Authors: Gerard Whelan
Stephen walked down the stone corridor outside his room. At its end was a stairway. His soft soles made no sound on the stone steps. At the bottom of the stairs he startled a young monk who was on his knees, scrubbing flagstones in the hallway. The monk jerked back in surprise, nearly knocking over the bucket of sudsy water that stood beside him. Stephen recognised him as the young monk from the courtyard the night before. The big, bearded man must have been Brother Philip – he’d suspected as much.
‘I’m sorry,’ Stephen said. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’
The young monk’s face reddened. ‘You … you’re the guest from upstairs,’ he stammered.
‘Yes,’ Stephen said. ‘I am.’ He repeated his apology.
‘It’s nothing,’ the monk said. ‘Really. It’s just that I didn’t hear you coming, and when I saw you standing over me …’ His voice trailed off, embarrassed, and he made a vague gesture with the wire-bristled scrubbing-brush in his hand. ‘I thought you might be one of the confined ones. They get out sometimes, no matter how closely we watch them. Some of them are very strong and … crazy.’
Stephen realised that the young monk was very afraid. He could think of nothing reassuring to say, so instead he asked
for directions to the kitchen. The monk indicated an open, arched doorway beside them that led outside.
‘Right across the courtyard,’ he said, pointing with the scrubbing-brush. ‘Go through the door directly opposite. That’s the kitchen wing. I don’t know whether Brother Philip and Fräulein Herzenweg are in the kitchens or the storeroom, but both rooms are right through there.’
The courtyard was neither as small nor as bare as it had looked from his upstairs window. Looking around and up, Stephen saw that his own room was in one of the two longer arms of a building that was shaped like a square-cornered U. The kitchen was in the opposite arm. To his left, forming the shorter base of the U, stood the main building of the monastery. It was built around a bell-tower that rose above two great wooden doors, which were standing open. On the fourth side, to his right, the top of the U was closed off by a high stone wall, pierced by a large gateway. The wooden gates, which were even bigger than the doors in the bell-tower, were also open.
The courtyard itself was partly flagged, partly gravelled. The well stood in the centre. In front of the main building was a strip of lawn, and between the lawn and the wall of the building itself lay a flowerbed riotous with colour. A flagstone path leading to the great doors bisected both flowerbed and lawn.
It was a very pleasant place in the morning sun. Overhead the sky was a brilliant, cloudless blue. The air was fresh and sweet, heavy with the scent of flowers and the humming of bees. A summer world. It seemed far too beautiful a world to
have spawned a great disaster.
He walked carefully across the stone flags – after several days in bed, his legs felt unsteady. The fresh air alone made him dizzy. His head swam with a riot of sensations – the bright light and the heat, the colours and the buzzing of bees, the scents of flowers. The world seemed completely strange to him, as though he’d spent years locked up in an airless cell. And still the questions chased each other round and round in his mind, as they’d done since he’d first woken the day before: who was he? what had happened? where was everyone else?
It was all too much. Stephen felt light-headed and a weak surge of panic welled up in him. He stopped by the well, leaning on its old stone parapet, breathing in the cool, damp air that drifted up from its depths. The bucket, hung from a long rope coiled around a wooden winch, had been recently used – maybe by the monk who was scrubbing the floor. Fat drops of water were dripping from its base. It took a while for each drop to plink into the water below. It was deep water that would be cool on the hottest day.
Stephen leaned over the well, looking in. Far below he saw the surface of the water, a little circle of reflected blue marred by the dark reflection of his own head. As he looked, the reflection of another head appeared beside his own, a very blond-haired head. He felt the physical warmth of someone standing right beside him, brushing against him. It was Kirsten. He hadn’t heard her coming. He looked up, smiling. Then he stopped. The smile froze on his face. There was nobody there. He looked around frantically, but he was alone
in the courtyard. He was sweating again. He shivered in the heat.
Inside the kitchen wing it was cool. When he walked through the doorway, Stephen found himself in another stone room with more wooden furniture. It looked like a storeroom. The walls, from floor to ceiling, were covered with cupboards and shelves of various sizes. The centre of the floor was taken up by an enormous table with rank after rank of large, closed drawers from table top down to the ground. To either side of him were two doorless arches leading to other unseen rooms beyond.
He heard Kirsten’s voice off to his left and went that way. He paused before entering the room. The incident in the courtyard had shaken him badly. Perhaps he was going mad too. But he simply refused to think about it. He would put it down to weakness and confusion, to the shocks that his system had certainly had. What he had to do now was to appear as normal as possible, otherwise they mightn’t let him go along, and he felt he simply had to see this empty world. He couldn’t really believe in it until he did.
‘Fresh fruit,’ Kirsten was saying as he walked into the room. She was standing beside the big, bearded monk he’d seen in the courtyard the night before. He’d been right, this was Brother Philip.
The room was very like the first one he had come through, but here there was an enormous, old-fashioned cooking range and shelves of pans and utensils. Kirsten and the monk were concentrating on a notebook she was holding, both of them looking hard at it as Kirsten checked off items with a pen. Stephen was quite close before either of them noticed him. It was the big monk who looked up first. For a moment he frowned, and it was an ugly look, as though he resented anyone coming so near without his noticing. Then it passed, and his face was pleasant again. Kirsten looked up and smiled.
‘Hello,’ she said brightly. ‘Philip, have you met Stephen?’
‘Ah yes,’ he said. ‘Our new helper. Hello, young fellow. I’m Brother Philip – the monastery’s token Irishman.’
Stephen shook the monk’s extended hand. It was a hard hand, strong and capable.
‘I’m Stephen,’ he said. He felt he sounded too sure. Was that really his name? It sounded stupid when he said it out loud.
The monk seemed to read his mind. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘names aren’t cut in stone. All of us here – we monks – chose new names when we came to the monastery. Sometimes it’s good to get away from what you were before.’
‘That’s what I told him,’ Kirsten said. ‘Maybe he was a thief before! Or a murderer!’
Philip smiled down at them through his beard. He pretended to examine the boy, who was maybe half a metre shorter than him.
‘Aye,’ he said, ‘he’s a dangerous-looking type all right.’
He took the notebook from Kirsten.
‘You’re coming on this raid of ours?’ he asked Stephen.
‘If that’s all right.’
Philip nodded. ‘It’s good.’ He smiled. ‘Maybe you can calm this young one down. We’d need a moving-van to bring half the stuff she wants to thieve, and a gang of brickies to shift it.’
Kirsten giggled.
‘Maybe it’s the only chance I’ll ever have to be a major criminal,’ she said.
‘You obviously don’t know our local market town,’ said Philip laughing.
He looked at his watch.
‘I want to talk to the abbot before we go,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you two have a last look at the list? Maybe Stephen can think of something we forgot.’
He laughed again as he went out the door.
When Stephen read the list he understood Philip’s laughter. There were about ten pages of items, many of them highly unlikely. The notion that he might add anything to it was ludicrous.
‘This looks like you’re getting ready for a siege!’ he said.
Kirsten put on a playfully mysterious face.
‘Ah,’ she said. ‘But who knows what will happen next? We have to be ready for any eventuality!’
‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think this lot will equip you for anything short of a flood. And that seems hardly likely in the mountains.’
Kirsten’s excitement was funny to see. Watching her,
Stephen felt an odd feeling of fondness. The prospect of an empty world seemed to excite her strangely. Stephen, on the other hand, couldn’t think of it without wondering what had happened to all the people. Many things might have happened to them, and a lot of those things were bad. Still, it seemed a shame to ruin Kirsten’s excitement by reminding her of that.
When Philip came back he was brisk and businesslike, but under his calm exterior Stephen thought he detected an excitement that almost matched Kirsten’s. It was a different kind of excitement though, a peculiar mixture of glee and unease which Stephen felt he must be imagining. They chatted briefly, but still Stephen sensed the same mixed feelings under Philip’s calm, amused exterior.
So what’s the problem if he’s mixed up? Stephen asked himself. It’s exactly how you feel yourself.
But Philip made him uneasy in a way that was even odder than the fondness he’d felt for Kirsten. He chided himself. They were both total strangers. What did he know about either of them?
‘Right,’ the big monk said finally. ‘That’s everything, I think. You’re sure you’re up to this, Kirsten?’
Kirsten gave him a withering look.
‘Just you try to leave me behind,’ she said. ‘I’d follow on foot.’
‘I declare to God,’ Philip said, ‘but I believe you would.’
He picked up the notebook, closed the cover and slapped the table with it.
‘Very well, lady and gentleman,’ he said.‘There’s a world out there waiting to be pillaged, a rotten job, I know, but someone
has to do it! Let’s go.’
And he led the way out with yet another laugh, which to Stephen sounded oddly forced. It was the last laugh that Philip would have for quite some time.
Sense came slowly. I didn’t hurry it. It was like waking from a special kind of sleep. I was just an awareness, receiving information through limited but vivid senses. I was in a body.
I knew where I was, more or less. To be in a
place
… the mere thought of it sent a shiver of excitement up the spine. A light sweat broke out on the skin, and I squirmed with a rich mix of fear, joy and tension. This is like no other feeling. Once felt, it can’t be mistaken for anything else.
I opened the eyes. There was a blue sky overhead. Blueness. I was out in the open, under a blue sky. I lay still for another moment, savouring the old sensations. I could feel the eyes blinking, reacting to the myriad colours and shapes. I could feel the muscles in the eyelids, perfect, tiny. I had a throat. I swallowed, to feel the movement there. I felt the mouth smile.
I sat up. I was on green grass in a clearing on a wooded slope. A hillside. I turned the head (my head, I reminded myself, for the moment at least), and looked around. I could see no sign of my friend.
A small brown animal crouched in the long grass, watching me. It stood, bright-eyed and trembling, wrinkling its whiskered snout, obviously confused. I looked like a human, yet it couldn’t sense danger.
‘Come,’ I said. The small thing hesitated, then came shyly over.
‘Hello there, creature,’ I said. The animal grew more confident as it got closer. It sensed my lack of humanness. It sniffed at my foot. I felt my smile widen. It was so simple, sitting here on a hillside, under a blue sky, with another animal. This was the miracle we’d forsaken.
There was a loud, rustling crash from the edge of the clearing, as though a much larger animal was floundering in the undergrowth there. That would be my friend. I rose carefully to the feet,
my
feet. The little brown animal froze, trying to decide whether or not the new sound was threatening.
‘Not to you, little one,’ I told it softly. ‘We’re no threat to you.’
I went towards the sounds. They were coming from a depression in the ground, a deep hollow filled almost to its brim with undergrowth and high drifts of old, dead leaves. A loud rustling came from somewhere among the foliage,
followed
by a string of curses. As I stood on the lip of the hollow I saw my friend’s arm and hand thrust up suddenly out of the leaf-drift. His head followed and he looked up at me with a sour expression.
‘I bet,’ he said, ‘this is somebody’s idea of a joke.’
His other hand appeared, clutching a grey hat. He looked funny, standing there. I had to laugh. It felt good.
‘They wanted to give you a soft landing,’ I said.
He waded through the banks of leaves and scrambled up the side of the hollow. His dark suit was stained with leaf
mould and dotted with fragments of broken twigs and leaves. He brushed it down with an air of injured dignity. They’d given me a fairly natty outfit too, I noticed, a tailored two-piece in charcoal grey with a fine black stripe. We looked terribly respectable – it was a pity there’d be nobody to see us. At least, nobody who’d appreciate the effect – nobody who’d live long after meeting us.
‘I see you’ve made contact with a native already,’ my friend said. I followed his gaze. The little brown animal stood shyly nearby, watching us. It had raised itself up on its hind legs and was sniffing our scents, puzzled.
‘Go home, thing,’ I told it. ‘We’re trouble.’
‘That we are,’ my friend said amiably. ‘Death on legs, that’s us. Blood smoking in the dust and mothers crying. Feeding of ravens and shields with broken bosses.’
‘Oh shut up,’ I said. ‘You’ll frighten it. Anyway, they don’t use shields here anymore. You’re old-fashioned, you are. A fellow has to keep up with the times.’
My friend finished brushing himself off. He put his hand on his head, straightened his tie, put his hands on his hips and stood looking around him appreciatively.
‘Marvellous!’ he said. ‘The old place looks good no matter what they do to it.’
He spat on the ground, and then leaned down and looked at the spit. He laughed.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘I should come back more often. I’d almost forgotten what it was like.’
‘Spitting?’
‘No, Dolt!
Being
.’
I looked around at the trees.
‘Well,’ I said. ‘Here we are. This is called a hill, right?’
‘Yes. We can go over it, or around it, or just down.’
I thought about that.
‘Over, around or down,’ I said slowly. ‘Yes, it’s all coming back to me now. We’ll go up. When you’re up you can see further.’
We set off uphill at a gentle pace. The trees thinned and then yielded to a barer landscape of thin soil and naked rock. My friend murmured with pleasure when we passed a bank of yellow-blossomed furze bushes.
‘Wonderful!’ he said. ‘I do love
places
.’
It wasn’t a hill we were on, but a mountain. At length we reached its bare rock summit. From there we could assess our surroundings. Around us were other slopes. The sun was bright, the sky nearly cloudless. We stood on the mountain and took in the view.
‘We’ll keep going this way,’ my friend said, pointing. ‘The sea’s behind us. There should be some class of a road over that way.’
We set off in silence, watchful. The world is always a dangerous place, and here we were inside the exclusion zone itself – anyone we met would be either confused or an enemy.
We were skirting the lower slopes of our third or fourth mountain when I sensed the pain. It hung in the still air like smoke. My friend felt it at the same time. We looked around.
‘Over there,’ my friend said.
I looked and saw a patch of colour on the hillside. A middle-aged man. He was dead, killed recently and messily – the body was still warm. His killer, or killers, couldn’t be far
away.
‘Time to go to work,’ said my friend quietly. His face had lost its smile and taken on a prim, purse-lipped look of disapproval. I knew that look from other faces he’d worn when we were in the strange thing called Time. Reaching into his pocket, he took out the little case. He opened it and took out the crystals, handing one of them to me. The water-rounded pebbles, shot through with quartz, felt hard in my soft hand. My friend put the case back into his pocket. I licked my lips. It was always hard to adjust in the beginning, and I hadn’t been on a job like this for two thousand years. Nobody had, really.
My friend looked at the carcass with disdain.
‘They’re acting like humans,’ he said.
It was an extreme insult, but I understood how he felt. Our kind has always hated waste.
We went ahead, warily, but we didn’t need to look far for the killer. He wasn’t even attempting to hide. He was standing on top of a big rock, a boulder deposited by some glacier long ago, even before
our
time. He was a young boy, maybe fifteen or sixteen years old. The stench of his madness got stronger as we drew near. He stood there looking down at us arrogantly as we approached. His eyes were wild, and he was covered with dirt. In one hand he carried a long, curved knife such as men used to cut crops – a sickle. I found it hard to take my eyes off the blade.
The boy made no move either to run or to attack.
‘He’s on his own,’ my friend said softly. ‘He really is crazy, just standing there like that. Do you want to ask him anything
first?’
‘What’s the point? Unshade him.’
Still the death-drunk boy made no move, although he must have known who we were. By now he must at least have felt the presence of the crystals. About five metres from the rock my friend stopped. He raised his arm and pointed the crystal at the boy. Now, finally, the boy did move, but it was too late. It had been too late from the moment we arrived.
The crystal’s power hit the boy square in the body and threw him back off the rock. When we walked around it we found him lying on the grass. He wasn’t breathing. The open dead eyes still held hate.
‘That’s one down anyway,’ my friend said. ‘I wonder how many more there are.’
‘Too many.’
‘Any is too many.’
We disposed of the body and went on. After a while, we came to a valley cutting through the hills. I could see part of an unpaved track. The track followed the fall of the ground until it disappeared from sight.
‘Here we go,’ my friend said. ‘That will lead to a road. Now we’re in business.’
Indeed, we were in business. It just seemed a pity that our business was killing.