long-forgotten battles on a world that was most assuredly as flat as a plate, and kings brutally seized bloodstained land they believed was by right of God theirs, only to have another god instruct his minions to seize it back a century later. Each manuscript appeared to glitter in the half-light as the heavily applied gold leaf curled up, flaking from flowers and borders.
D’Scover read on, carefully transposing some key phrases into a small brown leather-bound notebook. Once an entry caught his eye, his finger hovered above the section and, as he moved his finger from line to line, the words formed on the open pages of the notebook as though soaking through from inside the paper itself. The pages filled and the weak winter daylight began to fade as the clouds above the Text Chamber split to reveal a sky dotted with sharp white points of starlight. After many hours, and with his substance beginning to weaken, he pushed the books away across the table and laid his hands flat on the patinated surface. Taking a long inbreath, he pursed his lips and blew a sigh across the table, ruffling the pages of the books and making them jitter.
“It must be here,” he said to the empty room.
He cupped his hands together, curving one hand round the other to form a bowl, and breathed into it. A cascade of blue sparks rolled into his hands, whirling and twisting until he could hold no more. Squeezing his hands together, he crushed the blue light, causing sparks to pop out and skitter across the table. When he opened his hands again, a small blue sphere lay in his white bloodless palm. Holding it up, allowing the moonlight to fall through it, he could see the indigo clouds roll around inside. After a few moments the outline of a human head started to form within the clouds. As the image cleared, it triggered a memory within D’Scover and he dropped the ball. It rolled along the table, tumbling from the edge and disappearing in a glittering blue shower before it hit the floor.
D’Scover pulled one of the books out from the bottom of the pile and briskly flicked through the pages until he found the one he was looking for. A treatise on witchcraft from the seventeenth century lay open in front of him with its pages bearing many later additions in an inky scrawl. On one of these pages was a detailed drawing of the trial of a young witch in Hertfordshire. In this drawing the young girl sat, with a defiant expression, tightly tied to a post in the middle of a village green. The crowd around her looked angry and many of them raised farm tools above their heads. The account of the trial listed her supposed crimes, the crimes that damned her to a public burning. The book told how, among other acts of witchcraft, she had cured a child of deafness, pulled back a tree that had been blown over on to a house and diverted a flood that threatened a family’s crop. The picture of the so-called trial was small, but even so D’Scover could see that this witch was the same girl he had seen form in the ball.
“Another piece of the puzzle,” he said to himself.
D’Scover stretched out his arms and looked over the piles of manuscripts on the table. He became aware that his substance was so weak that he was only barely managing to hold his shape. His arms had become a thin grey shadow of his usual form and his hands were almost transparent. One by one he gestured for the books to return to their places on the shelves and they rose slowly and gracefully to slot themselves into their niches once more. When the table was cleared, all that remained upon it was his full notebook and the book containing the witch trial. Standing up, he gestured for the table to move to one side, and this it obediently did.
Once the floor space was clear, D’Scover took his place beneath the glass pyramid and turned his face towards it. He stretched his hands aloft and the great glass sheets of the pyramid opened to expose the cold night sky. D’Scover began to softly chant his Ritual of Dispersal and, after his grey vortex scattered into the darkness, the pyramid silently closed behind him.
“How do you feel?”
“Hard to explain really. I don’t feel dead, I actually feel kind of . . . alive.”
“Adam,” D’Scover turned the boy to face him, “you must let that feeling go. You are dead and nothing will change that. There is nothing in the known universe that can make you alive again. You have had your time.”
“You really do love a good speech, don’t you?” Adam sighed. “You asked, I answered. This is all new to me and I don’t know what answers you want so I just tell you the truth.”
The hospice was in darkness and, as the offices were empty, D’Scover had managed to Hotline into one unseen. Adam had been a little tricky to find as a first Dispersal into a building of that size often caused drift. D’Scover eventually tracked him down to the mortuary and pulled him back into the empty office he had just used. Adam’s old room was now occupied and so restabilising in there was no longer an option.
“What was your Dispersal like?” D’Scover asked.
“D’you actually want to know or is that another question that I should give a dumbed-down answer to?” Adam said.
“Adam, I know that you are angry, but it will pass. It is quite natural at this stage to . . .”
“Look, I’m sorry, I’m not really angry. I don’t mean to seem angry. I’m finding it hard to understand all of this and I think I want it all to end. Please just tell me what you want from me and let me go,” he pleaded. “I’m sure that I’m not cut out for all this. If I’m dead and I’ve dealt with all that memory stuff, then why am I still here?” He waved his hands at the blank walls of the cramped space. “Am I always going to be here, haunting this place?”
D’Scover sighed and walked over to the computer, removing his CC from his pocket and placing it back on the blank screen.
“I think that it is time we had a proper talk,” he said. “We will go to my offices and I will explain as best as I can.”
“At last!” Adam said, walking over to where D’Scover was holding his hand against the screen. “Hey, you have to use the keyboard not the screen, you know – or do you ghosts not have technology yet?”
The screen began to ripple and turn purple and the familiar blue sparks crackled across the matt surface, gathering pace as they started to swirl.
“Oh, we have technology,” D’Scover said to a stunned Adam. “We have plenty of technology.”
The sparks spread out and Adam stumbled backwards in the darkness, trying to move out of their reach, but D’Scover grabbed for his arm and pulled him into the enveloping neon light. Adam twisted around in panic as the sparks grasped at him and began to swarm over his arm. Once the first lick of sparks had touched his arm, he became rapidly absorbed in a swift wave of blue crackling light, and then was gone . . . All that remained was a red spiral that shimmered in the darkness for a second and vanished.
“Whoa, now that was amazing!” Adam gasped. “How did we do that? Where the hell are we?”
He now stood, staring at his arms and legs as though checking they were still all of the required number, in a darkened office high up, looking down on the blinking lights of the city.
“Just a tweak on your friend technology, and we are in my offices,” D’Scover answered. “When we Disperse, we can take advantage of the Internet, telephone lines, wireless connections, all manner of electronic systems; it is just a question of opening the right pathway and sliding in.”
“Can anyone do it? I mean, can anyone dead do it?”
“No,” D’Scover explained, busying himself at his desk. “It is a difficult procedure and one that is exclusively managed by the Brotherhood.”
“The Brotherhood?”
“Take a seat,” D’Scover gestured towards the couch, “I have a lot to explain.”
Adam turned, taking in D’Scover’s private collection. “Is this some kind of art gallery?”
“No, as I said, this is my office.”
“Tasteful,” Adam grinned. “You must earn a mint.”
“I earn no money for what I do,” D’Scover replied.
“Still,