The Triforium Read online

  Dedication

  To Sophie and Tigger and my lovely wife Nikki.

  The Triforium

  by Mark Patton

  Copyright © 2015 by Mark Patton

  e-Book Edition

  Published by

  EDGE-Lite

  An Imprint of

  HADES PUBLICATIONS, INC.

  CALGARY

  Notice

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of the author.

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  Contents

  Dedication

  The Triforium

  Contents

  Chapter One

  The Arrival

  Chapter Two

  Wallace Butterfield

  Chapter Three

  The Office in the Triforium

  Chapter Four

  During the Night

  Chapter Five

  Tipsy Dolls

  Chapter Six

  The Dean of Westminster

  Chapter Seven

  The Office in Croydon

  Chapter Eight

  A Haunting We Shall Go

  Chapter Nine

  The Performance

  Chapter Ten

  Maeva

  Chapter Eleven

  The London Eye

  Chapter Twelve

  High Times At The Brocken Specter

  Chapter Thirteen

  Coffee Possession

  Chapter Fourteen

  A Trip to the Abbey

  Chapter Fifteen

  Tom Parr

  Chapter Sixteen

  The Summoning

  Chapter Seventeen

  Emma

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Sacrifice

  Chapter Nineteen

  The Trial

  Chapter Twenty

  The Holiday

  Historical Notes

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  More from EDGE-Lite:

  Details

  Chapter One

  The Arrival

  The fisherman grunted and pushed hard onto the riverbed with his pole. His punt moved up and over the reed bed that had blocked the opening to the tributary. Now he and his passenger were in clearer water, not a chocked channel, but a meander, snaking through a wetland wood of willow and alder. A gibbous moon cast silhouettes of the old trees across the river. Here and there moonlight broke through the canopy, landing on clumps of yellow flag that lined the bank. The flowers hinted color in an otherwise black and grey, silver-lit landscape. The boatman had heard nothing from his passenger since their trip began at the headwaters of the Tyburn and he did not expect to. The hooded man hunched into himself, draped in his garment at the stern of the little skiff. Smells of rotting leaf litter and mold began to give way to the pungent stink of pig. Odors from the manures of various farm animals intensified as the limbs overhead began to thin. The spaces between the trees widened and then suddenly the trees were gone, replaced by pasture. Here the river split, going both to the left and the right to circumnavigate around a small island. The island was an insignificant bend in terms of the route of the river, but not at all insignificant to the people who inhabited the river’s shore.

  Seeing the island the passenger rose up and nodded to the fisherman, who then stuck his pole fast into the deep thick river muck. Small fires on the island had gone unattended and were winking out. The men who had made them had long ago fallen asleep. Some scaffolding was still about. It would be pulled down in the morning before the priests came to consecrate the site. There had been an old abbey built here long ago by King Edgar. By command of King Edward the Confessor it had been torn down and this new one built in its stead.

  These two iterations of Christian piety were not the first ceremonial stages for spiritual observances upon this site. A thousand years before Thorney Island had become a monastic community it had provided space for a temple to Apollo. Apollo, the Roman god of music, poetry, prophesies, and plague was also known as Phoebus Apollo, god of the sun and light.

  As the cloaked passenger had come to his feet he had felt no need to steady himself. He was comfortable with the rocking of the boat. Reaching down he lifted a closed lantern from the deck of the punt. It was lit and small seams of light escaped through ornate slits near the ring of the handle. Raising the lantern high with one hand, he unfastened the hasp to its little bronze door with the other. As he opened the lantern, a cold thick mist rose from the surface of the river. Tiny droplets of water hung in the air, fattening and shimmering in the moonlight. The mist began to spread; expanding across the riverbank till it blanketed the entire island in a thick fog. Strange blue humanlike shapes then appeared as the cloud like atmosphere pulsated with lurid incandescence. Ancient events, now not constrained by the rhythm of time, burst forth to replay scenes that once happened. Lightning flashed … but flashed silently. Armies clashed … but clashed silently.

  A young red-haired queen was hoisted up in the soggy haze, stripped naked, and then hung by her hands. Roman legionaries appeared. They whipped this queen, Queen Boudicca, mercilessly and raped her daughters beneath her dangling feet. But there were no screams or cries of horror. The scene faded and gave way to Celtic tribes massing under the queen’s standard. With her daughters by her side, Queen Boudicca rode out in a royal chariot seeking vengeance. Yet her rage was inaudible. Warriors and horses crashed through the mist, colliding with a Roman legion and shattering it. The city of Londinium burned in the fog. All of this happened within seconds and as silently as a leaf settling upon the surface of the Tyburn. Strangely, while everything was being hacked, fired, or pulled down, the Roman’s temple of Apollo was left alone. The victorious Celts crept around it, and then moved on.

  As the fog continued to pulsate, older things appeared. Events came into form that took place well before there had been a Christian abbey built upon the island or a Roman temple. What was now happening had happened long before the Romans had countered the Celtic revolt, long before Queen Boudicca took poison and died. Thorny Island was now just a grove of trees. But what trees! Ancient trees! Towering oaks and elms formed up within the mist. Druidic priests came into view as they suspended sacrificial victims in wicker baskets from the higher boughs. For the first time, as they set fire to the baskets, sounds could be heard. It was not the screaming of victims that could be heard but the chanting of the priests. It was barely audible, as though it was being muffled by the centuries still concealed within the mist.

  “Belenus the Shining one,” “Belenus the Bright One,” “Belenus the God of the Sun.”

  The door to the cloaked man’s lantern was now fully open. Light flashed out — more light than could have been contained within a single lantern or two or a thousand lanterns. Like a burst of sunlight but containing the light of many suns, it dissolved the mist and engulfed the newly built abbey. Then, the lantern door closed.

  Chapter Two

  Wallace Butterfield

  It wasn’t a surprise. It was a total shock. Wallace Butterfield had never imagined that he would be asked to meet with the chairman of the Westminster Abbey Foundation. When the invitation came in the post, he thought it was a joke. His first reaction was to call up his few friends
and let them know that he was onto them. “Ha-ha, very funny, you had my heart racing for a minute.” That sort of thing. But no one ‘fessed up. In fact, people became irritated with his questioning. When he did call the Abbey Foundation, he was directed to a Mr. John Bradshaw, personal secretary to the foundation’s chairman Reverend Poda-Pirudi.

  It was no joke. He had been asked to meet with the Reverend concerning some sort of architectural issue. Mr. Bradshaw could not be precise. He did not know what the issue was. He apologized that the Reverend’s schedule was so pressing that he could only meet with him at night, but assured him that it would be worth his while to attend.

  Wallace Butterfield had no idea what it was about, but if the Reverend wanted him to clean out the Abbey storm drains or dust off the books in the gift center, he was the man for the job. It would be a marvelous opportunity, something for his curriculum vitae. He could see it now, consultant to the Dean of Westminster Abbey — well, maybe not to the Dean but to this Reverend Poda-Pirudi. Butterfield wished that the Reverend might have had more of a British sounding name, not something Italian-sounding, but a nice double-barreled Anglo-Saxon name like Calvert-Beetlestone. That would have better suited his résumé. But whatever, Poda-Pirudi or Poda-Pirudi-Smythe, the Reverend’s name was going to the top. Something had to go there. But, then again, Wallace knew that his own name would be on the same résumé.

  Wallace Butterfield — what a horrible name. He’d thought of changing it. Butterfield that was so lame, so ridiculously pastoral, so comically bovine. Well, both of their names would go to the top of the résumé. There was little else there besides le Mareschal’s Supermarket. Wallace did help design le Mareschal’s Supermarket in Liverpool, off of the A5606. Though critics had described the market as a large unimpressive glass and chrome rectangle, some shoppers had told Butterfield that they had appreciated the large inventory of groceries and home products.

  The night before his meeting with the Reverend was a predictably hard night for Wallace. As always, he spent it in his small flat above his slightly bigger office. Wallace was prone to anxiety. He could not remember ever getting what he would consider a descent night’s sleep. His dreams, normally vivid and unusual, were positively hallucinatory that night. He marveled at what his brain could concoct when he was asleep. It never showed any signs of creativity or imagination when he was awake and really needed such inspiration. A jellyfish rhinoceros-like creature was hovering over Wallace’s bed, reaching down, slowly sticking long gooey tentacles up his nose and down his mouth while intoning an offbeat version of a monastic chant. Chilling, positively chilling — the sort of dream that has you believing that you are awake when you are really not. Fortunately, it all came to an end when one of the beast’s tentacles began to prepare Wallace for a ghoulish rectal exam. That did it. That was enough. Wallace already had his annual checkup. No more complicity with this dream. Up he woke — though it did take him a while to steady his nerves to the point that he could convince himself that a multi-tentacled rhino did not exist. It was 3 AM. He spent the rest of the night in fits and starts of almost-sleep, urgently awaiting the return of daylight.

  When the sun did finally arrive it made very little difference to Wallace’s state of mind because he had all of the day and part of the night to kill before he could even meet Reverend Poda-Pirudi.

  It had been a difficult year for Butterfield. His father had died abruptly from a heart attack at the onset of the le Mareschal’s project. Butterfield and Son Architects became for all intents and purposes Son — Newly Graduated — Without a Clue — Architect — Maybe. He had to bluff his way through the onsite meetings, stammered a bit, wrote down a lot of questions, and called up several firms that his dad had been chummy with to beg for advice. Still he had pulled it off. And it was a start. He often wondered why he had even attempted to get started in the first place. His student loans would take him years to pay off and then there was the matter that his father had overextended the business. That’s what caused the heart attack. Butterfield had to sell off the family home he had inherited just to get the family business back on its feet. Now he was living in a bedsit just above the office. It might have been easier if he had some family to lean on, but there was no one. His dad had been it.

  Butterfield didn’t know much about his mother or her family for that matter. Shortly after he was born, she became disgusted with the whole idea of being married, and left. Rumor was that she had gone off to Queensland with some computer techie who had worked for Barclays Bank and left under a cloud of suspicion. Wallace had an aunt who claimed that his mother wasn’t suited to care for a child, that she took one look at her newborn boy and got cold feet. But his father wouldn’t say much about that or anything else concerning his mother or her people. So, growing up for Butterfield was more or less life with dad: meaning bad food, rugger matches, and interminable meetings at the East Croydon Telegrapher’s Society. But now his dad was gone and the torch had been passed on to him, though at times he wondered if it wouldn’t be prudent just to take a torch to Butterfield and Son Architects. Still, he was determined to keep the family business afloat. Obsessing was what Wallace did best. Though he attempted not to remember these things as he filled up the hours till his appointment; it was difficult for him. So, he resolved to cram his head with as much information as possible about Westminster Abbey and worry about the rest later.

  ***

  There was a soothing romantic charm about the river walk at night, with its overhanging tree limbs and fanciful park benches. The Embankment had an archaic atmosphere. Behind him was Cleopatra’s Needle. Though clearly not Cleopatra’s — it was over a thousand years older than Cleopatra — it did come from ancient Egypt. Someone found a way to perch the twenty-one meter high, two hundred and twenty-four ton granite obelisk out over the river, flanking it with a bronze winged sphinx on either side. But to Butterfield, three thousand years of history staring down at him was nothing more than an incidental aspect of this stroll. It wasn’t the antique bric-a-brac that he appreciated most. No, it was what was on the other side of the Thames. As he came even with it, he paused to take it in. It had gone up over a period of time during his early teens. It towered. His fathered had often commented on this during their many walks, providing Wallace with the precise figures: one hundred and twenty meters wide, one hundred and thirty-five meters high. It was a lit up with electric diodes that bathed the mechanism in the purest of colors. The London Eye, Europe’s largest Ferris wheel and the city’s premiere tourist attraction. Butterfield could never resist the temptation of rock back and forth on his heels whenever he stopped to stare at it. But he knew that this evening he couldn’t afford to be caught up in it too long.

  A glance at his watch told him it was time to move on. He pushed off for his meeting, quickening his pace a bit. It would be wise to be early and unforgiveable to be late.

  Butterfield’s stride was naturally long. Everything about him was long. He had a long delicate nose, and elongated fingers and limbs to boot. He loped, rather than walked. His skin, especially in the incandescent light from the street lamps, was pallid, and his reddish brown hair drew attention to it. His skin he blamed on his genes and an urban, almost sunless, life. He would confess that he spent far too much time in his office, but he had to make a living, to make his start in his chosen career.

  His hair was moderately short and styled in a fringe cut. He had no mustache, no beard. He often worked in jeans and a casual shirt because he had so little contact with clients. However, for this occasion he was out of his denims and in a suit. He looked more like a boy playing dress up in his late father’s clothes, rather than the serious businessman he had hoped to be viewed as.

  Wallace left the Thames Path and clamored up the steps to Bridge Street. Parliament was to his left and Big Ben loomed high above his head. But he didn’t notice, or chose not to notice, the large bronze statue of Boudicca in front of him. Imposing
in bronze, her arms outstretched, one holding an upright spear, as she gazed down from her perch above the Thames. Her horse-drawn chariot plunging into battle, with her two violated daughters clutching to her dress. Below her, deep underground, still flowed the River Tyburn. But it was not as it had been. No, the modern Tyburn had been encased in brickwork, diverted, channeled, turned into a sewer. Wallace Butterfield didn’t know this.

  But there was something else that Wallace Butterfield didn’t know — couldn’t know: Despite his mild appearance and his pastoral name, Wallace Butterfield was special. He would have been amazed to know how exceptional he really was. Only a select group of observers were even aware of what distinguished him, and even they were baffled, staring at him intently. For Wallace Butterfield was a highly unusual freak of nature. If you could see as those who gaped at him saw, you wouldn’t be looking at his wing-tipped shoes or gawking at his rather ordinary worsted suit; his thin face and auburn hair would hold no significance for you. The object of concern was higher up, above his head. It was an ugly bluish head with a pair of big bulging oval eyes — eyes that were much like those that stared at him, with an ever-changing deep blue pulsating luminescence, like a squid’s skin. Every living thing had those eyes or something comparable to them. It was only the dead that could see them. No, not really just the dead … the about to be dead could see them too … that is the unborn souls that incubated within the fleshy walls of the living. All of them could see that Wallace Butterfield was different. Because Butterfield’s ghost had become unstuck…

  Butterfield quickened his pace. He imagined that he was cutting his arrival a bit too fine. Mr. Bradshaw had explained to Wallace that he was to meet with the Reverend in his office in the triforium and had provided instructions as to how to get there. But Butterfield worried that he would not be able to find his way to Reverend Poda-Pirudi’s office by ten o’clock sharp. Big Ben and the Palace of Westminster were now behind him. As Butterfield turned off Saint Mary’s Street, he could clearly see the Abbey in her evening glory.