The Unhappy Medium, page 3
But the horrific figure was not interested in the boy. His lumpy hand instead lifted up a single piece of the Goth’s ungodly bling and regarded it fixedly with his cold eyes. Though fitted with a cheap modern chain, the fine silverwork and ingrained tarnish pre-dated the tawdry Camden tat that hung alongside it. It had been fashioned in the shape of a small lantern complete with tiny glass panels and a locked latch that the Goth, despite much effort from his podgy fingers, had been unable to open. Inside lay the object of the monstrous figure’s unyielding attention – a tiny shard of yellowed, part-carbonised bone.
‘Take it! Take it man, you want it? Take it ... just don’t kill me!’ blubbered the Goth, whose bowel movements were now near continuous. Deaf to the boy, the figure merely closed the gigantic fingers of his right hand around the tiny relic and slapped his other hand like a filthy mop across the Goth’s sweaty, make-up splattered face. As he prepared himself for death there was a sudden movement above him, fast for such a huge, cumbersome body. With it the cheap chain parted noisily, and the silver and glass relic was taken. Leaning back from the whimpering boy, the monster opened the vast drapes of his overcoat to reveal a foul wasteland of ragged, filthy undergarments and an ancient leather bag slung under the right armpit. Deftly, the trinket disappeared into the satchel’s damp interior.
With that, his mission complete, suddenly the monster left, leaving the toilet door swinging on its hinges and the terrified Goth exposed to the washbasins and a curious general public. He was genuinely pale for the first time in his life and at least one stone lighter. His trembling hand slowly reached out and tugged the flush.
Ignored by the crowds on the concourse and drivers milling around the car park, the lumbering presence moved straight to the edge of the service station and hopped with surprising grace over the perimeter wall and away into the scrubland beyond. Above him, gathering darkness had brought with it a sudden squall, rain falling in sheets across the neglected agricultural land. Soon the sound of traffic from the busy motorway gave way to the sodden hiss of the downpour as the dark figure pushed on towards the Northumberland hills. Darkness closed around him as he climbed. Finally, he reached a stony depression in the hillside, a small hollow offering some meagre protection from the lashing wind. Here, he built a small fire, which sputtered and danced in the storm. In its puny light, the man in the wide-brimmed hat with the greasy crow’s feather began his incantations.
The Latin mantras were learnt so long ago and repeated so many times that he knew every complex stanza by his heavy heart, even if he didn’t understand a single word of them.
He didn’t need to. Laying a filthy rag on a flat stone, he reached into his bag for the Goth’s trinket and dropped it beside a small pestle and mortar. As the rain slammed down, driven by a hard easterly wind, he brought up his huge fist, the hard granite pestle balled up between his monstrous fingers. With staggering violence he brought it crashing down upon the ornate artefact. Its remarkable 300-year survival ended there in a wreck of splinters.
The trinket that the Bonetaker had shattered contained the sole remaining fragment of one-time fraudster, bully, abuser of children and serial torturer of women, Billy ‘The Knife’ Hamilton – the last remnant of a man who’d burned the innocent and abducted girls from hundreds of hamlets across the British Empire and who, even after his public execution, had still hung his foul shadow over the living. In the rain-haggard hollow, mumbling his ancient ramblings, the Bonetaker dropped the shattered 300-year-old bone into the mortar and with his voice rising against the howling gale, he added dried herbs and complex powders. Finally, he dropped in blood from a fresh gash upon his scarred hand and mixed them all together into a paste.
Far away, in an entirely different kind of place, a whirling being radiating malice and sickly purple light spasmed suddenly in its incandescent cage, its face sharpened by a life of constant spite and hatred but now filled with a shock realisation of its new vulnerability. Back in the world of men, the Bonetaker was ritualistically destroying Hamilton’s final surviving manifestation upon the good earth. As the giant mouthed his incantations, the murderer in this other world realised in a flash that his second time had come – his final time. There would be no more hauntings, no more possessions. The spirit of Hamilton, in a deep and maniacal panic, flew raging at his restraints, surges of purple plasma swimming around him within the cell in which he had for so long been contained .
To no avail.
For as the Bonetaker’s massive hand ground remorselessly, the raging fury began to abate, and in time, the tendrils of hatred, anger and malevolence that had made the spirit such a danger lost their ghastly purchase. The vile wraith watched aghast as the evil light flowed out of him like an ebbing tide.
Then all at once, the light, and with it all traces of one Billy ‘The Knife’ Hamilton – in this world or in any other – vanished for good.
The Bonetaker, his work at an end for now, buried the mangled trinket deep in the moorland soil and diligently folded away his otherworldly toolkit.
CHAPTER 3 – Newton Barlo w
There was nothing fantastical, paranormal or superstitious about Dr Newton Barlow. Dr Barlow was extremely black and white. He carefully trod the logical path of scientific reasoning and if it couldn’t be measured, observed, duplicated and peer reviewed, then Newton was having none of it.
Not that he was a walking talking real-life Mr Spock. On the contrary, Newton had deliberately gone out of his way to buck the cliché of the geeky academic and in time he became about as cool as an internationally renowned physicist can be, hanging around with rock bands, featuring in men’s fashion magazines and cracking smart and occasionally edgy jokes on panel shows. Good looking in a tall, gangly way, Newton was popular with the ladies, the envy of the academic male and a gift to the media. His sharp sideburns, Buddy Holly quiff and trademark black schmutter marked him out from his contemporaries resulting in a certain sniping resentment, especially when he popped up on prime-time TV spouting forth on everything from CERN to the paranormal. But the majority of criticism ended up looking an awful lot like professional jealousy, which of course most of it was.
It didn’t help that Newton came from a dynasty of scientific high-achievers. His grandfather had been right there at Los Alamos with Oppenheimer during the Manhattan Project, high on theoretical physics as the bomb took its first baby steps towards Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Like so many who had been on this theoretical roller coaster, Richard D. Barlow had been too deep in equations to foresee the horror that the terrible weapon could actually inflict. The devastating results shocked the sensitive Richard Barlow so much that he found it impossible to settle into the routines of the Cold War, with its paranoia and nuclear arms racing. So he had decided to up sticks from the desert laboratories and married a beautiful, gifted research student he’d met on a visit to England in 1947. She had turned the physicist’s head so comprehensively that it wasn’t a difficult decision to make the move, a neat transition from Los Alamos to the leafy cloisters of old Cambridge where he took a senior teaching position in the university’s prestigious physics department. Settled into a reassuringly theoretical environment, he thrived, and with his wife had a son, Graham.
Graham Barlow had been only ten years old when his father died in a car crash, killed outright in a collision with a truckload of sugar beet on the London road. But already Graham had enough exposure to the rarefied scientific environment of the university campus to steer him into theoretical physics. He never questioned following his father’s footsteps for a precisely measured nanosecond. In fact, the echoes of his father’s brilliance perhaps drove him beyond immersion to a form of scientific zealotry, his ambition evolving in time to border on the absurd.
Graham Barlow’s theoretical work at Oxford University in the 1970s was nothing less than magnificent. His theory of as-yet-undiscovered quarks had all the mathematical elegance, beauty even, that was needed to finally persuade the doubters that these elusive nuclear particles must exist. Several colleagues quipped that Graham Barlow would surely bag himself a Nobel Prize and that possibility hovered constantly in the back of Graham’s mind as he reached the prime of his career. Then, unwittingly, he and his wife Germaine found themselves with a son, Newton.
Germaine had been her husband’s professional confidant, ally and in many ways a scientific equal. So it was with some trepidation that the parents elected for Germaine to step back from her own career to bring up young Newton almost alone, giving Professor Graham Barlow distance from the nursery and the freedom to continue his research unobstructed.
In fairness, Germaine was in many ways relieved to finally have a reason to detach herself from the intensity of her husband’s ambitious programmes. His obsessive drive for success was becoming increasingly divisive at home. Science for breakfast, physics for lunch and a bedtime reading from Darwin; there would be little time in the Barlow household for basic childhood fun if Germaine had not dug her heels in. As the father pushed, so the mother increasingly pushed back.
All the same, Newton was genuinely bitten with the science bug. The house had been full of scientific curiosities, journals and papers, and most visitors were luminaries from the global scientific community. Newton had so many fond memories of playing games in the garden with assorted academics, or helping out with fun experiments organised by some of his father’s more light-hearted colleagues, keeping the lad entertained while the father sweated himself thin in his study.
Newton especially enjoyed it when one physicist in particular visited. Dr Alex Sixsmith had an irresistibly cheeky sense of humour and often, Newton had noticed, seemed to find more time for the young boy than his increasingly driven father. With no children of his own, the jolly, bespectacled and portly Dr Sixsmith couldn’t resist playing the fun uncle whenever he dropped by. Pathologically mischievous, he’d have Newton in stitches over his mother’s dinners in an atmosphere of homeliness the unmarried doctor clearly relished. And while they giggled helplessly at Sixsmith’s banter, Newton’s father would huff in frustration, the serious discussions he had intended to impose upon his colleague utterly side-showed. In later years, it was this same intensity that finally destroyed his marriage, just as Newton neared his eleventh birthday.
After their sudden but restrained separation, Germaine rented a small terraced house within easy walking distance of Graham. Newton’s father continued his work, but it was in a softer, almost apologetic manner. Belatedly, he realised how much his ambitions had cost the family and his own state of mind.
But it was all too late. The punishing research finally caught up with the learned Professor Graham Barlow and in the small hours of a humid July evening, he had a massive, fatal heart attack. He was found slumped inert over his desk, his bifocals askew on his lined and colourless face, his head resting on a pile of half-read research papers. That early-morning call from Stockholm had never come, and now it never would.
Ironically, the obituaries rewarded the dead physicist with all the plaudits he had never received in life. There was a sad paradox in this posthumous eminence. Although Professor Graham Barlow had never achieved the recognition he felt he deserved, his work had touched many. He had opened stuck doors across whole swathes of complex enquiry and while he may not have bagged the big prize, his work had enabled many others to find the right path. All this was apparent at the funeral, where the list of luminaries attending read as comprehensively as any Who’s Who .
Newton, never comfortable in a church himself, was baffled that his father had opted to have a church funeral. He’d always been such a devout atheist, but here they were anyway. Despite the religious teaching obligatory in his school, Newton had made the leap from belief via agnosticism to hardened atheism in the space of an afternoon in his first term. As he solemnly but reluctantly followed the funeral service, Newton resolved never to back down from his own well-honed beliefs, even if mortally terrified by his own imminent death.
After the service, Dr Sixsmith sought Newton out. True to form, the teenager was avoiding the cloying sympathies and trying to engage the gathered scientists in detailed conversation. Sixsmith ruffled the boy’s hair affectionately and led him away into the churchyard where they sat down together on a neat wooden bench.
‘How are you doing then young Newton?’ Sixsmith asked, his trademark irreverence restrained somewhat by the occasion.
‘I’m fine thank you, Dr Sixsmith,’ he replied earnestly. ‘It’s sad, of course, but I plan to get back to work as soon as I can.’
‘Work?’ Sixsmith narrowed his eyes briefly in puzzled amusement. ‘Are you talking about your schoolwork or have you a secret laboratory somewhere I don’t know about?’
Newton blushed at his own seriousness. ‘Sorry, er ... I just meant that I’m looking forward to getting all this over with. Can’t say I like funerals.’
‘No, not much fun,’ Sixsmith smiled knowingly, peering over his half-moon spectacles. ‘I tell you Newton, when it’s my time I’d rather get fossilised or something. Fired into space maybe.’ Newton laughed, and Sixsmith leant forward conspiratorially. ‘To be honest old boy, I find all this ...’ he gestured at the sombre graves around the churchyard, ‘... it’s all so ritualistic and silly. Don’t you think? Why we have to treat death in this po-faced way is beyond me. You live, you die and that’s that. Your atoms mingle back into the same cosmos they came from. Why do we need to dress it all up with fairy tales and solemnity?’ He pointed at the hearse. ‘I mean look at that thing, ridiculous! I’d rather get carted off to the crematorium in a milk float.’
‘Or a taxi!’ said Newton.
‘That would be good,’ said Sixsmith. ‘I’d like to see what they’d do when you failed to tip them. Anyway Newton, your mother tells me you’re doing well at school, especially the sciences. Not that I’m surprised of course! But any idea what you have in mind for when you leave?’
‘Well, I thought I’d try theoretical physics – there’s some fantastic research going on in superstring theory. That would be good. I’m also dreadfully keen on languages so I’ll probably do a couple of those on the side, Latin and French for starters, probably some German when I get the chance.’ Sixsmith pulled a teasingly reproachful expression.
‘Er ... hello? What about girls, music and clubbing? What about hanging out and generally having fun? Any time for all of that in your career map Newton, old chap?’ He smirked as Newton blushed.
‘Uh ... I guess, I mean I expect so,’ he stammered. ‘I haven’t really thought much about that kind of thing.’
‘Look Newton,’ Sixsmith elaborated, ‘I love science, I really do. But you can’t let it dictate everything you do. Not everything in life is quantifiable; some things just have to be done because they make you happy. That’s all. Leave some space in your life that’s free from all this hard logic.’ Newton sat silent for a second, confused. Free from logic? What on earth did he mean by that? He was fumbling for a considered reply when Dr Sixsmith cut him short again. ‘Come on Newton me old mucker, let’s stop that enormous brain of yours from reaching meltdown, we’d better get back – they’ll be wondering where we’ve got to.’
The mourners were spilling out of the chapel and back towards their cars. As Newton and his mother prepared to leave, Sixsmith leant into the car to say his goodbyes.
‘Stay in touch Newton. I’ll always be here if you need me.’ And with a wink he walked away.
******
And so, Newton passed his exams, with the straightest of A’s, and departed at last for university. He opted for King’s College London, every bit as good as Oxford and Cambridge but with the added advantage of the capital’s social sophistication. Newton, mindful of Dr Sixsmith’s cryptic advice, enjoyed the city beyond the university to its full. He mixed with a more varied and hip circle than the students around him and predictably it set him apart from some of his more conservative fellows. Newton was determined to be more Carl Sagan than Professor Brainstorm and took the resulting disapproval in his stride. All the same, the science came first and he was careful not to allow his social life to thrive at the expense of his studies.
Newton stayed on at King’s until he had a PhD in nuclear physics tucked neatly under his belt, and then turned his attention to his postdoctorate. He secured one at the Joint European Torus on a windswept aerodrome in Oxfordshire, lured by youthful optimism that this giant experiment in nuclear fusion would fulfil its much-anticipated promise and deliver a new clean energy source, the holy grail of all nuclear development. Unlike dirty, problematic fission reactors, fusion reactors would be exceptionally safe, not generating mountains of horrendously long-lived radioactive garbage. A noble enough desire one would have thought, but whenever he told acquaintances about his project, they recoiled as though nothing with the word ‘nuclear’ could ever describe anything but pure evil. People were so wedded to their ignorance, Newton observed, frustrated not for the first time by the yawning gulf between fact and assumption. In the pub, he started to say he was a mathematician, which was sure to stop the conversation dead and save him from what was becoming a repetitive and defensive series of arguments.
But gradually, even his own enthusiasm dulled. He was insightful enough to realise that the project wasn’t going anywhere. The fusion reactor, if it was to have any chance of success, had to operate at temperatures hotter even than the core of the sun and making the concept work in practice was sadly the longest of long-shots. The undertaking was going to drag on at the pace of continental drift, and Newton, being Newton, wanted more excitement.
Besides, he’d become distracted and perhaps a little obsessed by another hobbyhorse. Trawling through the archives on fusion research, he’d come across a strange phenomenon called ‘bubble fusion’, an unusual series of observations that had sparked some excitement back in the 1970s. Experiments had hinted that sound waves could force small bubbles in a liquid to collapse incredibly quickly upon themselves, heating the gas inside to extreme temperatures hot enough to melt steel – and maybe as hot as the sun’s core. There were vague signs even that the hot gas had prompted nuclear fusion, the same holy grail that Newton’s earlier studies had so notably failed to achieve. But then the case went cold – until now, two decades later, when some small research groups were pursuing bubble fusion once again, hoping that this time they could test its potential rigorously with the new technologies available. Newton was intrigued. This interesting frontier appealed greatly to his sense of the arcane and problematic. It was a real challenge with possibly world-changing potential. It was controversial too, of course, and possibly pointless, but if true, it could be sensational. He couldn’t resist it.
