Tales From The Wyrd Museum 2: The Raven's Knot (22 page)

Like the webbed strands of a great, luminous spider, a network of fluorescent tapes criss-crossed the country road, fencing off the grass verge and threading into the nearby wood.

A queue of police cars, their lights idly flashing and radios crackling, lined the edge of the trees and sombre-faced constables paced about the cordon, exchanging grim looks. One young policeman stood away from his colleagues. All the colour had drained from his face and he took deep breaths of the acrid, burned air to try and conquer the nausea which had seized him.

‘You all right now, Col?’ a corpulent sergeant called.

The man waved back, but remained where he was and stared blankly at the darkening sky. If he ever saw another sight like the one which had just turned his stomach then he would definitely resign from the force. How the forensic guys managed, he couldn't begin to imagine.

At last the queasy fluttering in his guts subsided and, although his face was still ashen grey, he mopped his forehead, preparing to rejoin the others.

Wandering back, his legs still a trifle shaky, he saw a small blue van skid to a halt in the middle of the road and an oddly dressed man, who was obviously some kind of gypsy, came leaping out to charge towards the tape barriers.

‘Hey!’ the policeman yelled, his voice combining with the shouts of his colleagues. ‘You can't come through here!’

Aidan slithered beneath the cordon and at once five burly officers came running to stop him.

‘Let me pass!’ he demanded when strong hands grasped his shoulders.

‘This is a sealed area, Sir,’ the overweight sergeant snapped, roughly bundling him back towards the tapes. ‘The scene of a very serious incident and we don't want no ghoulish souvenir hunters. Now get lost before I charge you with something.’

Frog-marched through the cordon, Aidan's temper exploded and in one smart movement he ducked and slipped out of his much-patched coat to round furiously upon his captors.

‘Be still!’ Aidan commanded and such was the tremendous authority which rang in his voice, that the officers froze and stared at him in stupefied amazement.

‘Now,’ he continued, taking his coat from the sergeant. ‘Let's have no more nonsense and be a bit more civilised, shall we?’

The policemen swayed unsteadily as though stirring from sleep.

‘You can't come through here,’ the sergeant reiterated, albeit with less confidence this time.

Aidan glared at him. If there was one quality he couldn't stand it was bull-headed stupidity. It would be so easy to daunt them with a few of the simple tricks he knew, but in spite of his anxiety to discover what had happened to his friends, he knew he would learn more if he followed their tedious procedures.

‘Who's in charge here?’ he demanded.

The sergeant wanted to tell the funny little man that police matters were none of his business, yet when he looked at those emerald flames he found himself saying, ‘Chief Inspector Hargreaves, Sir.’

Aidan's grave expression brightened considerably. ‘Charlie Hargreaves?’ he cried. ‘There's a bit of luck. Be a good fellow and toddle off to fetch him would you?’

‘I don't think so, Sir.’ the officer refused, avoiding those weird glittering eyes. ‘Like I said, this is an extremely serious incident.’

‘I know that!’ Aidan snapped, dragging his fingers through his long hair in frustrated outrage. Mastering himself, he leaned forward and spoke to the overweight officer in a low, conspiratorial whisper.

‘Listen,’ he growled. ‘If you continue to obstruct me, I for one really will lose my rag and I don't think your superior would appreciate this shameful treatment of one of his oldest friends.’

The sergeant swallowed audibly, ‘You really know the Chief Inspector?’

‘He and I used to scrump apples together when we were boys. Terror of the orchards we were.’

A sceptical sneer formed upon the sergeant's face but the gypsy was so assured that his doubts rapidly trickled away.

‘Colin!’ he called out to the young constable. ‘Go tell the Chief Inspector there's a Mr...’

‘Aidan.’

‘A Mr Aidan to see him.’

The grey-faced constable hesitated before following the orange tapes into the trees.

‘Don't worry, lad,’ the sergeant told him. ‘It'll all be bagged up by now.’

The young officer nodded feebly and hurried into the wood.

‘Bagged up?’ Aidan muttered, staggered by the man's crass insensitivity. ‘Would you care to explain that deplorably callous comment? What exactly did you mean?’

‘Can't say, Sir,’ came the unhelpful reply.

Aidan considered him anew and in a cold, cryptic voice, earnestly intoned. ‘You want to watch those night shifts. Too fond of the late take-aways aren't you—and then a beer or five with the lads?

‘I'm a good reader of people, my fine, fat sergeant. Faces are the maps of our lives, did you know that? Well, by my reading of your ugly, pugnacious mug, you've got two years before the first heart attack and, six months after that—it's the biggie.’

The policeman opened his mouth but said nothing and could only gaze at him in consternation.

‘Aidan!’ a voice cut through the uneasy atmosphere. ‘Thank God.’

Hastening from the trees came Chief Inspector Hargreaves; a tall, solidly built man with dark hair that was turning grey at the temples who possessed a rather caved-in looking face framed by a neatly clipped, brindled beard.

Thank you, Sergeant!’ he barked gruffly. ‘Let him by.’

Aidan gave the rotund officer an infuriating wink as he slid past but, before joining the chief inspector, the gypsy paused.

‘Never too late to change,’ he said more gently than before. ‘A little less lager, a lot more exercise and a huge dollop of good manners will get you another forty years. Think about it.’

The sergeant wagged his head and stared after the curious man in wonder.

‘Teasing my officers?’ the chief inspector murmured when Aidan approached.

The gypsy put up his hands in mock surrender. ‘I admit I lost my temper,’ he said. ‘But they really are a pretty doltish lot.’

‘They're good people, doing a difficult job. Not surprising if they're a bit rough around the edges today—it's not been a particularly happy one. At least the reporters have packed up and gone now.’

The men regarded one another, the one in the brown frock-coat was much the shorter of the two, but the man in the uniform looked up to him all the same.

‘It's good to see you, Leader,’ he whispered, throwing his officers a cursory glance as he led Aidan aside. ‘You have no idea how relieved I am now you're here,’ he confided. 'This is beyond me—it's got us all completely baffled.’

‘So, Charlie,’ Aidan said quietly. ‘What happened?’

Hargreaves conducted him along the verge to an area where the grass was flattened and an assortment of objects lay unattended and curiously out of place upon the turf.

‘This is how they left it. We haven't a clue how the vehicle was moved, no tyre marks—nothing.’

With a profound sadness which betrayed its marks upon his swarthy face, Aidan gazed upon the campsite of his friends. This was where he had left
Eden's Bus
only the previous evening. There was the box the dogs slept in and there upon its side was a large water container.

‘Did you find anything?’ he asked.

The chief inspector moved a little further across the grass. ‘There was some blood over here,’ he stated. ‘We don't know whose yet. Leader, they... they're all dead you know.’

‘I guessed that they would be. Now—take me to it.’

*

Through the trees Hargreaves led him and, as they pressed deeper into the wood, the unpleasant smell of burnt timber mounted steadily.

‘It was a ruddy big blaze,’ the chief inspector commented. ‘Could see it for miles—but you'll see just how big for yourself when we get there.’

Tramping over the leaf mulch, Aidan noted numerous policemen scattered through the woodland searching through the thickets with long sticks.

‘Not all of them were in the bus when it exploded,’ Hargreaves uttered, choosing his words delicately. ‘One of them... well—we still haven't found all of him yet.’

Aidan squeezed his eyes shut as the information cut through him, then, with renewed determination, he forged on.

Now the trees that they passed were coated with a film of soot. A little farther in and they became charred and withered. Then, as they progressed on to ground that was still smouldering, the chief inspector turned stiffly.

‘This is it,’ he said. ‘It's not pretty.’

Moving aside, he let Aidan view the horrendous scene ahead and the little man staggered forward.

It was like stepping into a vision of Hell.

The world was suddenly stripped of every colour and only a stark coal-black wasteland remained. All that was left: of a wide area of dense woodland was a stunted forest of cindered stumps which chinked and chimed as they cooled, pouring countless strings of bitter smoke heavenward.

A thick carpet of ash smothered the incinerated soil, and Aidan's feet sank deeply into the downy layers of carbon as he gazed upon the wreckage which lay in the centre of this blasted devastation.

There, ruptured into three large, twisted fragments of buckled and mangled metal, were the shattered remains of the cheerfully painted coach his friends had once lived in.

Unrecognisable in its cremation, the vehicle's fractured frame sprawled across the fired landscape like the crashed ruins of an airline disaster.

Blistered and burned in the inferno, the once vibrant colours had given way to a torrefied shell whose windows had melted, and patches of bubbled glass dotted the surrounding embers.

In and around the vehicle's tortured skeleton, forensic teams wearing white paper cover-alls were meticulously sifting the debris and hunting through the scorched remnants, overlooking nothing.

‘Rhonda, Luke, Owen, Dot, Patrick,’ Aidan grieved. ‘An evil way to die.’

The chief inspector came and stood beside him. 'The bodies have gone off to the path, lab.’ he said grimly. ‘Can't be many worse ways to go than burning to death.’

‘That's assuming they survived the fall.’

Hargreaves stared at him, ‘Fall? If you could shed any light on how this accident could possibly have happened, I'd be most grateful. How does a coach get inside a wood, without leaving any kind of trail then blow up like this? It just doesn't make any sense.’

‘There you go assuming again,’ Aidan told him. ‘This was no accident. Something is stirring, Charlie—something great and terrible.’

Crossing the desert of ash, the tails of his coat flapping behind him, he went to take a closer look at the roasted wreck—to the astonishment of the forensic scientists in their sterile coverings.

Hargreaves hurried behind him, gesturing to the others that the odd little man had his permission to be present.

Like a dog searching for a scent, Aidan roved amid the destruction, halting occasionally to squint at a battered scrap of bodywork to try and figure out which part of the coach it had originally came from.

Watching this eccentric interloper weave in and out of what should have been their exclusive domain, the scientists became gradually more irritated until they finally put down their instruments and complained to the chief inspector who attempted to placate them.

‘Charlie!’ Aidan shouted abruptly. ‘Come see this.’

Hargreaves hastened over to where the gypsy was kneeling before a distorted sheet of perforated metal and crouched beside him.

‘This is a section of the roof,’ Aidan remarked. ‘But what do you make of these ragged holes?’

‘Looks almost deliberate,’ the chief inspector breathed. ‘Too regular to be a result of the explosion. As if something ripped clean through it on purpose.’

‘That's exactly what happened. The bus was seized by the roof and hoisted off the ground, must've been pretty high too—then it was dropped here.’

Hargreaves rose. ‘That's impossible,’ he hissed. ‘Apart from a whacking great crane, what on earth could have done that?’

Aidan ran his fingers over the jagged rents and, in a quiet, despairing voice, murmured,
‘Valkyrja?’

A deathly expression stole over the chief inspector's face and he choked back an exclamation of horror.

‘Valkyries...’ he gasped. ‘But that's impossible—it's preposterous!’

Lost in turbulent thought, Aidan slowly drummed his fingers upon the punctured metal before stretching to stand beside his old friend.

‘Don't disappoint me, Charlie,’ he said in a hushed, mournful tone. ‘Where's your learning? You're descended from Askar folk same as me, you go to the museum every year like I do to adorn the fountain and look for a sign—you know there are all sorts of possibilities in this world.’

‘Even so, Valkyries—in this day and age? They were supposed to have been destroyed in the early time.’

Aidan held him with his powerful eyes. ‘The tales say that only the hosts were vanquished,’ he reminded him. ‘The unclean spirits were never captured or brought to book. Somehow the twelve servants of Woden have returned. Those malevolent creatures the Gallows God created to overthrow the Nornir are back amongst us.’

There was a silence as both men considered this terrifying prospect.

‘The Fates are in hideous danger,’ Aidan eventually said, rousing himself from his doom-filled thoughts. ‘I have to get back to Glastonbury—I've been away too long already. Verdandi has left the museum, she is heading for the Tor. If those nightmares find her...’

The chief inspector agreed, but scanning the devastation around them and looking at his officers, he wondered what he should tell them.

‘Charlie,’ Aidan snarled, knowing what was passing through his friend's mind. ‘It doesn't matter any more. The end is coming—don't you understand? If the Valkyrie are loose, there's nothing any of us can do! We're human and they're not. Those vile abhorrences are beyond us and the best you can do is to quell the panic for as long as you can. Say what happened here was a freak accident after all. Don't let the public know—not yet.’

Hargreaves nodded briskly. ‘I won't,’ he promised. ‘Now you go Leader, the Nornir need you. Don't fail them.’