The Key by Simon Toyne

unlocks the Sacrament
    The Sacrament becomes the Key
    And all the Earth shalt tremble
    The Key must follow the Starmap Home
    There to quench the fire of the dragon within the full phase of a moon
    Lest the Key shalt perish, the Earth shalt splinter and a blight shalt prosper, marking the end of all days
    She read it again, trying to dig meaning from the words. It seemed like a warning, but was too incomplete for her to understand.
    There had to be more.
    She grabbed another scrap of paper and fed it to the dying flame. The fire was burning faster than she had anticipated and smoke was starting to fill the room. She turned to the next page in the diary and held it over the flame.
    More darkened text emerged, much more, but the fire was burning so quickly she didn’t even stop to read it. She knew she was almost out of fuel and the smoke levels in the room were getting dangerously high so she kept moving blank pages over the heat, one after the other, feeding the flames until there were none left and the fire shrank to nothing and died in a final curl of smoke.
    Outside she could hear footsteps approaching. In a few moments someone might walk into her room with the priest right behind them. She pulled open the window as far as it would go, scooping up the evidence of the fire and feeding it to the breeze. She left the window open in an effort to dilute the smell of smoke and scrubbed her hands with sanitizing gel while she cast around for somewhere to hide the diary. The room was bare. There were no hiding places. Kathryn lunged towards the bed and hid the diary in the only place she could see and undoubtedly the first place anyone would look. She hid it under the mattress.

19
    Father Ulvi Ş im ş ek sat in the hospital corridor, his fingers working the string of worry beads he always carried, still brooding about the earlier visit from the police inspector. He had been so dismissive and superior, questioning his presence there as if he were nothing.
    If only he knew.
    He counted the beads through his fingers, smooth stones made warm by the heat of his hand. There were nineteen on the black cotton string, each one made from a particular type of amber he had chosen because of its dark, reddish colour. Nineteen beads – nineteen lives, each one recalling a face. He counted in his head, his lips moving slightly as he remembered the names and how each had died.
    Despite the priest’s clothes, Ulvi’s service to the Church was more specialized. He considered himself a soldier of God, trained by his country but now serving a greater sovereign lord. The beads reminded him of his own past – in the west of Turkey, close to the ancient borders with Greece – and while others of his faith said the Rosary to help purge them of their sins, he used the beads to remind him of where he had come from and what he had done. The dark stains on his soul were too deep to be cleansed in this world. And the world was imperfect. Only God was pristine. So he chose not to pretend that he could better himself here, or atone for what he had done. He was what he was, a darker instrument of the Lord’s bright purpose. And God Himself had made him this way; He alone would judge him when the time came.
    Ulvi reached the end of his roll call of remembrance and slipped the bracelet back into his pocket. He heard the clink as it snaked past his mobile phone and down to the ceramic knife beneath it, the blade as sharp as glass but invisible to the metal detector that had swept over him at the start of his shift. Elsewhere in his jacket was a hypodermic syringe with a nylon needle, a small bag of powdered flunitrazepam, and an ampoule of Aconitine poison. He had brought them with him every day since the cops had grown used to him and the routine checks had become sloppy.
    He looked over at the policeman, slumped in his chair, his attention dulled and elsewhere. He was still reading the paper, working backwards from the sports pages like he did every day,