The Chronicles of Jonathon Postlethwaite: The Seed of Corruption (33 page)

                            After all it was he who had the forty five magnum under his coat. Santiago realised that at two o'clock in the morning he had little chance of finding the public house without directions. Despite the town’s relative size to cities that he knew quite well, the complexity of this places backstreets had him beaten. So when the welcoming neon of  a  hotel  sign  flickered  off  and  on  above  a  street beckoning him, he pulled in gratefully, roused the sleepy night porter and booked a room for the night.

                            The stillness of the quaint ‘olde worlde’ decor of `Brampston's  Oldest  Coaching  Inn',  The  White  Hart pleased Ben and he suddenly felt tired. The journey had taken more out of him than he expected and he dropped himself down on the four poster bed and was dragged by fatigue into a deep sleep. The reoccurring dream did not return on this night. Another took its place. Again he found himself floating in the night sky, but the city below him was far from the town that he had seen before. He was in a world of twilight and he sensed that it never got any lighter here above the sprawling maze of crevice like streets onto which a thin drizzle washed relentlessly without any cleansing effect. He felt himself descending towards the towering, but tightly packed tenements that lined every street and realised that he was not alone. Someone else was present in his dream. His summoner.

                            The builders of the city he now glided down towards had given little thought to architectural flair or style, it was chaotic, disorganised – a city of thousands of towering Babels. Each storey of these building had been added without thought or relation to any engineering theory.

                            Consequently they leaned precariously over the streets below as if the slightest tremor would send them plunging onto the seething masses below.

“The Lower City." boomed a voice. “My domain.”

                            Santiago felt his self sweeping down into the City's ravines, gliding above the jostling crowds where his attention was directed to figures in black whom the ragged citizens avoided. The figures he now  regarded seemed arrogant, their attire of top hats and long black coats setting them apart from the others who milled around them in the confines of sewage washed streets.

                            Both of the men he now watched were armed, one with a ancient flintlock rifle, the other with a rusty cutlass. They stepped back to the side of the street as four men dressed in short leather tunics beat and barged their way through  the  crowd.  The  High  Hats  backed  off   drifting  anonymously down a side street.

"They are Tans." the voice spat. “They out number us and stand between me and my rightful place in this city - as its master!" the voice became increasingly angry, seeming as if it were reverberating around the City's canyons. But the Tans did not hear the voice for Ben realised that this was not a dream, this city was a real place. Somehow he was here and the voice was inside his head, its owner guiding him and commentating on the power distribution here.

                            Compared with the High Hats the Tans wereheavily armed. Although they were still bearing weapons which the arms dealer had only  seen  in  museums  or hanging    on    apartment    walls,    they    seemed almost    overburdened  in  comparison  to  their  potential adversaries and the weapons seemed in better condition.

                            Ben Santiago slowly began to realise what was happening here and the part he was destined to play. Somehow he would equip these underdogs in order that they might prevail over them and put their enigmatic master in his `rightful' position. He heard a soft chuckle inside his head and realised that the commentator could read his thoughts and knew that his message had been made clear. This accomplished he felt himself being borne into the air again and flying over the city. They were moving on. Something else had to be explained or so it seemed.

                            From high above the city he looked down on a great, black river snaked in stagnant loops across the city dividing one section of the population from another from horizon to murky horizon.

                            On the opposite bank ahead of him, a narrow strip of land gave a clear view from the walls of a divided section across the river to the boundaries of the Lower City. Tans guarded the bridges and gate of the Upper City in number, bristling with muskets, pikes and swords. His flight continued over the Upper City and the terrain below him changed little from the cramped chaos he had left behind. Only the great domes of the Halls of machines were different in their monumentally impressive size, so huge that they dominated the Upper City that the buildings here seemed to be enveloped entirely in their sooty shadows.

                            Then beyond them Santiago saw the city of the Tallmen. Here was a startlingly different culture that radiated the existence of a technology far beyond that attained by the rest of the city he had seen. It might pose a problem he thought, and different solutions would be needed than those to brush  aside  the  Tans.

                            The  voice  ominously  remained  silent as it waited. Beyond the Halls of Machines, whose bulk cut off the Upper City from the city of the Tallmen, high towers housed searchlights which swept relentlessly the wide, paved killing ground between the two cultures. As if organised to for his benefit, two human figures emerged from the shadow Machine Hall side of the paved clearing and sprinted towards the light towers.

                            They ran only a few paces before lasers arced from the nearest sentry towers and reduced the trespassers to ash. Here was a challenge. Santiago thought. But one which could be overcome. Technology was never infallible and the more complex it got the easier it was to fool. He laughed as he realised he was rising to the challenge and the voice laughed with him.

                            Abruptly the dream ended and Ben awoke slowly, readjusting to the surroundings of the hotel room. He lay back considering the dream as a shaft of colds winter light broke into the room through a crack in the heavy curtains. Was it really real? Was there such a place as he had seen or was he going mad, inventing all this inside his own head, living out some fantasy? He reached into his wallet and pulled out the photographs of the town. These were real. He was here. The answers to his questions, Ben knew, lay at the Cross Keys Public House and, there too; his so far nameless, summoner.

Chapter Twenty Three

                            On the night that Ben Santiago arrived in Bramston and received  his  dream  briefing   from   Silus   Flax his nemesis, Jonathon Postlethwaite, emerged onto its silent,  frosty   streets.   The   icy   weather   that   the town had experienced for  days  had  intensified  with the coming of the night, the temperature had rapidly to well below zero and transformed the pavements into glittering slippery surfaces Jonathon found hard to negotiate in Scoggins's unsuitable footwear which  he had commandeered.

                            Shortly    after    he    had    left    Rislo    and    the Turkanschoner he made his way warily toward the lights of the town beyond the cemetery. He had been standing by the church wall shivering in the unfamiliar cold and taking in the scene from the alien world in which he now found himself, when a softly humming machine, its headlamps blazing, had glided to a halt beside him and the window wound slowly down.

                            The man's harsh voice had taken him by surprise, but he was relieved that the occupant of the machine was in fact human. Astonished that the driver seemed quite normal he had stared in disbelief for a few moments unable to cope with his request which was presented in a language he understood but was confused by an accent.

                            Normally it would have only been a matter of moments before he got a grasp of what the man asked by delving into his mind, but when he did the familiarity he found there shocked him further. Silus Flax was there! His spirit tainted the man's thoughts, but there was more. Those very thoughts were like those of the monster he detested, this stranger's soul was also a yawning abyss like Flax's. Jonathon recoiled and shook his head dumbly in disbelief and then probed his mind again for conformation. This time the grey haired man felt his psychic scrutiny and feared him.

Anger suddenly exploded in the man's mind, a vicious coiling serpent that lashed out toward Jonathon. But it wasn’t Ben Santiago's anger. It came from beyond him. From the mind that had summoned him here and protected the key to his conquest of Dubh.

                            Jonathon   retreated   and   forced   up   his mental barriers. The black snake in the mind of Ben Santiago did not have the ability to  pursue  the intruder beyond those confines in  which  it  currently dwelt and in which it had always had a physical root.

                            The car’s engine screamed and roared off into the silent streets, leaving a gasping Jonathon to continue his search for Flax. But the chance encounter had give him further confirmation that Flax was close. He had felt his powerfully protective presence in the driver's mind and the man had asked for directions to a Cross Keys Public House, whatever that was. That was a clue. All he had to do was find this place and he woudl find who he looked

for.

                            He wandered the rapidly chilling streets hoping for some further psychic clue, a communication between Flax and the man, so that he might eavesdrop and find direction but none came. After an hour or so and no closer uncovering Flax's whereabouts here,  he  realised  that he needed to find food or shelter or he would freeze to death.

                            Sucking his fingers and stamping his feet to bring some feeling back into his numbing extremities, he decided his task was hopeless and he should return to the cave and pass through the dimension door, if it was still

there, and return again after he had recovered from the effects of the cold and eaten.

                            He made his way back to the church easily, using its floodlit spire as a guide through the maze of narrow streets. As he approached the market square he was startled by the activity that was now taking place there. Two brightly coloured vehicles with brilliant blue flashing lights were parked by the roadside. The beams of dazzling lamps arced around the shadowy gravestones as the dark uniformed men searched for the body of a man, who they had been told, had been murdered there.

                            The courting couple stood at the church wall with a man in a black uniform and a high domed hat. Jonathon slipped into the shadows and watched as more uniformed men arrived with excited, barking dogs in a large white van.

                            Jonathon shivered, not only because of the cold, but because of their resemblance to Flax's High Hats, and edged his way into a darkened alleyway at the back of the square.

                            Tall buildings rose either side hung over him and above the ancient cobblestone street which  reminded him of Dubh. Perhaps that was why he  felt  strangely close to the City here he tried to persuade himself, that and the strange men in the square who looked like High Hats. Yes of course, that was why he felt the way he did.

                            As he shrank back into the enveloping darkness of the alley way, away from the men with their howling dogs, he came across a pair of large wooden gates which stood ajar. Turning, the smell of baking pastry reached his nose. It came from the yard beyond the gates. The smell made his mouth water and he became acutely aware of how hungry he actually was as he realised it was nearly two days since he had eaten in the well shaft below the Castle of Lepers with Rislo.

                            Jonathon's hunger led him through the wooden gates which groaned in protest as he pushed through the gap. He glanced around the empty yard and then, his hunger overcoming him, he dashed to the shadows below the rows of blank windows and crept towards the door this mouth-watering smell was emanating from.

                            The door was open and the faint blue light from the gas oven illuminated the room. For a bakery it was untidy, to say the least. Half completed pies and empty bottles littered the worktop and the floor. Dirty knives and unclean plates and bowls lay everywhere. Jonathon closed the door gently behind him and shut out the freezing air.

                            The gas oven heated the room quickly and the feeling returned throbbing to his fingers and  toes. Jonathon opened the heavy oven door and a blast of hot hair hit him. He realised that the baker had forgotten to switch it off, which was not surprising if he had been solely responsible for consuming the vast quantities of alcohol from the many empty bottles which lay around the floor and were lined up in regiments on the worktops.