Isle of Noise Read online

  Isle of Noise

  Edited by

  Michael Staniforth

  and

  E.A. Stokes

  A UoN SFFSA Anthology

  “Bleeding Heart” copyright © 2017 Nat Wassell

  “Golden Memories” copyright © 2017 E.A. Stokes

  “Smoke and Mirrors” copyright © 2017 Sam Kurd

  “Like A Circle In A Spiral” copyright © 2017 Rachel Tonks Hill

  “Anomaly: Claire” copyright © 2017 Emily Cooper

  “Side Effects” copyright © 2017 Amy Maidment

  “Nemo” copyright © 2017 Michael Staniforth

  “Obolus Protogonos” copyright © 2017 John Steele

  “The Andromeda System” copyright © 2017 Jonty Levine

  “Kansy” copyright © 2017 Nel Taylor

  All other written works in this book copyright © 2017 the above named contributors

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  ***

  Contents

  The Beginning

  Bleeding Heart — Nat Wassell

  Interlude 1

  Golden Memories — E.A. Stokes

  Interlude 2

  Smoke and Mirrors — Sam Kurd

  Trophy Killer Nabbed – Justice At Last

  Like a Circle in a Spiral — Rachel Tonks Hill

  Interlude 3

  Anomaly: Claire — Emily Cooper

  Interlude 4

  Side Effects — Amy Maidment

  Interlude 5

  Nemo — Michael Staniforth

  World War III by Timmy Benton

  Obolus Protogonos — John Steele

  Interlude 6

  The Andromeda System — Jonty Levine

  Interlude 7

  Kansy — Nel Taylor

  The End

  ***

  The Beginning

  Since men have been intelligent enough to understand the world around them they have asked questions; some of them have mistrusted the answers. In the twentieth century people called them conspiracy theorists but back in the tense days of the sixteen hundreds these people were simply ignored.

  John Cartwright was one of these men. For years he had seen things happen that didn’t make sense and when questioned he was told to hush. To passers-by in the street he was a normal man who worked in a relatively well-paid job when work was hard to come by. He worked, in fact, at the House of Commons, not as anyone of note of course, he was only a son of a Cartwright. No, he was the one that cleaned the floors and swept out the huge luxurious fireplaces.

  But he saw things other didn’t, he asked questions when others accepted and the day he finally realized that he was right was a day that changed many other people’s lives as much as his own. The date was the fourth day of the first month and tensions, as always, were high, but like most of the servants that worked in the house he simply kept his head down and hoped he didn’t get in the way.

  John was washing down the windows when he heard the voices; but he didn’t pay them much mind, as they didn’t to him.

  “You have to leave and it has to be now.”

  “He would never do such a thing; he would never enter the House of Commons.”

  “He is on his way now. All of you must go or your heads will be forfeit.”

  “Where shall I go?”

  “Don’t tell me and I will grant you the same privilege if I am asked. There are carriages and drivers ready to take you from this place but you must go now!”

  The hushed voices moved through the passageway behind John and through the windows he saw six figures hurry passed him; five went out the door and the sixth slipped deeper into the halls. John didn’t dare to turn to look at who it was. For a commoner to look a gentleman in the eye was unheard of. The air moved passed him and the thick scent of oils and pipe tobacco swirled under his nose before, like the men, it was gone.

  Slowly, he moved through the hall washing the windows and sills with his cloth and bucket, forgetting the men, just repeating the actions till he came to the end of the hall and to the crowd that had gathered in the way. Unlike the crowds that gathered in the halls and open areas, these people were, like him, workers. He even spotted liveries meaning some were servants of the politicians. All were gathering, peering through the small gaps they could find in the huge doors that closed off the main room in the houses of commons.

  “What’s happening?” he asked one of the women at the back of the crowd.

  “The king…. He’s here,” she said in an excited voice. No, she wasn’t excited, she was scared. Even with her limited education she knew this was something to be frightened of.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Don’t know,” she hissed. “Won’t know if you keep asking me questions.”

  John sighed and moved through the crowd. People were reluctant to move to give up their place in the off chance they would see something but John was only a little man. He was able to move right to the front, he looked through the door and into the room.

  The man wasn’t anything like he thought. Many a time had he helped replace the fixings holding up the king’s portrait that was in the main entrance and the man in the picture was tall and proud with strong features, he held himself high. But this man, he looked fragile and weak, his skin was pale and ruddy, his cheeks were drawn as he looked round with sunken watery eyes. He looked old before his time, his make-up hiding years of scars and marks, his hair obviously sticking out from under his wig. He had sat himself on the speaker’s chair and was gazing over the members as they sat in stunned silence.

  “I see the birds have flown,” he called out to a silent room. Even his voice seemed thin and weak as it echoed through the room and into John’s ears. No one moved, nobody breathed; they simply sat silently looking at the floor or their own expensive boots and shoes. One man did dare to look at the king.

  “William Lenthall…. Where are the five of them?” the king asked, his voice soft but filled with menace.

  The speaker of the house tried to keep calm as the two men watched each other.

  “Your highness?” he simply spoke,

  “Well? Do you see them, or hear them?” He seemed to gain confidence as he spoke. His voice took on a patronising but demanding feel.

  * * * *

  Even from where John was hidden he could see the man was caving under the relentless stare from the man who was meant to be King Charles, the first of his namesake to take the crown. It was as if his legs gave in under the rest of his body, his knees buckled and he fell heavily on the floor, his highly polished boots scuffing on the wood.

  “May it please your majesty? I have neither eye’s to see nor tongue to speak in this place but as this house is pleased to direct me whose servant I am here; and humbly beg your majesty’s pardon that I cannot give any other answer than this is to what your majesty is please to demand of me.”

  The silence became deafening, every heartbeat could be heard in that moment. Blood thundering through everyone’s veins, or was it just his own muscle thundering in his own chest?

  To have the king enter parliament? To have him try to arrest five men for treason? Everyone knew at that moment that this was something that would be remembered for years to come. A hand touched his arm and a soft voice in his ear urged him to come with them. The defiance was clear in the room as the man urged the king to move more and more till soon his voice was clear.

  “Your highness, we have to leave,” he was begging.

  Finally the man nodded, stood and turned silently on his heels heading quickly for the great doors. The servants
behind John scattered but he held his ground. The king burst through the doors into the entrance hall and John found himself alone.

  He froze.

  The king turned his gaze to John and instinctively he looked down at the cloth that twisted in his hands.

  “I fear today I have lost this city,” the king said softly as he walked passed him.

  To him, John was invisible, he was nothing more than a pillar he now passed, nothing but background.

  “John,” someone hissed, breaking the man out of his frozen state. He shuffled over to the corner where the people stood. They silently watched the king and his men leave and then the main room beyond suddenly came to life again. The din of people talking was a sudden and jarring change to the silence that had been coming from that room, as someone closed the door and left the group to look on the great doors.

  “That was not the king,” John declared.

  The people who knew John simply sighed and rolled their eyes.

  “Why would you say that?” a voice said carefully.

  John turned his eyes to the picture all of them had seen day in and day out.

  “He looked nothing like that.”

  The crowd dispersed with tuts and mutterings as John watched the proud figure of a man staring down at him with his armour.

  “This was not him…. this is all a lie.”

  * * * *

  It wasn’t just servants that watched the room but others sets of eyes watched from the shadows with great interest, men who were not thought to be there, men who were never mentioned in the history books. These men worked and lived in the shadows when it came to the world and its participants. These people didn’t participate, they were not thought to have wives and children, they didn’t have friends, no one looked for them other than the other silent watchers of the world.

  They were made of the same material as man; they were made of flesh and blood. They had heart and minds for emotion and logic but they were not the same as the men that they manipulated and twisted to their own use. The king was in fact the man that went into that room but those were not his words, nor would they have been his actions. It was amazing what a simple root and leaf could do when boiled in alcohol and the hair of a person, its steam collected then added to a person’s drink. You would be amazed at how easy it was for a second to enter the first person’s dreams to whisper in their ear.

  “Divine right of the king…. The king is infallible in the eyes of the lord…” they would say night after night.

  “Go to parliament. Arrest the men.”

  Soon after that day the king raised his standard at Nottingham castle, the wind whirled round the hill and took the fabric, blowing over the standard. It was an ill omen and one that made the men that watched the world smile.

  Their job here at least was done.

  * * * *

  The mud was seeping into the fabric that separated his body from the dirt. Years had gone by since the first time the man thought to fight for his people and his religion and now, on a chilly October morning, finally his struggle was at an end. Abraham quietly looked down at the grave in front of him and then, with steady hands and calm eyes, he looked at the men in front of him, one by one, making sure to look them all in the eye. Not one looked back at him.

  “I will not blame you here right now. I know you aren’t the men who wanted to do this. You are the men who have been told to do this. And when I am gone from this world and free from the pain that came to us all, I hope you live a long and healthy life; then you will all live with this moment from now till the day you die…. You will live knowing that 100,000 of my brothers and kin were killed by your hands. And for that I feel sorry for you. I will not forgive you, but I pity you the torture that will follow you through this life.”

  The bullet ripped through the man’s chest and then another and another until all had fired one bullet and the man lay bleeding on the ground. As he lay there, the pain gone, the cold feeling of the Ukrainian soil under him slipping away, he looked up to the men and frowned. There were two men more, both not touched by the muck and the blood that surrounded them all; two men who were just watching from the distance.

  * * * *

  It was time to go. The house was empty finally and it was time for him and his family to head south. It wasn’t seen as going over the boarder any more, Scotland and England were now the same thing and Robert had been chosen as one of the Scottish representatives and so he was to go to London.

  “It’s a huge honour Robert,” his wife had soothed. “We will make a home wherever we are.”

  She seemed almost happy to be going to London, but then what well breed women wouldn’t want to spend her days in the opera houses and shopping. She wasn’t born to this country, she wasn’t of Scottish blood.

  “Are you sure this is the right thing to do?” he had asked the angel in his dream last night. “You are to go to London, work with the men there.”

  So now he was going. He took one more look around the room before closing the door and pulling his coat collar up against the rain outside. Couldn’t take too long, his carriage was waiting. At least it didn’t rain as much in London.

  * * * *

  The men stood round the sleeping figure and watched him. None moved or shifted their position; they simply watched. He was one of the most powerful men in the world, definitely in his country.

  “Are they sure of this?” one of the men finally asked.

  “The time is now. We have got the leaders in the Crimea to start to fight amongst themselves. Now is the time to plant the seed of invasion.”

  “I understand that…. I am not an idiot, but…. Does it have to be Russia?”

  The men looked at the sleeping man and nodded.

  “It does… the power has to shift and it has to be Russia.”

  There was no more argument. The glass vial was opened and placed under the man’s nose one of the men sat on the floor and breathed in deeply from a second vial then they were switched over and finally the man’s eyes rolled back in his head and closed.

  “How long will this take?”

  “Not long…”

  Both men simply watched the sleeping man and smiled.

  * * * *

  “I never thought it would come to this,” the general sighed. “Did you see the fields… they say there are a million men out there... a million all looking to me.”

  The general looked round the quiet park the two were strolling in before his eyes turned to the man beside him. Why was it so easy to talk to someone who didn’t exist?

  “Lord Wellington, you will succeed. You have right on your side…”

  “But what if I lose?”

  Napoleon sighed and looked round the silent world the two of them stood in. The man beside him smiled and shook his head.

  “You are the emperor, you are the man that will finally push back your enemies and all will kneel before you. How can you lose when you have fate in your hands?”

  If felt good to voice his fears and to keep them in check. The dreams had become a sanctuary to him, but he had seen the armies of either side and he had seen the machines of war.

  “You are right sir…. If I was to be opposed by god then he would have given me a sign by now.”

  “Tomorrow you fight at Waterloo and the gods are on your side… Fight with everything you have and push that devil back to the hell he came from,” the men said to their companions. “And when you have won you will know you were right in the eyes of god.”

  The dreams faded and blackness took over once again. It had been a hard thing to execute but they needed to make both men fight as hard as possible to make them think their god was on their side. Only a mad man would go against a million troops and only a fool would try to fight a man as skilled in the art of war as the emperor.

  “What will happen tomorrow?” one of the men asked softly. Later on as they watched the fire in the camps burn and the sun start to pale the sky

  “Wellington w
ill win. Napoleon will flee to Paris.”

  “It is already seen?”

  “No… but we need it to happen.”

  The fighting would begin soon. The first men would die in the name of their king and country and once again the men that watched the world smiled.

  * * * *

  From the third floor of the opulent building that was simply named “The Institute” the men that watched the world looked down into the clean and pale street. The pavements had been scrubbed and swept clean in preparation for the royal visit. Even the roads didn’t have a speck of dirt on them, or they didn’t till now. The car parked, the metal in the engine clicking from the heat generated in the internal combustion engine. The car was painted black, the seats were black, everything was black against the clean pavements in the bright sun, everything but the blood that dropped onto the pale grey street. They had watched the two of them being taken out of the car, first the live archduke – but with a bullet wound to the jugular he wouldn’t be alive for much longer - and then the corpse of his dead wife.

  “They were meant to kill the governor not the wife,” one of the men scolded.

  “That is unimportant. It has started, the archduke will die and events will move from here. We will be able to build and work to our plans while all eyes will be on the world and the fear that will come from the certainty of war and while they watch that, we can build our foot hold.”

  The men watched the world they had twisted to their liking. From the whispers that were fed to the king to fuel his pride to the death of this man and the events that would follow.

  The world wasn’t ready for the death and suffering that would be revealed to them in the years to come but the institute was. The institute was ready to build an empire, to move from the shadows and, watching the world they had created, to work to shape its future to their will.

  “Interviews start tomorrow for agents to work the machines… and we will target the poor and desperate at first. The ones that are in need of money and shelter – they will be the first to come to us and even if most don’t survive, the information we will get from them will be the foundation on which we will build… No one will know it, but the lowest in their society will be the ones to save them,” the first man sighed.