The sun shone warmly through the window of the office room of the Taplin Council Planning office where Gordon Spencer sat, idly watching his little executive toys tick and whir to the beat of the big clock facing him.
The telephone hadn't rung, now, for an hour, and he was getting impatient. He buzzed Janet, his secretary. The door opened, and Janet looked in.
"Do you want something?" she asked him. "A cup of tea?"
"Er, no thanks, Janet, I've just had one," Gordon replied. "Truth to tell, I'm gasping for a fag right about now."
"I thought you'd quit," Janet said.
"I have," Gordon said. "It's just all this waiting, you know?"
"It's terrible, having to wait to hear from the hospital," Janet said. "If we hear from the hospital, we'll know. But it's a routine operation, Gordon. There's nothing to worry about."
"Maybe as not, but I worry anyway," Gordon replied. "I mean, Sandra's probably in theatre right now, having her tubes, you know, and well I ask myself - what if she doesn't come out of it?"
"She'll be okay," Janet said, brightly. "She'll be back home before we are, right as rain. You mark my words." She smiled. "Are you sure you don't want a cup of tea?"
"Ay, it's better than a fag -" Gordon said, getting up, as Janet turned to exit the room.
Something slipped into both of them.
Gordon Spencer; age 42, height, five foot eleven, weight three stones over, build stocky, brown hair, brown eyes. Janet Andrews; age 49, height, five foot eight, weight average, build lean, mousey hair going grey, brown eyes.
Both people quivered like hooked fish a moment. Then they turned to face one another.
"Amalthea," whispered Gordon, the words sounding unfamiliar, odd, echoey.
"Flavius," replied the woman, her voice also echoing hollowly. "Together at last," she added, the words in an unfamiliar language.
Awkwardly at first, and then with increasing confidence, the possessed couple crossed the room to meet in the middle, embracing one another and kissing passionately.
A moment later, they separated and began to undress one another in the middle of the floor.
"What is it?" asked Libra, as the door opened and Vestal entered the room.
"More emails," she said.
"Don't tell me," Libra said, leaning his head forward over his desk, his hand on his forehead, his forearm and elbow supporting his head. "They hate the idea."
"How did you guess?" Vestal asked.
"They hate it, they hate me, and they consider me a net.troll and a ... what was that other term? The derogatory one. Soulless skulker." He groaned.
"It's not all bad," Vestal said. "We're still behind you."
"I didn't think they'd want to change their opinions," Libra replied. "It's like Zeiss said. The Internet was the greatest thing for liberty since sliced bread. Now all you can do on it is buy sliced bread."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"I don't know. It ... sounded cool at the time." Libra shrugged, sat back. "Very well. They hate the idea. Move on."
"Is that what bothers them?" Vestal asked. "The thought that someone might suddenly up and turn the whole community into a ... a commercial enterprise?"
"No, I was thinking more of an army of crusading fanatics," Libra replied, rubbing his eyes. "Terrorism. The last bloody thing I want - certainly not in my town."
"How did your chat go?"
"Securing the line was the easy part," Libra replied, ironically. "The Liverpool posse accused me of setting up my own private little empire, a little Jonestown in Cheshire, and told me where to get off." He paused. "Terrorism. The last bloody thing I want ... in Peterleigh."
Vestal chuckled. "So no help from them, then."
"None," Libra said. "It's a simple idea, really. You get your people to contact other fledgling communities and cells like this one in Liverpool, and you do a little exchange with them. You go hunting some of their hardarses who don't know you; they come over and take down some of yours, who don't know them."
"The Exchange," Vestal said.
"Only, when you start doing this, you find it becomes necessary to organise the cells the same way, as far as possible. You establish a standard based on abilities, maybe, or manifested edges, rather than on personal background - although I've been gathering evidence that suggests that your background before imbuing tends to reflect what you get from the Messengers, in the way of edges. More or less. People who were healers before tend to get edges most paramedics would give their eye teeth to possess, and your basic hoodlum yobbo thug tends to get the heavy stomping and kicking edges."
"I'm not a yobbo," Vestal said. "I just want to give the thing that took my kid away a little payback, when I catch it."
"All right, I'll concede that. Point is, if you've got the numbers - and we're getting to that stage - you can maybe start to pick your team members to suit the task, instead of having to make do with what you've been given.
"Someone in trouble because they're going wacko? Send in healers. A bad beast to take down? Send in your wackos. Give the extremists something to really challenge them, a real enemy to fight, instead of wandering around blind, taking potshots at other imbued."
Vestal sighed. "They'll learn."
"Or die trying, and then the next lot that come in are going to have to start completely afresh, with just as much of an idea of what all this is about as I did when I was imbued."
"In other words, none," Vestal said.
"Which brings us to the next point. Beyond a certain time, hunters in a community cease to be effective. The local monsters get to know their ways, and the more blatant and violent they are, the quicker they get noticed, by the monsters as well as the police - even the ones not under monster control.
"If hunters don't go loopy from the pressures of the hunt, something will take them down, and if they're lucky, a wheelchair or a hospital life support machine is the only reward they can look forward to. But even inactive hunters have their uses. If they can't hunt, they can teach. And that's the long term goal of my plan."
"Mentors," Vestal said.
"Mentors," Libra replied, "You're already a hunt veteran. Sooner or later, if I live, I'll be considered a hunt veteran. If we all survive, we'll reach the point where we can perform the hunt better by teaching newcomers than by hunting ourselves. Anyone who's been imbued more than a year now and who's still around will be a real Elmer in the newcomers' eyes at that time."
Vestal laughed out loud. "'Elmer.' Elmer Fudd. Charming."
"So we need the community structure that gives them the opportunity to continue the struggle, by allowing retired imbued to bring newcomers up to speed. We may all be hopeless now, but if we're all still here in five years' time, the up and comers among us could have the benefit of people with years of experience of taking down critters, one mobile call away." He groaned. "If we can find more long - term thinkers who agree."
"You will," Vestal said.
"I'm lucky I have all of you with me to pick me up off the ground when I trip over my two left feet," Libra said. "You've been around, what, a year?"
"A year, in my case," Vestal said. "I became aware of other hunters not long after, but really only as a bunch of individuals. Nothing cohesive. Nobody able or willing to take leadership, everyone arguing over the nature of the hunt, everyone going their own way. All indians, no chiefs."
"And the others?"
"Everyone else here have been imbued more or less about a year, too. Except Zeiss19 and Vagabond, who've been around longer than that."
"How long?"
"Since almost back to the beginning of our kind, I believe. Vagabond - you know, Martin? - he was the first round here, I think," Vestal replied. "I heard it said that he got his wake-up when he was teaching in class. Helped a girl who'd been possessed, some sort of spirit that'd gotten her into trouble."
"Trouble?"
Vestal ran her hands over an invisible swollen midriff. "Baby trouble," she said. "Nasty. She was fourteen."
"Poor bloody cow," Libra said. "What happened to her?"
"She's all right," Vestal said. "She's in a different school, now, out of town."
"Oh."
There was a pause.
"Although, and I swear I could have heard it wrong, Martin says there could be an earlier hunter. Thing is, he says that there was one and only one before him, in this town. And this is the bit I think I got wrong, because what he's describing's impossible by all accounts."
"What's impossible?"
"That there was an imbued in Peterleigh Before."
"Before what?"
"Before 1999. Before the Messengers."
Learning to drive was not so difficult as the entity Flavius thought. A lot of the host's conditioned reflexes were easy to stimulate, even if higher functions such as memory were still inaccessible to him.
Amalthea sat in the car as it sped along the road. They'd taken a moment in the car to further experience the delights of corporeal form. Her body was still in afterglow, her smile warm in a way that Miss Andrews had rarely experienced. Locks of her hair, normally worn up in a tight bun, now splayed loosely over the headrest and car seat. She moaned softly.
"It's been so long," Amalthea said.
"We will have a chance to sample many more bodies, better than these," Flavius replied. He glanced forwards, at the country lane they were driving along. "It's close. It's very close."
"How much further?" Amalthea asked.
Flavius slowed the car down, brought it to a halt in the middle of the road. He closed his eyes. "Here," he said. "it's somewhere here."
Amalthea smiled. "I can feel it too," she said.
"They thought to deny it us," Flavius said. "Hid it away. Tried to conceal it."
"If it'd gone into the river, we'd have been finished," Amalthea said. "If it hadn't been for our timely intervention ..."
They got out of the car, crossed the ditch and approached the hedgerow. "Problem," said Flavius. Amalthea looked back at the car. "Not a problem," she said.
"What you're telling me," Libra said, "is that there have been no imbued before, what, August 1999? And that all of a sudden, there are?"
"Yeah," Zeiss19 replied. "There's this guy, Witness1, who founded the Hunter Net. I think he was the first imbued. At least, everyone on Hunter-net seems to concede that point to him. He's certainly the first imbued to go online." He shrugged. "Nobody can find out when he was imbued. He just won't spill."
"But before then," Libra said, "nothing. No Messengers. No imbued. Just the enemy."
"Exactly," said Vagabond.
"But what's this?" Libra asked, pushing the photograph across the desk to Vagabond. Vagabond passed it back to Libra, pointed out a detail on the photo.
The photo was an ancient sepia tone picture of an old scene from pre - 1910 Peterleigh. Three old men in rough jackets, trousers and heavy boots stood around a grave marked ISIAH LUCAS 1751 - 1803 and engraved with something oddly familiar, to which Vagabond was pointing.
"Is that what I think it is?" Libra asked, passing it over to Zeiss. Zeiss glanced at it, nodded, returned it to Vagabond.
"Certainly looks very similar," Zeiss said. "But is it hunter sign?"
"If it is hunter sign, or something like it, it's on a grave marker one hundred and ninety eight years old," Libra replied.
"Kevin, love, give me the signal when you're ready."
The lad with the cropped hair and the facial piercings behind the TV camera nodded, peered through the viewfinder, lined up the shot. "All right, Sheila, on my mark. And two, and one, and ... Speed."
Sheila Armstrong, up and coming presenter of local show "Hidden Legacy," paused a moment and launched into her prepared script.
"So you see," she began, winningly, flash of teeth, blue eyes shining, bright blonde hair, "the site around the corner here may possibly be that of an old leper hospital from the twelfth century. We can't be sure until we've excavated our test pits. Geophysical research has gone over the area with a fine toothed comb, and they've come up with some incredible finds already." She proceeded towards a long, low table near a trench where several people in mucky clothes were scraping away at the damp, muddy soil with delicate implements.
Beside the table, an older chap with short, thinning silver hair and a silver moustache grinned for the camera as Sheila came up to him. "Bob, what have you found?"
"Some remarkable artifacts already," the avuncular Bob replied. "We established from the old OS maps that the road used to once cut through about ten metres closer to where we're digging than it is now."
"Really?"
"Aerial photography confirms this," Bob replied, showing Sheila a photo of the field, where a definite curve could be seen in relief against the crops beneath. Beside that was a square outline, much fainter, in the ground.
"See the road here?" Bob said, tracing the line through the crop. "The old estate in the eighteen hundreds used to have a midden right about there, for stuff. I think there's every chance we'll find some really choice stuff there."
Sheila looked at the finds on the table. "And what are these artifacts?"
Bob picked up a large tile. "Encaustic tile, Sheila," he said. "Possibly dating back to the twelfth century. We found that in the soil, with a couple of other tile fragments. All very interesting." His eyes turned to focus on the other object on the table. "But this little beauty is a real anomaly," he said. "It was literally washed up from the ground by the rain from the other night."
"What is it?" Sheila asked, as the man picked up the object and looked at it.
"Some sort of box," the man replied, appraising it. "Lead, by the weight of it, and covered in very strange symbols. About a foot long, three inches across and deep." He shrugged. "It's all of a one piece, but it should be heavier than it actually weighs. It's my guess that this box is hollow, and it's been seamlessly sealed shut by some unknown process."
"Where was it found?" Sheila asked.
Bob shrugged. "It could have been thrown onto the midden in the eighteen hundreds; we aren't sure. But it looks like it's much older than that by a long chalk. Too old to be from around here, unless it's s hoax."
"How much older?"
"By a few thousand years, at least."
"What do you mean -?" Sheila began.
The car crashing through the hedge not twenty feet from the test pit completed her sentence. The car, streaming bits of hedge, careened into the field, ran into the table and Bob, and sent Sheila flying into the test pit with the volunteer archaeologists.
Bob did not stand a chance; the impact sent him flying over the hood of the car, bouncing and rolling over the roof, to land in a crumpled heap behind the vehicle as it came to a halt.
Sheila watched from the pit, prone, as the people got out of the car and went over to Bob.
"Is he dead?" asked the male, as the female leaned over the body.
"Possibly," the female replied. "Here it is. The humans did all the hard work of digging it out for us." They looked at the box, then turned to face the team in the pit.
"This is something that belongs to us," the male said.
"We've been waiting some time to retrieve it," said the female.
"Thank you," replied the male. He looked at the woman. "I don't think we need witnesses. Do you?"
By: Fiat Knox
Copyright © Fiat Knox, 2001