THE WAY
‘Prisoners of the Gyre’
‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…’
W.B. Yeats
INDEX
Prologue A Face in the Hand 3 – 8
BOOK 1: THE CALLING
Chapter 1 Hunting for Clues 9 – 22
Chapter 2 Olympian Friends 23 – 32
Chapter 3 Lost Years 32 – 44
Chapter 4 Tears in the Night 45 – 56
Chapter 5 The New Girl 57 – 69
Chapter 6 I Don’t Like Monday’s 69 – 78
Chapter 7 Beyond the Generator 79 – 94
Chapter 8 A Snake in the Grass 94 – 106
Chapter 9 Moon Dreams 106 – 122
Chapter 10 Unwelcome Partners 123 – 133
Chapter 11 Things in Motion 133 – 143
Chapter 12 The Museum 143 – 159
Chapter 13 Not So Happy Families 160 – 173
Chapter 14 A Change of Mind 173 – 181
Chapter 15 Talk on the Border 182 – 192
Chapter 16 The Ancient Watchers 192 – 204
Chapter 17 Into the Night 205 – 215
Chapter 18 Dreaming on the Edge 216 – 225
Chapter 19 The Task is Set 226 – 265
PROLOGUE
- A FACE IN THE HAND -
Light sandy brown in colour, weighing no more than a bird, it sat plump as a new baked bun in the palm of Kian’s hand. The puzzle face, bearing a disturbing resemblance to a disembowelled intestine, stared inscrutably back up at him. He half expected it to speak, but all he could hear was his own blood pounding in his ears, the incessant rumble of which had hardly slackened in the several hours since, trembling, he had picked up the tiny mask from the restaurant table, slipped it into his pocket and then walking through the vastness of the museum with all the quaking confidence of a condemned man, he had finally made it out into the spartan light of a December day.
No alarms had sounded. No hand had reached out to take a firm hold of his expectant shoulder. No one had chased him down the dozen steps to where Caz was waiting for him, eyes askance, visibly taken aback by the look on his face.
‘Run!’ was the single, silently mouthed word that broke the spell of his frozen lips. And so they had, scattering standers by like a pair of gazelles that have just smelt Leopard.
They were through the main gates and had crossed Great Russell in an instant, but as they cornered wildly onto Coptic Street, Caz almost collided with a taxi.
‘Ere! Slow down! You’ll see us all killed!’ was the irate cry from the cabbie.
She regained her balance and sped on, vainly trying to catch up with Kian who had the bit well and truly between his teeth and was tearing down the lane as if his life depended on it. And then suddenly, in an instant, he was over, crashing to the floor in a great scud of limbs and flailing feet. Heart in her mouth, Caz was by his side in a trice.
‘Kian! Kian! Are you alright! Are you ok? Kian, are you hurt?’
‘Yeah, yeah! I’m fine. I’m fine. It’s alright! Don’t fuss.’ He rose gingerly, muttering ‘But what..? How did I..?’
Dazed, grazed, the boy looked around for the cause of his fall. It was then he noticed a stick, a bundle, and a slender black dog staring grimly up at him from the shadows. There was a sudden, mountainous eruption, as the array of rags and old sleeping bags she guarded, shifted and rose.
‘I think you must ‘ave dropped this’ said a muffled voice from within the layers of tattered scarves and weathered combat fatigues, worn oddly inside out.
Mittened fingers pulled back the folds from around a heavily lined face to reveal a pair of deep set, cloudy, and clearly sightless eyes. Laser like they seemed to fix a fathomless stare on the spread-eagled boy. A hand came forth and held something out.
‘I saw it fall. Fall from off ya. Saw it clear as niyht.’ The figure tapped the side of his head and laughed grimly. ‘Saw it inside ‘ere. So I assumes it must be yours.’
Kian recoiled. But the hand reached further and opened to reveal his museum booty, seemingly spilled in the tumble. The tiny ancient effigy faced him as blindly as its current custodian. Instantly the roar of London faded.
‘That’s some memento you ‘ave there me boy. Not somethin’ to be idly tossed aside. I suggest you deal wiv it more wisely.’ He paused, chewing on the remnants of some leathery tobacco before adding nonchalantly ‘Well, do ya want it back or no?’
Kian snatched up the object. At the same instant the presence grabbed him by the wrist with his other hand. For a second he held the boy tight, as if testing his strength. With a great wrench Kian broke free.
The figure chuckled once more. ‘Don’t mind me son. I’m nothin’ but an awld fool.’ He smiled, covered his face, and sank slowly back down onto the pavement. Kian was overcome by a strong desire to escape this smelly old relic who had heard his name, handed him back the spoils of his crime - clearly guessed at his guilty secret! Mask held tight, the boy backed up, leapt to his feet and without a glance behind, sped away.
‘Kian!’ Wait! Wait for me!’ Caz shouted after.
She to was up now, about to follow, but then hesitated, feeling a compulsion to take one last look down as the man, his stick, his rags, his dog, slunk back into the gloom of the disused shop front. Caz could feel the strange, nagging draw in her secret place intensify, as it had done earlier that day passing the selfsame doorway on the way up to the museum. Fumbling in her coat pocket, she found a coin. Not seeing the usual paper cup, she dropped the silver into the dog’s water bowl. It landed with a plop.
‘I hope you’ll be ok?’ she ventured into the shadows. The figure did not stir. The dog sat motionless.
Hands sheltering her eyes from the low winter light, Caz peered urgently off down the street as if into a dream. Kian was by now far away from her and she feared she might lose him in the traffic. But still she hesitated. Words drifted up from the doorway.
‘You’d bett’a follow or ‘e’ll get away from ya luv. Might do well not ta let him out of ya sight… and we both know which kinda seein’ I’m talkin’ ‘bout. Now, on ya way!’
And with that she was off; down Princes, then Shaftsbury and finally straight on, the final stretch that led to Charing Cross and hopefully home.
Kian was there, well ahead of her, waiting flushed and impatient. Inhaler in hand, gasping for air, breathing deep, the words rasped out of him ‘There’s… a train… leaves in three minutes… platform seven. Come on will you! Hurry!’
In the nick of time, tickets in hand, they were through the barrier and racing down the platform. Breathlessly they boarded and collapsed into two window seats.
As soon as the train began to draw away, he was on her; ‘Why did you have to say my name!? Why did you have to let him hear my name!? You said it over and over again. He’ll tell the police! He’ll tell them everything. That’s just great. Brilliant! Thanks a bunch.’
Without looking for an answer, Kian fixed his eye to the plate glass window and blanked her. Dejectedly, Caz sank back in on herself and withdrew. The glow in her secret place ebbed out.
BOOK 1
CHAPTER 1
- HUNTING FOR CLUES -
At every station on the sixty minute journey home Kian willed and willed the doors to close before the pursuing posse of police marksmen tumbled aboard. Each torturous second he awaited the booming announcement informing passengers that there was a criminal at large. But the intercom remained resolutely mute. And no one of note, bar the odd pensioner or mother overburdened with her day’s shopping, entered the near empty carriage in which the two youngsters sat silent as ghosts.
No further words were exchanged until they stumbled out at Gravesend station and even then, as Caz turned to say something, anything, who knows what, just to make contact, Kian had shot off, bag flailing, with no more than a ‘See ya tomorrow’ floating behind him, no time to look and catch the hurt welling up in her eyes.
And now he was home; secure in the sanctuary of his bedroom.
In his short fourteen year life he had never, ever, done anything like this before. Imagine, stealing from the British Museum! Imagine, stealing something as rare and as old as this; just about the only existing carving of a primeval monster! The death mask of Humbaba, the fierce one! The terrifying beast out of the Gilgamesh epic; from Mesopotamia! Ancient Iraq! 3,500 years old and counting! Once again, goose pimples broke out on the back of his neck. ‘Why, oh why, had he allowed himself to do it?’
‘It’s her fault. She made me,’ he thought. ‘It would never have happened but for her and her crazy…’
A sudden, fleeting image of the street person flashed through his mind; powerful fingers about his wrist, squeezing him tight. He brushed it aside. Breathing deep, he sought to apply himself to the task in hand. Looking down, a deep fascination immediately overcame all his fears and a cat like curiosity focussed his mind.
‘What was this strange face all about? And why, oh why, had it come into his possession?’
Since returning he had spent what felt like no time at all (but was in fact close enough to a couple of hours) scouring his book collection for answers, pumping the internet for clues, guidance, something that might make sense of what he had done other than the obvious two years he now faced in youth custody. But nothing of worth yielded to his frantic searches. Oh sure, there were the usual bland summaries, the lofty cross references to the bible and the great flood, several allusions to Noah’s Ark, plenty of talk about ‘the story that begins it all’, along with much amazement at how after millennia of internment, the slumbering Gilgamesh (in the form of crumbling clay tablets) had been dragged fortuitously from an ancient rubbish tip by a keen young Victorian archaeologist to once again stun the world with his deeds of daring do. But nothing could he find that came close to explaining the ‘why?’ that had driven him to thievery that day.
Kian was of course already acquainted with the epic tale of the legendary Sumerian King and his quest for the meaning of life. How could he not be, seeing as it pretty much stole the limelight in the first chapter of many of the books on legend and myth that now so packed his shelves that they had been forced to find extra elbow space, strewing themselves across the floor and piling into every corner of his room. It wasn’t long after the fascination for all things mythic took a firm grip on his life that Kian set out to read it through. He remembered how from the off it had been something of a struggle; the themes were unfamiliar and the language archaic. But he had persisted and bit by bit he finally got into it. He was by then a prolific reader, and had long since learned not to give up on a story just because it made demands, because he knew they were often the ones that paid off the best in the end.
Thus it was that one sweltering day, lying under a shady umbrella nursing a wounded ankle, the shimmer of reflected water from a nearby pool dancing willfully across the open page, he first encountered the beast whose hypnotic features he was later to clasp so intently in his hand. For a good half hour he had found himself torn between the increasingly gripping tale and his need to monitor his mother, who he could spy chattering away in that unnaturally florid fashion to the blonde haired stranger who had seen fit to lift her, dripping from the water’s edge, and deposit her onto his sun lounger like some prize catch at a fishing contest. But finally he could resist no longer, and his focus succumbed entirely to the story’s call.
His eyes darted anxiously from line to line, as bit-by-bit the world about him slipped into suspended animation. But within the realm of Gilgamesh, all was uproar. An ancient forest quivered with the tumult of bodies crashing through heaven lofted trees, startling the native fauna from their lairs and scattering them heedlessly amongst the dense undergrowth. High above all echoed the cornered cry of the beast Humbuba, staring wildly, eyes pleading, its blood red tongue lolling heavily from side to side, its powerfully muscled limbs flailing hither and thither, seeking any escape from the piercing blows that Gilgamesh, and his brother in arms Enkidu, rained down upon its face and neck. Finally, inevitably, it succumbed to their onslaught and with a last, piercing cry of despair, down it thundered. Up went the triumphant throat roar from the two heroes, who clambered upon the colossal carcass and, showing no mercy, axe hacked their adversary until all convulsions ceased and the last of its life source ebbed away into the cold embrace of the dark, dank earthen floor. For a brief moment, silence; a cascade of stillness coursed over all as the shock waves momentarily seemed to slow the very motions of the earth. Finally the breeze could contain itself no longer and with a tell-tell gasp blasted the grave news to the four corners - the champion of the forest, placed there by the high gods themselves to protect this timeless paradise from man’s rapacious hand, had been brazenly dispatched, its great head hacked off and dumped in a sack like so much garbage!
Kian slammed shut the volume and stared ahead, motionless. Yes, he knew this is what heroes do to monsters; they slaughter them! But there was something about this incident, something about the frenzied ferocity with which they had obliterated the creature, followed by their crazed levelling of the ancient woodlands in which he lived, that so troubled the boy that he no longer felt any desire to persist with the adventures of Gilgamesh. For the one and only time he had put aside a story barely a third the way through, never rediscovering the will to come back to it.
Perhaps it had something to do with the circumstances in which he had first attempted it; after all being bitten by a serpent and then having to watch a snake in the grass take possession of your mother doesn’t happen to one every day, but whatever the cause, his ignorance on the matter was now of consequence when faced by an urgent need for answers. How he now wished he hadn’t allowed his squeamishness to conquer his will, and instead managed to stagger on to the story’s end, for he felt sure if he had he would have learnt something vital, a clue of some kind that would make sense of why, two years later, here he now was, stealing a last surviving image of that selfsame butchered custodian of the wild; so rare, so small, so alone in his hand, its blank eyed grimace only serving to amplify his ignorance and auguring some grave consequence ahead.
As part of his frantic investigation into its meaning, he had already meticulously sketched a picture of the beast’s complex contours and posted it onto his personal web site, www.kiansdoorwithin.com, opening a new story home page with the title Gilgamesh… he who saw everything’, derived from the very first line of the story, as was his habit (in his alarmed state he had failed to consider just how risky such an evidential posting might well prove to be).
The site was a preciously guarded secret. He had begun it six months previously under the auspices of a school IT project but this had been merely a ruse by which to get it up and running without anyone at home suspecting what he was about. The real purpose had been to create a secret hideaway, a place to hoard his discoveries, a kind of pirates cave, only the gems within glistened with a different kind of hue.
When he began to explore a new myth Kian would first post a story page containing a detailed outline written in his own words. He would then search online for images, maps or diagrams with which to flesh out the tale or scan in pictures from his books and even, as of late, skilfully draw his own and post them if no other came to hand that better suited his needs. In this fashion he had so far set up over thirty individual myths, or ‘Story Doors’ as he liked to call them, most of which concerned the well known Greek legends but there were also a small handful of exotics from around the world including his current obsession with King Arthur; and of course there was now a meagre looking Gilgamesh page, crying out for something of substance to be added to cover up its bare bones.
His idea of creating ‘Story Doors’ was one that still gave him a thrill; it was how he envisioned each myth – as a way through to something wondrous hidden in the beyond. He had great plans for his site, whereby doors would lead to further doors and multiple corridors would flow off in all directions, but thus far he had only succeeded in crafting the point of entrance and ‘hallway’ beyond but it still made a pretty cool homepage. Most of all he was pleased by the free flowing script he had engraved on the virtual entrance door’s imposingly sturdy oak panels.
It proclaimed:
‘A myth is a magical story from the ancient past,
Brim full of wonder and mystery.
It works like an onion; the more you explore it, the more layers you find.
The more layers you find, the stronger the flavour gets.
The more intense the flavour, the closer you get to the
Truth
Buried deep within.
Enter and feast, Truth Seeker.’
Although heavily indebted to an ancient Persian proverb he had fortuitously stumbled upon, all about why stories mattered so much, he was still really proud of what he had written, surprising even himself with the provocation of his words. Sometimes he would just sit and stare at their polished form on his computer screen and drift off into a reverie concerning one of the tales within, imagining what it would be like to seek out adventure like the heroes of old.
Thus far he had kept the site a secret, especially from the invasive fingers of his stepbrother, Jeric, whose antipathy towards Kian knew no bounds. Despite being fully six years younger, Jeric regarded Kian’s room, along with all his belongings, as his to desecrate. Regularly he would come home from school and find his world turned upside down. In particular Jeric had a talent for knowing just which of Kian’s things mattered the most and honing in on them for special treatment. Much loved books would have pages torn out or be defaced with red marker. Computer games would vanish or turn up scratched and disfigured and posters would be torn down or have darts stuck in them.
Kian begged and begged Mary, his mum, to let him have a lock on the door but she refused, saying ‘You need to be kind to your brother and that means sharing your things…’ Before he could but in with a provocative ‘He’s not my brother!’ she would continue ‘and that’s my final word on the matter.’ This turning a blind eye was now part and parcel of existence at No.72.
In particular Jeric liked to get access to Kian’s desktop. His mother had banned Kian from setting up a secret access password. She claimed this was under the auspices of exercising due parental supervision but Kian could detect the usual telltale sign of his stepfather’s controlling influence at work. As an upshot, whenever Kian was out and Jeric was at home he was sure to be found glued to the screen, mouse clicking away, diligently defacing whatever files he could uncover.
‘My Dad says I can use it whenever I like and he says you’re not to stop me, so screw you!’ was the brazen response when caught in the act. Kian would stifle the instinct to throttle and instead, firmly propel the protesting Jeric through the door and out onto the landing. The shrill little voice, which grew ever more gratingly Texan when enraged, sounded through the chip-board like a Harpy; ‘I’ll tell my dad when he gets home, I will. He’ll sure leather you’re ass, he will!’
Ignoring the sharp kicks to the base of the door, Kian would wedge a chair under the handle and then begin the tiresome process of trying to salvage what he could from the fiend’s intrusion. Of late his behind had hardened somewhat to leathering and he would take his chance.
He soon mastered the art of leaving obvious but unimportant files readily accessible thereby giving Jeric the kind of easy victory he fed on. But after the disc melting incident of a fortnight back, where he had lost a great deal of painstakingly assembled material, even his mother had drawn the line and dared to insist on Jeric being temporarily banned from his room. Preoccupied as he was by an impending business trip to the States, his step father had for once, strangely acquiesced. But how long this fragile truce would last was another matter and so Kian took no chances; the secret website was now his preferred means of data protection.
For these reasons he was increasingly circumspect about who he opened up to, and as he worked on late into the night, he kept more and more to his own council. As he looked about him - at his family, his school, his home town - everything seemed so drab and bitter to the taste. He longed for colour, for meaning, for a sense of ‘livingness’ to come into his life, but the endless strife and days of rain and sofa slouching and dreary takeaway dinners consumed to a constant backdrop of sport, soaps and fake reality TV, meant he could already see his life shrinking before it had even had a chance to get going. Only in the myths could he find a place of real expanse and vibrancy, one capable of enriching his swift and eager spirit.
So now here he was; picture posted, mouse poised to add comments as he glanced from screen to object and back again.
Despite his fear, he felt inexplicably drawn to the figure’s macabre features. He stared hard at the mesmerising flow of lines, wondering what the pattern might mean. Not seeing where else to begin, he placed his finger on the creature’s right ear and began to trace a path, gingerly, back and forth, up and down, first through the cheek, then into the mouth and down through its zigzagging teeth, (an uneasy feeling), down further to the chin and then unexpectedly up and over the opposite jowl, into the crazy pavement hair and then back down to where he had started, following the dictate of the flowing path. But what was this? He wasn’t quite back where he had begun. Rather his finger now rested on an inner fold, parallel to where he had entered but further in from the edge. He smiled, almost for the first time that day, and the word ‘Labyrinth’ floated inquiringly into his mind. And so his finger rolled on, lost in the rhythm, back and forth, this way and that, wherever the tide took him, a calming almost hypnotic voyage around the eyes, up over the forehead, until …
His heart almost burst through his chest.
The thump, thump, thump, was real! No longer inside him, but coming up the stairs, heading towards his room! He had no time other than what it took to crash exit his PC, and thrust the unflappable face beneath a pillow as he dived for the cover of his bed, feigning sleep.
Just in time. An instant later the bedroom door was thrust asunder. His mother’s flushed features were framed against the stairwell, momentarily motionless, before, in a torrent, her outburst fell upon him.
‘Do you have any idea of what you have done? DO YOU?’ she bellowed.
Kian didn’t think he had ever seen her this angry. He attempted to burrow deeper into his pillow.
‘I’ve been up the walls, demented. Where have you been? The school were on the phone saying you’d disappeared in London and how they had no idea where you’d got to and … and… I’ve been worried sick! I’ve tried calling and calling and texting your mobile but no answer... I’ve had to leave work early … I’ve been on to the police and to your dad...’
‘He’s not my …’
‘SILENCE!!’ she roared, taking a moment to half calm herself, then continued, ’Do you realise I had to wake him up in his motel, even though he needed the sleep before his flight home! He’s not at all pleased, I can tell you… (at this news Kian’s stomach sank). And now… what do I find? Here you are, as per usual, hiding in this room all along, without a care for others or what they might feel, doing what? No doubt wasting your time reading more of these STUPID BLOODY BOOKS!’
With a cry of pent up frustration, she hurled a handy copy of Egyptian myths across the room, where it erupted on the wall above his bed, fluttering Kian with paper. He hid his face further in as he sought to hide the lie.
‘I had an attack mum. I just needed to come home.’
‘Then why didn’t you call me? I’ve told you a hundred times what to do but do you listen..?’ Hardly able to contain herself she went on despairingly, and with no let up in the machine-gun delivery, ‘Why can’t you just be normal, like everyone else? Why do you have to be so … so different!? As if we don’t have enough to worry about what with the state of things… and you forever winding your dad up – and he’ll take it out on me you know that! Not to mention your asthma! I’m up the walls, I really am. Up the walls! And here you are, off with the fairies as usual!! Sometimes I … I just feel like giving up on you, I really do!’
Slam went the door. A bust of the Greek god Hermes nose dived from the shelf above and was only saved from shattering by a pile of dirty laundry strewn against the far wall. He listened as his mother’s footsteps echoed down the stairs and then winced as the whole house shook to the front door slamming with equally frustrated force. Where she had gone – to pray, to weep, to rage anew – he could not say. All that mattered was that she had gone.
CHAPTER 2
- OLYMPIAN FRIENDS -
Kian sat stock still, allowing the last splashes of his mother’s invective to wash off him. Much as he still secretly cared for her, she had become a different person in the year and a half since she remarried. Bit by bit their relationship had withered. In her desperate attempts to keep his stepfather sweet, the bond with her son was slowly being sacrificed. Kian’s response had been to gradually disconnect his feelings and detach from her, and as he did so, the gulf between them grew still further.
He reached into his pocket and took out his phone and turned it back on from silent. Mr. Henderson had instructed them all to switch off their mobiles whilst in the museum and what with everything that had happened since, Kian had not thought to … Oh cripes, eleven missed calls! All from his mother. Also a bunch of desperate texts. One from his stepfather. Very short. Very threatening. He methodically deleted the lot. Finally, a text from Caz. A single word.
‘Sorrey’.
He smiled at her spelling. Went to delete it. Thought better and let it be.
Resignedly, he carefully sorted the pages from the broken backed book into some kind of order and then, having retrieved his fallen hero, he got up on a chair and placed him back in pride of place amongst the front row of the pantheon of assorted fantastical figures he kept up on high. Leaning back for a moment, Kian surveyed their mostly plastic faces. He realised he hadn’t taken much notice of them of late, not since his website had begun to take up all his spare attention.
They had been painstakingly collected from far and wide. Some had arrived as special offers, some had been scavenged in junk shops, some unearthed online, and miraculously some secured on the single holiday he had thus far experienced in Greece, alone with his mother, two summers back, a holiday where to his pride and joy he was finally able to get his hands on a proper figure of Zeus as well as a great mini-statue of his golden son Apollo, plus the much treasured bust of Hermes. He particularly loved their authentic red eyes.
Momentarily he remembered with a shudder what else had come home with them from that trip. Casting the thought from his mind he breathed deep and then surveyed the massed ranks. He might have stopped playing with them for a while now but they still loomed large like an exultant legion in his mind.
The twelve Greek gods (or more accurately the eleven Kian had) took pride of place bang in the centre of the shelf. The chief of them all and the largest was of course Zeus, thunderbolt baring king of the Gods, with next to him, trident in hand, his brother Poseidon, the old ruler of the sea, followed by the younger eager-beavers, golden haired Apollo and Ares the god of war, desperate to get to the front but kept in check by Zeus’ out stretched arm, allowing Kian’s favourite, the messenger god, the wise one, Hermes, to be set slightly forward of them all. Hidden behind him lurked shape-shifting Dionysus, the one Greek God whose purpose Kian simply could not grasp (seeing as it had something to do with sending his followers stark staring mad!) and thus whom he simply ignored.
As a matter of courtesy Kian still left a space for Hephaestus the smithy, best known by his Roman name Vulcan, the limping master of molten metal, and the only male Olympian he had yet to collect. The lack of an available statue, despite a year’s admittedly half-hearted searching, only reinforced Kian’s sense of his insignificance in the great scheme of things, despite the fact he now clearly ruled the world long after all the other gods had been banished or had fled the stage. Try as he might, the boy felt no affinity with this unsightly champion of industry; a god was really only worth something if he had a part to play in a great story and the faltering Hephaestus failed on all scores, other than as the butt of the jokes concerning his beautiful wife, the goddess Aphrodite.
He had felt somewhat uncomfortable by his decision to also collect goddess figurines. First off, they were girls, and he still didn’t really have the faintest idea what they were about! Secondly, although he knew it was ok for boys to be into heroes and gods, dragons and monsters - goddesses in their long flowing dresses and bare arms, well that was quite another thing.
This had been amplified by the one occasion in which he had taken some of his figures into school to give a talk on the Greek pantheon, only to have the other boys in his class ridicule his obsession and in particular take out their freakish juvenility on his goddess statues. That was why Aphrodite now stood there somewhat twisted and deformed, with one of her arms blackened and her face burnt off. He had thought at the time about throwing her away but something had stopped him. Deep inside, the boy felt a profound fascination for this strange enchantress of so many tales, and whenever he came across a drawing or a statue in a book he would stare, captivated, long past the time required to read the inscription beneath. So there she was; mangled Aphrodite, positioned on the right, slightly masked by a support for the shelf above, standing beguilingly within the seashell from which she first alighted onto dry land, born in a torrent of aquamarine waves as they broke frothily upon some long lost Mediterranean shore.
Next to her, stood her fellow goddesses. Firstly, with her back firmly turned, came Hera, high queen of heaven, she of the twelve-star crown but too often brought low by her jealousy of Zeus, her philandering husband. Alongside her stood Apollo’s twin sister Artemis, the huntress of the night (sadly minus her bow and bow arm – another casualty of that playground assault), she whom the Romans would later call Diana. Then came the warrior goddess Athena (Kian always gave an involuntary shiver when he spied the snake peeping furtively out from behind her broad, bronze shield) and finally even Demeter, the mother figure, pushed somewhat to the back, but still there all the same.
When Kian looked at the group, he couldn’t help but picture how the girls in his class clustered in gaggles at the bus stop or outside the local newsagent, brazenly eyeing up the boys as they gandered by. He blushed as he thought of how he scampered passed them with quickened pace, eyes to the floor, stomach churning, hoping to avoid contact with their assertive stares. How he shuddered at the thought of the muffled chatter and only half suppressed laughter that followed instantly after in his wake.
On the left of the shelf he had collected the great heroes, his favourite characters in all the myths; Heracles of the twelve miraculous labours; Jason the seeker, finder and winner of the Golden Fleece; Perseus who slew the serpent headed Gorgon; Theseus the brave, who entered the Labyrinth and dispatched the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, and tallest and most fearsome of them all, the warrior Achilles, who demanded and won such renown at Troy. Great heroes. Great stories. Secretly Kian wished he could be like them; bold, adventurous, free. Secretly he wished he lived their lives not his.
The strange thing was they were just crude figures from an imaginary past; indeed on the whole they were nothing much more than rubber toys or cheap plastic ornaments, but to Kian they had become living, pulsating, breathing beings with whom he now had a closer, more intimate and meaningful relationship than any soul alive. He silently asked their help. Help to face the next day at school. Their help to face the next evening by which time his stepfather would be home. And perhaps much worse troubles to come thereafter.
‘I suggest you deal with it more wisely.’
The words of the old tramp came floating back to him now. He stopped and pondered. Then he went over to the bed and drew the guilty secret out from under the pillow. He was no nearer discovering why what had happened had happened, nor what any of it meant, but he needed to hide the gruesome mask face somewhere safely for now. Kian knew it was too late to give it back and he certainly wasn’t going to own up to his parents. He shuddered at the thoughts of how they would react.
The whispered thought ‘Well, what would dad have to say about it?’ slithered unwelcomed into his mind. He quickly grabbed and decapitated it before it had a chance to utter a further syllable in that direction. There were some things he no longer let himself think about.
Looking up at the shelf of figures, he got back up on the chair, reached out and placed the figure of Humbaba deep in the second row, amongst the beasts and various fantastical creatures that also inhabited his world; the eye-popping, malevolent force against which his gods, goddesses, heroes and warriors were so sorely tested. These had been easier to come by because every model shop, online site and fanzine small-ads page was full of them; monsters. So he had a veritable army of multi-headed Hydras and fang faced Pythons, one eyed Cyclops’ and fire breathing Dragons. He made room for his new addition beside the bird-beaked figure of the Egyptian God of Wisdom Thoth, (who always seemed to end up hidden amongst the demons) and just behind a creepy plastic figure of the Gorgon Medusa, all flailing snake-hair and wild, seething eyes.
‘Mum always keeps well away from them’ he thought ‘so hopefully she won’t notice I’ve a new member joined the monster brigade.’ He chuckled inwardly and was about to climb down when a diminutive, crumpled shape lying prostrate on its side on the back row, caught his eye. He reached over and carefully lifted the figure out.
He blew away the dust and turned it around in his hand. A brief smile of recognition passed across his lips. It was Hector, Prince of Troy. ‘Fallen again mighty Prince?’ he thought. Kian went to put the figure back where he had found him, but thinking better of it, weighed him in his hand as if to judge his worth.
He struggled to remember how the figure ended up in his possession, seeing as he had not been the one to seek him out. Then it came back to him. Of course, Hector had arrived unannounced as one of a pack of seven miscellaneous metal warriors his mother found one Christmas as stocking fillers. He turned him over. Yes there it still was; the ‘Made in China’ stamp heavily embossed on the base which caused Hector to wobble somewhat and left him prone to keel over. The final slivers of colour slipped apologetically from off his once lustrous royal blue cloak. Kian remembered how the coarsely painted prince was flaking from the second he was unpacked.
As ever he looked at him with mixed feelings. He remembered how, when he had first realised who he was, he had briefly toyed with throwing him in the bin, but he had kept him all the same, as much for pig iron as for pleasure. But on the single occasion he had summoned up the will to set him once more before the towering Achilles, (standing as he did some ten inches taller, rubbery of limb and long of reach), even giving some allowance for the Achaean being a giant amongst men, it had made meaningful hand to hand combat something of a joke, and so Hector had ended up abandoned, cast aside in the shadows at the back of the shelf, Kian’s thin hope of being able to change the consequence of their battle thwarted by the ludicrous discrepancy in size.
Behind his youthful foible there lay a strange paradox. After all, it had been Hector’s tale of valour defeated that first ignited in the boy the passion for myth that was eventually to become so all consuming. Yet inadvertently, by discovering the Trojan’s tragic fate, Kian had also stirred a slumbering beast of his own, so raw, so overwhelming that he had long previously banished it to the deepest of places wherein nothing he thought could disturb it. For over two years he had kept up an unrelenting resistance to its call for release, numbing days in which he never once waivered nor cracked. But fate would have it otherwise; an encounter in the night which would unleash such a shockwave of suppressed feeling that it would almost drown him, endangering the tender shoots of his future passion before they had chance to take firm root. Although he had indeed recovered his footing, thereafter he instinctively knew here lay his personal Achilles heel; and this knowledge had led him to become more than circumspect about Hector and all he stood for.
CHAPTER 3
- LOST YEARS -
The twelfth of April, the day of his ninth birthday, the day they brought the news to the house that his invincible dad wasn’t coming back, was the day all feeling drained from Kian’s young life and everything inside went numb. From the first, there was no outward expression of grief; instead he merely gnawed and gnawed the inside of his mouth until it bled, staring blankly out of a rain tormented window whilst down below in the living room, his mother howled her heart out like a wild thing.
The dread of this moment had swallowed up the house for days since the news that his father was reported missing in action had first filtered through. It was 2003 and the fighting in southern Iraq had not abated since, as part of the allied invasion, the British army went into combat earlier that spring. The initial flush of excitement the eight year old Kian felt when he had first learnt that Dermot O’Connor, recently promoted warrant officer with Military Intelligence, was actually taking part in a real live battle, was soon replaced by a cold, nagging fear in the pit of his stomach which stopped him from eating and interrupted his sleep with nightmares. He would huddle with his mother in the dark, hot chocolate in hand, dressing gown wrapped tight, his strained face lit up by the flickering TV footage whilst, to an accompanying crescendo of ear splitting explosions, a tornado of flares, tracer bullets and computer targeted missiles tore certainty out from under the foundations of his life. Instantly war stopped being a child’s PlayStation game and instead became an adult place of mayhem and murder.
Kian had stared at the screen fixated, horrified, praying to catch a glimpse of his dad amidst the nightly inferno, his powerfully built yet always smiling features perhaps blackened by the acrid smoke, caked in sand, but alive nonetheless, waving to them, alive nonetheless, and coming back to them soon, alive, please God! But his face never materialised, only a forbidding phone call, a sickening, haunting, gnawing feeling and finally that grotesquely grim birthday with its single chime of the doorbell.
He had stood like stone, alone on the landing, staring blankly down into the hall, watching the soldiers who had arrived bearing the life annulling news being ushered away. As his Aunts’ closed the front door, the cries of his mother cascading around the house rose to a new level of desolation.
‘I’ll go in and see to her’ said Barbara. ‘Can you look to the boy?’
Sarah nodded, and turned with an upwards glance, preparing to mount the stairs to take and hold Kian in his grief - but he was no longer in sight. Silently he had withdrawn to his room, closed the door and turned out the light.
By the time the local catholic priest arrived to offer words of comfort and support, Kian had barricaded himself in. His Aunts’ had enough to cope with trying to calm their inconsolable sister and were relieved to leave Father Gerard to try and handle the boy alone. The old man eased out his collar, knelt down gingerly beside the door and spoke through the join.
‘Kian, me’ boy, please, it’s Father Gerard. Can you hear me?
Silence.
‘Listen laddie, I know this is bad but… you have to come out.’
Silence.
‘Kian? Do you hear me?
Silence.
‘Look, I understand how you are feeling Kian. Truly I do. My heart bleeds for ya, it does. But we cannot know… none of us can know… why it is such terrible things happen in the world. All we can know is that God loves us. That his son, Jesus, loves us… that Jesus is with you my Child, in your hour of need. He feels your sorrow as his own because remember, he also bravely sacrificed himself so that we might live… forever. And that is the path he has chosen for your father. Like Jesus, your father is a hero. And he is at one, with God, in heaven. Do you understand me Kian?’
Silence.
‘And now my son, he wants you… God wants you… to open the door, and to come out to us… to your mother, your aunts’ and me. Will you do that lad? Will you please come out?’
Yet despite repeated entreaties, Kian refused to come out or even speak with him through the door. Indeed he was never to exchange words with the priest again. Hitherto Father Gerard had been a good friend to the young boy, a welcome visitor whilst Dermot was away, month after month on service. He would take him for walks in the park or sometimes to the cinema, a special treat that always involved a cola and a large tub of butter soaked popcorn. The kindly old man enjoyed the boy’s willing chatter and encouraged him with his reading and his homework as well as preparing him for his eagerly anticipated first communion that Easter. But now Kian would not go near him, would have nothing to do with the public defender of a God who had so brutally ripped his dad away from him. There would be no more false prayers of hope, nor indeed would he celebrate communion or attend church, a source of great pain and heartache for his mother, who in turn retreated further into her deeply held faith, seeking in the story of ultimate sacrifice the strength to carry on. In this conflict lay the first wilting of their relationship.
It was, however, his mother who finally persuaded him to open the bedroom door, but only once the priest had been sent away. And when she pulled him into her arms, sobbing and clinging to his fragile frame, he responded by propping his head over her shoulder and fixing a grim stare on a stain in the wallpaper, and saying nothing.
In the days following he drifted in a dream like state, hardly able to raise his head from the bed of a morning, lying cocooned, wrapped up in layers of duvets and blankets. When he finally emerged from this chrysalis it was not as a butterfly - but he was changed alright. Shorn of his youthful wings, now sullen and shrouded, Kian seemed to have disappeared somewhere deep inside.
Of greatest concern to his mother and the grief counsellor who tried in vain to reach him, was that no matter what, he continued to refuse to give voice to any of the feelings of loss that clearly held him in a vice like grip. Mary often wondered if this was because no body was ever found and returned over which the boy could mourn. All they had of his father’s imposing six-foot-two inch frame was the dress suit he had left hanging in the cupboard at home, a pair of boots in need of a re-heel, a few photos and a couple of newspaper clippings which simply announced that Dermot O’Connor, Warrant Officer, British Army Military Intelligence, had disappeared in action in Iraq, presumed dead. Mary kept from her son the hazy but more informative details she was eventually given by a tight lipped liaison officer which seemed to suggest her husband had been on some hush-hush mission in Baghdad only to be led to his death by a young child, a boy seemingly not much older than Kian, who had first enticed his father into a ruined building by feigning injury only to then betray his location to the bombers by reflecting sunlight in a cracked fragment of mirror. The explosion was so massive nothing remained except for a blood stained helmet and a shattered assault rifle. So there was no coffin to send back; only polite condolences, talk of a medal, and an emptiness that knew no bounds.
After three weeks Kian suddenly asked to go back to school. His mother wanted to keep him at home, looking so ghost like and frail as he did, but he insisted. When he walked into the classroom that first morning the din instantly ceased. His classmates just stood and stared. All except Grace who walked over, handed him a flower, and then hugged him. Kian froze as the girl squeezed him a little too tightly. Detaching, he walked stiffly to his desk, sat down and took up the class work laying there waiting for him. Thereafter a false air of normality resumed in his school life as he applied himself once more to the daily demands. The one noticeable difference to before was that now he only spoke when absolutely necessary and at break times, instead of haring round the playground, joining in the adventures and games with the other children, he kept very much to himself.
At home, though, things were far from normal. Mary no longer even tried to reach out to him. She had learned of late that when she did, still unable to resist clutching him close, he would immediately stiffen and sharply pull away. So now she let him be. But each night, alone in her room she would sob herself to sleep whilst Kian in his bed next door lay motionless, eyes open, alert, listening, his mother’s lament softly seeping through the adjoining wall.
It was during the following summer after that he suddenly developed the severe asthma that would so blight his life. Without warning, he began to wheeze and cough at night. He started to complain of a tightness in his chest and shortness of breath whenever he ran. A trip to the doctors, a few tests, and the grim diagnosis followed. No reason could be given but Mary was convinced the repressed grief had triggered it. That first year he had an attack so bad that he was hospitalised. After that, an inhaler was to become his constant companion.
Thus it was that the once gregarious, outgoing eight year old of before had slowly transformed into a sombre, introverted ten year old loner, hiding away in his room, finding what comfort he could in his reading and his computer games. But as he remained at the top, or near the top of his class, none of his teachers were too worried and by the time 2004 had given way to 2005 most people had forgotten about his loss and why it was that he was now the way he was.
However, as both Kian’s eleventh birthday and the second anniversary of his father’s death approached, he suddenly worsened. He went off his food, feigned sickness every Monday morning in an effort to avoid school, or pretended to go in whilst secretly hiding out in the local park, and when his mother found out and begged him to attend, (she was by now in fulltime work, struggling to make ends meet, unable to risk taking time off), he silently blanked his teachers efforts to make him do any work or contribute in any way in class.
Although the day of the anniversary passed by without any particular incident, he point blank refused to be part of any celebration or commemoration, spending the time instead in front of the TV or playing games on his console. Hiding her own pain, Mary tried her best to reach him, but he would not let her in. A dark veil had once more come down over his life and she now feared it might never lift.
Towards the end of the final term of that year the school called her in for a frank heart to heart. His teachers were registering Kian as having slumped to near bottom of the class and the headmistress was most concerned about his plummeting attendance record. The final straw had been his failure to even sit his Key Stage 2 SATS exams. At this news Mary was lost for words; she had no idea that he had fallen this low. She promised that it was just a phase, that the summer holiday would change everything, that they would see a new Kian as he moved up to Secondary school upon his return the next academic year. But her nightly prayers were becoming more desperate by the time July had given way to mid August and there was still no sign of his state lifting.
‘Thank you God for his reading’, she whispered as she tucked him up of an evening, carefully removing a volume from beneath his sleeping chin. Through thick and thin, he had remained a bookaholic and even now, in this darkest of times, the boy always read himself to sleep. Mary knew where the habit came from - his dad, who had never been seen without a volume or other secreted somewhere about his person and who had, from soon after Kian was born, sought every opportunity to read to the child. ‘Readin’ grows the mind me boy’ he would say from behind that familiar, heart warming smile. ’Its all well and good growin’ tall and strong in ya body, but if the mind isn’t stretched as well… well you’ll slowly shrink inside, if you get my meanin’!? You see, TVs all right... if you want to have a laugh and a bit of messin' but if you’re lookin’ for a real story, if ya want’ta learn about what really matters, if you want to discover the great mysteries in life, you’ll hav’ta look to a book.’
Whenever he would return on leave from some overseas posting, he always brought back a handful of earth (or more often sand) and a bundle of exotic new tales. Then, having poured the soil into a labelled jam jar, he and Kian would curl up amongst a foam of pillows, the obligatory hot chocolate in hand, and in his strong, clear, West of Ireland accent Dermot would begin; ‘Once upon a time, in a far off land…’
But after his death and the final granting of her paltry war widow’s pension, Mary could afford very little each month for books, so the local library became Kian’s favourite hideaway. He would sit in there for hours, digesting the young persons section like a rabbit munching through lettuces. And when he finally got through all the available titles, he planned to start all over again. It didn’t really matter what he read, so long as he wasn’t left without a book, wasn’t left alone in his head.
It was mid that August, with an air of resigned determination, that he thus found himself returning once more to the first book on the shelf. As he reached up to bring the familiar paperback down, (a compendium of native African animal stories really intended for someone several years younger), a shadow suddenly loomed large over head and a hand briefly rested on his shoulder. In his shock, Kian involuntarily lashed out, sending the stunned librarian’s glasses flying clean across the room.
‘That’s some swing you have there,’ chuckled the kindly figure, getting down on all fours in an ungainly effort to recover his lost sight. Mortified, Kian joined him on the floor and soon recovered the wayward lenses from beneath a stool, handing them silently back to their owner as he crawled by. ‘Ah, that’s better,’ smiled the librarian, ’It’s always a good idea to be able to see things properly. Now, let me take a good look at you, the most diligent of all my customers … the fellow who consumes books like a starving creature yet who only feeds on that which feeds him not!’
Kian looked up at the penetrating eyes, awaiting clarification of this perplexing remark. Instead the librarian merely held out a large hard backed volume. ‘Here’ he said ‘this is what I was about to give you when you swung that right hook at me. Go on, take it’
Gingerly Kian took hold of the book, and turned it over. ‘TROY’ was the single word emblazoned on the faded cover. None the wiser, he looked blankly up at the man’s patiently smiling face.
‘I’d read it if I were you ...’ continued the bespectacled figure, rising to brush the dust from off his trousers. ‘I think you’re about old enough to step up a gear or two, and I think its time you got to chew a little red meat off the bone, don’t you?’
With that he returned to his desk and the mountainous pile of new titles impatiently awaiting indexing.
Kian stared after him for a while but the man took no more notice of him than he did of the flies as they crashed their madly buzzing frames off the skylights overhead. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and the summer heat was beating down on the prefab roof with the intensity of a giant oven. Kian wished the librarian would open a window or a door or something to let in a cool breeze and clear the stifled air. His chest felt constricted and his breathing grew shorter and somewhat laboured, a sure sign of his asthma building up a head of steam. He thought about getting up, leaving, running out into the open, but instead he slid further down the wall to the cool, stone slabbed floor, took a deep pull on his inhaler, steadied himself, and turned his eyes back to the book in hand.
‘Who or what was Troy?’ he thought. The illustrated dust cover had long since been trashed, and the green binding, its corners somewhat battered and frayed, proffered no other clue other than the title, proudly displayed in majestic gold embossed lettering. He ran his fingers through its strangely formed shape. They were not like modern letters; they seemed older, bolder, strangely stirring.
‘Troy!’
Inadvertently he had said the word out loud. He quickly looked up to see if anyone had heard him, if any disapproving face was glaring back. But he was quite alone; only the stooped back of the librarian, stumbling under the weight of voluminous titles gave a hint that there was anyone else alive in the building.
He opened the first page. A picture greeted his eye. A line of long wooden ships with startling white and amber eyes painted on their bows and greeny-yellow snakes woven on their sails, was ploughing a white flecked sea of aquamarine blue. Standing tall and proud on their foredecks, stern faced warriors with great pointed spears and high horsehair helmets stared provocatively off into the near distance in which, beyond a line of sand, the walls of some great citadel could just be made out. Kian felt a strange tingle of excitement, and with a final look at the picture, he turned the page and dared to join them on their hazardous adventure.
CHAPTER 4
- TEARS IN THE NIGHT -
The mechanical click of the clock on the wall pressed out its insistent rhythm. Under duress, the minutes passed into hours. And still the pages turned as the boy determinedly ploughed on. Even the occasional thump of the librarian’s stamp banging out a discordant refrain failed to disturb his concentration, vanishing instead into the background swell, as inch by inch Kian was drawn further out and on by the tide of the story.
The initial pages had suggested otherwise as he at first struggled to find his usual easy stride. Hitherto he rarely, if ever, suffered any such difficulty and in truth his ability was far in advance of his age. Normally he read at great pace, only occasionally struggling with a word or a meaning, often finishing a second page before a classmate would complete a first. But here, alone on the library floor, he was finding the language meatier than he was used to and the strange names and places, none of which he had ever heard of before, made him labour.
His mind wandered. Not a good sign and not what he read for. Indeed, if it hadn’t have been for the intriguing maps, the eye catching pictures, and the dogged persistence that was one of his unacknowledged strengths, he might have given up like so many youngsters before him offered the same stern challenge. But he didn’t. He struggled on, grasping at a meaning here, blinking at an oddly foreign name there, falling through the web until suddenly, unaware it had happened to him, he found himself pitched into a dark, brooding, prophetic dream foretelling how a great city was to be burnt to the ground and a newborn baby prince declared to be the future tragic cause. Here, suddenly, was this very same child being left to die on the side of a mountain, only to be found by a herdsman and brought up as his own. In his mind’s eye, Kian saw a fleeting image of a sun beaten, grizzled but kindly face, somewhat like the librarian’s, leaning down and gently lifting the small bundle up from the dry grass and into his attendant arms.
Perspiration dripped from the end of Kian’s nose, which he brushed away with an indifferent flick of a finger for the adventure now held him, enthralled. His eyes widened and glimmered with fascination as the child, now a young man named Paris, entrusted to judge which of three goddesses being the fairest should obtain a wondrous golden apple, finally chooses the goddess of love, Aphrodite, and suddenly, love turns to threatened war because of the promise she makes to Paris that he will have as his reward the beautiful Queen Helen, another man’s wife. The whirl of events spun Kian around and before he knew what was what, he was standing dockside at a great seaport, surrounded by a mighty host of Greek warriors, waiting to board ship and head for the city of Troy, hell bent on getting Helen back, back from the clutches of Paris who had stolen her away.
His eleven year old mind couldn’t quite grasp why Paris wanted her or even what ‘wanting’ her meant, nor could he understand why her enraged husband along with so many others should wish to cross the wind swept waters to find her, but he still felt a flush of excitement as he stared at the picture of the vast armada spread out across the shimmering bay.
Just then, the old librarian put his head round the bookshelf and spied Kian curled up on the floor, face pressed close up against the page.
‘I’ll be locking the doors in five minutes and I’m sorry to say you can’t sleep here. Time to go young man.’
He saw the boy’s face drop.
‘Not wishing to appear overly radical but may I suggest you consider bringing it home with you?’
Strangely, Kian had yet to take out even a single book, preferring, as the fancy took him, to sit all day in the quiet of the library imbibing away, lost in a world of his own. The place was so rarely frequented he found he could nearly always put his latest read back on the shelf for the evening and trust it would be there, loyally awaiting his return at whatever time it suited him the next day. He liked the sense that he had a secret refuge, a bolthole where no one could find him and therefore he chose not to allow his other life to invade its treasured constancy. Bringing a book home might give the game away and until now he hadn’t risked that happening (little did he know that his mother had long since discovered his lair, and thanks to the kindness of the librarian, who promised to keep a close eye on the boy, had allowed him his little ‘secret’, trusting the vigilant book minder to keep an equally careful watch over her son).
Kian held the treasured volume tight against his chest, and thought fast. Tomorrow was Sunday. He wouldn’t get back in until 9.00am Monday morning. He simply couldn’t wait that long. He swallowed hard and nodded to the librarian.
‘Good. Now, normally as a first timer I would have to get your mother to sign a form for you but seeing as how you are actually my most studious and valued customer, I think I can risk it just this once. I’ve prepared a temporary ticket. All I have to do is issue a date stamp, and you are on your way.’
Once home, Kian slipped up to his bedroom as per normal, saying nothing to Mary, and hid his booty under his mattress. He silently ate his dinner, watched an hour of TV, and then giving her a placating hug and a kiss on the cheek, he quietly took himself off to bed. Once under the covers, torch and ginger biscuit to hand, he settled down to feast.
Outside, rain began to fall steadily, dampening the Saturday night hubbub on the estate, with its slamming doors, wild cries and low curses. But within the tented oasis the hours passed in glowing isolation. The cloaking night drew in and the chapters slipped by as for the very first time, Kian truly became at one with a story. The battering crash of bronze sword against uplifted shield sent shudders through his young frame. Every heaving sinew echo-laboured in his body, every bellowing war cry reverberated in his ear,
‘Prisoners of the Gyre’
‘Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…’
W.B. Yeats
INDEX
Prologue A Face in the Hand 3 – 8
BOOK 1: THE CALLING
Chapter 1 Hunting for Clues 9 – 22
Chapter 2 Olympian Friends 23 – 32
Chapter 3 Lost Years 32 – 44
Chapter 4 Tears in the Night 45 – 56
Chapter 5 The New Girl 57 – 69
Chapter 6 I Don’t Like Monday’s 69 – 78
Chapter 7 Beyond the Generator 79 – 94
Chapter 8 A Snake in the Grass 94 – 106
Chapter 9 Moon Dreams 106 – 122
Chapter 10 Unwelcome Partners 123 – 133
Chapter 11 Things in Motion 133 – 143
Chapter 12 The Museum 143 – 159
Chapter 13 Not So Happy Families 160 – 173
Chapter 14 A Change of Mind 173 – 181
Chapter 15 Talk on the Border 182 – 192
Chapter 16 The Ancient Watchers 192 – 204
Chapter 17 Into the Night 205 – 215
Chapter 18 Dreaming on the Edge 216 – 225
Chapter 19 The Task is Set 226 – 265
PROLOGUE
- A FACE IN THE HAND -
Light sandy brown in colour, weighing no more than a bird, it sat plump as a new baked bun in the palm of Kian’s hand. The puzzle face, bearing a disturbing resemblance to a disembowelled intestine, stared inscrutably back up at him. He half expected it to speak, but all he could hear was his own blood pounding in his ears, the incessant rumble of which had hardly slackened in the several hours since, trembling, he had picked up the tiny mask from the restaurant table, slipped it into his pocket and then walking through the vastness of the museum with all the quaking confidence of a condemned man, he had finally made it out into the spartan light of a December day.
No alarms had sounded. No hand had reached out to take a firm hold of his expectant shoulder. No one had chased him down the dozen steps to where Caz was waiting for him, eyes askance, visibly taken aback by the look on his face.
‘Run!’ was the single, silently mouthed word that broke the spell of his frozen lips. And so they had, scattering standers by like a pair of gazelles that have just smelt Leopard.
They were through the main gates and had crossed Great Russell in an instant, but as they cornered wildly onto Coptic Street, Caz almost collided with a taxi.
‘Ere! Slow down! You’ll see us all killed!’ was the irate cry from the cabbie.
She regained her balance and sped on, vainly trying to catch up with Kian who had the bit well and truly between his teeth and was tearing down the lane as if his life depended on it. And then suddenly, in an instant, he was over, crashing to the floor in a great scud of limbs and flailing feet. Heart in her mouth, Caz was by his side in a trice.
‘Kian! Kian! Are you alright! Are you ok? Kian, are you hurt?’
‘Yeah, yeah! I’m fine. I’m fine. It’s alright! Don’t fuss.’ He rose gingerly, muttering ‘But what..? How did I..?’
Dazed, grazed, the boy looked around for the cause of his fall. It was then he noticed a stick, a bundle, and a slender black dog staring grimly up at him from the shadows. There was a sudden, mountainous eruption, as the array of rags and old sleeping bags she guarded, shifted and rose.
‘I think you must ‘ave dropped this’ said a muffled voice from within the layers of tattered scarves and weathered combat fatigues, worn oddly inside out.
Mittened fingers pulled back the folds from around a heavily lined face to reveal a pair of deep set, cloudy, and clearly sightless eyes. Laser like they seemed to fix a fathomless stare on the spread-eagled boy. A hand came forth and held something out.
‘I saw it fall. Fall from off ya. Saw it clear as niyht.’ The figure tapped the side of his head and laughed grimly. ‘Saw it inside ‘ere. So I assumes it must be yours.’
Kian recoiled. But the hand reached further and opened to reveal his museum booty, seemingly spilled in the tumble. The tiny ancient effigy faced him as blindly as its current custodian. Instantly the roar of London faded.
‘That’s some memento you ‘ave there me boy. Not somethin’ to be idly tossed aside. I suggest you deal wiv it more wisely.’ He paused, chewing on the remnants of some leathery tobacco before adding nonchalantly ‘Well, do ya want it back or no?’
Kian snatched up the object. At the same instant the presence grabbed him by the wrist with his other hand. For a second he held the boy tight, as if testing his strength. With a great wrench Kian broke free.
The figure chuckled once more. ‘Don’t mind me son. I’m nothin’ but an awld fool.’ He smiled, covered his face, and sank slowly back down onto the pavement. Kian was overcome by a strong desire to escape this smelly old relic who had heard his name, handed him back the spoils of his crime - clearly guessed at his guilty secret! Mask held tight, the boy backed up, leapt to his feet and without a glance behind, sped away.
‘Kian!’ Wait! Wait for me!’ Caz shouted after.
She to was up now, about to follow, but then hesitated, feeling a compulsion to take one last look down as the man, his stick, his rags, his dog, slunk back into the gloom of the disused shop front. Caz could feel the strange, nagging draw in her secret place intensify, as it had done earlier that day passing the selfsame doorway on the way up to the museum. Fumbling in her coat pocket, she found a coin. Not seeing the usual paper cup, she dropped the silver into the dog’s water bowl. It landed with a plop.
‘I hope you’ll be ok?’ she ventured into the shadows. The figure did not stir. The dog sat motionless.
Hands sheltering her eyes from the low winter light, Caz peered urgently off down the street as if into a dream. Kian was by now far away from her and she feared she might lose him in the traffic. But still she hesitated. Words drifted up from the doorway.
‘You’d bett’a follow or ‘e’ll get away from ya luv. Might do well not ta let him out of ya sight… and we both know which kinda seein’ I’m talkin’ ‘bout. Now, on ya way!’
And with that she was off; down Princes, then Shaftsbury and finally straight on, the final stretch that led to Charing Cross and hopefully home.
Kian was there, well ahead of her, waiting flushed and impatient. Inhaler in hand, gasping for air, breathing deep, the words rasped out of him ‘There’s… a train… leaves in three minutes… platform seven. Come on will you! Hurry!’
In the nick of time, tickets in hand, they were through the barrier and racing down the platform. Breathlessly they boarded and collapsed into two window seats.
As soon as the train began to draw away, he was on her; ‘Why did you have to say my name!? Why did you have to let him hear my name!? You said it over and over again. He’ll tell the police! He’ll tell them everything. That’s just great. Brilliant! Thanks a bunch.’
Without looking for an answer, Kian fixed his eye to the plate glass window and blanked her. Dejectedly, Caz sank back in on herself and withdrew. The glow in her secret place ebbed out.
BOOK 1
CHAPTER 1
- HUNTING FOR CLUES -
At every station on the sixty minute journey home Kian willed and willed the doors to close before the pursuing posse of police marksmen tumbled aboard. Each torturous second he awaited the booming announcement informing passengers that there was a criminal at large. But the intercom remained resolutely mute. And no one of note, bar the odd pensioner or mother overburdened with her day’s shopping, entered the near empty carriage in which the two youngsters sat silent as ghosts.
No further words were exchanged until they stumbled out at Gravesend station and even then, as Caz turned to say something, anything, who knows what, just to make contact, Kian had shot off, bag flailing, with no more than a ‘See ya tomorrow’ floating behind him, no time to look and catch the hurt welling up in her eyes.
And now he was home; secure in the sanctuary of his bedroom.
In his short fourteen year life he had never, ever, done anything like this before. Imagine, stealing from the British Museum! Imagine, stealing something as rare and as old as this; just about the only existing carving of a primeval monster! The death mask of Humbaba, the fierce one! The terrifying beast out of the Gilgamesh epic; from Mesopotamia! Ancient Iraq! 3,500 years old and counting! Once again, goose pimples broke out on the back of his neck. ‘Why, oh why, had he allowed himself to do it?’
‘It’s her fault. She made me,’ he thought. ‘It would never have happened but for her and her crazy…’
A sudden, fleeting image of the street person flashed through his mind; powerful fingers about his wrist, squeezing him tight. He brushed it aside. Breathing deep, he sought to apply himself to the task in hand. Looking down, a deep fascination immediately overcame all his fears and a cat like curiosity focussed his mind.
‘What was this strange face all about? And why, oh why, had it come into his possession?’
Since returning he had spent what felt like no time at all (but was in fact close enough to a couple of hours) scouring his book collection for answers, pumping the internet for clues, guidance, something that might make sense of what he had done other than the obvious two years he now faced in youth custody. But nothing of worth yielded to his frantic searches. Oh sure, there were the usual bland summaries, the lofty cross references to the bible and the great flood, several allusions to Noah’s Ark, plenty of talk about ‘the story that begins it all’, along with much amazement at how after millennia of internment, the slumbering Gilgamesh (in the form of crumbling clay tablets) had been dragged fortuitously from an ancient rubbish tip by a keen young Victorian archaeologist to once again stun the world with his deeds of daring do. But nothing could he find that came close to explaining the ‘why?’ that had driven him to thievery that day.
Kian was of course already acquainted with the epic tale of the legendary Sumerian King and his quest for the meaning of life. How could he not be, seeing as it pretty much stole the limelight in the first chapter of many of the books on legend and myth that now so packed his shelves that they had been forced to find extra elbow space, strewing themselves across the floor and piling into every corner of his room. It wasn’t long after the fascination for all things mythic took a firm grip on his life that Kian set out to read it through. He remembered how from the off it had been something of a struggle; the themes were unfamiliar and the language archaic. But he had persisted and bit by bit he finally got into it. He was by then a prolific reader, and had long since learned not to give up on a story just because it made demands, because he knew they were often the ones that paid off the best in the end.
Thus it was that one sweltering day, lying under a shady umbrella nursing a wounded ankle, the shimmer of reflected water from a nearby pool dancing willfully across the open page, he first encountered the beast whose hypnotic features he was later to clasp so intently in his hand. For a good half hour he had found himself torn between the increasingly gripping tale and his need to monitor his mother, who he could spy chattering away in that unnaturally florid fashion to the blonde haired stranger who had seen fit to lift her, dripping from the water’s edge, and deposit her onto his sun lounger like some prize catch at a fishing contest. But finally he could resist no longer, and his focus succumbed entirely to the story’s call.
His eyes darted anxiously from line to line, as bit-by-bit the world about him slipped into suspended animation. But within the realm of Gilgamesh, all was uproar. An ancient forest quivered with the tumult of bodies crashing through heaven lofted trees, startling the native fauna from their lairs and scattering them heedlessly amongst the dense undergrowth. High above all echoed the cornered cry of the beast Humbuba, staring wildly, eyes pleading, its blood red tongue lolling heavily from side to side, its powerfully muscled limbs flailing hither and thither, seeking any escape from the piercing blows that Gilgamesh, and his brother in arms Enkidu, rained down upon its face and neck. Finally, inevitably, it succumbed to their onslaught and with a last, piercing cry of despair, down it thundered. Up went the triumphant throat roar from the two heroes, who clambered upon the colossal carcass and, showing no mercy, axe hacked their adversary until all convulsions ceased and the last of its life source ebbed away into the cold embrace of the dark, dank earthen floor. For a brief moment, silence; a cascade of stillness coursed over all as the shock waves momentarily seemed to slow the very motions of the earth. Finally the breeze could contain itself no longer and with a tell-tell gasp blasted the grave news to the four corners - the champion of the forest, placed there by the high gods themselves to protect this timeless paradise from man’s rapacious hand, had been brazenly dispatched, its great head hacked off and dumped in a sack like so much garbage!
Kian slammed shut the volume and stared ahead, motionless. Yes, he knew this is what heroes do to monsters; they slaughter them! But there was something about this incident, something about the frenzied ferocity with which they had obliterated the creature, followed by their crazed levelling of the ancient woodlands in which he lived, that so troubled the boy that he no longer felt any desire to persist with the adventures of Gilgamesh. For the one and only time he had put aside a story barely a third the way through, never rediscovering the will to come back to it.
Perhaps it had something to do with the circumstances in which he had first attempted it; after all being bitten by a serpent and then having to watch a snake in the grass take possession of your mother doesn’t happen to one every day, but whatever the cause, his ignorance on the matter was now of consequence when faced by an urgent need for answers. How he now wished he hadn’t allowed his squeamishness to conquer his will, and instead managed to stagger on to the story’s end, for he felt sure if he had he would have learnt something vital, a clue of some kind that would make sense of why, two years later, here he now was, stealing a last surviving image of that selfsame butchered custodian of the wild; so rare, so small, so alone in his hand, its blank eyed grimace only serving to amplify his ignorance and auguring some grave consequence ahead.
As part of his frantic investigation into its meaning, he had already meticulously sketched a picture of the beast’s complex contours and posted it onto his personal web site, www.kiansdoorwithin.com, opening a new story home page with the title Gilgamesh… he who saw everything’, derived from the very first line of the story, as was his habit (in his alarmed state he had failed to consider just how risky such an evidential posting might well prove to be).
The site was a preciously guarded secret. He had begun it six months previously under the auspices of a school IT project but this had been merely a ruse by which to get it up and running without anyone at home suspecting what he was about. The real purpose had been to create a secret hideaway, a place to hoard his discoveries, a kind of pirates cave, only the gems within glistened with a different kind of hue.
When he began to explore a new myth Kian would first post a story page containing a detailed outline written in his own words. He would then search online for images, maps or diagrams with which to flesh out the tale or scan in pictures from his books and even, as of late, skilfully draw his own and post them if no other came to hand that better suited his needs. In this fashion he had so far set up over thirty individual myths, or ‘Story Doors’ as he liked to call them, most of which concerned the well known Greek legends but there were also a small handful of exotics from around the world including his current obsession with King Arthur; and of course there was now a meagre looking Gilgamesh page, crying out for something of substance to be added to cover up its bare bones.
His idea of creating ‘Story Doors’ was one that still gave him a thrill; it was how he envisioned each myth – as a way through to something wondrous hidden in the beyond. He had great plans for his site, whereby doors would lead to further doors and multiple corridors would flow off in all directions, but thus far he had only succeeded in crafting the point of entrance and ‘hallway’ beyond but it still made a pretty cool homepage. Most of all he was pleased by the free flowing script he had engraved on the virtual entrance door’s imposingly sturdy oak panels.
It proclaimed:
‘A myth is a magical story from the ancient past,
Brim full of wonder and mystery.
It works like an onion; the more you explore it, the more layers you find.
The more layers you find, the stronger the flavour gets.
The more intense the flavour, the closer you get to the
Truth
Buried deep within.
Enter and feast, Truth Seeker.’
Although heavily indebted to an ancient Persian proverb he had fortuitously stumbled upon, all about why stories mattered so much, he was still really proud of what he had written, surprising even himself with the provocation of his words. Sometimes he would just sit and stare at their polished form on his computer screen and drift off into a reverie concerning one of the tales within, imagining what it would be like to seek out adventure like the heroes of old.
Thus far he had kept the site a secret, especially from the invasive fingers of his stepbrother, Jeric, whose antipathy towards Kian knew no bounds. Despite being fully six years younger, Jeric regarded Kian’s room, along with all his belongings, as his to desecrate. Regularly he would come home from school and find his world turned upside down. In particular Jeric had a talent for knowing just which of Kian’s things mattered the most and honing in on them for special treatment. Much loved books would have pages torn out or be defaced with red marker. Computer games would vanish or turn up scratched and disfigured and posters would be torn down or have darts stuck in them.
Kian begged and begged Mary, his mum, to let him have a lock on the door but she refused, saying ‘You need to be kind to your brother and that means sharing your things…’ Before he could but in with a provocative ‘He’s not my brother!’ she would continue ‘and that’s my final word on the matter.’ This turning a blind eye was now part and parcel of existence at No.72.
In particular Jeric liked to get access to Kian’s desktop. His mother had banned Kian from setting up a secret access password. She claimed this was under the auspices of exercising due parental supervision but Kian could detect the usual telltale sign of his stepfather’s controlling influence at work. As an upshot, whenever Kian was out and Jeric was at home he was sure to be found glued to the screen, mouse clicking away, diligently defacing whatever files he could uncover.
‘My Dad says I can use it whenever I like and he says you’re not to stop me, so screw you!’ was the brazen response when caught in the act. Kian would stifle the instinct to throttle and instead, firmly propel the protesting Jeric through the door and out onto the landing. The shrill little voice, which grew ever more gratingly Texan when enraged, sounded through the chip-board like a Harpy; ‘I’ll tell my dad when he gets home, I will. He’ll sure leather you’re ass, he will!’
Ignoring the sharp kicks to the base of the door, Kian would wedge a chair under the handle and then begin the tiresome process of trying to salvage what he could from the fiend’s intrusion. Of late his behind had hardened somewhat to leathering and he would take his chance.
He soon mastered the art of leaving obvious but unimportant files readily accessible thereby giving Jeric the kind of easy victory he fed on. But after the disc melting incident of a fortnight back, where he had lost a great deal of painstakingly assembled material, even his mother had drawn the line and dared to insist on Jeric being temporarily banned from his room. Preoccupied as he was by an impending business trip to the States, his step father had for once, strangely acquiesced. But how long this fragile truce would last was another matter and so Kian took no chances; the secret website was now his preferred means of data protection.
For these reasons he was increasingly circumspect about who he opened up to, and as he worked on late into the night, he kept more and more to his own council. As he looked about him - at his family, his school, his home town - everything seemed so drab and bitter to the taste. He longed for colour, for meaning, for a sense of ‘livingness’ to come into his life, but the endless strife and days of rain and sofa slouching and dreary takeaway dinners consumed to a constant backdrop of sport, soaps and fake reality TV, meant he could already see his life shrinking before it had even had a chance to get going. Only in the myths could he find a place of real expanse and vibrancy, one capable of enriching his swift and eager spirit.
So now here he was; picture posted, mouse poised to add comments as he glanced from screen to object and back again.
Despite his fear, he felt inexplicably drawn to the figure’s macabre features. He stared hard at the mesmerising flow of lines, wondering what the pattern might mean. Not seeing where else to begin, he placed his finger on the creature’s right ear and began to trace a path, gingerly, back and forth, up and down, first through the cheek, then into the mouth and down through its zigzagging teeth, (an uneasy feeling), down further to the chin and then unexpectedly up and over the opposite jowl, into the crazy pavement hair and then back down to where he had started, following the dictate of the flowing path. But what was this? He wasn’t quite back where he had begun. Rather his finger now rested on an inner fold, parallel to where he had entered but further in from the edge. He smiled, almost for the first time that day, and the word ‘Labyrinth’ floated inquiringly into his mind. And so his finger rolled on, lost in the rhythm, back and forth, this way and that, wherever the tide took him, a calming almost hypnotic voyage around the eyes, up over the forehead, until …
His heart almost burst through his chest.
The thump, thump, thump, was real! No longer inside him, but coming up the stairs, heading towards his room! He had no time other than what it took to crash exit his PC, and thrust the unflappable face beneath a pillow as he dived for the cover of his bed, feigning sleep.
Just in time. An instant later the bedroom door was thrust asunder. His mother’s flushed features were framed against the stairwell, momentarily motionless, before, in a torrent, her outburst fell upon him.
‘Do you have any idea of what you have done? DO YOU?’ she bellowed.
Kian didn’t think he had ever seen her this angry. He attempted to burrow deeper into his pillow.
‘I’ve been up the walls, demented. Where have you been? The school were on the phone saying you’d disappeared in London and how they had no idea where you’d got to and … and… I’ve been worried sick! I’ve tried calling and calling and texting your mobile but no answer... I’ve had to leave work early … I’ve been on to the police and to your dad...’
‘He’s not my …’
‘SILENCE!!’ she roared, taking a moment to half calm herself, then continued, ’Do you realise I had to wake him up in his motel, even though he needed the sleep before his flight home! He’s not at all pleased, I can tell you… (at this news Kian’s stomach sank). And now… what do I find? Here you are, as per usual, hiding in this room all along, without a care for others or what they might feel, doing what? No doubt wasting your time reading more of these STUPID BLOODY BOOKS!’
With a cry of pent up frustration, she hurled a handy copy of Egyptian myths across the room, where it erupted on the wall above his bed, fluttering Kian with paper. He hid his face further in as he sought to hide the lie.
‘I had an attack mum. I just needed to come home.’
‘Then why didn’t you call me? I’ve told you a hundred times what to do but do you listen..?’ Hardly able to contain herself she went on despairingly, and with no let up in the machine-gun delivery, ‘Why can’t you just be normal, like everyone else? Why do you have to be so … so different!? As if we don’t have enough to worry about what with the state of things… and you forever winding your dad up – and he’ll take it out on me you know that! Not to mention your asthma! I’m up the walls, I really am. Up the walls! And here you are, off with the fairies as usual!! Sometimes I … I just feel like giving up on you, I really do!’
Slam went the door. A bust of the Greek god Hermes nose dived from the shelf above and was only saved from shattering by a pile of dirty laundry strewn against the far wall. He listened as his mother’s footsteps echoed down the stairs and then winced as the whole house shook to the front door slamming with equally frustrated force. Where she had gone – to pray, to weep, to rage anew – he could not say. All that mattered was that she had gone.
CHAPTER 2
- OLYMPIAN FRIENDS -
Kian sat stock still, allowing the last splashes of his mother’s invective to wash off him. Much as he still secretly cared for her, she had become a different person in the year and a half since she remarried. Bit by bit their relationship had withered. In her desperate attempts to keep his stepfather sweet, the bond with her son was slowly being sacrificed. Kian’s response had been to gradually disconnect his feelings and detach from her, and as he did so, the gulf between them grew still further.
He reached into his pocket and took out his phone and turned it back on from silent. Mr. Henderson had instructed them all to switch off their mobiles whilst in the museum and what with everything that had happened since, Kian had not thought to … Oh cripes, eleven missed calls! All from his mother. Also a bunch of desperate texts. One from his stepfather. Very short. Very threatening. He methodically deleted the lot. Finally, a text from Caz. A single word.
‘Sorrey’.
He smiled at her spelling. Went to delete it. Thought better and let it be.
Resignedly, he carefully sorted the pages from the broken backed book into some kind of order and then, having retrieved his fallen hero, he got up on a chair and placed him back in pride of place amongst the front row of the pantheon of assorted fantastical figures he kept up on high. Leaning back for a moment, Kian surveyed their mostly plastic faces. He realised he hadn’t taken much notice of them of late, not since his website had begun to take up all his spare attention.
They had been painstakingly collected from far and wide. Some had arrived as special offers, some had been scavenged in junk shops, some unearthed online, and miraculously some secured on the single holiday he had thus far experienced in Greece, alone with his mother, two summers back, a holiday where to his pride and joy he was finally able to get his hands on a proper figure of Zeus as well as a great mini-statue of his golden son Apollo, plus the much treasured bust of Hermes. He particularly loved their authentic red eyes.
Momentarily he remembered with a shudder what else had come home with them from that trip. Casting the thought from his mind he breathed deep and then surveyed the massed ranks. He might have stopped playing with them for a while now but they still loomed large like an exultant legion in his mind.
The twelve Greek gods (or more accurately the eleven Kian had) took pride of place bang in the centre of the shelf. The chief of them all and the largest was of course Zeus, thunderbolt baring king of the Gods, with next to him, trident in hand, his brother Poseidon, the old ruler of the sea, followed by the younger eager-beavers, golden haired Apollo and Ares the god of war, desperate to get to the front but kept in check by Zeus’ out stretched arm, allowing Kian’s favourite, the messenger god, the wise one, Hermes, to be set slightly forward of them all. Hidden behind him lurked shape-shifting Dionysus, the one Greek God whose purpose Kian simply could not grasp (seeing as it had something to do with sending his followers stark staring mad!) and thus whom he simply ignored.
As a matter of courtesy Kian still left a space for Hephaestus the smithy, best known by his Roman name Vulcan, the limping master of molten metal, and the only male Olympian he had yet to collect. The lack of an available statue, despite a year’s admittedly half-hearted searching, only reinforced Kian’s sense of his insignificance in the great scheme of things, despite the fact he now clearly ruled the world long after all the other gods had been banished or had fled the stage. Try as he might, the boy felt no affinity with this unsightly champion of industry; a god was really only worth something if he had a part to play in a great story and the faltering Hephaestus failed on all scores, other than as the butt of the jokes concerning his beautiful wife, the goddess Aphrodite.
He had felt somewhat uncomfortable by his decision to also collect goddess figurines. First off, they were girls, and he still didn’t really have the faintest idea what they were about! Secondly, although he knew it was ok for boys to be into heroes and gods, dragons and monsters - goddesses in their long flowing dresses and bare arms, well that was quite another thing.
This had been amplified by the one occasion in which he had taken some of his figures into school to give a talk on the Greek pantheon, only to have the other boys in his class ridicule his obsession and in particular take out their freakish juvenility on his goddess statues. That was why Aphrodite now stood there somewhat twisted and deformed, with one of her arms blackened and her face burnt off. He had thought at the time about throwing her away but something had stopped him. Deep inside, the boy felt a profound fascination for this strange enchantress of so many tales, and whenever he came across a drawing or a statue in a book he would stare, captivated, long past the time required to read the inscription beneath. So there she was; mangled Aphrodite, positioned on the right, slightly masked by a support for the shelf above, standing beguilingly within the seashell from which she first alighted onto dry land, born in a torrent of aquamarine waves as they broke frothily upon some long lost Mediterranean shore.
Next to her, stood her fellow goddesses. Firstly, with her back firmly turned, came Hera, high queen of heaven, she of the twelve-star crown but too often brought low by her jealousy of Zeus, her philandering husband. Alongside her stood Apollo’s twin sister Artemis, the huntress of the night (sadly minus her bow and bow arm – another casualty of that playground assault), she whom the Romans would later call Diana. Then came the warrior goddess Athena (Kian always gave an involuntary shiver when he spied the snake peeping furtively out from behind her broad, bronze shield) and finally even Demeter, the mother figure, pushed somewhat to the back, but still there all the same.
When Kian looked at the group, he couldn’t help but picture how the girls in his class clustered in gaggles at the bus stop or outside the local newsagent, brazenly eyeing up the boys as they gandered by. He blushed as he thought of how he scampered passed them with quickened pace, eyes to the floor, stomach churning, hoping to avoid contact with their assertive stares. How he shuddered at the thought of the muffled chatter and only half suppressed laughter that followed instantly after in his wake.
On the left of the shelf he had collected the great heroes, his favourite characters in all the myths; Heracles of the twelve miraculous labours; Jason the seeker, finder and winner of the Golden Fleece; Perseus who slew the serpent headed Gorgon; Theseus the brave, who entered the Labyrinth and dispatched the half-man, half-bull Minotaur, and tallest and most fearsome of them all, the warrior Achilles, who demanded and won such renown at Troy. Great heroes. Great stories. Secretly Kian wished he could be like them; bold, adventurous, free. Secretly he wished he lived their lives not his.
The strange thing was they were just crude figures from an imaginary past; indeed on the whole they were nothing much more than rubber toys or cheap plastic ornaments, but to Kian they had become living, pulsating, breathing beings with whom he now had a closer, more intimate and meaningful relationship than any soul alive. He silently asked their help. Help to face the next day at school. Their help to face the next evening by which time his stepfather would be home. And perhaps much worse troubles to come thereafter.
‘I suggest you deal with it more wisely.’
The words of the old tramp came floating back to him now. He stopped and pondered. Then he went over to the bed and drew the guilty secret out from under the pillow. He was no nearer discovering why what had happened had happened, nor what any of it meant, but he needed to hide the gruesome mask face somewhere safely for now. Kian knew it was too late to give it back and he certainly wasn’t going to own up to his parents. He shuddered at the thoughts of how they would react.
The whispered thought ‘Well, what would dad have to say about it?’ slithered unwelcomed into his mind. He quickly grabbed and decapitated it before it had a chance to utter a further syllable in that direction. There were some things he no longer let himself think about.
Looking up at the shelf of figures, he got back up on the chair, reached out and placed the figure of Humbaba deep in the second row, amongst the beasts and various fantastical creatures that also inhabited his world; the eye-popping, malevolent force against which his gods, goddesses, heroes and warriors were so sorely tested. These had been easier to come by because every model shop, online site and fanzine small-ads page was full of them; monsters. So he had a veritable army of multi-headed Hydras and fang faced Pythons, one eyed Cyclops’ and fire breathing Dragons. He made room for his new addition beside the bird-beaked figure of the Egyptian God of Wisdom Thoth, (who always seemed to end up hidden amongst the demons) and just behind a creepy plastic figure of the Gorgon Medusa, all flailing snake-hair and wild, seething eyes.
‘Mum always keeps well away from them’ he thought ‘so hopefully she won’t notice I’ve a new member joined the monster brigade.’ He chuckled inwardly and was about to climb down when a diminutive, crumpled shape lying prostrate on its side on the back row, caught his eye. He reached over and carefully lifted the figure out.
He blew away the dust and turned it around in his hand. A brief smile of recognition passed across his lips. It was Hector, Prince of Troy. ‘Fallen again mighty Prince?’ he thought. Kian went to put the figure back where he had found him, but thinking better of it, weighed him in his hand as if to judge his worth.
He struggled to remember how the figure ended up in his possession, seeing as he had not been the one to seek him out. Then it came back to him. Of course, Hector had arrived unannounced as one of a pack of seven miscellaneous metal warriors his mother found one Christmas as stocking fillers. He turned him over. Yes there it still was; the ‘Made in China’ stamp heavily embossed on the base which caused Hector to wobble somewhat and left him prone to keel over. The final slivers of colour slipped apologetically from off his once lustrous royal blue cloak. Kian remembered how the coarsely painted prince was flaking from the second he was unpacked.
As ever he looked at him with mixed feelings. He remembered how, when he had first realised who he was, he had briefly toyed with throwing him in the bin, but he had kept him all the same, as much for pig iron as for pleasure. But on the single occasion he had summoned up the will to set him once more before the towering Achilles, (standing as he did some ten inches taller, rubbery of limb and long of reach), even giving some allowance for the Achaean being a giant amongst men, it had made meaningful hand to hand combat something of a joke, and so Hector had ended up abandoned, cast aside in the shadows at the back of the shelf, Kian’s thin hope of being able to change the consequence of their battle thwarted by the ludicrous discrepancy in size.
Behind his youthful foible there lay a strange paradox. After all, it had been Hector’s tale of valour defeated that first ignited in the boy the passion for myth that was eventually to become so all consuming. Yet inadvertently, by discovering the Trojan’s tragic fate, Kian had also stirred a slumbering beast of his own, so raw, so overwhelming that he had long previously banished it to the deepest of places wherein nothing he thought could disturb it. For over two years he had kept up an unrelenting resistance to its call for release, numbing days in which he never once waivered nor cracked. But fate would have it otherwise; an encounter in the night which would unleash such a shockwave of suppressed feeling that it would almost drown him, endangering the tender shoots of his future passion before they had chance to take firm root. Although he had indeed recovered his footing, thereafter he instinctively knew here lay his personal Achilles heel; and this knowledge had led him to become more than circumspect about Hector and all he stood for.
CHAPTER 3
- LOST YEARS -
The twelfth of April, the day of his ninth birthday, the day they brought the news to the house that his invincible dad wasn’t coming back, was the day all feeling drained from Kian’s young life and everything inside went numb. From the first, there was no outward expression of grief; instead he merely gnawed and gnawed the inside of his mouth until it bled, staring blankly out of a rain tormented window whilst down below in the living room, his mother howled her heart out like a wild thing.
The dread of this moment had swallowed up the house for days since the news that his father was reported missing in action had first filtered through. It was 2003 and the fighting in southern Iraq had not abated since, as part of the allied invasion, the British army went into combat earlier that spring. The initial flush of excitement the eight year old Kian felt when he had first learnt that Dermot O’Connor, recently promoted warrant officer with Military Intelligence, was actually taking part in a real live battle, was soon replaced by a cold, nagging fear in the pit of his stomach which stopped him from eating and interrupted his sleep with nightmares. He would huddle with his mother in the dark, hot chocolate in hand, dressing gown wrapped tight, his strained face lit up by the flickering TV footage whilst, to an accompanying crescendo of ear splitting explosions, a tornado of flares, tracer bullets and computer targeted missiles tore certainty out from under the foundations of his life. Instantly war stopped being a child’s PlayStation game and instead became an adult place of mayhem and murder.
Kian had stared at the screen fixated, horrified, praying to catch a glimpse of his dad amidst the nightly inferno, his powerfully built yet always smiling features perhaps blackened by the acrid smoke, caked in sand, but alive nonetheless, waving to them, alive nonetheless, and coming back to them soon, alive, please God! But his face never materialised, only a forbidding phone call, a sickening, haunting, gnawing feeling and finally that grotesquely grim birthday with its single chime of the doorbell.
He had stood like stone, alone on the landing, staring blankly down into the hall, watching the soldiers who had arrived bearing the life annulling news being ushered away. As his Aunts’ closed the front door, the cries of his mother cascading around the house rose to a new level of desolation.
‘I’ll go in and see to her’ said Barbara. ‘Can you look to the boy?’
Sarah nodded, and turned with an upwards glance, preparing to mount the stairs to take and hold Kian in his grief - but he was no longer in sight. Silently he had withdrawn to his room, closed the door and turned out the light.
By the time the local catholic priest arrived to offer words of comfort and support, Kian had barricaded himself in. His Aunts’ had enough to cope with trying to calm their inconsolable sister and were relieved to leave Father Gerard to try and handle the boy alone. The old man eased out his collar, knelt down gingerly beside the door and spoke through the join.
‘Kian, me’ boy, please, it’s Father Gerard. Can you hear me?
Silence.
‘Listen laddie, I know this is bad but… you have to come out.’
Silence.
‘Kian? Do you hear me?
Silence.
‘Look, I understand how you are feeling Kian. Truly I do. My heart bleeds for ya, it does. But we cannot know… none of us can know… why it is such terrible things happen in the world. All we can know is that God loves us. That his son, Jesus, loves us… that Jesus is with you my Child, in your hour of need. He feels your sorrow as his own because remember, he also bravely sacrificed himself so that we might live… forever. And that is the path he has chosen for your father. Like Jesus, your father is a hero. And he is at one, with God, in heaven. Do you understand me Kian?’
Silence.
‘And now my son, he wants you… God wants you… to open the door, and to come out to us… to your mother, your aunts’ and me. Will you do that lad? Will you please come out?’
Yet despite repeated entreaties, Kian refused to come out or even speak with him through the door. Indeed he was never to exchange words with the priest again. Hitherto Father Gerard had been a good friend to the young boy, a welcome visitor whilst Dermot was away, month after month on service. He would take him for walks in the park or sometimes to the cinema, a special treat that always involved a cola and a large tub of butter soaked popcorn. The kindly old man enjoyed the boy’s willing chatter and encouraged him with his reading and his homework as well as preparing him for his eagerly anticipated first communion that Easter. But now Kian would not go near him, would have nothing to do with the public defender of a God who had so brutally ripped his dad away from him. There would be no more false prayers of hope, nor indeed would he celebrate communion or attend church, a source of great pain and heartache for his mother, who in turn retreated further into her deeply held faith, seeking in the story of ultimate sacrifice the strength to carry on. In this conflict lay the first wilting of their relationship.
It was, however, his mother who finally persuaded him to open the bedroom door, but only once the priest had been sent away. And when she pulled him into her arms, sobbing and clinging to his fragile frame, he responded by propping his head over her shoulder and fixing a grim stare on a stain in the wallpaper, and saying nothing.
In the days following he drifted in a dream like state, hardly able to raise his head from the bed of a morning, lying cocooned, wrapped up in layers of duvets and blankets. When he finally emerged from this chrysalis it was not as a butterfly - but he was changed alright. Shorn of his youthful wings, now sullen and shrouded, Kian seemed to have disappeared somewhere deep inside.
Of greatest concern to his mother and the grief counsellor who tried in vain to reach him, was that no matter what, he continued to refuse to give voice to any of the feelings of loss that clearly held him in a vice like grip. Mary often wondered if this was because no body was ever found and returned over which the boy could mourn. All they had of his father’s imposing six-foot-two inch frame was the dress suit he had left hanging in the cupboard at home, a pair of boots in need of a re-heel, a few photos and a couple of newspaper clippings which simply announced that Dermot O’Connor, Warrant Officer, British Army Military Intelligence, had disappeared in action in Iraq, presumed dead. Mary kept from her son the hazy but more informative details she was eventually given by a tight lipped liaison officer which seemed to suggest her husband had been on some hush-hush mission in Baghdad only to be led to his death by a young child, a boy seemingly not much older than Kian, who had first enticed his father into a ruined building by feigning injury only to then betray his location to the bombers by reflecting sunlight in a cracked fragment of mirror. The explosion was so massive nothing remained except for a blood stained helmet and a shattered assault rifle. So there was no coffin to send back; only polite condolences, talk of a medal, and an emptiness that knew no bounds.
After three weeks Kian suddenly asked to go back to school. His mother wanted to keep him at home, looking so ghost like and frail as he did, but he insisted. When he walked into the classroom that first morning the din instantly ceased. His classmates just stood and stared. All except Grace who walked over, handed him a flower, and then hugged him. Kian froze as the girl squeezed him a little too tightly. Detaching, he walked stiffly to his desk, sat down and took up the class work laying there waiting for him. Thereafter a false air of normality resumed in his school life as he applied himself once more to the daily demands. The one noticeable difference to before was that now he only spoke when absolutely necessary and at break times, instead of haring round the playground, joining in the adventures and games with the other children, he kept very much to himself.
At home, though, things were far from normal. Mary no longer even tried to reach out to him. She had learned of late that when she did, still unable to resist clutching him close, he would immediately stiffen and sharply pull away. So now she let him be. But each night, alone in her room she would sob herself to sleep whilst Kian in his bed next door lay motionless, eyes open, alert, listening, his mother’s lament softly seeping through the adjoining wall.
It was during the following summer after that he suddenly developed the severe asthma that would so blight his life. Without warning, he began to wheeze and cough at night. He started to complain of a tightness in his chest and shortness of breath whenever he ran. A trip to the doctors, a few tests, and the grim diagnosis followed. No reason could be given but Mary was convinced the repressed grief had triggered it. That first year he had an attack so bad that he was hospitalised. After that, an inhaler was to become his constant companion.
Thus it was that the once gregarious, outgoing eight year old of before had slowly transformed into a sombre, introverted ten year old loner, hiding away in his room, finding what comfort he could in his reading and his computer games. But as he remained at the top, or near the top of his class, none of his teachers were too worried and by the time 2004 had given way to 2005 most people had forgotten about his loss and why it was that he was now the way he was.
However, as both Kian’s eleventh birthday and the second anniversary of his father’s death approached, he suddenly worsened. He went off his food, feigned sickness every Monday morning in an effort to avoid school, or pretended to go in whilst secretly hiding out in the local park, and when his mother found out and begged him to attend, (she was by now in fulltime work, struggling to make ends meet, unable to risk taking time off), he silently blanked his teachers efforts to make him do any work or contribute in any way in class.
Although the day of the anniversary passed by without any particular incident, he point blank refused to be part of any celebration or commemoration, spending the time instead in front of the TV or playing games on his console. Hiding her own pain, Mary tried her best to reach him, but he would not let her in. A dark veil had once more come down over his life and she now feared it might never lift.
Towards the end of the final term of that year the school called her in for a frank heart to heart. His teachers were registering Kian as having slumped to near bottom of the class and the headmistress was most concerned about his plummeting attendance record. The final straw had been his failure to even sit his Key Stage 2 SATS exams. At this news Mary was lost for words; she had no idea that he had fallen this low. She promised that it was just a phase, that the summer holiday would change everything, that they would see a new Kian as he moved up to Secondary school upon his return the next academic year. But her nightly prayers were becoming more desperate by the time July had given way to mid August and there was still no sign of his state lifting.
‘Thank you God for his reading’, she whispered as she tucked him up of an evening, carefully removing a volume from beneath his sleeping chin. Through thick and thin, he had remained a bookaholic and even now, in this darkest of times, the boy always read himself to sleep. Mary knew where the habit came from - his dad, who had never been seen without a volume or other secreted somewhere about his person and who had, from soon after Kian was born, sought every opportunity to read to the child. ‘Readin’ grows the mind me boy’ he would say from behind that familiar, heart warming smile. ’Its all well and good growin’ tall and strong in ya body, but if the mind isn’t stretched as well… well you’ll slowly shrink inside, if you get my meanin’!? You see, TVs all right... if you want to have a laugh and a bit of messin' but if you’re lookin’ for a real story, if ya want’ta learn about what really matters, if you want to discover the great mysteries in life, you’ll hav’ta look to a book.’
Whenever he would return on leave from some overseas posting, he always brought back a handful of earth (or more often sand) and a bundle of exotic new tales. Then, having poured the soil into a labelled jam jar, he and Kian would curl up amongst a foam of pillows, the obligatory hot chocolate in hand, and in his strong, clear, West of Ireland accent Dermot would begin; ‘Once upon a time, in a far off land…’
But after his death and the final granting of her paltry war widow’s pension, Mary could afford very little each month for books, so the local library became Kian’s favourite hideaway. He would sit in there for hours, digesting the young persons section like a rabbit munching through lettuces. And when he finally got through all the available titles, he planned to start all over again. It didn’t really matter what he read, so long as he wasn’t left without a book, wasn’t left alone in his head.
It was mid that August, with an air of resigned determination, that he thus found himself returning once more to the first book on the shelf. As he reached up to bring the familiar paperback down, (a compendium of native African animal stories really intended for someone several years younger), a shadow suddenly loomed large over head and a hand briefly rested on his shoulder. In his shock, Kian involuntarily lashed out, sending the stunned librarian’s glasses flying clean across the room.
‘That’s some swing you have there,’ chuckled the kindly figure, getting down on all fours in an ungainly effort to recover his lost sight. Mortified, Kian joined him on the floor and soon recovered the wayward lenses from beneath a stool, handing them silently back to their owner as he crawled by. ‘Ah, that’s better,’ smiled the librarian, ’It’s always a good idea to be able to see things properly. Now, let me take a good look at you, the most diligent of all my customers … the fellow who consumes books like a starving creature yet who only feeds on that which feeds him not!’
Kian looked up at the penetrating eyes, awaiting clarification of this perplexing remark. Instead the librarian merely held out a large hard backed volume. ‘Here’ he said ‘this is what I was about to give you when you swung that right hook at me. Go on, take it’
Gingerly Kian took hold of the book, and turned it over. ‘TROY’ was the single word emblazoned on the faded cover. None the wiser, he looked blankly up at the man’s patiently smiling face.
‘I’d read it if I were you ...’ continued the bespectacled figure, rising to brush the dust from off his trousers. ‘I think you’re about old enough to step up a gear or two, and I think its time you got to chew a little red meat off the bone, don’t you?’
With that he returned to his desk and the mountainous pile of new titles impatiently awaiting indexing.
Kian stared after him for a while but the man took no more notice of him than he did of the flies as they crashed their madly buzzing frames off the skylights overhead. It was three o’clock in the afternoon and the summer heat was beating down on the prefab roof with the intensity of a giant oven. Kian wished the librarian would open a window or a door or something to let in a cool breeze and clear the stifled air. His chest felt constricted and his breathing grew shorter and somewhat laboured, a sure sign of his asthma building up a head of steam. He thought about getting up, leaving, running out into the open, but instead he slid further down the wall to the cool, stone slabbed floor, took a deep pull on his inhaler, steadied himself, and turned his eyes back to the book in hand.
‘Who or what was Troy?’ he thought. The illustrated dust cover had long since been trashed, and the green binding, its corners somewhat battered and frayed, proffered no other clue other than the title, proudly displayed in majestic gold embossed lettering. He ran his fingers through its strangely formed shape. They were not like modern letters; they seemed older, bolder, strangely stirring.
‘Troy!’
Inadvertently he had said the word out loud. He quickly looked up to see if anyone had heard him, if any disapproving face was glaring back. But he was quite alone; only the stooped back of the librarian, stumbling under the weight of voluminous titles gave a hint that there was anyone else alive in the building.
He opened the first page. A picture greeted his eye. A line of long wooden ships with startling white and amber eyes painted on their bows and greeny-yellow snakes woven on their sails, was ploughing a white flecked sea of aquamarine blue. Standing tall and proud on their foredecks, stern faced warriors with great pointed spears and high horsehair helmets stared provocatively off into the near distance in which, beyond a line of sand, the walls of some great citadel could just be made out. Kian felt a strange tingle of excitement, and with a final look at the picture, he turned the page and dared to join them on their hazardous adventure.
CHAPTER 4
- TEARS IN THE NIGHT -
The mechanical click of the clock on the wall pressed out its insistent rhythm. Under duress, the minutes passed into hours. And still the pages turned as the boy determinedly ploughed on. Even the occasional thump of the librarian’s stamp banging out a discordant refrain failed to disturb his concentration, vanishing instead into the background swell, as inch by inch Kian was drawn further out and on by the tide of the story.
The initial pages had suggested otherwise as he at first struggled to find his usual easy stride. Hitherto he rarely, if ever, suffered any such difficulty and in truth his ability was far in advance of his age. Normally he read at great pace, only occasionally struggling with a word or a meaning, often finishing a second page before a classmate would complete a first. But here, alone on the library floor, he was finding the language meatier than he was used to and the strange names and places, none of which he had ever heard of before, made him labour.
His mind wandered. Not a good sign and not what he read for. Indeed, if it hadn’t have been for the intriguing maps, the eye catching pictures, and the dogged persistence that was one of his unacknowledged strengths, he might have given up like so many youngsters before him offered the same stern challenge. But he didn’t. He struggled on, grasping at a meaning here, blinking at an oddly foreign name there, falling through the web until suddenly, unaware it had happened to him, he found himself pitched into a dark, brooding, prophetic dream foretelling how a great city was to be burnt to the ground and a newborn baby prince declared to be the future tragic cause. Here, suddenly, was this very same child being left to die on the side of a mountain, only to be found by a herdsman and brought up as his own. In his mind’s eye, Kian saw a fleeting image of a sun beaten, grizzled but kindly face, somewhat like the librarian’s, leaning down and gently lifting the small bundle up from the dry grass and into his attendant arms.
Perspiration dripped from the end of Kian’s nose, which he brushed away with an indifferent flick of a finger for the adventure now held him, enthralled. His eyes widened and glimmered with fascination as the child, now a young man named Paris, entrusted to judge which of three goddesses being the fairest should obtain a wondrous golden apple, finally chooses the goddess of love, Aphrodite, and suddenly, love turns to threatened war because of the promise she makes to Paris that he will have as his reward the beautiful Queen Helen, another man’s wife. The whirl of events spun Kian around and before he knew what was what, he was standing dockside at a great seaport, surrounded by a mighty host of Greek warriors, waiting to board ship and head for the city of Troy, hell bent on getting Helen back, back from the clutches of Paris who had stolen her away.
His eleven year old mind couldn’t quite grasp why Paris wanted her or even what ‘wanting’ her meant, nor could he understand why her enraged husband along with so many others should wish to cross the wind swept waters to find her, but he still felt a flush of excitement as he stared at the picture of the vast armada spread out across the shimmering bay.
Just then, the old librarian put his head round the bookshelf and spied Kian curled up on the floor, face pressed close up against the page.
‘I’ll be locking the doors in five minutes and I’m sorry to say you can’t sleep here. Time to go young man.’
He saw the boy’s face drop.
‘Not wishing to appear overly radical but may I suggest you consider bringing it home with you?’
Strangely, Kian had yet to take out even a single book, preferring, as the fancy took him, to sit all day in the quiet of the library imbibing away, lost in a world of his own. The place was so rarely frequented he found he could nearly always put his latest read back on the shelf for the evening and trust it would be there, loyally awaiting his return at whatever time it suited him the next day. He liked the sense that he had a secret refuge, a bolthole where no one could find him and therefore he chose not to allow his other life to invade its treasured constancy. Bringing a book home might give the game away and until now he hadn’t risked that happening (little did he know that his mother had long since discovered his lair, and thanks to the kindness of the librarian, who promised to keep a close eye on the boy, had allowed him his little ‘secret’, trusting the vigilant book minder to keep an equally careful watch over her son).
Kian held the treasured volume tight against his chest, and thought fast. Tomorrow was Sunday. He wouldn’t get back in until 9.00am Monday morning. He simply couldn’t wait that long. He swallowed hard and nodded to the librarian.
‘Good. Now, normally as a first timer I would have to get your mother to sign a form for you but seeing as how you are actually my most studious and valued customer, I think I can risk it just this once. I’ve prepared a temporary ticket. All I have to do is issue a date stamp, and you are on your way.’
Once home, Kian slipped up to his bedroom as per normal, saying nothing to Mary, and hid his booty under his mattress. He silently ate his dinner, watched an hour of TV, and then giving her a placating hug and a kiss on the cheek, he quietly took himself off to bed. Once under the covers, torch and ginger biscuit to hand, he settled down to feast.
Outside, rain began to fall steadily, dampening the Saturday night hubbub on the estate, with its slamming doors, wild cries and low curses. But within the tented oasis the hours passed in glowing isolation. The cloaking night drew in and the chapters slipped by as for the very first time, Kian truly became at one with a story. The battering crash of bronze sword against uplifted shield sent shudders through his young frame. Every heaving sinew echo-laboured in his body, every bellowing war cry reverberated in his ear,