Chaos

by Thornton Bell, Lionel Fanthorpe, Patricia Fanthorpe

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

Psychic investigators have long been intrigued by the question of the existence of Elemental Spirits. Is it possible that Beings of incredible age wander unseen through the wild, lonely deserts, and drift above the peaks of barren, desolate mountains? Is there any connection between such speculation and the legends of ancient mythology? Could it be that the djinn and devas of India are only other interpretations of the same inexplicable phenomena? Man feels that he has progressed beyond magic and even the most rational of civilised religions are undergoing periods of theological revolution and fundamental re-appraisal in the mid-60s. But what if an Elemental Spirit invaded the safety and comfort of everyday life? What if something over than mankind burst like a tornado into the security of ordered human society? Could the logic and science of the Twentieth Century defeat the terrifying power of a thing which was alive yet not alive, dead yet undying?

Release date: February 27, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

THE REVEREND NIGEL FAIRWOOD looked at his watch as he closed the study door. It was five past eight. Perhaps he had overdone the Evensong sermon a little, but there was so much that one could extract from the Book of Job, and to begin explaining what Fairwood believed to be the true significance of that superb old document it was necessary to supply the congregation with a considerable amount of summarised history and a rudimentary examination of contemporary Hebrew thought. Having done this he was able to spend the last few moments of his sermon on the point that he had really wished to dwell upon in the beginning. It was all so difficult ….

Fairwood crossed to his bookshelves and took down a thick commentary. He laid it on his desk, pushing his telephone a little to one side to make room for it; he compared his Commentary notes with those he had carefully prepared for the sermon he had just delivered.

“So much left unsaid,” he murmured to himself, “yet, so vital, so important.” He shook his head sadly and ran a finger through thinning, curly hair, greying a little at the temples. Fairwood, in his early forties, was a tall, slim, athletic and well-preserved figure. Clear, keen eyes looked out at the world from behind thick, horn-rimmed spectacles. His ears were a little more prominent than is considered desirable by the givers of screen tests. Fairwood, who had never had, nor would seek to have, a screen test, was unconcerned by his owlish glasses, or his prominent ears. If he had been asked to sum up his philosophy in the metaphor which came most readily to him, he would have replied readily to the effect that the contents of the jar were more important than the earthen vessel. Although Nigel neglected his appearance to some extent, as his threadbare, bachelor blue suit testified adequately, he did not neglect his health. He was realist enough to know that a man who is fit works more efficiently than a man who drags from one weary task to the next in a state of semi-invalidism. To Fairwood, his church work and his pastoral duties were so vitally important that he himself had to be vital in order to cope with them as they deserved.

There were those in Stanford-in-the-Vale who disliked the Reverend Nigel Fairwood for his views; perhaps it was truer to say that although they disliked the views, they almost found themselves accepting them, for the sake of the man. It was almost impossible not to admire Nigel. He was a man—one of the all-too-rare company—whose life proclaimed as far as was possible the message he declared Sunday by Sunday in the village church. He was the kind of man whom Geoffrey Chaucer would have approved. Fairwood was, to some extent, the 1960 version of the ‘poor town parson’, of whom Chaucer had written, nearly six hundred years earlier. He was the kind of man, too, of whom Goldsmith would have approved. Like the parson in “The Deserted Village” of whom it was said:

“Truth from his lips prevailed with double sway,

And fools, who came to scoff, remained, to pray.”

Fairwood replaced his Commentary, and touched the bell set into the wall on the left of his desk. Shuffling footsteps announced the impending arrival of Mrs. Hodges. Gladys Hodges was a big shapeless old woman of indeterminate age, who had been part and parcel of Stanford Vicarage as long as most Stanfordians could remember. Gladys kept the beautiful old Georgian rectory clean. She cooked for those unmarried vicars who required such services, and she was what is known generally, and euphemistically, as ‘a tower of strength’ or a ‘pillar of support’ to the church activities in the field of jumble sales, bazaars, bring-and-buy stalls, and summer garden fetes. To a man like Nigel Fairwood, this aspect of parish life was anathema. Over-zealous organisers, of dart stalls, rifle ranges and functions of that kind, were persona non grata as far as he was concerned. Yet he was also a sufficiently practical man to realise that the church’s spiritual functions could not continue without the machinations of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and those business-like souls whose talents appeared to be mainly in the field of beating Mammon at his own game.

Fairwood had just taken out his diary, and commenced, Armstrong-like, to write up the events of the day, when a shadow crossed the study window. It was a late summer evening, and the long rays of the setting sun were falling athwart the old Georgian panes when the shadow passed. Its transition was so marked that, engrossed as he was, Fairwood could not help but notice it. He jumped to his feet and moved towards the window. It was not usual for anybody to move along the little grass path that led past the study. The main drive to the front door was the direct and obvious route to the vicarage; thick gravel crunched warningly beneath the feet of impending callers. But this shadow had passed as silently as a ghost. Fairwood felt a strange prickling sensation at the base of his skull, above the nape of his neck. A cold, icy trickle of something that might have been fear ran down his spine, and a feathery-winged butterfly was moving around in his stomach.

Mrs. Hodges opened the door.

“You rang, Vicar?”

“O, yes. I’d like some coffee please, Mrs. Hodges.” He paused. “Has anyone come to the door?”

“Not that I know of, vicar.” The woman’s voice was flat, uninteresting.

“That’s very strange. I thought I saw a Shadow pass the study window, but I must have been mistaken. Perhaps it was a low-flying owl.”

“P’raps it was.” Mrs. Hodges was giving a fair impersonation of Little Sir Echo, thought Fairwood. She was hardly the most scintillating of conversationalists, nevertheless, she did her best. To have removed Mrs. Hodges from the vicarage would have been as cruel an act as removing a snail from its shell, or a hermit crab from its borrowed home.

Nothing happened during the interval that elapsed while Mrs. Hodges searched for coffee. Nigel Fairwood wondered whether, perhaps, he had only imagined the shadow after all. But the seed of doubt was sown in his mind, and as he sipped the rather granular coffee which Mrs. Hodges had concocted according to some weird recipe that was apparently handed down from mother to daughter, as part of the village oral tradition, he kept wondering what, if anything, had cast the sinister shadow across the old Georgian lattice. He replaced the cup with a distinct summoning rattle. There was no need for the bell. Mrs. Hodges came and carted away the cup. The vicar began working on his article for the parish magazine, and yet, all he could think of was the shadow. It came back to him again and again, an unpleasant, fleeting something. It was as though the shadow crossed the white screen of his consciousness onto which his mind was trying to project magazine-type thoughts.

He was mid-way through a rather complex sentence, beginning ‘Furthermore, those of us to whom this matter is of particular significance, feel that …’ when the shadow moved from the realm of imagination to the realm of reality, insofar as a shadow can be said to have any reality. There was a tap at the window.

Nigel spun around in his chair and stared through the Georgian glass. There was the substance responsible for casting the shadow. The sun was in his eyes as he looked, and his first impression was of a dark, scarecrow-like figure, standing with its arms outstretched, the hands strangely thin, raised upward as though in supplication. Nigel Fairwood crossed resolutely towards the window, and moved sideways, so that he was no longer staring directly into the setting rays of the dazzling solar disc. The thin fingers of his strangely precipitous visitor clawed against the window, there was a nerve chilling, scratching, rattling sound as the fingers made their way over the lights of the casement. Holding his breath, Nigel Fairwood raised the catch and opened the window. It swung inwards with unexpected violence and the thing scrambled across the sill, in a great, ungainly movement, which reminded the vicar of the unsuccessful take-off attempts of a raven with its wings clipped. It came towards Fairwood so swiftly, that he thought at first it was going to attack him. One of the frighteningly thin fingers arrested his movement, like the admonitory index digit of a cartoon pedagogue. He felt a sensation of intense coldness as the finger touched him. He stood with his back against his bookshelves and, modernist though he was, he felt strangely glad that he still wore his crucifix about his neck. His knowledge of the supernatural was a limited thing, gleaned resignedly and rather cynically as an integral part of his basic training, an acquaintance with other religions and the mythology of by-gone eras, learned as history, never considered as a fact. Now, for the first time in his life, Nigel Fairwood wondered whether he was in the presence of an occult manifestation. His eyes travelled from the finger that touched his shoulder along the arm, shrouded in some kind of black material, to the shoulders which seemed almost devoid of flesh, so awkwardly did the black material hang upon them. Then, on from the shoulder travelled his gaze, until it ascended a thin, mufflered throat and beheld a face hidden in the shadows of a cowl, and eyes that looked at him through thick, dark glasses.

“Who are you?” By a supreme effort Fairwood got his voice under control. “What do you want?” There was a movement somewhere between the muffler and the dark glasses. What it was that moved, Fairwood was uncertain; it looked like a darker opening amid the concealed blackness. He felt as if he was going to be sick … And then, with a supreme effort of will, and a swift, silent, inner prayer, he tried to overcome fear with perfect love, according to his Lord’s injunction. If he could only regard this poor, pitiful thing as a being in need of help, then he knew that his sympathy would be aroused, and that he would be able to approach it without fear and without revulsion.

The mental struggle lasted for several seconds. Although the creature had opened its mouth it said nothing. The fear died down in Nigel Fairwood, and moving away from the arresting finger, he led the creature round, and indicated the old leather armchair, deep, comfortable and expansive, which he reserved for those who came to him with their troubles. That chair had been the springboard for many emotional releases. It seemed to invite confidence. And that, thought Fairwood, to himself, is probably as near as I myself could come to holding a superstition. The black-robed thing collapsed into the chair, like an inflated toy, whose valve has suddenly been unscrewed. There was another movement under the cowl, somewhere between the eyes and the muffler. This time Fairwood heard a sibilant, anguine sound that might, by the wildest stretch of the imagination, have been called a voice. It was an articulation, perhaps, rather than a voice, and Fairwood had to lean forward with strained ears to catch it, although he was by no means deaf.

“I have come to bring you this.” From beneath the black robe that it wore, the strange, skeletal figure produced an earthenware bottle. It was a round, wide-based object, about a foot high and seven or eight inches in diameter. It was very old, and as Fairwood took it and studied it under the light on his desk he could see that it was covered with a peculiar, hieroglyphic script. Unlike an older generation of clergy, Nigel Fairwood lacked the classical scholarship which would have enabled him to tackle the hieroglyphics with any degree of scholastic competence. However, he did know enough to be able to make an educated guess at their age. There was a raw, primitive quality about them, the hieroglyphics looked as though they had been familiar to the eyes of men before Abraham left Ur of the Chaldees, before Gilgamesh figured in the immortal epic.

The strange figure with the shrouded face, clawed at the priest’s sleeve.

“At last,” came the weird, anguine voice, “at last, an honest priest.” The dark glasses beneath the cowl glinted and flashed in the study light, and Nigel Fairwood got the impression that something—God alone knew what—was looking at his face.

“Strange, strange you are, but honest. I read that you are a man who seeks truth, and yet there is much of the old truth that you do not believe.”

The weird figure touched the earthenware bottle. “Guard it with your life! Swear that you will; swear it!”

Nigel Fairwood had the impression that he was involved in some strange kind of nightmare. This wasn’t parish life. Weird inhuman figures just did not come into a man’s study window and ask him to guard an earthenware bottle covered in strange hieroglyphics. This was something out of Rider Haggard, or Fanthorpe; this was Edgar Allen Poe, this was Algernon Blackwood … and yet, Fairwood’s quiet, modern routine had suddenly been shattered by this eldritch thing that appeared to have come from some other bourne of time or space.

“Very well,” he said quietly, scarcely recognising the sound of his own voice when he heard it, “I will guard it.”

“With your life! You must! It is a sacred trust!” The weird voice whispered on, coming from some unseen spot in the shaded space behind the cowl.

“Very well,” agreed Fairwood.

“Now, I must go. Time is short.” The thing was speaking with even more d. . .