The Unhappy Medium, page 27
‘Mein Gott, was ist das!’ he blurted. ‘Herr doctor, excuse me please!’ And with that he dashed away leaving Newton finally alone with LeClarard’s clockwork enigma. Alex reappeared beside him.
‘Don’t worry, he’ll be a while, I knocked over a coffee percolator. Right bloody mess.’ As confirmation, there was a distant bout of tutting and fretting that echoed past them in the now-empty museum. ‘So what’s what then Newton, old boy?’
‘OK, the riddle is about time and ... the orrery is basically a clock, right? The key is to put in the right date, and we can do that by moving the alignments of the planets to the date in question,’ said Newton.
‘Right,’ replied Alex. ‘So are we setting it for his birthday?’
‘I’m guessing, let’s try that first.’ Newton wound the planets around using a small brass handle in the base. The mechanism, beautifully engineered, moved with oiled grace until finally it reached 19 February 1694. ‘And ... voila!’ said Newton with a flourish.
‘Or not ...’ said Sixsmith after an unsatisfying silence.
‘Dammit,’ said Newton. ‘I should have known he’d make it harder than that. OK let’s think.’
‘Oh yes, let’s!’ said Sixsmith. ‘Er ... think about what?’
‘The first line of the code,’ said Newton distractedly. ‘Maybe it’s a Vigenère cipher, very popular when laughing boy was around.’
‘A what?’
‘Vigenère code. It’s a code that shifts letters along the alphabet – so maybe C represents A, D means B, for instance. But a Vigenère code is more complicated because each letter is shifted by a different amount depending on the sequence of letters in a separate keyword. So LeClarard’s code, JLZGCVQUHT – that could only be decoded if you know the keyword.’
‘Which is?’
‘I’ve no idea. But we’ve got to start guessing right now.’ Newton leant back out of the case and grabbed his phone.
‘What are you doing?’ asked Sixsmith.
‘Well back in the day you had to have a deciphering chart, but an app on my phone can do it, no worries. We still need the keyword, though, and we’re going to have to guess it. Can you keep an eye on the curator? I can’t have him stumbling back in on me.’
‘Gotcha,’ said Alex, and he flitted silently away towards the back offices.
Newton started to try possible keywords on a Vigenère decoding app. First he tried the vain man’s name, ‘LeClarard’, and came up with the useless answer ‘YHXVCEQDEI’. ‘Dammit!’ said Newton. ‘OK sunshine, let’s try your first name.’ He punched in ‘Flavian’, but once again the answer came back as gibberish.
In Purgatory, the astrologer slowly opened his eyes. He was only too aware that his puzzle was under attack, but cunning little weasel that he was, he was still confident that he was one embarrassingly obvious step ahead of Newton. A broad grin spread across his thin lips. The game was on.
Newton, frustrated, paused. ‘Bugger bugger ... come on ... think.’ He cast his eyes around the room for inspiration but found none. ‘Globe, geography ... could be Corsica.’ Newton punched in the name of the island. Once again the deciphered text was pure drivel. ‘Wait, he wouldn’t have called it Corsica, it would have been Corse. Of course!’ Newton confidently punched the word in and hey presto ... more gobbledygook.
LeClarard’s smile became broader still and sickeningly smug.
Sixsmith abruptly appeared beside Newton. ‘Get a bloody move on, the curator’s nearly finished cleaning up.’
‘I’m doing my frigging best, thank you very much,’ said Newton angrily, as Sixsmith faded away again.
He was grinding his teeth, prepared to try anything. Then it came to him – maybe LeClarard had made the keyword blindingly obvious. He punched in the lower line of the inscription, MDCXCIV.
‘XIXJANVIER’ came the answer.
LeClarard stopped smiling.
‘Gotcha!’ said Newton. ‘19 January 1694’. Wasting no time, he rotated the planets on the orrery to match the date, a month ahead of LeClarard’s birthday, and was rewarded with a loud clunk.
‘No!’ shrieked LeClarard. ‘NOOOOO!’
The sun, a three-inch brass sphere at the centre of the instrument, split apart across its equator. A wisp of sickly purple light seeped out from inside like steam from a kettle.
‘Bingo,’ said Newton. He leant carefully forward across the fragile brass solar system and lifted the top half of the sun upwards, then retrieved the object inside.
‘Quick!’ said Sixsmith from behind him, ‘he’s coming back!’
Looking into the palm of his hand, Newton was confused by what he saw. For all the world it could have been a dog snack. But it wasn’t. To his horror, he suddenly realised he was holding the preserved leathery shell-like ear of Flavian LeClarard. A golden hoop earring pierced its foul lobe and Newton saw several nasty little hairs poking out from the ear hole; it looked uncomfortably like a pork scratching. Gingerly he stuffed the withered ear into his jacket pocket trying not to gag, then quickly returned the orrery clock back to its original time and tried to appear unflustered as the curator reappeared.
‘Ah Herr curator,’ said Newton, ‘you’re back.’
‘Ya Dr Barlow,’ said the curator. ‘I am so sorry to have been delayed. It was a most annoying technical failure of the coffee percolator. So typical you know. Our budgets are very low you see. If it was one of the government ministries I am quite sure that it would have been of superior manufacturer, but not for us the Miele or the AEG. No. It was cracked very badly and poured all over the carpets. What a mess! Mein Gott what a mess.’ He sighed. ‘Such is the lot today of a modern museum professional,’ he went on. ‘You know, Dr Barlow, the government is quite indifferent to the way that ...’ Newton cut him short.
‘Sorry. You must forgive me but I have a plane to catch. Thank you so much for your assistance.’
‘Oh,’ said the curator, somewhat crestfallen. ‘Do you have everything you came for?’ He scuttled after Newton, who was hurrying away towards the exit.
‘Oh yes,’ said Newton smiling, ‘I certainly do. Thank you so much.’ He emerged onto the busy street and patted his pocket smugly.
Cockily pleased with himself, Newton virtually skipped all the way back to the hotel. Safe in his room, he carefully took LeClarard’s mummified ear from his pocket, placed it in a small plastic bag and hid it amongst his toiletries. He headed for the airport and by six o’clock he was back in London at the Deptford disposal site.
LeClarard’s ear burnt brightly, if only briefly, in the furnace. Then, thankfully, it was gone. In Purgatory, his cell fell silent. A small religious community in the jungles of Guatemala was spared the deaths LeClarard had been so looking forward to arranging, and now they could live in peace. Until the day, that is, when they would kill themselves all on their own without any outside assistance.
Needless to say, Jameson and Eric the Greek were delighted. What had been puzzling and perplexing the Purgatorial council for some thirty years, well, Newton had solved it with stylish academic panache in the space of a mere afternoon. Newton’s probationary period was officially over – time for new assignments.
On a roll, he went on to locate and secure the last mortal remains of one Tobias Conroy, a nondescript accountant who died in 1768. His polite presence on earth had been drab and uneventful, but in Purgatory he was revered as a tireless mover and shaker. Newton placed his bones in a safe deposit box in Mayfair just in time to prevent him being mashed up in a road-widening scheme.
Next, he uncovered the hidden relics of a colonial sadist in a junk shop in Welwyn Garden City, his timely disposal preventing the embarrassing haunting of a lap-dancing club in Ashford. Newton solved puzzles, broke codes and outbid his rivals at auction. Alex’s relic, the half-moon spectacles he’d been so wedded to, were also placed safely in a museum case at the Wellcome Trust in London. Newton travelled all over Europe and the Home Counties, righting wrongs, burying monsters, and saving the nondescript but useful. In the process, he made himself something of a star. With a new job, the trick is to make yourself indispensible and already, judging by his astonishing success rate, Newton was certainly that.
Fantastical months passed. Income poured in and Newton’s new relationship with Viv grew into a permanent and content fixture; he was once again a very happy boy. On top of all that, despite all Rowena’s increasingly petty efforts to derail it, his relationship with his daughter was blossoming. His new life was bizarre, maybe, but it was full of complexity, intrigue and a sense of purpose, and although he couldn’t tell anyone about it, Newton Barlow was having the time of his life.
CHAPTER 23 – The faithfu l
In the grounds of an old French manor house, the Bonetaker sat immobile and massive amongst the frosted shrubs, steaming gently like a compost heap. Wisps of vapour rose from his mildewed mass as he sat, stock still, watching the brightly lit windows.
He sighed wearily to himself as he pondered his next move, bitterly cold but unmoved by the frigid air. He was not a complex spirit, this Bonetaker. But as he followed his relentless pathways across Europe, he felt an acute sadness that would be a hard burden for anyone, let alone one so utterly alone, to carry. He was not only the last of his kind, he was the last of the most rejected amongst his own, cast away so far back in his primitive memory that the bitter details were lost to him. Only the lingering sting of that hurtful departure remained upon him, heavy and perpetual as only a really great pain can be. His Neanderthal tribe, low-brow in more senses than one, had once lived all over Europe, weathering ice storms and a savage natural world, the population reaching all the corners of the once-virgin land. Despite their historical notoriety for brutishness, these thick-set peoples had actually been surprisingly sophisticated, making jewellery, decorating themselves in vivid colours and using cunning new hunting techniques to harvest the plentiful game that covered the continent. Mammoth, bison and deer had been their quarry. Gifted as the highest manifestation of an evolutionary tree, they had made the most of their golden time.
Everything is relative, of course, especially relatives, and once the all-new smarter-than-thou Homo sapiens began showing up, the Neanderthals regressed from state-of-the-art humanoid brain box to dumb-ass throwback within geological seconds, just as today a brand new smart-phone can become as impressive as a breeze block in the time it takes to open the packaging. And so it was that the Bonetaker’s people were thrown firmly onto the back of their huge hairy feet. They were inexorably marginalised into the tougher landscapes where the game was rare, the firewood was non-existent and the berries gave you diarrhoea. In the swamps, mountains and moorlands, their besieged populations grew so small that inevitably, as their social lives shrivelled, they began to inbreed. As the top-of-the-range Homo sapiens sapiens (so good they named them twice) multiplied in fertile plains and valleys, the Neanderthals struggled to maintain a gene pool deep enough to reach their hairy knees.
Birth defects and mutations were rife. Dwarfism, gigantism, humped backs and webbed feet proliferated, and the small desperate communities cruelly banished those with such freakish novelties into the wilderness before settling down to a night of hairy lovemaking with the family.
And when these poor souls were banished, they were banished for good. Ideally, to die.
Giant as he was, the Bonetaker was mutated in another more complex sense. Not only did he fail to succumb to the elements in the deep dark forests, he lived to a ripe old age – one might even say over-ripe. For this outcast, all 25 stone of him, had a highly unusual gift.
The Bonetaker could not die.
No matter what the elements or the landscape threw at him – disease, blizzards and droughts – he lived on. Year after endless year, decade on decade and millennium upon crawling millennium, time passed taking the gentle giant with it. He’d outlived his heartless parents and his cruel, mocking siblings by a hundred thousand lifetimes, wandering heavy hearted through the landscape, headed who knows where.
Such longevity, married as it was to such utter rejection, is no gift at all. It is hard to imagine such loneliness. The Bonetaker had hidden from primitive villages in the Stone Age, the Iron Age and the Bronze Age, watching silently from the tree line as the humans raised their young, farmed, and ate together. Huge tears avalanched down his monstrous filthy cheeks.
Inevitably, he spawned a thousand folk tales, spun and exaggerated by liars and attention seekers, none of them accurate or kind. As he moved around Europe, one step ahead of the last manhunt, he would inspire a tale of goblins here, trolls there and Almases out on the Steppes. Always he would be portrayed as a monster, a terrifying supernatural killer of livestock and a ravisher of virgins. It was of course, utter nonsense. In reality the Bonetaker, despite his rugged bad looks and Gothic nightmarishness, was a committed vegetarian who only reluctantly killed in self-defence. Sadly though, this was an outcome he was forced to resort to all too often. Hunted by dogs, burnt from his forest refuges and driven high up into freezing mountain passes by swarms of vengeful, ignorant humans, he learnt to avoid the judgmental, superstitious peoples who now ruled the earth. Alone and despairing, he waited for a death that never, ever, came.
When his salvation did eventually come, it came from an unexpected direction, one humid summer night in the Black Forest of Germany, somewhere in the middle of the middle bit of the middle of the Middle Ages.
The Bonetaker had been sitting, forlorn and immense in the treeline above a walled city, watching, as he so often did, the more blessed lives unfolding beneath him. Lonely as ever, he was primitively mulling over how unfair life was, when he became aware, gradually, that he was not alone. Instinctively, he adopted a defensive posture to the white-robed man who now floated before him. But this strange human male was quite unlike those who had been tormenting him most of his unhappy life. This one was bright and smiling, exuding an unfamiliar kindness, glowing and benign, albeit with the unmistakable whiff of a petty bureaucrat.
‘Please, do not be alarmed,’ said Eric the Greek, oddly making himself understood to the Neanderthal, for whom illiteracy, on every level, was a defining feature. The soft words echoed in his heart and head with a beautiful clarity, and the Bonetaker, unused to communication from any source, was stopped in his massive tracks.
Goodwill was a total stranger to this poor outcast, as mysterious as love and as precious as gold. The warmth and kindness washed over him like a healing balm, soothing the pain and rejection he had carried for so long.
The glowing being told him of the earth, of heaven and of hell, the meaning of nature and magic and then, already intoxicated by contact, the Bonetaker and his new friend were joined by others. They clothed and fed the giant, and taught him a rudimentary language, training him to be their agent on earth. For the first time, a sense of purpose and meaning found lodging within the Neanderthal and he embraced it as fully as his small but perfectly formed soul could bear without exploding like a firecracker.
They filled his sloping forehead with strange and powerful new compulsions. More than happy to oblige his kind benefactors, the Bonetaker was soon travelling the length and breadth of Europe. He set forth in search of foul relics, trinkets and individuals, targets his patrons needed eliminated to rid Purgatory of its most evil souls.
And once he had located them – he destroyed them utterly.
But in time, his guardians drifted on. Gradually, they stopped coming at all, leaving the Bonetaker alone again in the dark forests. His big heart would have burst if it could have done. Yet, imprinted as he had been by these odd mystical beings, he remained compelled by their programming to seek out evil and all its traces upon the face of the earth. So, for centuries, he had wandered alone and unbidden, sniffing the winds for the traces of the malignancy that they had made his perpetual quarry.
It was just such a compulsion that had now led him here, across the narrow sea from England to Normandy. Steaming in the frost, the giant sniffed the air, focusing his odd senses on the manor house, feeling to pinpoint the precise location of the creeping evil that was arousing him. From the neglected shrubs, he impassively watched the tall windows, some partially unshuttered to reveal frantic activity inside. Outside on the gravel, men were dragging full jerry cans out from two BMWs.
The Bonetaker edged forward. He weaved silently through the vegetation, seeking to gain a better view through one of the tall windows. He saw a large roaring fire, heaped with files and documents that kept the flames leaping high in the hearth. Men in combat fatigues busied themselves packing suitcases and hold-alls, periodically checking their automatic weapons and ammunition pouches. But there was another man in the room that the Bonetaker could not clearly see – a grey-haired man, hidden from the Bonetaker in a high-backed chair. A young bearded man cradling a submachine gun walked up to the chair and addressed the mystery figure.
‘Father, we are nearly ready, you’ll have to move soon.’ A dark-suited arm extended, cradling a carving of Cardinal La Senza in his left hand as if it was a brandy glass. The Bonetaker’s nostrils flared.
‘Wait!’ said the old man, raising his other arm to solicit a pause in the frantic preparation. ‘Have your men face the windows, slowly and carefully.’
‘But father ...’
‘Do it now Gunter,’ he said, softly. ‘Do it now. We have a visitor.’ Gunter turned alarmed towards the windows. He motioned to his men. Obediently, the black-clad gunmen took up station at the windows, their automatics held up in preparation. Ostentatiously, they cocked their weapons.
‘What is it father? What have you sensed?’ The old man stood slowly and deliberately.
‘There is someone outside, no, not someone, something .’ He pulled on his leather gloves finger by finger. ‘It is watching us.’
