The Lazarus Prophecy (42 page)

In the priory generally the smog pervades and snuffs out light and makes of their familiar little world a cloaked, uncertain place and brings a defeating stain that afflicts the soul.

Or so it seems to Brother Philip, who has a belief in signs and symbols not wholly scientific or even rational. His instinct tells him that the smog is an augury. It leaves, when finally it lifts, a grey residue that blankets the virgin snow of the slopes, making it matte and lusterless. It despoils. He does not like it and neither do his brethren. But he has the suspicion it is liked by someone, someone with a strong sense of history and destiny.

This character remembers it fondly from a period enjoyed in a remoter time in a place of cobbles and gaslight and squalor and penny arcades, a lurid metropolis, a city of seething slums, a bleak and callous domain for most of those who peopled it, a home briefly cherished in his dark inhuman heart, to which he brought blood and turmoil.

F.G. Cottam
was born and brought up in Southport in Lancashire, attending the University of Kent at Canterbury where he took a degree in history before embarking on a career in journalism in London. He lived for 20 years in North Lambeth and during the 1990s was prominent in the lad-mag revolution, launch editing FHM, inventing Total Sport magazine and then launching the UK edition of Men's Health. He is the father of two and lives in Kingston-upon-Thames. His fiction is thought up over daily runs along the towpath between Kingston and Hampton Court Bridges.

This electronic edition published in 2014 by Bloomsbury Reader

Bloomsbury Reader is a division of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 50 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3DP

First published in Great Britain in 2014 by Bloomsbury Reader

Copyright © 2014 F. G. Cottam

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eISBN: 9781448214556

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