Lazar Read online

  LAZAR

  A tale of the spirit of the place

  LAWRENCE H. HEATH

  Text, cover, map and icons copyright © 2014 Lawrence H Heath

  All Rights Reserved

  To Linda, Liam and Lucy with all my love.

  To Ian with all my thanks.

  A special thank you to Bill Wakefield for permission to use his photograph “Sepia photo of stormy sky” in the creation of the cover.

  Contents

  Map

  July 26th

  July 27th

  July 28th

  July 29th

  LAZAR

  “It’s pronounced Wickidge, by the way Miss, not Wick-witch.”

  As he spoke, the driver glanced at the rear-view mirror reflecting the passenger in the back seat of his cab. She did not hear him. She was staring out of the window toward the horizon – a spirit-levelling line where the land met the sky and the sea. He spoke a little louder.

  “It’s spelt Wickwich, but the locals…”

  “Sorry,” said the girl, turning away from the window, “I was miles away. What’s that ruin over there? It looks like an abbey or something.”

  “That’s all that’s left of the last of Old Wickwich’s churches.”

  “Wickidge?”

  “Yes, Miss. Like I was saying – the locals call it Wickidge, not Wick-witch like you asked for when you got in at the station. They say it got its name ’cause of all the wickedness that happened there. That’s why the old town got swallowed up by the sea all those centuries ago.”

  The taxi-driver glanced at his mirror again. This time he had his passenger’s full attention.

  “Like I was saying, that ruin’s all that’s left of Old Wickwich’s 52 churches – one for every week of the year. The others are at the bottom of the sea. Some say you can hear their bells tolling when the wind blows up a storm, and others reckon their towers rise up through the waves, all ghostly like, at midnight once a year.”

  “When’s that?”

  “On the anniversary of their drowning, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “Yes, but when’s that?”

  “I’m not altogether sure, Miss, but the end of this month rings a bell. Rings a bell!” The driver laughed out loud at his unintended pun. His passenger did not laugh. She did not even smile as she turned back and looked out of the window.

  “Next week, you mean?”

  By the time the taxi reached the village of Wickwich, Jan’s imagination had conjured up an entire phantom city drowned beneath a moonlit sea. But her dreams of sunken steeples and tidal death-knells were soon dispersed by the reality of new Wickwich. When her eyes refocused on the outside world there was little more that a row of post-war bungalows and a line of windbreak trees to be seen. Nothing supernatural; quite the opposite in fact. She could almost smell the newly painted windows and the freshly mown front lawns. “Hardly the stuff that daydreams are made of,” she thought, and smiled at her reflection as the taxi turned left into the shade of a wooded lane.

  Halfway along the lane the taxi turned left again, up a gravel drive, and crunched softly to a halt in front of a plain Edwardian house that fell somewhat short of the imposing Gothic pile Jan had been expecting from its name.

  “Old Priory House, Miss. I’ll get your things out of the boot.”

  No sooner had the car doors slammed shut than the front door of Old Priory House flew open. A tall man with smiling eyes and greying temples strode out, his hand outstretched in welcome.

  “You must be Janet. Good heavens, how you’ve grown.”

  Why do grown-ups always say that, thought Jan? I don’t go up to my long-lost adult relatives saying, “My goodness, Uncle, you’re exactly the same height as when I last saw you.” But all she said was, “Hello, Uncle Bill. Do you mind if you call me Jan? All my friends do.”

  “Jan it is – as long as you promise not to call me Uncle; it makes me feel so old. Bill will do.”

  By this time Jan’s uncle had been joined by his wife.

  “You remember Auntie Jill – sorry, Jill. Jill, this is Jan.”

  “My goodness, Jan – how you’ve grown.”

  “Hal! Your cousin’s here.”

  “Hal?” said Jan, quizzically.

  Jan and her aunt had gone indoors and were standing in the hallway at the foot of the stairs.

  “Hal?” repeated Jan.

  “Ah yes,” began her uncle as he entered through the front door carrying Jan’s suitcase and rucksack. “While we’re on the subject of names, your cousin Harry now insists we all call him Hal – after some computer in a science-fiction film. He’s obsessed with the things – spends all his time up in his room playing games and writing software.”

  “And who’s fault is that?” Aunt Jill asked rhetorically. “Who was it gave him a computer of his own in the first place?

  “Hal!” she shouted up the stairs again, then turned to Jan. “You can look upon it as your task for the holidays; to get him away from his computer and out into the fresh air. We’ve been here nearly four months now and I know for a fact that he’s not once walked into the village or gone down to the sea.

  “Hal!”

  “He’s probably got his headphones on,” suggested Uncle Bill as he put Jan’s luggage down, “or else he’s trying out that new 3D headset he’s just spent all his money on. I wouldn’t mind betting he’s miles away in a world of his own – literally his own – completely unaware of what’s going on around him.”

  “Then I suggest we go and make him aware,” Aunt Jill proposed decisively as she turned to go upstairs. Uncle Bill bent down to pick the luggage up again.

  “It looks as though I’ve got my work cut out,” said Jan, conversationally, attempting to make light of her aunt’s obvious irritation.

  As they climbed the stairs Jan tried to imagine what her cousin Hal would look like. They hadn’t met for years, and now, it would appear, he had turned into a computer freak. Was he a nerd or a cyberpunk, she wondered?

  There was no way of knowing immediately when they entered Hal’s bedroom. It was in almost total darkness – the curtains were drawn to; the lights turned off; and the only source of illumination was a square of greenish grey which glimmered dimly in a corner. Then, suddenly, a carillon of bells peeled out and a disembodied voice intoned “Hell-o Jan-net well-come to Wick-witch” at full volume.

  Jan and her aunt and uncle nearly jumped out of their skins before they realised that the deafening sounds came from two speakers either side of the computer screen – which had burst into garish life, the words of welcome spiralling round and round in an animated whirlpool of throbbing colours.

  Hal, who was sitting side-on to the screen, turned his head toward them.

  “It’s my multimedia welcome – good, eh?”

  Jan waited a moment, while her heart slowed down, then said, as coldly as she could, “My name is Jan. And it’s pronounced Wickidge, not Wick-witch.”

  She was thinking: Nerd.

  As she spoke, her aunt strode over to the window and threw back the curtains, enabling Jan to see her cousin for the first time in years. He frowned as the daylight flooded in, and the deep shadow cast by his brow made his skin look almost white by comparison and prevented Jan from discerning the colour of his eyes. His hair was fair; cut stylishly but unkempt, in keeping with his overall appearance. His choice of clothes showed some awareness of what was fashionable, but on him, somehow, they simply looked dishevelled.

  Hal’s frown turned to one of puzzlement. He appeared to be genuinely surprised by the hostile reaction to his welcome. His hand reached out and tapped a key. The computerised fanfare ceased immediately and a silence descended upon the room – a silence more profound than simply the absence of the din. But it did not last long. Aunt Jil
l soon broke it by walking briskly to the door and declaring that she was going to get the guest room ready.

  “Er, yes,” Hal’s father stuttered awkwardly. “I’ll just take your things up there as well, Jan, while the two of you say hello properly.

  “You’re going to be the first person to use our new guest room in the loft conversion,” he added as he backed out of Hal’s room.

  He left, and the silence descended once again.

  After what appeared, to Jan, to be an age, Hal smiled and commented to no one in particular, “The guest room’s been ready for days. It couldn’t get more ready unless Dad redecorated it.”

  Jan heard herself let out a laugh. The sound appeared to remind Hal that she was there.

  “Sorry if I my welcome startled you,” Hal apologised, without looking up.

  “You didn’t,” Jan responded. “It would take more than that to startle me – though I think you gave your Mum a shock.”

  “Oh, Mum just doesn’t like my computer – thinks I spend too much time mucking about on it.”

  “And do you?”

  “I don’t play games, if that’s what you mean. I spend most of my time experimenting – finding out what the machine’s capable of. That’s why I thought I’d have a go at a personalised, multimedia welcome. I was trying out the functions on the sound card. Sorry I got your name wrong, by the way.”

  “That’s all right, Harry,” quipped Jan. She thought she saw her cousin smile as he turned back toward his keyboard to resume tapping in instructions.

  “What was that about getting ‘Wick-witch’ wrong?” he asked, without taking his eyes off the computer screen.

  “According to the cab driver the locals pronounce it ‘Wickidge’ – because of ‘all the wickedness that happened there’. Apparently things got so wicked that the town was swallowed up by the sea and all the inhabitants were drowned. The ghost of the city is supposed to rise up out of the sea on the same night every year.”

  “Is that so?” said Hal distractedly, more interested in correcting his program than in Jan’s explanation. “Just some silly legend, I suppose.”

  “No, it’s true. There was a town here once – you can see the ruins of the last remaining church as you drive into the village. You must have seen it, surely?”

  Hal did not answer. He did not appear to have even heard the question. He was engrossed in his computer.

  Jan looked at her cousin as his eyes and fingers darted from screen to keyboard and back again, his tongue protruding slightly between tight lips. At first she found it mildly amusing, but after a while it began to irritate her. Was he going to ignore her throughout her stay at Wickwich? Not if she could help it.

  “Boys and their toys,” Jan commented provocatively, as though speaking to herself. She smiled in the same way. Would her cousin rise to the bait? He did.

  “This is not a toy,” Hal insisted quietly. “It’s got a 3.6 gigahertz processor, 16 gigabytes of memory and a three terabyte hard drive.”

  Jan turned her back on Hal and walked over to the window, muttering “OK then, big boys and their big toys,” just loud enough to be heard. Or so she thought. But she had stared out of the window for nearly a minute before Hal made any sound, and that was only the resumption of the tapping rattle of his keyboard.

  “So,” resumed Jan, “if it’s not a toy, what do you do on it that’s really useful or creative or original?”

  Hal stopped typing for a moment and stared hard at his computer. Then, in answer to his cousin’s question he began punching keys and clicking on his mouse.

  “This computer’s more than capable of doing ‘really useful’ things,” he retorted, without taking his eyes off the series of icons, messages and menus that flashed across the screen in quick succession. “When Dad used it at his office, before he gave it to me, he designed all his houses on it. He’s an architect by the way.

  “Look, here’s how creative and original it can be…”

  The architectural plans of a house popped up on the screen. Hal pulled down some menus and clicked here and there. The plans were suddenly superimposed by a three-dimensional image of the building, rotating slowly through 360 degrees. Another couple of clicks and the image zoomed in through one of the walls to display an internal view of the top room.

  “See,” Hal turned to make sure Jan was looking at the screen, “that’s the room you’ll be staying in this week. Dad designed the loft conversion. I think you’ll find that’s ‘really useful’.”

  Jan walked over to the computer and stood in silence as the screen took her on a conceptual tour of her accommodation.

  “It’s called computer-aided design,” Hal explained, “CAD for short.”

  “Very impressive,” said Jan, with only the faintest hint of sarcasm, “but what have you done that’s creative and original?”

  Once again Hal let a series of instructions, stabbed into the keyboard, answer his cousin’s question. The house disappeared and a castle took its place.

  “It’s the ‘Fortress of the Dragon Laird’ from a computer game I’m working on. I based the design exactly on the descriptions of the castle in The Raptor King trilogy. I wanted to see if the author had been consistent.”

  Much to her amazement – and annoyance – Jan realised that she was beginning to be impressed by the capabilities of her cousin’s computer. Hal realised it too.

  “You see?” he said triumphantly, turning to look at Jan for the first time – his eyes were brown, she noticed. “You can’t get more creative than that. It’s turned something totally imaginary into something real.”

  “That’s not real,” Jan countered, “it only looks real. It doesn’t really exist – you can’t live in it like your father’s loft conversion.”

  “You reckon? Well, look at this…”

  “I’m looking.”

  “Wait a minute, while I get out of this and into another program.”

  Jan waited. And waited. Whatever the other program was it was taking ages to load on to the computer. In the end she lost interest and wandered back toward the window.

  The sun was at its highest point and the sky was a flawless blue. A gentle breeze shimmered through the leaf-rich line of trees along the roadside as they slumbered in the smothering heat. Three seagulls skimmed coastward overhead.

  This was reality, she thought. Here was where things really lived and breathed and touched and smelled and tasted.

  Jan scanned the flat horizon but the ruined tower was nowhere to be seen, presumably obscured by the line of trees or the slight rise in the land toward the coast. But, if she screwed her eyes up slightly and applied her imagination, vague shapes and shadows could just about be made out in the field next to the sky. Ancient earthworks, she conjectured.

  “Here you are, look at this.” Hal’s voice brought her back to the here and now. “You’ll need to put this on to see it properly. It’s called a head-mounted display – HMD for short.”

  He was holding what looked like an elongated, slimline version of a motor-cycling visor fitted with the arms of a very stylish pair of sunglasses. Several wires dangled from the back of it, one connected to the front of Hal’s computer and the others to a pair of in-ear speakers.

  “Must I?” The image on the computer screen was of a wooded landscape with a lake and distant mountains. Jan noticed that as Hal handed her the headset the perspective changed.

  “You’ll have to wear it to get the full effect,” he repeated. “Come on, take my seat.”

  Jan sat down, placed the speakers in her ears and then gingerly put the headset on. Immediately she found herself standing in the wooded landscape. It completely filled her field of vision. She turned her head to the left, and saw the trees on the left. She looked down. There was the ground.

  “How do I move forward?” she asked before she had time to disguise her fascination.

  “Use the mouse.”

  She fumbled about on the desktop, trying hard to find something in one w
orld while her eyes were looking into another. When at last she found it she moved herself about in all directions, wandering in wonderment through the woods and down toward the lake.

  “Brilliant, eh?” enthused Hal from somewhere outside her realm of experience. “It’s called virtual reality. It’s as close to being real as makes no difference.”

  Jan snatched the helmet off her head and looked straight at her cousin.

  “There’s a whole world of difference, Hal. You can’t touch it or smell the pine wood or feel the breeze.”

  “You will be able to soon. They’ve already developed a ‘power glove’ that lets you reach out and handle things in the virtual world.”

  Jan let out a burst of laughter.

  “What on earth for?” she demanded, standing up. “Why create a virtual world when we’ve got a real one all around us? Look outside your bedroom window, Hal. That’s reality. Real sky, real earth, real trees…”

  “Real ghostly cities rising from the sea,” Hal added, with just a hint of sarcasm. “The virtual forest on my computer’s a lot more real than your legendary lost city – at least you can see it and walk about in it.”

  Hal stopped abruptly. He could see an idea dawning on his cousin’s face. She stared at him inquisitively then turned away and frowned into the middle distance for a moment then turned back, her eyes wide open.

  “Could you join those two programs together?” she asked expectantly.

  “How do you mean?”

  “Could you create something on your Dad’s CAD stuff then walk around it using this headgear?” She glanced down at the head-mounted display then back up at her cousin.

  “Probably – I’ve never tried. Why?”

  “We could recreate old Wickwich.”

  Hal sat back in his chair and looked straight in Jan’s direction. But his eyes were not focussed on his cousin. They were already looking toward the technical challenges ahead.

  “Yeah,” he said, eventually, “that would be cool.”