Authors: Paul Wigmore
‘I will not stand down and I will not run away from you, you hear me bitch. I’m coming for you and it’s you that should heed my message
. Let Gavin go or I will send you straight back to hell where you belong bitch’ As she spoke, her hair radiated a golden glow that cut through the darkness like a ray of sunlight, her eyes became a deeper blue and the shadows quickly receded away from her leaving her in a pool of light.
Lilith was visibly vexed and her Koarth were now whimpering behind her curtain of flames, scurrying towards the darkness behind.
The flames around her grew higher still as she writhed among them as if she were trying to put on a show; she hissed and spat at Clara but was evidently afraid of the light. She retreated from the light as if it were a hot flame
(or a pool of holy water)
.The wind began to howl and the trees nearly shook themselves from their roots, but Clara knew she had somehow gained the upper hand.
‘I will not be buffeted by your black winds, I will not be drowned in your eternal sea, your molten fire shall not burn me and the soil of Agartha will not bury me, for I am The Guardian and it is I and I alone that control these elements.
’
The Guardian raised her hands towards the dream sky and from both of them she emitted strong yellow flames into the sky with a crack of thunder and Lilith cowered away into the ever decreasing shadows. The sky became a kaleidoscope of colours and the trees blossomed right before their eyes, The grass covering the playing field sprang into life and Lilith disappeared back to whence she came.
Clara now knew it was time to wake up and fulfil her destiny
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
Why was it so cold?
The man questioned himself as he got up for the fifteen hundredth time tonight to check on the boiler. The flame in the view window of the boiler confirmed it was alight along with the whirring and clacking sound that always accompanied the hot water making its way through the old pipe system.
Admittedly his circulation wasn’t what it once was, but then if he were being honest with himself, his circulation had always been problematic due
to the fact he had been largely overweight most of his life and didn’t give a rats ass about it.
Like it or lump it
he always thought,
(most tended to lump it).
This is why he was now at the ripe old age of sixty something or other, living in a run down one bedroom hovel above a curry house. He never blamed himself for his loneliness though; in fact... he preferred it that way. He had never learnt to mingle with others, they never did as they were told, so he would have to make them see things his way the only way he knew how, threats and violence, that had become less of an option as he got older though as his already impressive gut extended further and his arthritis had kicked in for real. Yeah being a loner had many benefits as he didn’t have to deal with the numskulls out there, but getting old had none. The worst was the cold, he was feeling it more and more each day, but today he was colder than a
nun’s cunt.
He was already wrapped up
in his old blue flannel trousers and two hefty woollen sweaters
(they looked and smelled about as old as he was)
but he decided to wrap the throwover from his chair in the corner around himself too for good measure. It stunk of old nicotine and stale beer but that wasn’t something he ever noticed as it had the same odour as he did.
He clumsily waddled the four or five short steps from the chair to the window overlooking the high st which had the radiator underneath it. His breathing had already become laborious as he reached his hand out to test the warmth of the radiator. Once again, he wasn’t surprised to find that it seemed to be working quite efficiently. He would have burned his hand if he had actually placed it on the iron of the heater.
So why was it he could still see the breath in front of his face, stood right here?
Whatever it was, it wasn’t gonna get fixed tonight. He decided it best to stop worrying about it and tomorrow he would get on to that paki landlord that owned the curry house downstairs and make him fix it one way or another.
As he finally got back to his chair and flicked the sports channel on he began to hear that same stupid song in his head that he had heard earlier. At first he had thought it was the church on the corner over the road, but his windows weren’t open and when he’d investigated, it was quite clear there was no one at the church, at least the singing wasn’t coming from there anyway. It had stuck with him most of the day like a bad headache but had eased off a while ago. Now it was back
, but only now it was louder. It was is if the voices were coming from within his tiny little room somehow. He pressed the mute button on the tele, knowing this wouldn’t help but it was worth a shot. He sat there leaning slightly forward in his chair looking into the corner of the room which led to the bedroom listening intently, and as he did the pitch rose higher and it seemed as if more voices joined the ghostly choir.
He tried to get up to
investigate, or maybe just so that he was doing something, rather than just sitting there listening to that noise. But as he did so his head was sent reeling backwards and he fell straight back into the chair, arms spread out at his sides smashing the old glass lamp with the nicotine blanket to the floor in a thousand pieces, although he felt it was his head that had been smashed into a thousand pieces.
His tiny brain had been sent into shock mode so the words on his lips immediately were
what the fuck is happening and who’s there,
but they came out in one unpronounceable word ‘whathefuwho?’
‘Been a long time “Daaaaad”... did you miss me? Of course the man in the chair was no more Gavin’s dad than Gavin was the chief of police but it had the desired effect on
“the man”.
He looked up towards Gavin whilst attempting to rub the blood away from his nose but only succeeding in smothering it up one side of his face.
The recognition in his face was as evident as a sledgehammer would have been to, well... to his face.
‘
I saw you...in my dreams... I saw you’ the now very nervous man said trying to push himself further and further into the back of the chair as if it offered some means of escape.
‘Aw, look at you... all scared and confused’ He pushed t
he tv off the kitchen chair it had been balanced on and let it drop to the floor as he turned the chair around, so he could sit astride it like in some of those old cop films he used to like.
‘They weren’t your dreams old fella... they were premonitions... you cowering in the corner, eating that crappy old stew off the floor... nah, they weren’t dreams, they were premonitions’
The old man gathered himself and sat forward in his chair, blood still trickling from the blow Gavin had dealt earlier.
‘Oh
... and are you gonna be the one to make my dreams come true then ya little shit? I remember your sister knocked you out one time, yeah, smashed ya head against the wall she did and ya dropped like a lead weight ya little pansy, haha come on then Gail’
There was an incident when Gavin and Lala were both a lo
t younger, maybe pre teen when
the man
had made them fight for his enjoyment, his sister in her frustration at having to beat her little brother had smashed Gavins head against the wall. He knew his sister didn’t want to hurt him, but she had no choice but to hit him, otherwise she would suffer the wrath of
the man
so he had decided to end it there and then as he didn’t want to hurt lala but if she carried on hitting him, he knew he would so when she smashed his head against the wall, he slid down the wall in a faint, as if he had the breath knocked out of him, eyes shut and holding his breath. Seeing Gavin on the floor unconscious seemed to be enough to placate
the man
and he went back to his Sunday racing channel, leaving Gavin lay on the floor while his sister celebrated although she didn’t really know what she was celebrating as the hurt inside her for what she had just done was stabbing at her heart as she looked at her brother lay on the floor, but she couldn’t say.
‘Come on then dumb fuck, come on then Gail’ the fat man teased, ‘lets fucking have it’
He got up finally out of his chair,
‘Come on my little number one’ he reached his hand out to Gavin and stroked his cheek... ‘You were always my number one...you know that, why fight? You know you were always my favourite... I always loved you the most’
Gavin quickly brushed his hand away, he felt a sick feeling inside of his stomach, a feeling that made him think that he would never be able to return to normality, what was he doing here, why was he here now in front of this sick twisted bastard that had robbed him of his childhood
, why was he even letting him speak to him, why was he even letting the piece of shit carry on breathing. He could snap his neck right now and be done with it. But then he remembered something, he remembered that after all these years since his tormented childhood, he had only one question to put to
the man
. It was a simple enough question so he asked it simply enough; he looked the old man in the face and asked
‘Why didn’t you ever love me?
The man took in a deep breath and seemed to ponder over the question, looking Gavin straight in the eyes as he brought his hand up to his bristly face to scrub at his whiskers before replying.
‘Didn’t love your mum enough to bother with you little shits too’
the man
laughed as he hawked his flem back down his throat.
Gavin saw red at this last comment and threw his hand towards
his childhood tormentor.
‘You’re nothing to me, nothing more than a bad memory now’ he screamed and
the mans
insides were suddenly on the outside, his intestines and other such entrails were stuck to the ceiling as the man looked on. Suddenly not so cocky, he lifted his head to the ceiling to follow the trail of blood and guts. Gavin held his hand out towards the ceiling and kept repeating the same words.
“We all fall down”
“We all fall down”
The man
spun round and round and as he did so, the entrails of his stomach came out inch by inch and he could do nothing more than look up to the ceiling and watch as his organs twisted around each other. He was numb with the pain, such exquisite pain. His eyes began to pop as he looked upon the thread of life that joined him to the ceiling. Gavin stood and laughed a maniacal laugh as he watched the life ebb away from the slowly spinning carcass that had dared to think he was anything more than a dead man when Gavin came calling.
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
When Clara opened her eyes that morning, she didn’t feel fresh or rejuvenated at all. She had woken in a cold sweat, heart beating ten to the dozen and for a second, only a split second, she tried to convince herself that the dream had been nothing more than a nightmare. A very realistic one, but a nightmare all the same. The hope flitted on by like a leaf in a storm when she realised she had hold of the talisman in her hands as if in some death grip. And if that wasn’t proof enough then the scratch marks on her arms from when the girl/koarth, had attacked her was the nail in the coffin for her,
(although she hoped not.)
It didn’t take long at all for the pair of them to get to Wirksworth in the Lakes. Clara had no time to explain anything to Seb over coffee and toast this morning.
“Just get your stuff together, we’re leaving now”
was the rather terse reply he got after enquiring about the sudden rush to be there before breakfast. He could tell just from her tone and darkness of eyes that this wasn’t a good time to joke about how he would hate to see her with a hangover in the morning. After all...
Mother Nature was a force to be reckoned with when riled.
They had travelled mostly in silent trepidation after Clara had explained in the car what had happened and shown the war wounds of her dream/ nightmare?, to him.
The village of Wirksworth was an old lead mining village and the facades of the houses and shops had remained virtually untouched since the 1700’s. There were a maze of little alleyways and ginnels which would make it impossible to navigate around in a car, also the architecture was so oldy worldy in that it looked so unplanned and haphazard as to make it charming. The roads were cobbled, something Clara hadn’t seen for many a year and an old church, “The Parish of St Mary the Virgin” with a strange path that completely encircled the churchyard, giving it the look of an old cathedral.