numbers down. He hobbled purposefully up the street to the castle courtyard, glancing into the well-lit pubs as he passed them. Seeing people enjoying each other’s company always made him feel a little sad and angry — mostly angry. Most things made him feel angry.
The rain eased a little as he reached his usual vantage. He was able to drink deep the sight of the ancient city. All grey stone and greenery. He could see the park and the train tracks that ran beside it. He could see the beige- and black-streaked thorn of the Scott Monument thrusting up from the edge the park. He could see orange, yellow and blue lights of the shops on Princes Street. He could see the ever-present buses, shuttling in and out crowds of busy shoppers. While the rain did keep down the foot traffic on the Royal Mile, it never seemed to impact the shoppers on Princes Street.
Lightning flashed across the sky, adding to the gothic charm, followed a few seconds later by thunder.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?”
He started and then winced in pain. He turned towards the slightly husky voice to see a young woman in a short black raincoat standing beside him. He had not sensed her approach, which was odd. The raincoat ended at the middle of her thigh. Ivory skin was visible between the tops of her knee-high black boots and the hem of her raincoat. Her hair was short and appeared to be ginger. It was hard to tell, as it had been plastered to her head by the rain.
Her face was pretty; however, most people would have considered it unremarkable. Not him.
It was a face he knew.
It was the face of the monster that had made his body a prison.
Baby’s hair was long and blond at the moment, but that could change, maybe next week, maybe next month, maybe tomorrow. Hairstyles were transient. She would never be locked into a particular look, as many people were. She had noticed that most people over a certain age seemed to lose interest in change. They reached age thirty or forty and then their personal sense of style froze. Their hair remained the same: short, long or bobbed. Their makeup stayed the same. Their clothing changed but that was more likely due to the fact that their favorite clothes wore out and the sweat shops in the Far East that manufactured them had moved on to producing different styles.
She was different from most people. She was a creature of change. Boredom and apathy were always snapping at her heels. They were nightmare creatures that hunted her, much in the same way that she hunted other people, the Herd.
She would stay in a place with a particular name and then, when the ennui started to creep up on her, when she could not squeeze any more enjoyment from where she was and who she was with, she would move on. She would change her name, her hair, her clothes and her accent — anything that felt right.
The only constant in her life was the presence of her adoptive family — her coven. They did not like each other much but they kept close for mutual protection and, of course, Leader did not let them stray too far. As she was the youngest, she was called Baby. She would be Baby until they added another to their number.
At the moment, Baby’s boredom was being kept at bay by her rather overweight, rather old and slightly bald neighbor, Albert, who was on top of her grunting and straining. She was not getting a lot of pleasure from the act itself but the anticipation of what was to come (nudge, nudge, wink, wink) was making her hot. Even though she appeared to be an extremely attractive twenty-something woman, it had taken some coaxing to get her neighbor into this situation. His age, diabetes and semi alcoholism had been challenges that she had needed to overcome. It took some work, but it would be worth it in the end.
She had surprised Albert an hour earlier when, instead of providing him with the cup of sugar he had come by to borrow, she had suggested that they fuck instead. At first, he had laughed off the proposition, not believing that his beautiful neighbor, who he knew by her current cover name, Rachel, would want to sully herself with him. Her intimate touches eventually convinced him that her suggestion was serious.
He had then asked about her husband, the young, muscular and reputedly violent Ray. Again she was able to overcome these objections and then merely had to overcome his physical limitations.
Her incredibly sharp hearing picked up the sound of a key in the downstairs front door. Her excitement built. The climax of months of work and effort was almost upon her.
She first met Ray four months ago and encouraged him to clumsily seduce her. To win Ray, she could not just sleep with him; she needed him to work for it. You see, Ray was your typical good-looking misogynist. He did not understand the concept of love and spent his days looking for the next wet hole to fuck on his journey through life. Her goal had been to convince him that he was in love and then shatter his heart. It beat watching EastEnders, Coronation Street and possibly even Neighbours.
This was not as difficult as you may think. She did the usual things to make a man fall in love. She had held off on being intimate. She had arranged for him to help her with a minor motor vehicle emergency. She had allowed him to beat up someone on her behalf.
A month after she had started her little project, he proposed. Two months later they married and moved into the terraced house beside Albert, a lonely, sad older man who looked after his severely disabled wife. The very same Albert currently was huffing and puffing on top of her
on his way to release.
She started to shriek with pleasure, to make sure Ray would know where to find them. Her first shriek startled Albert so much that he popped out of her. She guided him back in as he muttered apologies and then she screamed some more.
The bedroom door creaked. She turned her head to the side and saw Ray, standing there with his mouth open.
She winked at him.
At first he was too surprised to feel anything, but as he started to comprehend the situation she could feel exquisite emotions build in him. Her drug was emotion and she had orchestrated a masterpiece of misery that would feel better than heroin. The initial feeling of surprise was followed by heartbreak, which was in turn followed quickly by rage. She clamped her legs around Albert; no need to pretend ecstasy anymore. The crystal pendant she wore as a necklace started to heat up as it captured some of the overflow of emotion. She would share emotions recorded in the crystal soul catcher with her coven at their next meeting.
A primal scream burst from Ray, full of betrayal and anger and loss. The scream made Albert acutely aware of Ray’s presence. He tried to struggle from Rachel’s embrace. She held on to him, lost in the sublime flow of emotions. She felt him shrivel inside her, adding some embarrassment to the mix of terror and guilt that he was emitting.
She let Albert go as Ray grabbed him and threw him to the ground. Ray pulled Albert up by his comb over and pounded him in the face. Once, twice. Blood splattered the floral print duvet cover that was bunched at the bottom of the bed. Blood spurted down Albert’s face from his flattened nose.
Ray reached down and picked up Albert and did a standing press, so that he held him horizontally over his head. She was impressed. She knew Ray was strong — the ’roids made sure of that — but she’d had no idea that he was that strong.
Ray held Albert that way for a second then heaved him at the window. The white veil curtain was briefly tangled in Albert’s flailing limbs as his body burst through the glass. The sound of a car alarm indicated that Ray’s prized BMW had broken Albert’s fall.
Ancient Evil (The First Genocide Book 1) Page 1
