Henderson was a brilliant nuclear physicist until the night he staggered home a pathetic wreck of his former self, raving wildly about flying saucers and a strange being named Ravan. No scientific nation could afford to lose a genius of Henderson's capacity and Parnell Scott, an experimental psychiatrist, was given the job of restoring Henderson's sanity. Scott gradually infiltrated Henderson's apparent fantasy and found himself involved in research that produced frightening results.
According to ancient legends there had once lived a strange, tyrannical ruler named Ravan, who had possessed a vimana or 'flying car'. Bur Henderson knew nothing of the legends!
Parnell Scott worked desperately against time, sinister foreign agents intent on keeping Henderson insane, and something as old as human history yet as new as tomorrow and more dangerous than nuclear energy.
Release date:
September 30, 2014
Publisher:
Orion Publishing Group
Print pages:
320
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
THE moon shone fitfully through the avenue of tall poplars. A few strato-cumulus clouds floated above the distant hills, with a rather disdainful air. It was a late summer evening, and there was the unmistakable bouquet of night scented flowers in the air. It was a scene of rural East Anglian peace. A scene that could have been paralleled anywhere between the Wash and the Cam. In Norfolk, Suffolk or Essex, Cambridgeshire or Rutland, you would have found such a night and such a moon. The hills would not have been evident everywhere, but despite Norfolk’s reputation of flatness, it has its undulations, and they lend it a charming and attractive character. Footsteps broke the silence of the summer night. They were the footsteps of a desperately running man. A figure was thrown up in the moonlight with guant, stark suddenness. The running man was tall and sparsely built. His long, awkward limbs seemed to gangle; his head was thrown back with effort and strain. His feet struck the road surface with a flat, resounding noise …
His breath was torn from him in vicious, agonised grunts, and sobs. Here was a man who was running for his life, with a body that was not equipped for running, and was certainly not accustomed to it. His thin, grey hair blew wildly back from his sweat soaked face. His eyes, deep set and wild, seemed to dart in all directions, like the eye of a stag that looks for an escape from the hounds. The eyes flashed with recognition, as they fell on a gate. The running man looked over his shoulder for a second as though expecting to see the most revolting fiends in hell’s cauldron hot on his track. The road was empty, save for the moonlight. Nothing stood beyond the verges save the tall, colonnaded poplars. There was a little gasp of relief from the agonised runner. He folded himself across the gate and hung on it, like some mediæval penitent in the torture chamber of the Inquisition. Strength surged into his fingers through some hidden, psychosomatic source; the gate swung open, and he stumbled inside. Gravel crunched beneath his feet, the haunted, desperate eyes looked less haunted, not quite so desperate. He crashed against the front door of a sturdy, Georgian house, and put one hand pathetically against the panel, as though seeking access.
Melanie Henderson had heard the running footsteps, the strange gasping noise at the gate, and the crunch of the gravel. She was almost at the door when the impact of the running man’s body echoed and reverberated through the house like the crash of a vibrant cannon. Melanie was a vivacious, red-haired girl with a lithe, sensuous, curvaceous figure and flashing green eyes that were afraid of nothing. She jumped, but it was only because the noise had startled her by its suddenness. She didn’t hesitate for a second but strode swiftly forward and flung open the front door. The collapsed runner half rolled, half fell inside the front door. Melanie knelt beside him. The light from the hall flooded down on to the man’s upturned features. It reflected from deep-set, desperate eyes, from nostrils that had dilated; the lips curled back from the teeth in a hideous, abnormal grin.
“Father!” gasped Melanie. The eyes showed some kind of recognition.
“Father! What’s happened?”
“Ravan …” gasped the man.
Helanie wasted no further time in talking. The duosyllable which her father had uttered meant nothing at all to her. The only thing of which she could be certain was that he had either been badly injured or desperately shocked—perhaps a combination of the two. Melanie Henderson had a deep, powerful, practical streak, despite her femininity. She was also a very strong, determined young woman. Ignoring the kind of advice that is given in most good first aid books, Melanie half-dragged, half-carried her father’s helpless form into the lounge and levered him up on to the couch. She undid his collar, unlaced his shoes, and made him as comfortable as possible with cushions, before placing a light travelling rug over his body, from armpits to feet. There was a little less agony in the gasping, desperate breathing. He turned his head on one side and whispered softly.
“Melanie … get me a drink.” He sounded comparatively calm and rational. She fetched brandy from the cocktail cabinet.
“Thank you.” With her arm supporting his head and shoulders he raised himself sufficiently to drink it, and then fell back. She put her hand on his chest and waited anxiously as she listened to the breathing, and to the palpitations of his desperately beating heart.
“What happened?” she asked at last, when the desperation had eased, and the beating became steadier. He looked at her intently for a moment, and then said,
“Ravan.”
“What is ravan?” asked Melanie.
“Flying-car …” said her father thickly. All kinds of horrifying ideas were going through the girl’s mind. Had he had a stroke? He was one of the most brilliant nuclear physicists in the country. Perhaps it was only the jealousy of small minds which instigated phrases like “Genius is close to insanity,” or “Overwork leads to collapse”? Perhaps, thought Melanie, something horrible and frightening has thrown him temporarily off balance? But her fears that her father had suffered either a stroke or a deranging shock, grew worse as the minutes dragged slowly, painfully by. In answer to Melanie’s questions, all Conrad seemed able to say was that somebody or something called ‘Ravan’ possessed a flying car.
To Melanie it sounded like the ravings of a hurt mind. The condition improved slightly as she changed her question, and fetched her father another brandy.
“Where did it happen, Dad?” she asked.
“Folly …” he whispered.
“The Folly? What on earth were you doing there at this time of night?”
“I was taking a short cut …” he mouthed thickly. “It seemed a good idea. I’d been working late at the project; I thought I’d take a short cut.”
His breathing was nearer to normal now, but it had an unhealthy rasping quality to it which disturbed Melanie more than she was readily prepared to admit.
“The Folly,” she repeated softly. “Whereabouts?” He jerked suddenly.
“Near … near the reproduction of the Indian temples.” Melanie’s imagination and memory—visual memory—supplied her with a picture of the Folly grounds. It was an Eighteenth Century building in the Regency style. There were tall towers and fantastic minarets and spires, fashioned with more ingenuity than architectural ability, until the whole thing resembled some sort of fabulous building from Gothic adventure. It had been built by a man with more imagination and money than taste, a man who, like many of his contemporaries, had demonstrated more than a little desire for the exotic. In the days when the Grand Tour was considered indispensable to education, men associated the mysterious East with all manner of magic and enigma. To have built reproductions of Indian temples in the garden would have been very fashionable during the decade when the Folly was being constructed. Melanie wondered what could have appeared among the two hundred year old ruins of the pseudo Indian temples which could have distressed her father to such a desperate extent.
There was no real sign of a major improvement, and despite the lateness of the hour Melanie decided to call the doctor.
“I’m just going to telephone, will you be all right a minute, father?”
“Yes.” His voice was a hoarse, hollow croak. Melanie went quickly through into the hall, leaving the door open behind her. She picked up the telephone. The family practitioner was Neil MacBeth, he was a short, elderly, gnome-like Scotsman with the fatherly bedside manner of the best kind of Edwardian G.P. Even so, Melanie was a little hesitant about calling him so close to midnight. She need not have worried. Neil MacBeth was one of the huge majority of dedicated medical men, whose life’s work is more than a job or a profession, but a vocation in every sense of the word. Neil MacBeth was a healer first and a professional man second. He loved people. He was concerned about people for their own sakes. Like many others of his band, he was an altruistic crusader against sickness, suffering, disease and death.
“This is Doctor MacBeth speaking.” He had a broad Highland Scots accent still, despite the years he had spent in rural Norfolk.
“Melanie Henderson, here, doctor.”
“Hello, my dear, what’s wrong?”
“It’s father—”
“What’s the trouble?”
“He seems to have had some kind of stroke, or severe shock.”
“Oh, a traumatic experience,” said the doctor. There was the sound of a pencil scratching rapidly on a pad.
“I don’t like getting you out at this time of night, but I’d be glad if you’d come,” said Melanie.
“I’m on ma way,” assured the canny old Scot.
He arrived within ten minutes, for which Melanie was extremely grateful.
“It’s very kind of you, doctor, to come so quickly,” she said as she opened the door.
“It’s ma job, girlie, it’s ma job! There was a time, a year or two back, when I could have been quicker still, but there it is! Anno domini! Ah, despite the finest precautions of mice and men, anno domini lurks like a great black shadow, catching us all …”
The doctor went through to the couch in the lounge where Conrad Henderson lay. Melanie followed and hovered a little uncertainly as MacBeth examined her father. She watched the skill and precision of the gnome-like, white-haired Scot as he carried out his diagnostic process.
“Now then, lassie,” he said quietly, “we shall have to get him to bed.”
“Bed?” muttered Conrad, “Can’t go to bed, got to do something; Ravan, you see … got to do something about Ravan—”
“Aye, of course you have, but you’ll do more in bed than you will lying here. You’re in no state to do anything, till you’ve got your strength back. You haven’t strained your heart but you’ve come damn near to it! If you’d run another twenty yards you’d have had all sorts of troubles.”
“Flying car—” muttered Henderson.
“Do you think ye can give me a hand wi’ him, up the stairs?”
“Yes, of course.” Melanie assisted the old Scottish doctor to get her father upstairs.
Old Conrad Henderson was not a big man, or a heavy man, but he was long and awkward. It was not easy to make him negotiate the stairs with their bends and curves and narrow treads. They got him there at last; the doctor helped Melanie to undress him, pyjama him, and get him to bed.
“I’ll give him a wee sedative,” said the doctor. He gave Conrad Henderson a deft, skilful injection and ushered Melanie out of the bedroom, pulling the door to behind him.
“Now,” said the doctor. He paused, outside the bedroom door. “I’m in two minds about him. He’s certainly had a very severe shock, and he’s undergone some strenuous physical exertion which I’d not recommend for a man of his age, at least, which I’d not r. . .
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
