Ravens Gathering (28 page)

He’d been half expecting it, but was disappointed all the same. 
Over the past hour or so, he’d begun to feel safe amongst these people. 
It had felt as if they were there to help him, even if it was only to
understand what had been happening to him.  But deep down he’d known
they’d want something from him.  When he’d been asked for help from the
police earlier today, he’d kicked back.  Over the years, that had become
his natural reaction.  This time, in spite of the apprehension he felt, he
realised he was looking forward to helping.

“The van from the Post Office was hidden in one of the barns
at Forest Farm last night,” Adam said.

“I know.  The police found tracks there this
afternoon.  But how do
you
know?”

“I followed you to your parents’ house last night.” 
Adam showed no sign of embarrassment over this and, oddly, Martin felt no sense
of grievance at having his privacy invaded.  He was more interested in
where the explanation would take them.  “After you’d gone in, while I was
waiting for you, I saw the Raven.  He came out of the vicarage.”

“What was he doing there?”

“Difficult to say for sure, but we suspect he’s using the
vicar and his wife to help him.”  He must have seen some puzzlement on
Martin’s face, because he elaborated.  “There are certain things he
doesn’t seem to be able to do for himself yet, especially when it comes to the
advances in technology we’ve talked about.  We’re pretty sure he can’t
drive, for example.”

Martin couldn’t help himself.  He snorted a
laugh.  “I’m sorry,” he said.  “It just seems ludicrous that we’re
running scared of this bloke who can travel through time and has designs on
building up a power base built on fear – but he can’t drive yet.”

“You have to bear in mind that, in the grand scheme of
things, driving isn’t significant,” Adam pointed out.  “Besides, since the
advent of the motor car, he’s probably only spent the equivalent of a couple of
weeks around them.”

“That doesn’t mean to say he couldn’t control one if he
wanted to,” Mason added.  “He could tap into the Source and use the energy
flowing through a vehicle’s individual parts to make it move.  But it’s a
lot less draining to control flesh and blood.  He’d also get an energy
boost from all of the negative emotions passing through the person he’s
controlling.”

“Exactly,” Adam agreed.  “Which is exactly what he did
last night.  He was on his own when he left the vicarage.  He had
things to do.  But eventually he came back and fetched Simon.”

“Simon?”

“The vicar.  He took him to the Post Office, and they
stole the van.  Obviously I couldn’t get too close, so I didn’t see
exactly what happened.  But they were in there longer than it took to
break in and steal the van.  I can only assume some of that time was taken
up by the Raven forcing Simon to torture the dog.”  He looked meaningfully
at Martin.  “Like we said earlier, he wouldn’t have done it himself. 
He’d have fed off the loathing and shame and anguish that a man of the cloth
would have experienced in carrying out such a barbaric act.”

There was silence in the room for a few moments as they all
let that thought sink in.  Then Adam continued.

“Simon drove the van up to the farm.  Obviously, I
didn’t see everything because I was on foot.  But I saw them turn into the
farm entrance, and later I saw them come back on foot.  After they’d gone
back into the vicarage, I went up to the farm and looked around.  That’s
how I know the van was in the barn.”

 “It’s not there now, though,” Martin told them.

“We know,” Claire said.  “We’re pretty sure he’s used
it to go to another part of the country.  But he’ll be back.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because his home is on this same spot three hundred
thousand years ago.  And it’s a lot easier to cover distances in a motor
vehicle on tarmac roads than it is over the sort of terrain he’s got to deal
with there.  He’ll want to go back from the village.  Besides, he’s
done this before.  Betty Sullivan was his driver twenty-five years
ago.  And on previous visits he’s taken others, either to drive him or
guide him through the intricacies of contemporary activities like buying rail
tickets.  Every time, he’s come back.  And, having chosen the barn to
hide in last night, the chances are he’ll hide it there again when he comes
back.”

“Which, presumably, is where I come in?”

“It isn’t a coincidence that you’re staying at Forest Farm,”
Adam said.  “Something drew you there -”

“My dad was working there.”

“- and something made the
McLeans
invite you to stay there.”

“I think that might have had something to do with Tanya’s
interest in blokes, to be honest.”

In most environments, he would have expected to see knowing
smiles from the men.  What little reaction he saw suggested pity more than
anything else.

“These are all factors, Martin,” Adam went on.  “And
you could probably point to the troubles within the McLean marriage as well as
the financial difficulties they face as being issues that support those
factors.  But it does beg the question as to why everything should fall
into place now.”

“Coincidence?”

“If the Raven returns to the farm, you can decide for
yourself whether it’s a coincidence or not.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“Just be alert.  And let us know if the Raven
returns.  That’s all.  Don’t confront him, don’t try to
intervene.  We just need to be aware.”

“And what will you do?”

“Hopefully we do nothing.  But we’ve got John and Ed here
to help, and we can get others if we need them.”

Martin looked at Mason and Croft in turn, before looking at
Adam again.  “You made that sound as if they don’t belong here.”

Adam gestured to his wife and sister.  “Normally there
are just the three of us.  John and Ed got here this morning.”

“From France?” Martin asked, surprised that they’d been able
to get there so quickly.

“Yes.  You saw them arrive.”

The surprise turned to confusion.  “I’m sorry?”

“You were here when we all came back?”

The confusion evolved rapidly into bewilderment.  “What
are you talking about?”

“You were here, weren’t you?  We saw you.”

That was true, he realised.  He had been at the farm
this morning.  And they had appeared from nowhere.  He thought he’d
hidden himself well, but then he recalled Adam saying “Welcome back,” when
they’d first arrived in the Land Rover.  He clearly hadn’t hidden himself
well enough.  Or maybe no amount of hiding would have kept his presence
away from them.  Adam’s words started to make a kind of sense to him as
other things began to click into place.

“Wait a minute.  Did you say, when you all
came back
?”

“Yes.  Claire and Jennifer and I had been to the
Refuge.  We thought it was best to report everything in person.”

“So you didn’t just telephone?”

“We don’t have a telephone.”

“And you definitely haven’t had time to fly over and back
again.  So how do you do it, then?”

“We have ways...”  Adam deliberately tailed off.

“What, a kind of ‘Beam me up, Scotty’ arrangement?”

Unsurprisingly, none of them seemed to know what he was
talking about, but in spite of that, he guessed he was on the right track.

“You’ve got something in that barn that allows you to travel
to this Refuge, haven’t you?”

“Something like that,” Adam agreed.  “But let’s not
dwell on that.  The main thing is that we’ve got access to more help if we
need it.”

“And do you think you will need it?”

“We should all pray that we won’t.”

Yesterday had been a long day.  Productive, but
long.  Roads were confusing to him, dark tracks that seemed to go on
endlessly, jostling vehicles crowding them in a way he didn’t remember from his
last visit.  The journey had taken much longer than he expected, but he’d
quickly realised that the vicar’s navigational skills were little better than
his own.  Even so, he knew he couldn’t manage it by himself, not over such
a prolonged period of time.

Arriving at Aldermaston in the afternoon gave him a chance to
survey the village and surrounding countryside.  Then, when it was dark,
he’d used the Amulet to travel a thousand years into the past.  He didn’t
know how long ago the Atomic Weapons Establishment had been there, so he played
it safe.  They drove a mile and a half across open grassland before
returning to 1989, and the inside of a building within the AWE.  Having
bypassed the external security, completing the rest of their mission was
relatively straightforward.

Even so, he’d been exhausted by the time they returned to
the vicarage.  There he’d slept, grateful for the soft warmth of the
vicar’s bed.  Physically re-charged, he’d then needed the psychic
re-charge.  Terror, abhorrence, frustration and guilt provided that for
him in abundance.  Energised, he was looking forward to tonight.

On previous visits, he’d spent much longer.  Sometimes
weeks and months had passed as he learnt what was on offer.  And usually
what he learnt had given him only limited advantages.  But this had to
have been the quickest visit yet, and surely he had the greatest prize. 
They called it a bomb.  He didn’t know what that meant, but he’d seen
enough to understand what it could do.  There had been vague references to
it last time he was here, so he knew it had potential.  Now he knew
more.  The vicar had been able to show him pictures of its effects, and
described the devastation caused by the two bombs dropped nearly fifty years
earlier.  He couldn’t pronounce the names of the places mentioned, and he
didn’t really consider them important anyway.  What was important was the
death toll.  Curiously, there didn’t appear to be any definitive numbers
mentioned in the notes Cantor had been able to obtain for him.  But with
the lowest figures for one site being in the region of sixty thousand people
and the other being ninety thousand, it was clear that the power this afforded
him was beyond anything he could have previously imagined.  For a start,
he’d never encountered populations in his own time that came close to these
numbers.  So if he set one of these devices off, it would virtually
guarantee that anyone and anything within a radius of a few miles would be
destroyed.  Even more importantly, the pain and suffering caused would
generate massive amounts of psychic energy for him to tap into, boosting his
personal power beyond anything he could have experienced before.  Added to
that, the after effects on survivors in a wider area would mean a continuing
flow of that energy to him for years to come.

Such was his thinking, and thus the cause of his
excitement.  What he had yet to consider fully was how he was going to
benefit from this death and destruction without putting himself in
danger.  In one sense, that didn’t matter.  He had time on his side –
literally.  So he could consider how to resolve that issue later. 
The main thing was to have one of these bombs in his possession.  And the
thrill of that knowledge coursed through him, together with the anticipation of
what he would find as he went still further forward in time.

Of course, he knew he couldn’t go too far forward. 
Although he didn’t know when it would happen, he had been told there was an end
coming to the world.  The cause was unknown to him, but it seemed
reasonable to assume the ever increasing power of the weapons he was
discovering would have something to do with it.  With each leap in their
development, he felt sure he was getting ever closer to that time, and as the
rate at which their destructiveness escalated, he grew more cautious.  His
journeys forward in time grew shorter.  There was no scientific
calculation made, just a natural wariness.  The sheer scale of the
devastation this bomb could inflict suggested that the time was very
near.  Already he was contemplating a reduction in the number of years
before he would return to the village.  Maybe ten would be a safer
option.  Or maybe he should satisfy himself with the arms he had managed
to accumulate so far.

In spite of his abilities, he was only human.  When he
learnt of the amulet’s existence, it came from the lips of a desperate creature
who had managed to travel to a point where the Earth had already torn itself
apart.  What would be the point in going that far?  He had used these
trips through time to gather tools that would give him greater power at
home.  Of course, there appeared to be advantages to living in other
periods of history, and he didn’t rule out returning to some of them.  But
there was something strangely comforting about the familiarity of his own
time.  Not that he needed to make any decisions right now about whether he
should return to Ravens Gathering in the future.

Tonight, he would take the bomb home with him and add it to
the growing collection of weapons he was accumulating.  Before he did
that, he needed to make his presence felt in the village.  In a way, he
knew he already had, but that was only in small ways.  He had been
drip-feeding his malevolence to the general population since he arrived here
three days ago.  It was the norm for him.  The locals would be irritable,
argumentative and malicious.  Conflict would arise, and bloom outwards,
much like the mushroom clouds he’d seen moving images of.  And all he had
to do was pause outside their homes and make those mental deposits.

Of course, he was also responsible for more obvious trauma. 
The tractor that had injured Peter Salthouse had been under his control, as had
Simon Cantor when he butchered the dog.

The village was stirring, its misery rising.  But
tonight he would take things to the next level.  Tonight he would have a
reunion.  He had acquaintances to renew, and the horror those people would
feel should create more than enough energy to sustain him for several weeks to
come.

As he walked up the track towards the barns, he was aware of
the ravens.  Some hovered overhead.  Others perched on nearby
fencing.  There was no order to them yet, but that would come later when
they all gathered at the clearing.

Beside him, the vicar stumbled along, filled with the
anguish of having watched helplessly as his wife was raped.  For now, he
was needed.  The bomb was too heavy for them to carry into the woods, so
Cantor would drive the van to the clearing.  Once it was in place, he
would send for the old acquaintances.  They would join him in the clearing
before he returned home.

Everything was going according to plan.  Until he
reached the old outbuildings.