“I’m sure it’s the same young man from the press,” Father Tom said, continuing the story he’d begun on the way back from the graveyard. “He was here and asking questions a few days ago – quite insistent and well, a bit odd to be honest. He was irritated when I didn’t supply the answers that he wanted, when he realised that the whole mugging and the light incident hadn’t made much sense to me. To be quite frank, I was glad when he disappeared.”
“He was behind me,” Molly said, “I felt his breath against my skin. Are you sure it was the same man?”
“I never forget a face,” Tom said, “but I’m afraid that I haven’t any idea what his name was or which paper he was from.”
Molly turned to Dev. “Do you think he’s connected to the North Koreans?”
Dev shook his head. “I don’t think so. I think he was probably some nosy journalist who wanted to chase a story.”
Zack said; “Tell Dev that I’m not sure he’s right. Tell him that I think we need to be careful.”
Molly nodded. “Zack isn’t so sure,” she said, “and he’s been there, he saw what was happening. What if they’ve sent someone to trace the light? That would make sense, wouldn’t it? To interview Father Tom? To follow us?”
Dev sighed. “Molly, I think this is getting a bit melodramatic. Come on now, let’s just focus on trying to find out what is happening with the light and leave the James Bond stuff out of it.”
Molly folded her arms defiantly across her chest. Dev was being naïve if he thought this was just a game of physics. “But it could be dangerous...”
“Whoa! Hang on a minute,” Father Tom said, “you will have to bring me up to date on what’s been going on. You aren’t making any sense here, talking about North Koreans and lights. What have you found out?”
Dev leant forward in his chair. “We think that this light that people have been seeing, that you saw, is a light that’s connected to dark matter. We think that it absorbs dark matter, annihilates it. Zack has been to North Korea and witnessed a program that they are developing there that fuses dark matter with anti-matter to create a weapon, some kind of bomb. If he’s right and that’s what they’re doing then the bomb could be more powerful than the biggest nuclear bomb ever made. However, they seem to have hit a problem and it’s connected to some kind of light. They’ve discovered that this light absorbs dark matter. If that is true then the light will ruin their program. We think it’s all the same light.”
Father Tom was listening intently, but this was all too much for him. He blinked several times and said, “I need to write all this down, I can’t see this in my mind’s eye at all.” He stood and went to the sideboard to fetch a pad and pen and spent a few minutes scribbling some notes onto the page. “Right,” he said, “carry on.”
“OK, so the light absorbs dark matter and up until earlier today we didn’t know what dark matter was. We think we do now.”
Father Tom looked up from his notes. “Dev,” he said, “are you telling me that you think you’ve solved a mystery of the universe?” His voice was sceptical, mocking almost.
“I don’t know,” Dev replied. “I just know that we think dark matter is the energy from trapped souls and that the light releases this trapped energy, like some kind of guide or portal.”
Suddenly Father Tom smiled and then he let out a small laugh. “No,” he said, “honestly, I don’t think this is anything other than fantastical. Walking souls trapped on this earth... Molly seeing ghosts...ghosts travelling the world, presumably first class, and telling tales of the North Korean nuclear program. I am sorry to say but this has entered the realms of the ridiculous.” He sat back in his chair and dropped his pen down. “You two have gone off on one.”
Dev looked at Molly. “Can Zack prove it?” he asked.
Molly looked across at Zack. “I’ll move the pen,” Zack said. “It’s light, it shouldn’t be too draining.”
“Zack will move your pen to show you that he’s actually here,” Molly said, “in the room with us.”
Father Tom continued to smile. He stared at his pen. Zack slid down off the work surface and walked across to the table. He put his hand out and focused hard on the pen then he lifted it and moved it to the opposite side of the table. He dropped it down.
Father Tom watched as the pen he had been writing with raised itself up in the air, hovered for a few moments and then, still elevated, moved across the table and dropped down onto the other side of it. He sat back and his mouth fell open. He blessed himself, twice. “Are you telling me that there is the form of a spirit in this room with us?” he asked Molly.
Molly nodded.
“And he’s not the only one you’ve met?”
“He’s not the only one I’ve heard, but he is the only one I’ve seen,” she replied. “I can hear the voices of the dead, but I can’t see them, except in my dreams.”
“Tell him what happened when the light struck,” Dev said.
“All the voices disappeared,” Molly said, “and it’s not the first time either.”
Dev looked surprised.
“I remembered this a few minutes ago. Remember when we went to that housing estate after the light had been spotted? There weren’t any voices there either. It’s like the light took them all away then too.”
Father Tom was watching this exchange. “So,” he said slowly, “humour an old man and let me get this straight. You are saying that dark matter is made up of trapped souls and that the light releases these souls, allows them to escape this world? Is that right?”
“Yes,” Dev said. He glanced at Molly. “That is what we’re saying, isn’t it Molly?”
She nodded.
“Then the light is like some sort of beacon, a guide.”
“Yes.”
There was a silence as all three thought about this in their different ways. For Father Tom it seemed like a miracle, as if the light were some sort of Holy Spirit taking souls to the afterlife. For Dev it seemed that no matter how much he knew or calculated, how much he filled his brain with science, there were some things he just couldn’t explain and for Molly it seemed like a terrible sadness had fallen onto her shoulders. She had found something completely unique and now, if they were right, she was going to lose it.
“And the signs? The symbols and constellations?” Father Tom asked.
Dev shrugged. “They make up the Argo Navis, from what I can gather. Pyxis, Carina, Pupis and Vela; they all make the shape of the Argo Navis. What that means I have no idea.”
Suddenly Father Tom jumped up. “The Argo Navis is the ship that Jason and the Argonauts sailed!” he cried. “The stars are a ship – they could represent a vessel that the souls can sail in – a ship that guides the way. Don’t you see? They’re left every time the light strikes to tell us that this light is the ship, the vessel to take the souls out of this world to the next!” He hopped around the room for a minute, almost demented. “Dear God, it’s been a sign all this time and we haven’t found it. A sign!”
Dev narrowed his eyes. “I’m not sure that is exactly what...”
But he didn’t get to finish his sentence. Father Tom had slammed open the drawer in the kitchen and was rummaging noisily inside it. “A sign,” he muttered, “signs, all these signs...”
He turned and held up a silver badge. “A sign!” he said. He shook his head. “I’ve been so dense, that’s what this was all about. Jenny and Chris; the light, this badge. A sign...”
Dev and Molly looked at each other. The old man was ranting now and they were worried that he had completely lost it. Dev said; “I’m not sure that we follow you exactly Father Tom, this seems a little bit odd, we...”
Father Tom finally stopped shifting from foot to foot and came and sat down. He laid the badge on the table. “I have a family in the parish, a lovely family. They lost their son a while back, tragic accident, on the road and well, I didn’t see it at first, but Jenny, the boy’s mum, she came to me, once a week and she began talking about her
son. He was a scientist, mad about Greek Mythology and she began to let slip that she was seeing him, seeing a light. I dismissed it as nonsense, told her that ghosts didn’t exist, but then her husband came and he said things had been happening that he couldn’t explain. I said I’d go and see Jenny tomorrow. Her husband was worried, but he was also unnerved; thought he was imagining things.”
“But the light? How do you link this boy to the light?” Molly asked.
Father Tom looked at the badge. “That,” he said simply. “The badge. I found it the night that I saw the light. It belongs to Chris, I am sure of it. It is a badge from his school.”
All three again sat in silence for a short while, trying to absorb the combination of myth, science, physics and the supernatural. There were no curtains at the window and the black of night looked eerie thought the glass. Molly shivered.
“Do you think that anyone else might have been able to work this out?” Molly asked.
“It’s pretty complex,” Dev said. “I’d have thought it was unlikely. My guess is that the intensity of the light has been increasing, so has its ability to absorb. I think it is near its final capacity. We might be safe for now,” he said, “But how long that will last I have no idea.”
*
In the sitting room of the same house, in the dark, unknown to the three in the kitchen, a figure moved silently from the hall, across to the French windows that opened onto the small patio. He unlocked them and stepped outside. He made his way along the side path, through the open gate and out onto the street. The assassin moved without sound, without even disturbing the air. He made his way along the high street and stopped for a moment to find a map of the area on his phone. Once it was up he set off on foot; he had everything with him. That’s what made him the best; he was always prepared. He carried a long black, cylindrical case along with his usual equipment. This time he knew exactly what he was after and if he had judged it right, it wouldn’t be long before he got it.
*
Molly had the strangest sensation when she went into the hall something wasn’t right. Stopping to glance at the diary on the hall table, he saw Jenny’s name and the words ‘house visit’ written in for the following day. There was an address too. She passed on by it, but something worried her. She stopped and went back. Next to the address there was a thumb mark, a grubby thumb mark that looked as if someone had pressed down on the book. She switched on the light and went to the bathroom and on her return checked the sitting room, turning on the overhead light. There was nothing there, only strangely, the doors to the patio were open and the cold night air blew into the room. It must be her imagination. Molly stood completely still and thought hard. She felt his breath one more time and her blood ran cold. Without thinking twice, she slipped out of the door and ran down the road, heading for the address she had memorised at the forefront of her mind.
*
Dev stood and stretched. It had been a very long day and he was tired. He finished his coffee and called to Molly in the hall. He wondered where she had got to; she’d been gone for ages.
“I hope she hasn’t got lost on the way from the bathroom to here,” Father Tom said. Dev smiled. “I’ll just go and check,” he said. “Molly? You all right?”
In the hallway Dev stopped. The cold night air blew in from the patio doors and there was no sign of Molly. “She’s gone,” he said, puzzled, as Father Tom followed him into the hall.
He looked around him. “Zack? I don’t know where you are, but do you know where Molly has gone?”
There was no reply – obviously, he thought, I can’t see or hear Zack. He sighed.
But there was no reply because there was no Zack. He was only five minutes ahead of them, but he had already gone to look for Molly and found her missing. He too had looked at the diary and he knew where she was headed. With a huge effort of will he had moved the diary to the middle of the hall floor and put the lit torch on the page. Dev picked up the book and it took a few minutes before Father Tom realised what it meant.
“ It’s Zack, he’s left a message. She must have gone to this address. She...They...have gone to Jenny’s... but why now, so suddenly without saying anything? Something must be very wrong”.
CHAPTER 23 - London
It took Molly less than half an hour to get to the road where Jenny lived and, as she made her way along it, she kept thinking about what she was doing. If Dev was right and dark matter was causing the world to spin slowly away from the sun, if Zack was right and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea was making a weapon of mass destruction and if she was right and the light really did absorb dark matter and eliminate it then she had to save the light. It would be the most important thing she would ever do in her life.
And if Chris was the light then she had to get to Jenny and warn her. If they were smart enough to work it out, two seventeen year olds and a dead boy, then people with far more at stake would be equally as smart, maybe even smarter. Molly hurried along the road, counting the house numbers until she saw Jenny’s house up on the right. The lights were on in the front room and upstairs and it looked homely, welcoming and normal. Molly let herself relax a fraction.
At the front door, she rang and waited. She heard the noise of the telly and was about to ring again when Jenny shouted to her.
“Come round the back, its open! I’m just putting Sophie in the bath!”
Jenny must have been expecting someone else. Molly bent down and opened the letter box. “Hi, my name’s Molly,” she called through it, “I know Father Tom. Are you sure it’s ok?”
There was a short silence and a splash. Molly could see a polished wood floor and a long rug that ran the length of the hall way, but downstairs looked empty. She waited for a reply.
“Yup! Tom rang. Come on in.”
How did Father Tom know that Molly was headed to Jenny’s? He and Dev must have taken a good guess. Standing, Molly went round the side, through the gate and opened the back door into the kitchen. The house was clean and tidy, but it looked as if dinner had been left half eaten on the table. Molly wandered in.
“Hello?” she called, “Hello, are you upstairs?”
“Yup...”
“Shall I come up?”
There was no reply, so Molly climbed the stairs. There was no more splashing and it was quiet.
“Hi, I’m coming up now,” Molly said loudly. “Are you in the bathroom? Shall I wait on the landing?”
“In the bedroom,” a voice called. Molly stopped. The voice sounded strained, uneasy. There were four doors on the first floor, three were open, two were children’s rooms and were empty. The other was a bathroom, again empty. Molly went to the closed door in the middle of the four and turned the handle. Despite feeling a bit uneasy about intruding, she opened the door and walked in.
“Hi, I hope you don’t mind me coming up, I...”
Jenny sat on the bed, absolutely still and a small girl sat beside her. They held hands. Molly stood, motionless, and the door swung shut behind her. She didn’t need to turn; she could feel his breath behind her.
“Take the rope and tie her hands behind her back,” he said to Jenny. Molly waited.
Jenny stood and picked up a piece of nylon rope from the floor; it hadn’t been visible when Molly had first entered the room, but now she saw that he’d had it there ready for her. Jenny came across to her. Her face was drained of colour and her lips were pinched hard together. She was breathing heavily, trying to contain her fear.
“I’m sorry...” she murmured. She went behind Molly and Molly clasped her hands behind her back ready to be tied. He came out from behind her then and she saw the gun. She began to shake.
“Now go downstairs,” he said to Jenny. “Take the child. Wait, and pray for him to come.” He nodded at the door. “Call him, make contact. Do whatever it is you do when the light appears.”
Jenny nodded and a small sob escaped as she picked up Sophie. She carried the girl out of the room, but she couldn’t look at
Molly; she was too afraid.
“Bathroom. Now!”
He opened the door for her and Molly walked out. She wondered about making a run for it, but she knew that he would shoot her. He was here to finish the light, to destroy it, and he wasn’t going to let anything get in the way.
In the bathroom, she stood while he turned on the taps and ran the bath. Molly began to cry. She hung her head as the tears streamed down her face. He tied her feet with rope and edged her into the half-filled bath. She wasn’t going to drown; the water wasn’t deep enough. Lying in the semi warmth, Molly watched horrified as the young man tied a wire round her ankle and attached it to a table lamp from the bedroom that he plugged in on the landing. He placed the lamp out of her reach on the far edge of the bath and switched it on. She couldn’t move; if she did, she would trip the lamp into the bath and she would be electrocuted.
“Why don’t you kill me?” she whispered.
He turned to look at her then and she could see the deadness behind his eyes, the blank emptiness where feeling and regret and even evil should have been. There was nothing.
“I don’t need to,” the assassin said, “you will kill yourself.” He switched off the light and Molly could hear his footsteps on the stairs as he went down.
*
Zack was running as fast as he could. He was quick; he’d had good practise at running away from things. It was only as he got to the small parade of shops that he realised he’d gone wrong. He headed back and checked the street sign. A hundred or so yards up the street, he began to slow. He had memorised the number and he started looking for numbers on houses. He passed a man with a dog and the dog stopped dead still and whined. The man dragged him on.
“Come on boy,” he said, “I’m freezing out here, let’s get on with it.” The dog reluctantly let itself be pulled away, but its ears were up and it knew that Zack was there.