Domino

by Richard Cowper

Genres: Ghost; Occult & Supernatural; Horror; Science Fiction

Synopsis

From the moment when young Christopher Blackburn is prevailed upon to attend a seance at The Seekers' Temple a series of seemingly inexplicable and increasingly terrifying experiences gradually convinces him that he has been singled out by some unknown power which is bent on his destruction. But why? And what can he have which has attracted the attention of the sinister Guardians? In a desperate hunt for the answers to these questions Christoper learns for himself the old truth that no man is an island; the new one that it is possible to be in two times at the same place; and the sombre one that some of us are more responsible to posterity than we care to admit!

Release date: October 2, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 188

Sample

I’ve often wondered how long it had been going on before I became aware of it—one’s memories of early childhood are notoriously unreliable—but today I’m inclined to suspect that the nightmares which afflicted me at the age of four or five, and which my mental censor worked so hard to obliterate, may well have had a less obvious cause than my mother’s untimely death. Yet all that remains of them now is a vestigial shudder of terror; a sick remembrance of thrusting things blindly away from me; a remote echo of a mindless, terrified howling in the long watches of the night and a memory of the perplexity in my aunt’s voice as she strove to reassure me that it was ‘all right now’ and that they had all ‘gone away’. She spoke truer than she knew, for after we moved to Chelmswich I have no recollection of the nightmares ever returning. But I never forgot them entirely, nor did they simply diminish into the blue-grey mists of infancy. What happened was that they acquired a strange sort of dual perspective. As I grew older they became ever more remote in time and yet I half suspected that they were not really remote at all and that I could become once again that gibbering little creature beating against the face of the darkness in an effort to ward off the nameless invaders. I suppose I sensed that they, like the past itself, were within me, though I never let the knowledge disturb me unduly.

Had Aunt Dorrie been ‘educated’ she would, no doubt, have taken me to the child psychiatrist and we would both have been convinced that I was ‘different’ and would have lived our lives accordingly. As it was she decided that all I needed was plenty of fresh air and exercise, and so, shortly before my sixth birthday, we left the small house in Lewes and moved north to Glebe Farm near Chelmswich in Essex where, by a combination of good luck and fecklessness, my Uncle Jim contrived to make a fair living as a tenant farmer on a hundred and seventy-five acres of Lord Arlingford’s estates. Here among my aunts, my uncle and my five cousins I grew up in a world which seemed infinitely more real than the ‘swinging’ civilization we glimpsed on the television. International crises came and went: governments fell and were replaced by other governments which fell in their turn; Uncle Jim became a fanatical Anti-Common-Marketeer and engaged in an interminable battle with the Egg-Marketing Board; Auntie Meg gave birth to twins who both died within a week; I passed my ‘eleven plus’ and followed my cousin Arthur to the local grammar school; Aunt Dorrie got religion.

It’s a mystery to me why Aunt Dorrie never married. The photographs I’ve seen of her as a girl show that she was undeniably pretty, and she has always had that innate capacity for sympathy which makes some women born confidantes. Furthermore there was about her an indefinable quality of wonder, as though she were always being mildly astonished and secretly amused by what other people did and said. Aunt Meg hinted at a war-time romance but when I taxed Aunt Dorrie with it she just smiled in that sleepy, enigmatic way of hers and said that she was still waiting for ‘Mr Right’. When, in the course of time, I became curious about my father who had been killed in a flying accident when I was two years old, it was to Aunt Dorrie I turned for information. I learnt that he had been taught to fly during the closing years of the war and, after being demobilized with the rank of F/Lt., had become a charter pilot in one of the ‘3-Dakotas-and-an-overdraft: go-anywhere-do-anything’ companies that were saved from insolvency in the nick of time by the Berlin airlift. Thanks to Soviet foreign policy the shares in the company that ex-Lieutenant Blackburn had received in lieu of salary during the difficult early days had become worth considerably more than the paper they were printed on, and when, some years after his death, the now prosperous company sold out to an international air-freight consortium, his shares passed to my mother and thence to Aunt Dorrie who held them in trust for me. Thus it came about that early in 1966, at the age of eighteen, I learnt to my utter astonishment that I was heir to an estate of some five hundred and fifty pounds a year.

The news had the effect of unsettling me badly. Five-fifty a year may not sound a lot to anyone who is used to money, but when you are young and single and conditioned to thinking in terms of ten shillings a week, it seems like a licence to lifelong liberty. Up to that point my horizons had been bounded by my forthcoming examinations and the prospect of three or four years at university specializing in zoology. Overnight this particular landscape lost its attraction and I spent the following week toying with schemes of hitch-hiking round the world, spending a couple of years in the States or raising a loan on my prospects and using the money to get the local pop group I was associated with on to the London scene. Each alternative seemed to have charms which outweighed the others and all had obvious drawbacks. The most obvious of the lot, and the one which for that very reason I had put off considering, was Aunt Dorrie. For reasons founded quite frankly on love and affection I did not want to do anything of which she might disapprove. Accordingly, and with an elaborate casualness which could not possibly have deceived her, I contrived to get her on her own one evening and unburdened myself. She let me say my piece, nodding her head from time to time to show that she was attending. When I had done, she drew a deep breath, closed her eyes for a long ten seconds then opened them and smiled at me. ‘We’ll ask Peter what he thinks.’

‘Who’s Peter?’

‘Why, your dad, of course.’

To cover my embarrassment I fumbled a packet of cigarettes out of my pocket and took a long time over lighting one. ‘You’ll let me know then?’ I said.

‘I think he’d like to tell you himself,’ she said with a gentle simplicity that I couldn’t hope to convey in mere words. ‘After all you might think I was making it up.’

I wanted to laugh, to tell her it was all a load of phoney crap and that I wouldn’t be seen dead at one of her Astral meetings, but I couldn’t do it. Instead I found myself agreeing to go along with her on Sunday evening to ‘The Seekers’ Temple’ which occupied premises at 28 Cornmarket Lane, Chelmswich, and there to consult the resident Priestess who, it emerged, was on the mundane plane a certain Mrs Samuel Bigglesworth.

‘Healthy scepticism’ may have become a somewhat tarnished phrase but no other describes so fittingly my state of mind during my adolescence. With the possible exception of old Higsey my chemistry teacher, who was by way of being a secret Homoeopath in the same shamefaced way that other men are secret drinkers, all the savants whose duty it was to guide my footsteps along the high road of science were cast in the same rigid 19th Century intellectual mould. As far as they were concerned, and despite all the evidence to the contrary we ourselves afforded, homo sapiens was a rational creature and eventually all phenomena would be explained in their kind of rationalism. I sometimes got the impression that to them the universe and everything within it was some sort of super-sophisticated meccano set and God—even if one smiled tolerantly as one mentioned the word—had much in common with the Presidents of the Royal Society. They never allowed themselves to be drawn into discussion on the morality of scientific investigation on the grounds that it did not feature on the ‘A’ level syllabus. If any one of them had had a single original thought in his life, no trace of the shameful experience remained, and they had a surprisingly effective way of discouraging our speculations by a twitch of the eyebrow, a quiver of the nostril, or occasionally, if we persisted, a dry injunction to ‘save it for your Ph.D., lad’.

The possibility that one of my teachers might see me entering ‘The Seekers’ Temple’ caused me acute discomfort as I descended from the bus behind Aunt Dorrie. Fortunately it was raining just hard enough to keep people off the streets and a quick glance to left and right as we turned into Cornmarket Lane did something to restore my peace of mind. Aunt Dorrie trotted briskly up the narrow street and nodded at the scattering of vehicles parked along the kerb outside a substantial but depressing Victorian house. ‘That’s Mr Cobley’s car,’ she said. ‘He’s a councillor.’

I wasn’t sure whether this was some priestly office in the hierarchy of the faithful or a reference to his social standing so I just nodded non-committally and followed her up the steps to the front door.

As I glanced up at the chain-suspended slice of varnished log on which the legend ‘The Temple’ had been burnt out by a red hot poker, a trickle of rain slid down between my neck and my collar. At the same moment I became aware that one of my shoes was leaking. Then the door was opened by a small, grey-haired woman wearing a beige smock, across the bosom of which was embroidered a solitary forbidding eye. She smiled when she saw Aunt Dorrie. ‘Cora told me you were coming,’ she whispered. ‘And this young man will be Christopher.’

She turned her head as she spoke so that the smile included me. I murmured, ‘How do you do,’ scrubbed my wet shoes on the mat and edged past her into the hall.

The door closed with a solid clunk! I helped Aunt Dorrie out of her rain-beaded coat, handed it to the grey-haired acolyte and then unzipped my windcheater. Aunt Dorrie patted her hair tidy and gave me a reassuring smile. ‘That’s Miss Trooby,’ she whispered as the acolyte trotted off down the hallway bearing our wet coats. ‘She’s Mrs Bigglesworth’s secretary.’

From a shadowed recess half way up the stairs a clock pinged seven times. ‘What happens now?’ I asked.

Aunt Dorrie shushed me and Miss Trooby pattered back. ‘Do come through, Miss Camberley,’ she murmured, and led the way down a carpeted hall to a white-painted door with a fan-light above it. She ushered us into a large, bow-windowed room in which some dozen people, mostly elderly or middle-aged, were sitting in a double semicircle of chairs facing a small wooden dais. Aunt Dorrie effected the whispered introductions and we edged into two vacant seats at the end of the back row. I bent down, surreptitiously unlaced my shoe and fingered my damp sock. Miss Trooby trotted up to the dais, placed upon it a spindle-backed arm chair, then ducked away into a far corner of the room from which presently emerged the recorded strains of an ecclesiastical choir. The other members of the congregation shifted expectantly on their seats and Aunt Dorrie laid her hand on my sleeve. I wriggled my foot back into my shoe and glanced up in time to see a curtain over a concealed doorway pulled aside and a solid-looking woman dressed in a tweed skirt, a cashmere twin-set and a pair of ‘sensible’ shoes, walk confidently over to the dais and take her seat on the chair Miss Trooby had placed in readiness. ‘Good evening,’ she said in an unmistakable American accent. There was a murmured response. Her grey eyes flickered reflectively over the faces before her, met mine, hesitated fractionally and then moved on. Through the netted windows behind her I could just make out the lamplit branches of a leafless tree swaying slightly against the dark sky.

Mrs Bigglesworth settled her hands comfortably on the wooden arms of her chair, breathed deeply through her nose and then fixed her gaze on a point some feet in the air above our heads. ‘The Reality which pervades the universe is indestructible.’ She spoke in clear, ringing tones which brooked no dissent. ‘No one has the power to change the Changeless. Worn out clothes are shed by the body: worn out bodies are shed by the Dweller within the body.’ She paused as though to give this time to sink in, then continued: ‘He who dwells within all living bodies remains for ever indestructible. Therefore we must never mourn. I am the form through whom the Unmanifest shall become Manifest. I am the instrument of the Innermost Element; the Being of Beings; the Immortal; the Changeless. I await His command.’

She lowered her head and, relapsing into a familiar, conversational tone that was distinctly disconcerting, continued: ‘I shall now go into a trance. Don’t be alarmed. While I am in my trance those elements of the Unmanifest who have accompanied you here tonight and have communications which they may wish to pass on to you will be able to make use of me for that purpose. May I take this opportunity to remind you that all communications are sacrosanct?’

With that parting shot she smiled at us, let her chin sink on to her breast, and began to breathe in deep, slow breaths. The music faded away until it was no more than a mere hint in the background. I shivered violently and wondered if I was catching a cold. A voice, still recognizably Mrs Bigglesworth’s, though higher pitched said: ‘Good evening, Dorothy, I’m glad you took my advice about the arthritis. We’re making a lot of progress with our research right now and we feel it’s right that you Seekers should be the first to benefit.’

The pseudo-voice rumbled on in this vein passing on messages of advice and good cheer while the members of the congregation nodded and looked pleased. It struck me as all rather pathetic and I was wondering what advice was likely to come my way when suddenly Mrs Bigglesworth jerked back in her chair, twisted her head savagely over her left shoulder and wrenched her face into a series of quite horrifying contortions, the tendons in her neck taut as bowstrings. Her eyes stared wide open and a voice totally unlike the other gasped out: ‘Doctor Blackburn, I’ve got to—’

Seemingly of their own volition, Mrs Bigglesworth’s hands leapt from the arms of the chair and gripped her savagely by the throat. The chair jerked sideways, one leg slipped off the dais, and before anyone could move, the Priestess of the Temple was sprawling on the floor, blue in the face, with the chair on top of her.

A man in the front row sprang forward, dragged her rigid fingers away f. . .