Brotherhood of Shades

He closed his hand round it and, with his empty one, gestured for the balcony doors to open. Obediently they slid back and out he walked on to the windswept balcony.

The weather had changed and the breeze that had once toyed with the leaves now ripped around the building like an angry beast. D’Scover shifted his substance to allow the sharp wind to pass through him as he walked the length of the balcony to the end where the blank wall looked out over the sprawling city. He turned to face the wall, opened his hand carefully and looked at the key that lay in his hand, stuck fast under a lustrous silver haze. Lifting the key hand, he placed it against the wall, palm first, and the silver haze bled out from underneath, forming a liquid that trickled over the brickwork and ran along the mortar cracks like mercury through a maze. The silver liquid soon crept across a large rectangle area on the wall in front of him and then, abruptly, it stopped and sank in. Gradually the bricks and mortar began to blur and fade away until they were replaced instead with a smooth black stone surface shot through with silver veins. D’Scover stood back and waited for it to finish taking shape and, with the hollow sound of stone scraping against stone, a door appeared.

Chapter Seven – The Keeper of the Texts

The huge dark room had only a weak square of light at its centre. This trickled down from a glass pyramid that rose from the ceiling, cutting into the churning winter sky. D’Scover looked up to see the bruise-coloured clouds tear across above him, pushed rapidly by a vicious and aggressive wind.

He walked across the dark room with the confidence of someone who knew every square centimetre of this cavernous space. At the circular table in the middle of the large square room, he reached out and waved his hands over it and a green glass lamp standing in its centre gradually illuminated much of the room, forcing the shadows into reluctant retreat. The conjured light trickled slowly like glowing treacle into all four corners of the room and showed the walls to be entirely covered with books. Tall mahogany shelves climbed to the ceiling and towered over D’Scover, groaning under the weight of countless tomes. Volumes of all description were crammed into this library and each looked older than the last with the oldest of all high up on the soaring shelves.

Walking towards one of the bookcases, D’Scover counted his way along, looking for just the right one. Stepping backwards into the thin pall of natural light, he cast his eye to the very top where the cobwebs hung like gossamer bunting in a macabre parody of decoration. Still staring upwards, he gestured towards the remaining shadows in the darkest area furthest from the light and a narrow wooden ladder, supported by a rail on one of the uppermost shelves, rolled towards him, stopping just a few centimetres away. He climbed up and, as he reached the upper level, brushed away the cobwebs to reveal the ancient texts beneath.

As he pulled one from the shelf, it sent a cloud of spiralling dust into the room, which caught the thin light and danced around him. Ignoring the dust, he opened the book and scanned down a few pages quickly before replacing it. The ladder moved steadily along from shelf to shelf and D’Scover continued to pull out book after book, each time searching the pages carefully for the correct content. Occasionally something would catch his attention and he would place a text carefully in the air behind him and gradually it would descend to rest on the table below, drifting slowly like a leaf dropped by the wind.

Time passed and the pile grew; soon nothing could be seen of the table except the brass stem of the lamp and its glowing green shade. D’Scover looked at the table and grudgingly descended from his lofty perch and returned to the desk. Pulling an imposing oak chair towards him, he sat and gave a beckoning gesture to the lamp. The light from it dutifully crawled back towards him and arranged itself in a thick golden puddle, concentrating its greatest strength over the chosen volumes. D’Scover opened the first one and began to read.

The paper was brittle with age and only D’Scover’s carefully diminished substance allowed him to turn the pages without them shattering in his hands. The Texts had been in the possession of the Brotherhood since its founding, but many were much older. Father Dominic had collected manuscripts from all over the world, from the small works of fables by twelfth–century scholars and the human-skin-covered grimoire of the fourteenth century, to the sixteenth-century works in his own hand.

The history of civilisation was laid out between these faded covers on countless elaborately decorated pages. Here fabulous animals and flowers of all description wound their way round the words of teachers from many centuries. Across this parchment landscape marched the armies of Kublai Khan, hunting for now extinct animals, and unicorns pranced among a twisting maze of vines. Armies fought long-forgotten battles on a world that was most assuredly as flat as a plate, and kings brutally seized bloodstained land they believed was by right of God theirs, only to have another god instruct his minions to seize it back a century later. Each manuscript appeared to glitter in the half-light as the heavily applied gold leaf curled up, flaking from flowers and borders.

D’Scover read on, carefully transposing some key phrases into a small brown leather-bound notebook. Once an entry caught his eye, his finger hovered above the section and, as he moved his finger from line to line, the words formed on the open pages of the notebook as though soaking through from inside the paper itself. The pages filled and the weak winter daylight began to fade as the clouds above the Text Chamber split to reveal a sky dotted with sharp white points of starlight. After many hours, and with his substance beginning to weaken, he pushed the books away across the table and laid his hands flat on the patinated surface. Taking a long inbreath, he pursed his lips and blew a sigh across the table, ruffling the pages of the books and making them jitter.

“It must be here,” he said to the empty room.

He cupped his hands together, curving one hand round the other to form a bowl, and breathed into it. A cascade of blue sparks rolled into his hands, whirling and twisting until he could hold no more. Squeezing his hands together, he crushed the blue light, causing sparks to pop out and skitter across the table. When he opened his hands again, a small blue sphere lay in his white bloodless palm. Holding it up, allowing the moonlight to fall through it, he could see the indigo clouds roll around inside. After a few moments the outline of a human head started to form within the clouds. As the image cleared, it triggered a memory within D’Scover and he dropped the ball. It rolled along the table, tumbling from the edge and disappearing in a glittering blue shower before it hit the floor.

D’Scover pulled one of the books out from the bottom of the pile and briskly flicked through the pages until he found the one he was looking for. A treatise on witchcraft from the seventeenth century lay open in front of him with its pages bearing many later additions in an inky scrawl. On one of these pages was a detailed drawing of the trial of a young witch in Hertfordshire. In this drawing the young girl sat, with a defiant expression, tightly tied to a post in the middle of a village green. The crowd around her looked angry and many of them raised farm tools above their heads. The account of the trial listed her supposed crimes, the crimes that damned her to a public burning. The book told how, among other acts of witchcraft, she had cured a child of deafness, pulled back a tree that had been blown over on to a house and diverted a flood that threatened a family’s crop. The picture of the so-called trial was small, but even so D’Scover could see that this witch was the same girl he had seen form in the ball.

“Another piece of the puzzle,” he said to himself.

D’Scover stretched out his arms and looked over the piles of manuscripts on the table. He became aware that his substance was so weak that he was only barely managing to hold his shape. His arms had become a thin grey shadow of his usual form and his hands were almost transparent. One by one he gestured for the books to return to their places on the shelves and they rose slowly and gracefully to slot themselves into their niches once more. When the table was cleared, all that remained upon it was his full notebook and the book containing the witch trial. Standing up, he gestured for the table to move to one side, and this it obediently did.

Once the floor space was clear, D’Scover took his place beneath the glass pyramid and turned his face towards it. He stretched his hands aloft and the great glass sheets of the pyramid opened to expose the cold night sky. D’Scover began to softly chant his Ritual of Dispersal and, after his grey vortex scattered into the darkness, the pyramid silently closed behind him.

“How do you feel?”

“Hard to explain really. I don’t feel dead, I actually feel kind of . . . alive.”

“Adam,” D’Scover turned the boy to face him, “you must let that feeling go. You are dead and nothing will change that. There is nothing in the known universe that can make you alive again. You have had your time.”

“You really do love a good speech, don’t you?” Adam sighed. “You asked, I answered. This is all new to me and I don’t know what answers you want so I just tell you the truth.”

The hospice was in darkness and, as the offices were empty, D’Scover had managed to Hotline into one unseen. Adam had been a little tricky to find as a first Dispersal into a building of that size often caused drift. D’Scover eventually tracked him down to the mortuary and pulled him back into the empty office he had just used. Adam’s old room was now occupied and so restabilising in there was no longer an option.

“What was your Dispersal like?” D’Scover asked.

“D’you actually want to know or is that another question that I should give a dumbed-down answer to?” Adam said.

“Adam, I know that you are angry, but it will pass. It is quite natural at this stage to . . .”

“Look, I’m sorry, I’m not really angry. I don’t mean to seem angry. I’m finding it hard to understand all of this and I think I want it all to end. Please just tell me what you want from me and let me go,” he pleaded. “I’m sure that I’m not cut out for all this. If I’m dead and I’ve dealt with all that memory stuff, then why am I still here?” He waved his hands at the blank walls of the cramped space. “Am I always going to be here, haunting this place?”

D’Scover sighed and walked over to the computer, removing his CC from his pocket and placing it back on the blank screen.

“I think that it is time we had a proper talk,” he said. “We will go to my offices and I will explain as best as I can.”

“At last!” Adam said, walking over to where D’Scover was holding his hand against the screen. “Hey, you have to use the keyboard not the screen, you know – or do you ghosts not have technology yet?”

The screen began to ripple and turn purple and the familiar blue sparks crackled across the matt surface, gathering pace as they started to swirl.

“Oh, we have technology,” D’Scover said to a stunned Adam. “We have plenty of technology.”

The sparks spread out and Adam stumbled backwards in the darkness, trying to move out of their reach, but D’Scover grabbed for his arm and pulled him into the enveloping neon light. Adam twisted around in panic as the sparks grasped at him and began to swarm over his arm. Once the first lick of sparks had touched his arm, he became rapidly absorbed in a swift wave of blue crackling light, and then was gone . . . All that remained was a red spiral that shimmered in the darkness for a second and vanished.

“Whoa, now that was amazing!” Adam gasped. “How did we do that? Where the hell are we?”

He now stood, staring at his arms and legs as though checking they were still all of the required number, in a darkened office high up, looking down on the blinking lights of the city.

“Just a tweak on your friend technology, and we are in my offices,” D’Scover answered. “When we Disperse, we can take advantage of the Internet, telephone lines, wireless connections, all manner of electronic systems; it is just a question of opening the right pathway and sliding in.”

“Can anyone do it? I mean, can anyone dead do it?”

“No,” D’Scover explained, busying himself at his desk. “It is a difficult procedure and one that is exclusively managed by the Brotherhood.”

“The Brotherhood?”

“Take a seat,” D’Scover gestured towards the couch, “I have a lot to explain.”

Adam turned, taking in D’Scover’s private collection. “Is this some kind of art gallery?”

“No, as I said, this is my office.”

“Tasteful,” Adam grinned. “You must earn a mint.”

“I earn no money for what I do,” D’Scover replied.

“Still, looks like you don’t exactly go without though, do you?”

“There is nothing I require, no.”

Adam flopped down on the couch and leaned back into a softly yielding corner of the large piece of furniture.

“Very classy, comfy. None of your superstore rubbish here, eh?”

“Adam,” D’Scover’s voice had taken on an even more sombre tone, “I am prepared to give you the answers that you need.”

“That’s all very well, Mr Mysterious,” replied Adam, “but I don’t know what the questions are, do I? Can I have a clue?”

D’Scover sighed. “Maybe if I explained more about the Brotherhood, you would have a greater understanding.”