by Amy Cross
“You wake up?”
He nodded.
“But that means you weren't dead in the first place!”
“My cremated body begs to differ,” he replied. “Plus, there's always a short period during which I'm... out. As I said, I honestly don't understand it, but it happens, as Quix can tell you. This is the second time she's witnessed my resurrection.”
Katie looked over at Quix, who nodded.
“It's not a bad thing, really,” he continued. “It allows me to reset, so to speak, and to tidy up a little. As Mr. Wagoner so amply demonstrated, I do have a habit of causing trouble and drawing attention to myself.”
“Let me get this straight,” Katie continued, “you just... come back to life?”
He nodded.
“In a cemetery?”
He nodded again.
“And you have no idea how it work?”
“None whatsoever,” he replied. “The strangest thing is, there's always a new headstone, too. I have no idea who makes them, but whenever I wake up, there's one right next to me, with the dates of my most recent lifespan. I really wish I could catch the bugger, but whoever the mysterious stonemason is, he always scarpers long before I get there, and my surveillance cameras always cut out at the crucial moment. Wouldn't you think that, in the circumstances, he might leave a note or something?”
“Maybe it's God himself?” Katie suggested.
“Absolutely not.”
“How do you know?”
“Because...” He paused, seemingly lost for words. “I just know, okay? It's completely impossible.”
“Things you say are impossible often turn out to be very possible,” she pointed out.
“Not this time.”
“And now you're back?”
He nodded.
“But... how?”
“Let's not go round in circles,” he told her. “Take a look at what I'm working on.”
“And how long has this been going on for?”
“Long enough. Katie, look at -”
“How long?”
He paused. “I remember when London was just a collection of little wooden huts by the river. I remember when the Romans came. I remember Mag and Magog, and I remember the sight of Caer Lud in the morning haze. I remember things from before that, too. I was born on the same day that the ground here was broken for the first settlement, and I dare say I'll be here until the last building sinks into the mud and maybe then, finally, I'll die permanently. There, is that enough information for you? Now come and look at the goddamn screen.”
Making her way around the table, she saw that he was running the same program he'd used a few days earlier to map the Harrington Cole building using audio recordings and whistles.
“I managed to record myself talking to the thing in that building,” he explained, “and from that I've been able to map the room. The serum in my system made it so that I couldn't tell what was real and what was a hallucination, but look...” Opening one of the folders, he showed her a 3D map of a small room with several figures standing around. “That's me,” he explained, pointing at one of the figures, “and those two are you and Quix when you came in to get me.”
“What about the other two?” she asked.
He paused for a moment. “When I was in that room,” he said finally, “I thought I could see a vast burning sun. It was an illusion, of course, brought on by my drug-induced faith. The room was dark, probably too dark for either of you to see properly, but this data proves that there were two people in there.” He pointed at one of the other figures. “I think that was Harrington Cole, or whatever was left of him after all this time. Maybe it's just an echo of his mind. I don't know how they kept him alive for more than a century, but that was him. And then, if you follow the time-line a little further...” He hit a button, showing that the figure suddenly vanished from the room. “He disappeared.”
“Where did he go?” Katie asked.
“He claimed he could go anywhere, that the experiments had truly elevated him to the level of a god. If that's the case...” He paused, staring at the screen. “He wanted to be god,” he continued finally. “He believed in God, and when that belief was broken, he set about creating God, and he used himself as the starting point. Where would you go, Katie, if that was your ambition?”
She looked at the screen for a moment. “Back to the beginning,” she whispered.
“The beginning?”
“To all the places where God should have been, almost as if...” She turned to him. “What if he is God? What if that's what God is, a man who went back in time and watched over mankind from the beginning? Maybe he didn't create everything, but he still might have been there.”
“Oh, please -”
“No, hear me out! What if he went back in time?”
“That's a ridiculous theory.”
“I think it might be true.”
“Coming from the person who posited flamethrowers in a church!”
“And genetically-engineered angels aren't ridiculous? What about ghosts in the Thames or a talking parrot that stole gold from the Bank of England? Those both seemed ridiculous until they happened! You can't just arbitrarily draw a line and claim something's ridiculous because you don't want to believe it!”
“And who was the other figure?” he continued, pointing at the final figure on the screen, who appeared to have been standing in the far corner of the room. “He wasn't very talkative. I had no idea he was even there. It's almost like he was just... watching things, and listening.”
“What do you really think happened?”
“I think Harrington Cole went spinning off into oblivion,” he explained, “and I think the post of God remains unfilled. I'm 99.99% certain that God has never been real.”
“Only 99.99%?” she replied. “You were always 100% before.”
He stared at the screen for a moment. “Sometimes it's good to keep an open mind. Don't you?”
“I don't know,” she replied. “Sometimes. Maybe.” She paused, before turning to him. “I also figured out how you pulled off that card trick.”
“No-one ever figures it out.”
“I did.”
“No you didn't.”
“You guessed.”
He raised a skeptical eyebrow.
“You totally guessed,” she continued, taking a step back. “You probably try it with everyone you meet, figuring that you'll get it right at least 2% of the time. And when it works out, you pretend there's a trick to it, but there isn't. You were relying on me assuming that you'd managed to read my mind, but you hadn't. It was pure fluke.”
He stared at her for a moment.
“Well,” he said finally, “that's rather put me in my place, hasn't it?”
“I'm right!”
“No comment,” he muttered, clearly annoyed. “Still, it's a useful lesson in not taking things at face value. Now if you don't mind, I have to get on with analyzing this data, plus I already have various other investigations on the go and you have to take this list and get me some office supplies.” Grabbing a handwritten note, he passed it to her. “I'm running dangerously short of paperclips.”
“Admit I was right about the card trick first.”
“I will admit no such thing.”
“Are you sulking?”
He shook his head.
“You're sulking.” She turned to Quix. “He's sulking.”
Quix smiled and nodded, before turning her attention back to the books she was stacking. After a moment, picking up one particular book, she glared at the cover before showing it to Robinson.
“What's that?” he asked. “Oh, The Calamity of Angels by J.R. Hildebraith, yes, very useful. In fact -” He paused suddenly. “Oh. You know, I think maybe that one is overdue...”
Sighing, Quix grabbed her coat and ran out of the office.
“I'll pay the fine!” he called after her.
“So is this going to happen again one day?” Katie asked. “Are you going
to die whenever you can't be bothered finding some other way out of a situation?”
“Absolutely not. In fact, I very rarely -”
Before he could finish, a screeching sound emerged from one of the side-rooms. Getting to his feet, Robinson ran to the door and looked through. When Katie joined him, she saw to her horror that the piece of wallpaper Robinson had stolen from Mrs. Williams' house was hanging from a set of clips, with a series of bright white lights trained on its hideous pattern. The paper itself was starting to flex, and the screeches seemed to be coming from the pattern as it twisted and churned.
“I was right,” Robinson said with a broad smile. “There is a demon hidden in -”
Suddenly a shape began to emerge from the paper, as if it was pulling itself free. Katie watched in stunned horror as the cloudy black figure strained as it tore itself away from the wallpaper, revealing a dark face with angry yellowish eyes.
“Is that...” she stammered. “I mean, is...”
“I've got to admit,” Robinson replied calmly, “even by my standards, this is quite weird.”
As he spoke, the demon finally pulled itself free of the wallpaper. It turned to look around the room, and then it rushed across the table, broke the far window, and disappeared into the afternoon air.
“Damn,” Robinson muttered with a sigh. “I should have planned ahead for containment issues.”
“Was that seriously a demon?” Katie asked. “In the wallpaper?”
“Only one way to find out,” he replied, grabbing his coat from the hook. “Don't worry, I'm sure we can catch it before it causes any major damage. It can't be very powerful, not if it had taken refuge in a piece of wallpaper in a house at Fifty-four Maplethorpe Avenue.”
Following him to the door, Katie tried to make sense of everything that was happening. She watched as Robinson grabbed various pieces of equipment from one of the shelves, some of which he passed to her to hold. After a moment, realizing that asking about his plan probably wouldn't be much use, she told herself that the best approach would probably be to just hold on tight and hope to pick up enough information on the way.
“So can I ask you just one thing?” she said eventually.
“You can try, but we're in a hurry. That wallpaper demon is small but it could still cause problems.”
“Those times when you die... Do you really not get even the slightest hint of anything on the other side?”
He turned to her and paused for a moment, before handing her a fishing net that – presumably – was somehow linked to their pursuit. “You want me to say that there's something, don't you?”
“Well, I -”
“There isn't,” he continued, with a haunted expression in his eyes. “I'm sorry, but there's nothing. I've been there, Katie, and I promise you, there's nothing on the other side of the veil. And as I think the events of the past few days have shown, there is absolutely definitely no such thing as God. Now come on, let's get after that creature.”
“Okay,” she replied, “but can you at least tell me one other thing? What really happened to your other apprentices?”
“Huh?” He turned to her for a moment. “Katie, trust me, it's complicated.”
“But they're not all... dead, are they?”
“Of course not,” he replied, putting a hand on her shoulder before turning and hurrying through the door. “Quix is still alive and kicking, isn't she?”
“Oh,” she said, feeling a faint shiver pass through her body. She paused for a moment, standing in the doorway with the fishing net in her hand, before figuring “What the hell” and rushing after him.
***
The wind blew in long across the moor, rustling the tops of nearby trees and battering the south-facing wall of the little wooden cabin.
Inside, sitting on a small stool in the gloomy room, the old man sat hunched over his latest stone tablet. With a chisel in one hand and a hammer in the other, he was finishing up his latest job, carving a new headstone:
Robinson
2015 to
Rest in peace
He let the chisel hover for a moment over the gap where the second date should go. For a few seconds, he contemplated adding the next piece, before figuring that he should let nature take its course.
“No need to rush,” he muttered to himself, with a faint smile.
Once he was done, he sat back and let out a sigh of pain as he felt a twinge in his back. He admired his work for a moment, before setting the hammer and chisel down. Getting to his feet, he gasped again, feeling a tightening sensation running all the way up to the base of his neck. Limping slowly to the door, he turned and took one more look at the latest tablet, before grabbing his coat and heading outside.
Down at the bottom of the hill, some children were playing. One of them happened to glance up and spot the frail old man making his way from the hut. For a moment, the girl narrowed her eyes, filled with a sense that the scene – as banal as it appeared – held some greater importance that was just on the edge of her perception. Finally, jolted out of her thoughts by a nudge from one of her friends, she turned and got back to the game, while the old man shuffled away in the distance.
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
