Earth
Alex
Looks different in the dark, I thought. That said, I remembered very little of that day, anyway. Oh, I remember everything that led up to David pressing that infernal button, but after… well after, is just one big blur. But I do remember the man who helped me – the bloody man who took the rod – perhaps not clearly, but well enough.
The alley was well crowded with the four of us there – Jamie stood out in the street at the mouth of the alley, watching for police or anyone else who might be curious as to why a crowd of people would venture into a dead-end alleyway at two in the morning.
‘Here, Alex, exactly in front of me?’ Jalholm asked.
‘As close as makes no difference, Jalholm. We were at this end of the alley. The door, there behind you, was behind us, and we faced that far wall… and I’m sure that’s the very same pile of rubbish on the floor that was there then.’
I yawned as I surveyed the old beer tins and cigarette ends that made up the small heap by the far wall. God, I hate the people that make such a mess… lazy, dirty, uncaring sods! Next to mobiles phones, litterbugs were my next worse pet hate. Pull yourself together, woman. Focus!
Turning back to Jalholm, I let out a gasp. He seemed to be surrounded by a glow, almost like those luminous green plastic figures that kids get on Halloween.
Pauline and Tony both had their mouths open, and their eyes wide as they stared at him, and I shivered as I meekly asked, ‘Are you supposed to glow like that, Jalholm?’
Jalholm said nothing as he waved his hands in what seemed a furious dismissal.
Tony inched passed Jalholm to stand at my side. ‘Is he doing it now… scrying, I mean?’
‘I assume so,’ I answered. ‘People don’t normally glow that funny green unless something strange is going on.’
Jalholm turned and glared at me for an instant, and then turned back to whatever it was he was doing.
Slowly, the air in front of him, too, began to glow the same colour green but much fainter.
Tony let out a long slow, ‘Wow…,’ that seemed to last forever, and all the while I held my breath. The colour of the air stayed the same, a very pale, luminescent green, but different shades of that very same green now seemed apparent in the whole. A picture was forming, I realised.
Jalholm muttered something I didn’t quite catch – he sounded frustrated.
Slowly he stepped forward into the green glow, his own green colouring seeming to merge with the air he stepped into, somehow strengthening it, making it glow as he did.
Then, he slowly turned in full circle, his eyes wide, scanning in front of him. As his turning brought him to face me, I realised that he did not see me. What he looked at was not here but somewhere else.
‘It’s working,’ I whispered,’ to myself more than to Tony at my side.
Jalholm muttered something. ‘What did you say,’ I asked. Behind me a phone rang, some kind of Caribbean dance music. Typical bloody Jamie, I thought.
‘I said that this is very strange… the residue is here, but it is different somehow, not at all what I expected.’
The Caribbean tune was still playing behind me. Answer the bloody phone, Jamie. ‘But can you tell where David went?’ I asked, the bloody phone still ringing, but louder now.
‘Answer the sodding phone, Jamie,’ I yelled, as I turned toward the alley mouth, only to find Jamie stood right behind me, the lack of colour in his face apparent even in the dark alleyway. His hand held out a phone in front of himself as if it were a live cobra.
‘It’s David’s phone… the one David gave me,’ he said, his voice shaky. ‘It’s never rung before, never at all.’
My heart was in my mouth, while Jamie’s was open wide as if he was trying to catch flies.
Jalholm’s commanding voice brought me back to myself. ‘Answer it someone. How can I hope to puzzle this out with such an atrocious noise ringing in my ears?’
Jamie hesitantly lifted the phone to his ear to answer, but I snatched it away before he could speak. ‘I’ll bloody answer it. If it really is David, I’ll know, and then he’s for it.’
Heart hammering, I took a deep breath and then snapped, ‘Who is this? Is that you, David?’
A voice came back to me through the ear-piece, a voice I knew, a voice I thought to never hear again.
The words were few, and spoken with an urgency that belayed their sparsity – ‘Give the phone to Jalholm, now!’
But it was the voice my mind took in, the words ignored. In an instant that voice had my world, my whole life in a turmoil that threatened to end me.
‘Sarah!’ I screamed. ‘Sarah, it’s you. I know it is. How—’
‘Give the phone to Jalholm. You are in great danger! Do it, Alex. Do it NOW!’
Tears streaked down my face, and I knew that I, too, was as ashen as Jamie. It was Sarah… it was, it really was.
Round and round went my thoughts as the voice on the phone yelled at me to pass the phone to Jalholm.
It seemed a lifetime before her words, her commands, broke through the whirlwind that was my mind. I had to give the phone to Jalholm, I knew, and yet it was Sarah. I could not give her up. I could not.
Jalholm stepped in front of me, his hand outstretched for the phone. ‘Give it to me, Alex. She shouts loud enough that I hear her plea. Give the phone to me as she insists.’
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‘Yes. Give him the phone, Alex. Give it to him,’ Sarah’s voice pleaded, and I knew then that I would do as she asked. I could deny her nothing.
My hand shook as I held out the phone to Jalholm. ‘Take it. It’s urgent.’ My voice shook more than my hands, so torn was I between giving up the phone, the phone that spoke with my dead sister’s voice, and holding it close to listen to her speak one more time.
Hesitantly, Jalholm took the phone from my shaking hand. ‘Hello, this is Jalholm,’ he said quietly, and unlike me, he seemed completely in control.
He listened for only a few seconds, and then his face, too, lost all its colour. ‘To me!’ he shouted, while almost at the same instant a fear, the likes of which I had never before felt, filled me. I was suddenly terrified – I wanted to cry, scream, hid myself, fall upon my knees and beg – all together at the same instant.
A hand grasped me, pulled me forward, Jalholm’s hand.
‘Together. Touch me. All of you, touch me!’ came his words, pitched as a command, a command that somehow cut through the fear that filled me, and demanded obedience.
Strong arms closed around me, and through my tear filled eyes, the faces of the others looked back at me, their eyes, too, wide with terror. All except Jalholm, he looked afraid, but yet somehow seemingly confident and in control, too. ‘Stay close. Do not let go of me!’
And then the fear, the terror, was gone. Not eased, not lessened, it was just completely gone, and we were all somewhere else.
Somehow, I was on my hands and knees, my fingers splayed out before me, half buried in sand. Behind me, I heard water, waves rolling in along a beach, mingled with the sound of someone violently retching.
‘What the hell was that?’ Jamie blurted, his voice full of the fear of only a few seconds ago. ‘What David did was bad, but that…’
Sand? Where are we? I thought. And then through the memory of the terror I had just lived, came a single thought, Sarah!
‘You are safe now, Jamie. All of—’
‘Sarah!’ I screamed at Jalholm who stood above me. ‘That was Sarah, my sister… on the phone. She spoke to me. How can that be? What did she say? Tell me, Jalholm. Tell me!’ My shoulders shook and sobs wracked my body as I sat back to look up into Jalholm’s face. ‘Tell me,’ I repeated, my voice now quiet, my tone pleading.
‘Your sister? But—’
‘Quiet, Jamie… I do not know who I spoke with, Alex. Truly I do not… yet the voice was familiar, almost as your voice… almost as when I dreamed. It was you then, your voice, and yet not so; somehow subtly different. But come,’ Jalholm said, as he knelt, took my arm and gently pulled me to my feet. ‘We cannot stay here out in the open. I have refuge but a short walk away. Come, all of you. Jamie, help poor Pauline, she will need your arm… You are safe now, he cannot follow us to this place. He—’
‘But what about the bloody particles that are left,’ Jamie said. ‘Can’t he, whoever he is, use them just as you intended?’
‘Possibly, if he knew of them and he was strong as a scryer, he could use them, Jamie. But still he would not find us. Unless I am mistaken, you all feel disorientated and possibly wish to vomit as your poor friend Pauline has done. That is the effect—’
‘Stop bloody rambling, Jal,’ Jamie interrupted, abruptly.
‘Forgive me, it is in my nature and I find it hard to change… That was not a simple use of my rod, Jamie. Four times we travelled, jumping instantaneously from one location to the next. When I first learnt of the collision particles, I configured my rod to do as we have done today, so that I could not be followed if I fled. We are as safe as we possible can be.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’
‘He hunted me, pursued me, and again found me with you today. So, I am sure that given time he will do so again. But not today, not this week even. We are safe for now… Come. As I said, refuge and some little comfort is but a short walk away.
‘Some little comfort! You’ve got to be kidding. This is yours?’ Jamie’s voice was incredulous as we all stared up at the beach house.
More like a beach mansion, I thought.
The house was enormous, something only film stars could afford, I was sure. Steps led from the beach up to ornate gardens filled with statuary and wonderfully maintained shrubs and borders. In the centre, mere yards from the house itself, was a swimming pool, a swimming pool at least as big as those I’d seen at beach front hotel complexes for hundreds of people to use. The building itself was ultra modern, all hard lines, hardly any curves anywhere. It was two stories high with what looked like an observatory poking its head out of the red tiled roof on the far side.
I found myself repeating Jamie’s question, ‘This is yours, Jalholm?’
‘All mine… and all my own design, too.’ Jalholm’s voice was smug and haughty for an instant, but then he said, ‘Forgive me, please. It seems that I shall be begging your forgiveness for some time to come. I cannot seem to stop my old, so very conceited self from creeping into my words.’
He looked so very abashed that I took his hand. ‘Aren’t you going to invite us in then, Jalholm? Then you can tell me what…’ I hesitated. I had almost said, ‘my sister told you’, and it would have been so very natural to say so, as if it really was Sarah who had spoken to me. But it couldn’t be, I knew that now. Sarah was dead, and no matter what trick life was now playing on me, I knew that whoever had spoken, it was not Sarah. It just could not be. ‘You can tell me what the woman said. Every word mind, every single word.’
‘That I will gladly do, Alex,’ Jalholm said, a slight sadness in his voice, ‘Though she said not a great deal… Come, follow me.’
And with that Jalholm set off along the marbled path that meandered through the gardens, past the pool and on to the house beyond.
‘Bloody Hell, Jalholm. You own this?’ Jamie asked, for what must have been the tenth time. ‘All this?’ His arms were spread wide as he turned around in the enormous entry hall that we stood in. ‘I thought that you said you’d been locked up in a nut house for the last twenty years.’
‘The nut house, as you put it, was a hiding place, Jamie. Somewhere I believed I would be safe. But I was not confined there, not when I had my rod,’ Jalholm said, as he brandished his walking stick for all to see.
‘It is a long and boring tale. Alex knows the gist of it. Suffice it to say that I was not confined to the hospital and, within certain restrictions, was free to roam as I pleased. This is but one of several such refuges that I have prepared for times such as these…’ Jalholm’s voice grew hushed as he continued, ‘I had hoped to never use them, but… but then David came… and you, Alex, and my hope was dashed away, replaced by the fear and terror of old… the fear of but a few short moments ago.
'This place, I used somewhere in the middle of my so very irrational flight from his servant. Now, I do not believe they discovered many of my hideaways, certainly not this one.’
‘What was it, Jalholm?’ I wanted to talk of the woman, the woman with my sister’s voice, but the fear I had felt, the memory of it, was so strong that I had to know.
‘Was it him, was it Dar’cen?’
‘No not him, at least I pray not. His fear, the terror he brings, is far greater. That was but a shadow of him… a servant, one imbued with his power, his evil. David was…’
As his voice trailed away, Jalholm turned away from us, something like shame seemed to fill his eyes.
‘What, Jalholm? David was what? Finish what you were about to say,’ I said, gently.
Slowly Jalholm turned back to face us, his eyes falling for an instant on Tony before turning finally on me.
‘I do not intend to besmirch your friend David… but he is… was such a one. He, too, had the power to instil such fear and dread. He did not do so to me, but I sensed it in him almost the first we met.’
Glancing at Tony, he said, ‘I know that David, the David you know so well, the David that is your father, Tony, would not now use such a weapon… but that power is something that Dar’cen gifted him, and he did not give such a gift lightly… I fear that he who follows us is one such as David was when he served the demon… and that he is at least the equal of David.’
My mind was in turmoil. The memory of what had just happened – Sarah’s voice, and then the almost debilitating fear, and now this; Dar’cen had his new servant, his new Kanteth.
It was all too much. A panic and anxiety filled my mind such as I had not felt since Sarah’s illness was first discovered.
I began to tremble uncontrollably, and darkness formed at the edges of my vision.
Faintly I heard, ‘Alex, are you okay?’ Jamie’s words, I knew, but so faint, so very, very distant. And then, there was just blackness.