A Gathering of Twine Read online

  Gordon cast his eye about. “It must be here,” he muttered.

  “Maybe the family got rid of it,” Tate offered.

  “No. Tony was fascinated by the thing. Lady Constance would never have let it be thrown away. I thought there was an ottoman in this room...”

  A dragging noise at the end of room announced that Tuther had found a chest under the bed and was pulling it out.

  “Celus!” said Tate, clearly exasperated. “Want to take a little bit more care? That thing’s an antique. Probably the carpets too.”

  Tuther looked impassively at Tate and then opened the chest.

  “Have you got it?” Gordon asked.

  “Uh-huh,” grunted Tuther, and with obvious exertion heaved out a giant jaw onto the bed. A few seconds later three more flattish stones came out. Tate assumed that these were the vertebrae that Gordon had mentioned.

  Tate and Gordon bent over the bed, and as they did so, the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs could be heard.

  “Ugh, you found it!” said Mrs Torinelli from the doorway. “Here,” she indicated to Tuther, “you take this,” and handed him a tray of cups, saucers, and a pot of tea. “I’ll be in the kitchen if you need me.” The Housekeeper moved off quickly.

  “Well,” said Tuther smiling, “she didn’t want to hang about.” He put the tray down on top of the chest of drawers and started pouring the tea. “So? What have we got Georgey boy?”

  Tate stared hard at Tuther.

  “Sorry. Professor,” said Tuther in exaggerated tones.

  Tate went back to examining the jaw with Gordon. The jaw was complete, almost perfectly circular with no hinge, and Tate surmised that the razor sharp teeth must have been to shred food before it passed into the gullet.

  “They feel warm,” Tate said eventually.

  “Maybe there’s a hot water pipe running under the bed, to the bathroom,” said Gordon, nodding towards a narrow door that led to the ensuite.

  “Maybe. Let’s see. There is good detail for a forgery. Plenty of nicks along the tooth line. What did Lord Ashley say it was?”

  “A worm’s jaw,” replied Gordon who had put his glasses on and was examining the jaw closely.

  “Biggest worm I’ve ever seen,” Tuther muttered. Tate shot the younger man a look but Tuther was rifling through some papers from the chest.

  “Celus!”

  “What?”

  “Have some respect,” Tate barked, clearly exasperated by his strange companion’s behaviour.

  Tuther said nothing but went back to shuffling through the papers, albeit more quietly.

  “What do you think?” said Tate, turning back to the pathologist.

  “Well setting aside the impossible size of such a beast, I still say it’s fake. It’s certainly not bone, but I’m not sure what kind of rock this was sculpted from. And I cannot see any obvious signs of the stone being worked. The teeth show wear like you say, but...”

  A loud crack made them both jump. Tuther stood up and put the poker back in its rest by the fireplace.

  “Celus! What the...?”

  Tuther bent down, and picked up the two halves of the smashed vertebra from the floor, and examined them.

  Without saying anything, he crossed the floor to where Gordon was and showed him the smashed ends of the vertebra.

  “Well I never...” Gordon took both halves from Tuther to look at them closer.

  The smashed vertebra revealed a network of perfect cylinders running inside, exactly the like the bones found at Maiden Castle. These felt warm too and Gordon turned them over in his hand. Little flakes of dust and debris rose up from the inside, and Gordon took a small torch from his pocket to look inside with greater detail.

  “Incredible,” said Gordon eventually, and then coughed a little as the flakes irritated him. Despite the cool day, the room felt warm, and he took his jacket off. “The makeup of these.... whatever they are is very similar to those skeletons at your dig. Do you think...?” Something seemed to click into place. “Germans?” he asked.

  “I’m... not sure,” said Tate doubtfully. Tuther said nothing.

  Gordon continued to turn the vertebrae stones over in his hands. He was starting to feel quite unwell. His heart was beginning to race, and nausea rose up inside him.

  “I... I... just need to sit...” he began, and then a wave of grey overtook him.

  “He’s going,” he heard a far off voice say. Tuther maybe.

  He felt something take his shoulders, and then his weight. His ears popped and it he felt like he was in a dream.

  “Is he one of us?” someone else began, but the sound of his own heartbeat in his ears drowned everything else out.

  *

  [Maiden Castle Stele 34-36]

  By Portents and Designs, Danu sent Greine and Celus to the east where they met the blind brothers Gofannon and Amathon, whose hands were bound by a rope to a giant eagle and followed wherever it led, as punishment for speaking out against Lord Shemel, who had taken their lands.

  As Greine approached, the eagle changed into a Ghazal and they fought before Greine killed it. Restoring their sight by blues, Danu revealed that Gofannon and Amathon were her sons, once lost of the Tuatha and now found.

  Gofannon was a mighty smith and forged the Plate of Danu from the shattered iron pieces left after the Great Flood. Through the Plate, Danu was once again able to speak directly to Greine. Danu blessed Greine’s lands and the four surrounding kingdoms, that all may speak in the same tongue and rally to Greine’s cause of building the Second Seeplin.

  Amathon was a skilled mason, and so built the mightiest castle with the greatest towers on top of Greine’s fogou and fashioned the Stone of Fal into a throne.

  Danu gifted the castle to Greine and permitted him to use all the rooms for his court, with the exception of the Tallest Tower. The top of this tower was Danu’s temple, and from time-to-time was home [translation contested; host] to Her presence. Permanently shrouded in cloud, Greine and Celus were forbidden from entering the temple but once a year, and even then only after many washings and purifications.

  Occasionally, the presence of Danu in her temple could be seen from outside the tower, as though the Fires of Heaven were pouring forth.

  Danu regularly visited Greine, in the form of a horse drinking in a river, to instruct him on the construction of the next Seeplin.

  *

  Gordon opened his eyes. What had happened?

  He had been talking to Tate, and then he had started to feel hot... and then a bit ill... and now?

  He started to his feet and looked about him. He was no longer in St Giles House. He saw a number of small rises in the land around him and fancied that he recognised them as being those on the Ashley Cooper Estate. But there was no sign of the building, the driveway or indeed his car, let alone the strange companions he had journeyed here with.

  Behind him, he heard a clicking sound. Three figures ran past him. He went to call to them but stopped himself. He had taken them for men, but there was something wrong. Their gait was almost mechanical. Each stride was exactly the same as the previous. No stumble, or adjustment, just a solid sprint. Each was dressed in drab attire, with a black cloak or shawl draped over their shoulders. Their hair, jet black, reached their shoulders, and their skin was as pale as alabaster.

  For a moment Gordon thought they were triplets. However as one turned, barking something to the two others, he realised that despite their hawkish features they were not quite identical. Brothers maybe?

  “The Goddess blast you!” the one in front snarled. “Run you dogs! The Third Twine’s army is right behind us!”

  And then Gordon saw their eyes. Their irises that were not just black, but totally pitch as if they were pits that had never felt the sun’s caress, and their faces smooth as glass, as if they had never smiled a single day in all their lives.

  The three figures carried on running towards the west. Although it could only have been late morning, Gordon saw th
e sky was beginning to turn lilac, and then deepen to a more ominous purple.

  Following the direction of the retreating figures, Gordon crested a rise and found himself at a line of trees. He was sure that there had been a dry stone wall here. Stepping out from the shade, he saw the land fall away from him, heading towards the coast. Even though the sky was free of cloud, the horizon was a sickening purple, like a new bruise, and he felt his stomach clench.

  He saw lightning flash and fork. Where was it? Over the sea? On the coast? Gordon was not sure that he should be able to see that far, and yet he did. A distant peal of thunder came, deep and rumbling, like a mighty leviathan stirring from an eon of rest.

  The lightning came again followed by more thunder. And then again. And again.

  Whatever was going on, it was building up. Another flash. And another. And another.

  The forks were nearly continuous now, overlapping each other, sometimes joining to form super bolts that left the air sizzling with ozone. And still more. Three bolts filled the sky simultaneously.

  Gordon could just make out three dots of the men he had seen, all still running at full pelt. The purple sky had advanced from the horizon, now rumbling over his head, and away to the east. It was all around him, boiling like a cauldron.

  Five bolts. Six. A seventh crackled into life like a possessed live wire. An eighth arched epileptically the length of the horizon. Gordon lost count how many were filling the sky at any one time. The peals of thunder were running into each other, becoming a single constant tone.

  And then, above the cacophony of nature’s savagery came a noise that he would never forget. Like some demon bovine giving birth, a deep wet tearing sound came from the south. From the sea.

  The crackle of lightning intensified, and Gordon involuntarily shrank back.

  The tearing boom came again and this time, the wind joined with it, rising in pitch, threatening to drown out the now constant roll of thunder. Something caught his eye, slightly to his right. He half turned, and in that moment another matrix of lightning bolts erupted, casting an impossible profile on the skyline.

  The lightning blazed again, like heavenly fire, and Gordon saw it clearly. There, looking down from his elevated position, he saw the shape of a castle in the far distance. The stockade fence was clearly silhouetted, and behind that the rising walls of a primitive castle. At one end he could see a tower under construction like some incongruous stub, and the keep looked bulky and substantial.

  But... his mind was reaching. He knew that area. He had played there as a boy. There was nothing there, only the grassy mounds surrounding a long dry moat. There had been no castle for... at least a millennium. Maybe more.

  Another boom drew his attention back to the coastline, and the wind increased again. Behind him, Gordon could hear the trees beginning to creak against the unrelenting onslaught. Pieces of grit were being kicked up from the ground, and he had to narrow his eyes which were already watering.

  Sensing that he should probably be clear of the trees, he continued forward a little way. The sky over the coast was now a complex weave of lightning bolts, and if he could have heard the thunder over the shriek of the wind, he would have known that its pitch had changed, becoming deeper and more menacing.

  The boom came again, stronger now and drowning all else out. And something moved in the sky above the coast. Something colossal and monstrous and that should not be. There it was again. An impossible shape, arcing and swinging across the purple boiling clouds.

  Gordon gasped and the gale instantly filled his lungs, forcing the breath from him, leaving him winded. What was that he had seen? It could not be.

  He saw it again. Clearly this time. There was no mistaking it.

  A fleeting glimpse of something resembling a single vast alien arm swung across the sky. Tens of miles... no, hundreds of miles across. It seemed to be descending from the very heavens. Bulging muscle rippled in the clouds.

  Gordon could do nothing but stare, slack-jawed and terrified, as the impossible behemoth swayed liked some drunken apocryphal juggernaut across the skyline.

  And what was that? There was something else there. His eyes were streaming and he could barely make it out. Things. Things were falling off the abomination. From his vantage point, they looked like matchsticks. Tiny slender pieces, of insignificant size, compared to the nightmare that was tearing itself from the sky, like the Antichrist cannibalising its own mother as it was laboured and delivered. And the pieces were falling. Thousands of them falling over and over and over. Falling into the sea and onto the land.

  If they look like matchsticks from here, reasoned Gordon, they must be... hundreds of feet long.

  His mind snapped back to the stone jaws of the Ashley-Cooper statue. And he knew. In that moment of terrible enlightenment, he knew the jaw was real. No mere approximations of a mad sculptor. No terrifying ravings of a deranged artist or falling fascist regime. It was real.

  Gordon recalled reading a book once, by an American author. His mind grasped for his name but missed. He remembered the use of the word cyclopean and had not understood the sense of proportion it was trying to convey.

  He understood now.

  Then, like a dying bull, the tentacled monstrosity slammed into the ocean.

  For a moment, Gordon did not comprehend what he had just seen. The creature – whatever it was – was obscured by a grey haze.

  And then his mind caught up with his vision and screamed. A second later his mouth got the message but his lungs were too sore to oblige. Instead, he whimpered, and that too was snatched and stolen by the hurricane around him.

  The ground began to heave. Slowly at first, but the oscillations quickly grew in intensity and frequency, as if some elemental housewife were shaking a carpet. The trees behind him surrendered noisily, throwing themselves into the dirt, prostrate in supplication. Gordon knelt to the ground to maintain his balance and watched helplessly as the grey haze moved towards the shoreline, thickening, and darkening like a drunken temper made flesh.

  Its height began to build rapidly, and by the time it entered the shallows, Gordon had given up guessing how high the tidal wave was. Miles probably. Such considerations were irrelevant.

  As the apocalypse hit the shore, Gordon noticed the white foam, high at the top.

  It is travelling slower at the bottom, he mused. It’s going to break over you, Harry.

  Gordon watched as the castle was enveloped, like an actor on stage stepping behind a curtain. The ground continued to buck, and he found that he had to lay flat. He turned over to watch the last of the sky, as the wave came crashing down, erasing all in its path.

  And then he closed his eyes and bade black sleep welcome.

  *

  Gordon’s chest heaved and his lungs gasped. Something was on top of him… no, someone was on top of him.

  He started to struggle, arms thrashing wildly. The figure cleared him, and he realised that there was more than one.

  Gordon sat up choking and spluttering. Tears ran down his face.

  “Wha...?” he began.

  “It’s ok Doctor,” Tate said soothingly, his hand reaching for Gordon’s shoulder. “You’re ok.”

  “You gave us quite a turn there,” said Tuther from behind Tate.

  Gordon looked about himself, bewildered.

  “Wha...?” he began again.

  “You fainted,” said Tate. The window behind him was open now, letting a cool freshening breeze in. “We were just getting you onto the bed when you came around.”

  Gordon was confused. “How long was I...?”

  “A couple of seconds... a minute at the most.”

  He felt like he had been gone hours, but already Gordon’s experience was fading, like a bad dream. Yet he knew he had seen something. The purple sky. The tentacle. God, the worms. And the wave. The memory was distant, but it was there.

  Gordon had an uneasy feeling. It was more than a dream. He knew what he had seen. And heard. You do not hear
the wind like that in a dream.

  “Did I hit my head?” Gordon asked, groggily.

  Tate shook his head. “No. We were close enough to catch you. Do you have a headache?”

  Gordon nodded.

  “Fetch some water Celus.”

  Tuther left the room, and Tate heard the sound of his footsteps on the staircase as he tried to find Mrs Torinelli. He came back with the elderly housekeeper a few minutes later, and Tate took her to one side to explain recent events to her.

  Tuther sat next to Gordon on the side of the bed, his back to Tate.

  “Doesn’t matter how many times you see it, it still shakes you,” he said quietly.

  Gordon looked at Tuther with a deep loathing but made no reply.

  “You’ll try to write it off,” Tuther muttered, looking out of the window. “A dream. A flight of fancy. The illusions of an overworked mind in a stressful situation.”

  “What do you know of it?” Gordon asked weakly, his throat still dry.

  Tuther shrugged. “Blake once said that if the doors of Man’s perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is, infinite and majestic. Man sees through these narrow chinks that he has built into his cavern. I think Blake knew that Time was an artificial construct.” Tuther paused, and then looked straight at Gordon. “And if one was to truly open their perceptions, you could experience past, present and future simultaneously.”

  Gordon looked hard at the man, still trying to control his breathing, trying to comprehend what Tuther was saying.

  “What was it?” Gordon whispered back, not looking at Tuther any longer, but out into the late morning. “Past or future?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” shrugged Tuther, looking to the coast. “It’s already happened.”

  “It matters to me Mr Tuther. And a good deal of other folk too I shouldn’t wonder.” Gordon’s voice had a steely resolve.

  “I know it does Doctor. I know it does.” Tuther got up and joined the conference with Tate and Mrs Torinelli.

  *

  It would be a good hour before Gordon felt safe enough to drive and the journey back to Maiden Castle was conducted in total silence. They were greeted by a bad tempered Sergeant Coombes who demanded to know where they had been.