The Triforium Read online

  Butterfield seized hold of one of Reverend Poda-Pirudi’s shoulders with his free hand. “Can’t you stay for a while? Give me some pointers? I’m just not capable of doing this. You’ve got the wrong architect!”

  “It’s a piece of cake Wally. See that lantern in your hand, it is quite a gizmo. It contains an ember from the Big Bang that is held in stasis by the offsetting polarity of a minute array of black holes. As I told you, it’s quite a handy gadget. If I had the wrong architect, he wouldn’t be able to hold the thing up. It weighs much more than everything on this planet. You are ready. You just don’t know it yet.”

  As Butterfield looked in amazement at his arm holding up the lantern, the Reverend added. “You see, we of the Brotherhood just don’t know where God is. He may be hiding, or in reclusion somewhere, or he may not even exist at all. But if he doesn’t exist, something is going to have to be done about that. Someone or something is going to have to step up to the plate and evolve into him. But don’t you worry Wally; I think we’ll find him. And when we do, he’ll have a lot of explaining to do. Oh by the way, could I ask you for a small favor?”

  “Yes, yes, of course, Reverend — I mean Jae.”

  The Reverend laughed. “Yes Jae. That’s right it’s Jae. I’m glad to see after all I’ve put you through that we are on a first-name basis. But what I would like to ask you is, would you mind awfully, I mean in a few centuries or so, having Johnny Bradshaw’s remains removed from the Mucking Marshes Landfill? You could have them interred at Trelawney Parish, in Jamaica. That’s where his folks are buried.”

  Now it was Butterfield’s turn to laugh. “It will be my pleasure. But there is something you can do for me as well.”

  “What’s that Wally?”

  “When you find God, say hello to him for me.”

  “I’ll do that Wally. I’ll do that.” With that, Reverend Poda-Pirudi held up his lantern and with a brilliant flash of piercing white light was gone.

  Butterfield glumly pondered the empty space that had just contained the Reverend and wondered what would be in store for the two of them. But no sooner had he considered this then there was another flash of light and the Reverend reappeared.

  Wallace Butterfield was completely baffled.

  “Oh I hope I didn’t startle you Wally. I have one more thing to do.”

  The Reverend pointed to a spot on the beach just in front of Butterfield’s toes. A case of Green Man’s Own suddenly materialized there. Before Wallace could ask what it was for, the Reverend pointed up, and again disappeared in a tremendous flash.

  Butterfield looked up to where Reverend Poda-Pirudi had indicated. At first he saw only a speck just below the clouds. This speck was making its way leisurely toward the island. Then the wind blew the object directly over him. At this point he could discern that he had been staring at a parachute. The parachute drifted downward till it was just over his head. Now he could see who was attached to the parachute harness. It was Maeva. She wasn’t wearing a polka-dot dress. She was naked.

  ***

  Historical Notes

  Where Westminster Abbey stands today there was once an island called Thorney Island. Two branching rivulets of the Tyburn River created this island. The Tyburn River still flows underneath the city of Westminster and still empties into the Thames. There is a belief that Thorney Island was the original site for the Roman Temple of Apollo outside of the ancient city of Londinium. The Roman town of Londinium was sacked by Boudicca, Queen of the Celtic Iceni, around 61 A.D. after she was stripped naked and whipped and her daughters raped by the Romans. She raised armies from some of the tribes of Briton and then defeated a Roman legion, IX Hispana before she and her army were destroyed by the army of the Roman governor of Britannia. There has been some speculation that Thorney Island was also a sacred site to the Celtic peoples before the Roman occupation.

  It is believed that the first church to be erected on this site was built at the command of King Sebert, king of the East Saxons, in the 7 th century.

  Later on, in the 10 th century, another Saxon king, King Edgar, granted the lands surrounding this church to the Benedictine order of monks. Then, between 1042 and 1052, Edward the Confessor constructed the Abbey that occupies the site today.

  Alexander Wood in his “Ecclesiastical Antiquities of London and its Suburbs,” 1774, recounted a popular tale concerning the consecration of the church built by King Sebert, “The night before the dedication, it is related that St. Peter, in an unknown garb, showed himself to a fisher on the Surrey side, and bade him carry him over, with promise of reward. The fisher complied, and saw his fare enter the new-built Church of Sebert, that suddenly seemed on fire, with a glow that enkindled the firmament.”

  In the 13 th century, King Henry III had a master stonemason, called Odoricus, come from Rome to install the Cosmati Pavement, which forms the front of the High Altar at Westminster Abbey. Odoricus used polished semi-precious stones from far-off Egypt and the mines of ancient Sparta to form spectacular geometric flooring that bore a brass-lettered inscription that forecasted the end of the world. Which, if all goes as predicted, will be in another 19,000 years.

  There are over 3,000 people who have been interred within the Abbey, which includes many of Britain’s most celebrated monarchs, nobles, scientists, composers, soldiers, authors and poets, and politicians. However, with such a potential for generating ghost stories the Abbey has had few. Father Benedictus is one. He is allegedly seen on occasion talking to visitors or floating about. I should emphasize that he never stole the reliquary arm of Saint Cyriacus. John Bradshaw, the First President of the Council of State and presiding judge during the trial of King Charles, is the other. There have been reports of his ghostly appearance in his old office in the triforium, along with sightings of him walking about the Abbey on the anniversary date of the execution of the king.

  There is a legend that when the Thames lions drop their rings that London will flood.

  Baron Thomas Babington Macaulay wrote of the execution of the Duke of Monmouth in his History of England. He credits the duke with the quote that the headsman Jack Ketch recites in this book, “Here are six guineas for you. Do not hack me as you did my Lord Russell. I have heard that you struck him three or four times. My servant will give you some more gold if you do the work well.”

  Charles Fredrick Field was a famous Victorian detective in Scotland Yard. Charles Dickens was a good friend of his and he did like to chum about with him on his investigations. Dickens did model his character Inspector Bucket after him in his novel “Bleak House.”

  In the WITCHes’ ceremonies there are excerpts from the 3,000-year-old Egyptian funerary text, Book of the Dead. The passages involving Giving Birth To Osiris and The Heart of Carnelian are from AWAKENING OSIRIS © 1988 Normandi Ellis, with permission from Red Wheel/ Weiser, LLC Newburyport, MA and San Francisco, CA.

  The excerpt concerning eating magic and devouring the gods, is known as the Cannibal Hymn, it is from the Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Text (2,400–2,500 B.C.), which I adapted from James Henry Breasted’s 1906 translation. The Pyramid Text is considered to be the world’s oldest collection of written spells. They were transcribed from hieroglyphics that were carved into the pyramids of Saqqara.

  Tom Parr was a Shropshire farmer who was alleged to have been one hundred and fifty-two years old at the time of his death. Among Parr’s many claims was that he fathered an illegitimate child at age one hundred. Due to the popular belief that he was so ancient, the Earl of Arundel had Parr conveyed out of the countryside of Shropshire and brought to London. In London, Parr was presented to King Charles I. During this time he became quite a celebrity and both Sir Anthony van Dyck and Sir Peter Paul Rubens painted his portrait. Unfortunately for Parr, the limelight didn’t agree with him and he died shortly after his arrival. William Harvey, the famous physician who mapped the human circulatory system
and described its workings, was called upon to perform an autopsy. One of the conclusions of this autopsy was that the change of diet from simple food to rich cuisine had contributed to Parr’s demise. Notes from the autopsy also described his internal organs as being those of a considerably younger man. Based on Doctor Harvey’s findings and apparent confusion over the actual year of Parr’s birth, it is now believed that Parr may have been in his seventies when he succumbed to illness. Nevertheless, King Charles was impressed enough by Parr’s credentials to have him buried among the notables of Westminster Abbey.

  In the Marovo Lagoon, of the Island of New Georgia, Solomon Islands, the people tell tales of poda, spirits of their ancient ancestors, who inhabit various natural aspects of the region, stones, forests, and reefs, awaiting their eventual trip to the afterworld. This is supposed to happen when they are picked up by other poda in great stone war canoes. Poda pirudi are particularly powerful and untamed spirits that haunt the woodlands or reefs. Kiso pa Jae is the protective shark spirit of Jae Passage in the Marovo Lagoon. It is the custom of the people of this area to honor sharks and never do them any harm. It is believed that the sharks are aware of this and reciprocate by not attacking local divers and fishermen.

  Carl Linnaeus, the famous seventeenth century zoologist, first used the word larva to describe immature insects. However, there is an older meaning for the word larva, a Latin meaning. To the Romans larva meant ghost.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  At nineteen Mark Patton shipped aboard the Research Vessel Chain as a helmsman for the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. By his mid-twenties he was flying out of Otis Air Force Base for the National Marine Fisheries Service on weekly North Atlantic Fisheries patrols. After graduating from Northeastern University, he became a roughneck for Delta Drilling in the Texas oil patch. He left Texas to become a police officer and later a head of Natural Resources on Cape Cod. Now retired, he devotes his time between the mountains of northern New Hampshire and his home on Cape Cod, where with his cellist wife, he composes music and pursues his longtime passion for writing.

  If you enjoyed this read, please leave a review.

  For more EDGE-Lite titles and information about upcoming speculative fiction please visit us at:

  www.edgewebsite.com

  More from EDGE-Lite:

  The Rosetta Man

  By Claire McCague

  Wanted: Translator for first contact. Immediate opening. Danger pay allowance

  Estlin Hume lives in Twin Butte, Alberta surrounded by a horde of affectionate squirrels. His involuntary squirrel-attracting talent leaves him evicted, expelled, fired and near penniless until two aliens arrive and adopt him as their translator. Yanked around the world at the center of the first contact crisis, Estlin finds his new employers incomprehensible. As he faces the ultimate language barrier, unsympathetic military forces converging in the South Pacific keep threatening to shoot the messenger. The question on everyone’s mind is why are the aliens here? But Estlin’s starting to think we’ll happily blow ourselves up in the process of finding that out.

  “What makes The Rosetta Man stand-out? An unusually dense squirrel population for sci-fi. It’s light-hearted, accessible sci-fi with exotic present day settings and a pair of aliens who are focused on observing the revealing chaos their visit creates.” –Claire McCague

  Details

  The Triforium

  by Mark Patton

  Copyright © 2015 by Mark Patton

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by

  EDGE-Lite

  An Imprint of

  HADES PUBLICATIONS, INC.

  P.O. Box 1714,

  Calgary, Alberta, T2P 2L7,

  Canada

  The EDGE-Lite Team:

  Producer: Brian Hades

  Editor: Ella Beaumont

  Cover Artist: Neil Jackson

  e-Book Design: Mark Steele

  Publicist: Janice Shoults

  e-Book ISBN: 978-1-77053-097-3

  * * * * *

  All rights reserved. Under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-Book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  * * * * *

  EDGE Science Fiction and Fantasy Publishing and Hades Publications, Inc. acknowledges the ongoing support of the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and the Canada Council for the Arts.

  (EBK-20150926)

  www.edgewebsite.com