Published by One Fine Day Reading 2013
www.onefinedayreading.co.uk
Edward Chilvers asserts his right to be identified as the author of this work
[email protected]
By the Same Author
The Shallow Valleys
Perished
The Executioner’s Apprentice
The Executioner’s Apprentice: The Siege
To the Land of the Vertical Mountains
From a very young age Dr Harley Huxtable had been convinced he was destined for greatness. He had been a strange child, one devoted to his studies and making no friends, completely uninterested in sport or the play of other children. Much of the time he had appeared lost in a world completely of his own making, either reading avidly or wandering up and down the grass concourse of his boarding school muttering inaudibly to himself, his daydreams such that not even the most vicious of bullies could rouse him from his musings. At school he had been brilliant, at university he was hailed a genius and by the time he became Professor of advanced matter physics at one of the greatest universities of the world he was considered a great man. His work on particle theorem was unparalleled and by the time he reached his fortieth birthday he was hailed by some as a modern day Newton. And yet Harley never really seemed to enjoy any of it, never seemed to appreciate the lauding of his teachers, the adulation of his fellows or the dinners given in his honour at which the greatest scientific minds of the country would line up to pay homage to him. He never really awoke from his dreaming. Most of his colleagues and students found him to be vague and aloof, sometimes even downright rude. He did not seem to be at all interested in the simple pleasures of alcohol, entertainment and sex – rumour persisted that he did not even own a television. But he must surely, they wondered, be up to something in that huge farmhouse he had managed to acquire for himself in the Thames Valley countryside just outside Oxford.
Many in the scientific community worried that Harley was too lazy, that if he only applied himself a little more his brilliant mind (a mind that came around only once every few hundred years, they said) could advance the cause of physics into a new epoch. Though his research papers were brilliant he produced few of them. He did not like to lecture and was rarely at the university when he didn’t have to be. When his colleagues tried to share notes with him or come together with him to benefit from his wisdom he simply snubbed them. Most of his time he spent shut up in that farmhouse of his, a farmhouse which did not contain any animals and where the grass on the fields was simply left to grow as it pleased.
“Just a little deeper into the rock.” Dr Harley Huxtable stood back and watched as the great quarrying equipment bored down even further into the Scottish mountainside. All around him people in white coats and goggles hovered around, hanging on to his every word. He had told his colleagues and financers he was conducting an experiment into the gas particles found deep within the prehistoric rock as a means to investigate their aging processes, but this was all nonsense. His research assistants and fellows trusted him absolutely because he was a genius. And the fact none of them really knew or understood the experiment was not really all that surprising, in fact it was typical of Harley because the great man was quite simply on another plane to the rest of them. He did not trust anybody enough to reveal the true meaning behind the drilling. Behind him stood a huge wooden crate the size of a house and inside that crate, packed tightly with foam and sawdust, was the realisation of his lifetime dream.
Benjamin Rutherford, former SAS Major and winner of the Military Cross, was a broken man. His career in the army, where he had once been tipped all the way to the top, was now at
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