I’d returned from America just that morning and paid a ridiculous amount of money to an Asian taxi driver, who loved to talk of his passion for all things Bollywood, to drive me all the way from Manchester directly to Alex’s house.
I caught her just as she was leaving for work; she was locking her front door just as the taxi pulled up.
I gave Abdul a twenty pound tip; after all, sixty miles and just over an hour of complete silence must have been some feat for him.
The first ten minutes of the journey had made the promise of such a tip essential if I was to retain my sanity.
My thoughts were already a jumble, and so to listen to his incomprehensible rantings would have been far too much to bear.
So I had pleaded for silence, promised the tip, and then we had sat in blessed silence, with not even the radio, for the remainder of the journey; the silence only broken by his need for directions as we neared Alex’s home.
As I started up her drive, Abdul was pulling away, his music already blaring his one true passion.
Alex all but ran down the path to meet me, her arms flung wide, her face a mix of elation, confusion, and more worryingly anger.
And her first words were a reflection of those mixed emotions.
“David, thank God. I’ve been worried sick… where the bloody hell have you been? You haven’t rung, you haven’t answer my calls or my texts, and then you just show up here!" She trailed off at that, and we stood there, hugging each other.
She pulled back and looked at me, the hint of a smile on her face and a glint of humour in her eyes – a look so very reminiscent of the woman Carthia in those last fateful moments.
Seeing that look, that glint in Alex’s eyes, brought so much anger and pain; in an instant wild and violent emotions raged within me.
And then, as though she somehow saw my pain, Alex took my hand and led me back towards the house.
“Come on, let's go inside. You can tell me all about Jalholm, and where the hell he’s gotten to. But first I need to phone Stuart and see how he takes to me pulling a sickie… I don’t think he’s going to be very pleased at all.”
The warmth of her hand and the gentle kindness in her words took away all my hurt, and I smiled for the first time since she’d left me to travel back home.
Over coffee, we exchanged a few pleasantries, but I knew she was itching to get to the heart of it. Small talk was not one of Alex’s fortes. That said, there was very little I could tell her of Jalholm.
After she left that day he had suddenly dried up. It was late anyway, and so, reluctant as I was to break off when he was so near to the crux of his tale, I agreed to call it a day, promising to be back early the next morning.
But as soon as I arrived the following morning, I was ushered into Jefferson’s office and quizzed about William for almost an hour before they told me the truth.
I suspected of course, knew really. That was all it could be other than finding him dead in his room, and if it had been that, then the police would have been talking to me rather than a lone doctor. Jalholm had vanished.
He had been locked away in his private room the night before, everything the same as normal. He had, they said, seemed to have reverted somewhat into his previous moods – saying nothing and seeming occupied elsewhere.
But that was something they were quite used to given the nature of their patients, so they had thought nothing of it, and Jalholm had been securely locked away for the night.
The only deviation from the norm was that Jalholm had actually taken something to help him sleep, had gone so far as to ask for the medication.
At the time they had thought little of his request given the dramatic change in his behaviour over the preceding days.
In the morning, he just was not there anymore. Nothing had been damaged, his door was still locked, and he had left everything behind except for a single set of clothes and his walking stick.
And I realised as they told me this, how I had again shown how poor my judgement was, and how near I had been yet again to achieving my goal.
I had seen his walking stick on that very first day. Seen how little he relied upon it, and seen how intricate its embellishments were. And yet when he did not use it again, did not even bring it when we met, I did not think of it at all, did not again bring it to my mind.
Not until now, when it was too late, and he had used his travelling rod to escape. I searched the surrounding towns, checked the hotels, hostels and homeless shelters and did not find a single clue as to where he might have gone. The police had already been alerted to his escape, but they too, found nothing.
Doctor Jefferson let me see copies of the original arrest record for William from all those years ago, and so I visited all the hotels and bars in the myriad streets that surrounded the area where he had been arrested.
I found nothing. Outside of the hospital William, Jalholm, call him what you will, never existed, or if he ever had, he and time, had eradicated all signs of the man. I stayed a week longer, visiting or telephoning the hospital each day, but I knew that he was gone, lost to me.
A chance of return snatched away from me again at the very last, just as hope had begun to fill my life.
I returned to the UK in a hurry, my mind full of thoughts of Jalholm’s flight and of that last night in New York. Phoning Alex had not even entered my head.
Alex and I spent the afternoon reviewing what Jalholm had told us.
We sifted and measured his every sentence, looking for hidden truths or links to other parts of the story, looking for anything that might be used to find him, or learn more of what he knew.
We both agreed that what he had told us on the last day, had been the truth. He had been too invigorated with what he said, far too animated, and at times, horrified at how he had been fooled and the consequences of his actions.
He was from the era when Dar'cen arrived, and he created the travelling circles and, I was sure, the travelling rods that came later; one of which I was convinced he held on that first day and used on that last night to escape the hospital.
And he had somehow discovered Dar'cen, that if nothing else was true – what he had told us was far too detailed, far too full of horror to be untrue.
Then his story had stopped, fallen short of what was for me the most crucial – how Dar'cen had come to Ellas, and how Jalholm had managed to free himself and escape to our world.
I believed that he must have used a travelling rod to come here to Earth, but breaking free of Dar'cen was much, much more than merely having the means, as I myself knew all too well; how had he broken free of the compulsion that surely must have held him?
Then, Jalholm had been shocked when I talked of how I was returned, something about the raised figure of a bird in flight on the Rod I myself had used, had agitated him, but what?
And there was the name, Darganu. Jalholm’s earlier explanations of the name had been utter drivel, and I had been sure that, as his story progressed, he would have gotten to the truth of it.
The name was important somehow, I just knew it was.
Alex and I went over and over the conversations we’d had with Jalholm, but were not able to find anything we considered new. All we were left with were questions.
So what was it that had caused him to run from me? For we agreed, it must have been I that he fled from. And if that was the case, why? What changed on that last day to make him do so?
Nothing else had happened that day, I was sure. Something I had said after Alex left or possibly earlier that morning, had given him cause to fear me.
Either he thought himself in danger from me, or there was something in the rest of his story that he no longer wanted to share.
The only conclusions we could come to was that it had to do with how he, Jalholm, had brought Dar'cen to Ellas, or how he himself had escaped to Earth.
The latter seemed the more likely, especially when I thought of his walking stick.
He had a travelling rod, I was sure, and perhaps something I had said in those last hours, had made him fear for it, fear that I wanted it so much that I would harm him to possess it.If not that, then what else could it be? So close, we agreed. So very, very close.
The silence stretched between us until finally Alex said, “So what else happened after I left? Something obviously did… you seem so tense… alert, I suppose I should say.
"I’ve not seen you like this since that first day we met."
I had wanted to tell her, needed to. But seeing Alex, being together again, cheered me and lifted the cloud that had blanketed my life since Jalholm had vanished.
And so I had put off telling her, steered away from those darker matters.
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Then, yet again, out of the blue she sensed my mood, knew that something was wrong, and that there was something I had not told her.
“You know, I really do think there is something of a Wise One in you, Alex… you seem to know my thoughts much as Setia did."
She laughed. “No David, it’s just plain from your face, your entire body language.
"Something has happened to make you watchful and alert again, almost as though you expect an attack or something. To be honest, seeing you like this scares me."
“I had two messages while I was over there, both on the last day before I flew home. Text messages, would you believe? Our friend, if he or she is a friend, has embraced the electronic age!”
I took out my phone, scrolled to the first message and passed the phone to Alex.
“You are not safe, they hunt you,” she read aloud, and then looked at me quizzically. “And?”
“The second came just moments later; it said, ‘They come for you, NOW!’ The now was in capitals to stress the urgency. Have a look for yourself."
Alex looked at the second message as I continued.
“Less than a minute after the second message arrived, someone banged on my hotel door and yelled out, ‘Police! Open up!’
I had already heard their footsteps; there were two of them outside the door and others down the hall.
"It was a quandary really because I had no idea who or what I was dealing with, or what they wanted of me. And then, there was the mysterious messenger. Was he really a friend, or had he sent these so called police to my door?"
“What did you do? What happened?” Alex asked, anxiously.
“I sat facing the door and told them to come in, and that the door was unlocked. After all, I didn’t think I had anything to fear from them; I would prove extremely difficult to overpower, and killing me would be all but impossible.
"Besides, I thought that I might learn something from them – who they were, what they wanted and who sent them. You know, all the things that we know so little about.
"Most of all, I then feared for Jalholm.
"Did they know of him? If they or our self appointed friend had been following us, then they almost certainly did. They might even have him already. Perhaps he did not run after all, perhaps they had somehow taken him.
"All of those thoughts flew through my mind as the door slowly opened and the first man stepped into the room."
As I related the story to Alex, my mind wandered back to the room, as it had so many times on the flight home as I had tried to make sense of all that had happened.
***
I knew immediately that this was no ordinary beat cop, and as his gun raised toward me my mind reassessed. No, not police at all.
His movements were too precise, no wasted effort, a professional, confident in his ability yet still leaving nothing to chance. His every move was planned to guide my eyes towards him, towards the gun he pointed at me, while the real threat came from his partner who held a shotgun, cocked and ready to fire into my chest as soon as the first stepped to the side.
So they were here to try to kill me, or to incapacitate me enough that they could take me as my body struggled to heal itself from the extreme damage that a shotgun blast would do.
But for the latter they must know of me, know who I was, or at least my capabilities, and that would explain the others in the hall.
They were now to the left of the open door that number two occupied, patiently waiting to unload his shotgun into my sitting form – they were there to bind me, and help to carry me away.
Mere seconds had passed when number one fluidly stepped to the left. “Come in Sarge,” he said with far too much emphasis on the title, too thick and heavy with sarcasm.
I guessed that they had argued over who should wear the stripes this time out.
The comment was yet again a misdirection, meant to divert me from Sarge’s real intent with the shotgun.
As number one moved to the left, I dove out of the chair, also to the left. The shotgun blast ripped through where I had been sitting, sending the chair flying across the room.
Before the chair had come to a stop, I grasped number one’s gun hand, crushing and breaking his wrist.
My other hand hit him squarely in the chest knocking him backwards and into Sarge, just as he pumped another shell into his shotgun.
They both tumbled backwards through the open door, half into the hall beyond, and as they fell the shotgun went off again, but I was already stepping out onto the balcony.
If I am going to learn anything from this encounter, I need to reverse roles and become the hunter, I thought, as I dropped from my balcony, swinging onto the next one down and then the next after that until I finally dropped down to the street below.
All the while though, my senses told me I was being watched; somewhere out there was my mysterious friend.
I mingled with the crowd until I came alongside the hotel entrance, and stepping inside, I quickly walked to the bank of lifts.
Pressing the button for the basement garage, I took the moment while the lift descended to collect my thoughts.
The rucksack on my back contained all my possessions, my passport was in my pocket, I had paid for the hotel in cash and no fingerprints of mine would be found on any of the rooms surfaces. So, as long as I got on tonight’s flight home, there would be little chance of tying any of this back to me, and if they somehow did, I would be thousands of miles away by then.
My original assessment of the situation had been incorrect, I realised. They really were a threat to me.
They knew enough to be able to incapacitate me with a shotgun blast, and were then ready to cart me off. I had to find out who they were.
The lift door opened and I quickly stepped out, immediately moving to the side and crouching low behind a parked car.
As I scanned the garage for signs of the men, a van pulled out of its parking space at the far end of the garage, and drove towards the lifts; straight toward me.
At the same time the doors of the lift furthest from me, opened and three men stepped out, dragging a fourth between them.
They too scanned the area. They could see the van approach, but still looked for signs of trouble, signs of me, I supposed.
The van pulled to a stop in front of them as they moved forward towards it and, at that very same instant, I crashed into the three of them, causing them to stumble and trip over each other and the one they dragged.
I quickly disabled all three; I did not try to kill any of them as I wanted answers, but some of the injuries I inflicted would have been with them for life – if not for what came next.
I picked up the shotgun and used it to blow in the van’s windshield, and then beckoned the driver to step out.
As he obliged, his eyes told me what was to happen long before I saw his smile, and only that look saved me from injuries that surely would have resulted in my death.
Neither my body’s healing powers, or even those of Dar'cen himself could have rebuilt me from what would have been left after the blast that followed.
Even as I moved, dove for cover of the parked cars, my mind reeled at what was happening.
They would take me or kill me, even at the cost of their own lives, and given the smile on the suicide bomber’s face, they would do it gladly.
Who are these people? I asked myself yet again. Were there two factions, or was the messenger and these would be killers one and the same?
And if so why give me warning of what was to come?
***
My story to Alex broke off there.
I had not told her everything, not given the details, because the devastation that was caused, and how human flesh could be rent by such a blast was beyond imagining, beyond what I was prepared to tell.
Of the van there was only a smoking shell, and of my assailants there was nothing at all left, they had been obliterated by the blast that had been their comrade.
To Alex, I told of how I escaped injury, walked away, hailed a taxi to the airport and flew home leaving it all behind me.
But two pieces of shrapnel, ball bearings, had torn through my lower leg as I scrambled away. Digging them out and waiting for the healing process to take place had been a very real concern.
I needed to get on that flight without raising any suspicions, and injuries like those, not to mention my bloody clothes, were a dead giveaway.
An all night mall solved the clothing issue, and a few hours of clenched teeth saw me whole again. Healing itself was not a pain free process, if anything it magnified the original pain tenfold – another gift from my former master; one to ensure that I did all I could to avoid injury whilst carrying out his bidding.
Alex was horrified at what I had told her, but I was sure that she had not really grasped the full consequences of what had happened.
She had not really understood what the original messages had meant, but this was a sign far more clear – he was here on this world, or if not him, then his servants.
Nowhere was now safe. Whoever watched me, whoever sent the messages, was not someone to be trusted, not someone to be taken lightly and dismissed as I had those few short months ago.
And then Alex surprised me. I was wrong, she had understood far more than I had thought.
“Dar’cen must be here then… either that or people that serve him must be,” she said. “But how can that be? How can they be here, and how do they know about you? The woman Carthia sent you back, that’s what you said, isn’t it?”
I nodded, but she was already moving on, not waiting for any kind of confirmation.
“So what are they doing here? Besides trying to capture you, I mean? Do you have any idea at all?”
I didn’t. I’d already exhausted all avenues of thought on the flight back and in the taxi ride.
Between the messages and the attack, I was now certain that someone from Ellas was here on Earth.
But who, what they wanted, and whether there was more than one faction was open for debate.
On face value, I had messages from the good guys, and an attack by the bad guys. But it couldn’t be that simple. Nothing was ever that simple.
And even if it was, who the hell were they?
It was difficult enough to understand when it was just the messages, but factor in the attack, and I had not the faintest clue what was going on.
Without more information or a huge leap of intuition from Alex, I was stumped. It was almost… almost as if, at every step, I was being manipulated, led by the nose by a group or groups of people unknown, toward an equally unknown goal.
The very thought infuriated me, and it must have shown, because as she reached across the table and took hold of my clenched fist, Alex said,
“You look that pissed off that I guess you’re all out of ideas too… your life has been a real barrel of fun, hasn’t it David?”
Then, with a grin, she said, “Don’t worry. We’ll get through this, we’ll get to the bottom of it all. We’ll find Jalholm again, or you’ll capture whoever is leaving the messages… either that or I’ll have to use my superior intellect to solve the problem for you.”
I snorted, and Alex’s face contorted with feigned annoyance.
“What? You don’t think that I can work out what’s going on?” she asked, as she squeezed my hands tightly in hers and smiled a pathetically weak smile.
“But you’re right of course – I haven’t a flaming clue either. But we will get there. I promise we will.”
Then her weak grin widened and her eyes sparkled, as she said, “First though, I think a glass of wine is in order to celebrate your safe return. Besides, after a few drinks, you’ll be surprised at how much clearer it will all seem.”
Alex was wrong though. Even after half a dozen glasses, I’d not had a single moment of clarity, and neither had she.
But night brought the dreams, and the alcohol did give the terrors that they held, clarity; far too great a clarity.
In my drink fuelled dreams, I was always there, really there, reliving all that he did to me, all that he had me do.
In the morning, I swore once more that I would never again drink.
The brief respite from my world of troubles that alcohol gave, was not worth the pain and terror that the dreams brought.