The Fatal Tree (2 page)

Previously

I
t appears that we left our questors in a bit of a cliff-hanger in Damascus, circa 1930, where they were gathered at the Zetetic Society headquarters on Hanania Street in the Old City. It should be recalled that the society and its offices function as the nexus point for all those of goodwill who seek to understand the phenomenon of ley travel and what can be learned from it. For example, we learned that certain cosmic events have been set in motion that now threaten to bring about the apocalypse of annihilation known as the End of Everything.This discovery impelled a conclave of questors to discuss the impending cataclysm – discussions that went precisely nowhere... until several small but significant events occurred in quick succession and changed everything.

It began when Kit Livingstone innocently and inadvertently revealed that he had once, whilst “dreaming time” with the venerable En-Ul in the prehistoric Bone House, encountered the late, great Arthur Flinders-Petrie at the mythical location known as the Spirit Well. How did he know it was Flinders-Petrie? There could be no mistaking the man’s identity, because his torso was tattooed with the symbols representing his many and various journeys throughout time and space. When Kit saw him, Arthur was wading into the Well of Souls – another name for the Spirit Well – carrying the lifeless body of his beloved wife, Xian-Li. When he emerged from the well, Xian-Li had been miraculously restored to the land of the living.

This disclosure was overheard by Mrs. Rosemary Peelstick, formerly a ley traveller herself but latterly hostess-in-residence at the Zetetic Society headquarters. The venerable Mrs. P immediately grasped the significance of Arthur’s action, and, indeed, the shock of hearing it was such that she lost control of her tea tray and sent the entire assemblage crashing to the flagstone floor. No great catastrophe in itself, you might think; such messes are easily dealt with. Cassandra Clarke was present at the scene and, in an effort to be helpful, reached into her pocket and drew out her handkerchief with the aim of mopping up the spilt tea.

Careful readers will remember that, whilst this particular handkerchief was nothing more than an ordinary square of white cotton cloth and one that Cass used in all sorts of ways, it had most recently been employed as a work surface in her attempt to reverse-engineer one of the Shadow Lamps. Those clever devices had been helping guide our questors through the maze of portals and pathways constituting the illimitable network of ley lines.

During her investigations, some of the rare earth contained within the Shadow Lamp spilled onto the surface of the handkerchief and caught in the fibres. Before Cass could deploy the handkerchief as a mop, Kit perceived a faint yet unmistakeable image on the cloth: a spiral whorl with a straight line directly through the centre and three separate circular dots spaced evenly along the outer edge of the spiral curve. Kit intervened and, upon closer examination of the cloth, both he and Cass realized that all things are interconnected and there is neither chance nor coincidence: the cloth bore one of the designs that Kit had seen on Arthur Flinders-Petrie’s chest in the form of a blue tattoo.

Meanwhile, others who had been somewhat sidelined in the pursuit of the Skin Map were advancing their own quests. Lady Haven Fayth and her faithful retainer, Giles Standfast, had made an unfortunate ley leap that landed them on the empty, windswept steppes in the time of Emperor Leo the Wise. Their attempts to locate a ley or portal that might take them out of their circumstances failed and, unable to orient or protect themselves, they were taken into the custody of the Bulgars, who were making their way through what we might now call Central Asia on their way to the great city of Constantinople. It began very much to look as if Lady Fayth and Giles’s ley-travelling days were over.

And so we pick up the story of Wilhelmina Klug, Kit’s former girlfriend and now co-owner of the Grand Imperial Kaffeehaus in Old Prague – and also of Fra Gianni Becarria and his new friend, the renowned astrophysicist Dr. Tony Clarke, aka Cass’s father, who tends to take a scientific view of all these events. And, last but not least, of the degenerate criminal Archelaeus Burleigh and his nefarious Burley Men who are, at present, languishing in gaol below the Rathaus in Prague owing to their assault on the baker Engelbert Stiffelbeam, Wilhelmina’s business partner.

As we proceed, the certainties on which our questors have come to rely seem to be very much in flux and, with them, we now enter a world in which everything we know is wrong.

G
ordon Seiferts looked out of the window of the operations module of Skybase Alpha. He blinked and looked again because he saw something that should not have been there: the moon.

Captain Seiferts was undertaking his daily background radiation reading and thermal image of Earth, but the blue planet was nowhere to be seen in his field of vision. He swivelled the camera 230 degrees and was able to bring Earth into view, but the metrics were all skewed. Fearing that the space station had somehow drifted out of orbit, he hurried down to the command module, where the mystery was compounded.

Instead of his colleagues and fellow scientists – men who had been working and sharing living space for the last three months – he found a crew of extremely astonished Russian cosmonauts. Seiferts did not speak Russian, and the cosmonauts did not speak English, so it took some time to work out that Seiferts was not aboard Skybase Alpha as he supposed, but on Mir 2, which was on a survey expedition to map the moon. Following this revelation, Seiferts grew so agitated and incoherent he had to be sedated and bound to a hammock for the duration of the mission.

Near Tacoma, Washington, fourteen vehicles plunged into Puget Sound when the highway bridge on which they were travelling disappeared beneath them. In all, thirty-two people were killed. However, local fishermen passing through the sound on their way out to sea were able to pull three extremely confused survivors from the water – none of whom could give a credible account of what had happened.

Able Seaman Mike Taylor of the
Orca IV
expressed utter incomprehension of the event. He was quoted in the
Tacoma Times
, saying: “It was the craziest thing I’ve ever seen. I mean, those cars came from nowhere – it was like they just fell out of the sky. I still can’t figure what happened. Those poor people…” The accident occurred in the area of the newly proposed Tacoma Narrows Bridge – a fact that was not lost on the Puget Port Authority, whose public relations office commented, “Obviously, a disaster like this is tragic for those involved. But whatever the explanation turns out to be, it does raise serious questions about whether that is the best place for a bridge at all.”

The incident was put down to a severe weather inversion resulting in a freak tornado. Such extreme weather conditions, although rare, are not unknown. In the Midwest, tornados have been known to pluck objects from the ground and transport them over many miles before depositing them in unlikely places.

Howard Smith went to sleep in his bed in Carol Stream, Illinois, and woke up on a floating agricultural island on the edge of Lake Texacoco in Mexico.

After kissing Julie – his wife of thirty-five years – good night, he closed his eyes in the bedroom of his suburban Chicago home, slept soundly, and awoke the next morning to find himself surrounded by wary Aztec farmers discussing the baffling presence of this pale-skinned alien who had appeared in their midst. They decided he was a sky god and, despite his strong protests – uttered in a language they could not understand – the farmers took him to the priest, who gave him a collar of gold and established him in the temple at Tenochtitlan.

In the Laxmi Nagar district of Mumbai, India, Sireena Shah prepared breakfast for her three children who were getting ready for school. She fed them and sent them out of the door with their lunch boxes – only to return to the kitchen to find them still dawdling over their food. She assumed they were playing a trick on her and was giving them a good scolding when her husband appeared on the scene, wanting
his
breakfast. She would have gladly given him something to eat, except for the fact that he had eaten and departed for the office forty minutes previously; his dirty dishes were still in the sink.

The entire R&D team of Arcosoft Games of Cupertino, California, disappeared while on a conference call with executives at Gyrotek, a marketing firm in San Francisco. When repeated attempts to reestablish contact failed, a secretary sent to the boardroom reported that the team had apparently staged a walkout as some kind of protest and left the building.

From the team members’ point of view, however, the boardroom simply vanished – to be instantly replaced by a battlefield occupied by two opposing forces during what would later be called the Battle of Balaclava in the second month of the Crimean War. All eight men and five women of the Arcosoft team were slaughtered during a cavalry charge when British troops failed to identify them as noncombatants.

In Damascus, Rosemary Peelstick stood in front of a greengrocer with a sack of oranges in her hand.
What am I doing here?
she wondered. She looked down at the net bag, but had no memory of purchasing the oranges. The grocer smiled and offered his familiar greeting; she gave him an embarrassed wave, then walked home. It was, she decided, a sign of age, what was called a senior moment. She had another such moment later that day when, on the way to the genizah to join the discussion there, she turned into the hallway and found herself in the front room, again wondering why she was there.

Later, when talking to Tess Tildy, she suddenly heard herself saying the same words in the same conversation they had exchanged not an hour before. When she mentioned this to Tess, the elder woman confessed to having similar memory lapses. “It happens when you get older, dear,” she said. “I don’t think there’s anything worth worrying about.”

But when Mrs. Peelstick saw Gianni Becarria in the courtyard talking to Brendan Hanno and then, not three seconds later, turned around and saw him sitting in the front room reading a book, she knew there was something very much worth worrying about. The sight of the Italian priest nonchalantly thumbing the pages of the
History of the Ottoman Empire
sent her running back to the courtyard to find another Gianni and Brendan still immersed in conversation. She grabbed Cassandra Clarke, who happened to be passing by, and instructed her to look in the courtyard. “What did you see?”

“Well, Gianni and Brendan are talking physics, from what I can gather. Why?”

“That’s what I thought. Now,” said Mrs. Peelstick, “go and look in the front room and meet me in the kitchen. But don’t say anything to anyone before you speak to me.”

Cass regarded her curiously. “You’re as white as a sheet, Mrs. P. What’s up?”

“Just do as I ask, please. There’s a good girl.”

Cass moved through the hallway and put her head through the door into the front reception room. There she saw Gianni reading his book; she did a double take and ran back to where Mrs. Peelstick was waiting in the kitchen. “Okay, what’s going on?” she demanded.

“Shh! Keep your voice down,” warned Mrs. Peelstick. “You saw them too?”

“I saw two Giannis, yes,” Cass confirmed in a harsh whisper. “Why? What’s happening?”

“I think we have a problem,” she said.

“I’ll say. This is deeply weird.” Cass turned her wide-eyed stare toward the hallway as if fearing what would come through the door next. “We’ve got to tell somebody.”

A hasty kitchen summit was convened – to which neither Gianni was invited – where Mrs. Peelstick informed certain key members of the Zetetics of her alarming observations. “I don’t want to start a panic,” she told them, “but we have a situation.” It quickly transpired that she was not alone in noticing a range of small but significant anomalies: “odd little wrinkles in reality” was how Tess put it. When those wrinkles began to proliferate, the company knew that the dimensional reality they presently inhabited was growing increasingly unstable. The instability, Tony Clarke informed them, would only increase as the underlying structure of reality grew ever more volatile.

“Worst case?” said Tony. “When the anomalies accumulate to a level that can no longer be sustained, the dimension will collapse.”

“Collapse,” mouthed Brendan. “By that you mean be destroyed.”

“Not destroyed, per se – more like
extinguished
. It would be as if this reality had never existed.”

“What would happen to us?” asked Wilhelmina Klug.

“You, me, and everyone else who happened to inhabit this dimensional reality would simply cease to exist too.”

The temperature in the room seemed to plummet. Kit Livingstone gazed around at his fellow questors. “Is this it?” he wondered. “Is this the End of Everything?”

“Merely the first wave, I would say,” replied Tony. “Toward the end, the destruction will be far more devastating.”

His words were still hanging in the air when the first of three explosions rocked the building, breaking glass in the windows, rattling the furniture, and sending stucco from the ceiling crashing to the floor. Kit was struck by a chunk of falling plaster. “What the– ” he sputtered, shaking white rubble out of his hair. He jumped up and ran down the hall.

“Kit!” shouted Cass as the second explosion sent dishes from the cupboards crashing to the floor.

“Stay back!” cried Kit. “I’m going to check it out.”

He raced to the reception room. Gianni was gone. Pausing at the front door, Kit pressed his ear to the wood and listened, then opened the door a crack and peered out. He saw nothing unusual, so he stepped out onto the threshold and looked down the smokefilled street, where he saw something that had not been seen in Syria in two hundred years: a horse-drawn caisson pulling a cannon into position. Soldiers in tall, black square-topped hats, blue coats, and white trousers accompanied the cannon; they wore black boots and carried muskets fitted with bayonets. An officer with a red cockade and white ostrich plume on his bicorne hat observed the operation from the saddle of a brown horse. The officer carried a naked sabre and shouted orders in French to a company of soldiers who appeared to be moving house-to-house and pulling out residents. The air reverberated with the screams and cries of frightened citizens and the shouts of the soldiers.