As I said, I’m new to this present round of blogging and I’m trying to navigate through it all. But here’s the prologue for my novel. If you’re intrigued write to me. I’ll be posting the next four chapters only, to tempt you into buying my novel so you can see how it ends! 

This is my work, and there’s a copyright on it. Please respect this. 

The ISBN number is 978-1-7781448-0-6

ALCHEMISTS OF THE CAMINO

A NOVEL

BY TIM SOPER

        

                                                          PROLOGUE

The light was fading quickly in the small interrogation room. Only minutes before, the last beams from the setting sun had cast golden squares across the wall, their edges defined by crisscrossed shadows from a metal grill over the high window. Now a leaden light was settling into the room, barely held at bay by two electric bulbs.

“Speak slowly and clearly, Mr. McLaren,” the police chief said. “The authorities in Madrid and Barcelona want to make a transcript of this as quickly as possible, but don’t leave anything out, however unimportant it may seem to you. Remember, we have all night.”

The chief reached over to the recording machine and pressed a button. Tom shifted in his seat, leaned toward the microphone, and began to speak:

To understand my tale, you must be prepared to accept two facts: First, you must know that there are ghosts. Incredible as it may seem to you, there are people who exist in some form after death, replaying the moments on which their deaths hang; Second, you must know that there are people who have not died, even in hundreds of years. Death has eluded them because they have drunk the alchemical “Elixir of Life”. If you accept these two facts then the events of this past evening will make perfect sense.

You must also know that I have survived a terrorist attack. Three years ago I married late in life, at the age of 56. I had never seen myself as the married type, being something of a loner and being rather too self-absorbed. You see, I’m a cosmologist; a physicist by birth, by nature, and by profession. The world of cosmic science is where I had been most comfortable; the place where the universe sprang into being billions of years ago. I work in the academic, theoretical world of Big Bang evolution, and I’m an expert in stars and in the transformation of elements by stellar fusion. But then I had fallen in love with a colleague named Florence, to my astonishment and against all expectations. I discovered something in life even more exquisite than my pampered career.

Florence was a scientist with a poetic side; a dark-haired bohemian in a lab-coat. Her name suited her, being delightfully old-fashioned, and evoking compassion, strength, and grace. My simple name, Tom, bore the scientific rationality of a doubting Thomas. She saw rainbows where I saw refracted light. She saw the world with a smile of joy and wonderment, while I saw everything with a furrowed scrutiny. We had worked together for years and only slowly had I learned to see beauty where she saw it, and then to love her deeply.

Many years before we were together, Florence had travelled the Camino. She had been seeking new adventures, wanting to take a break from the intense demands of her science. So she walked alone from France to Santiago de Compostela, on the north west coast of Spain, joining the pilgrims of today, and of all the past centuries. She returned not only with a sense of inner calm, but pregnant. It was then that I began to see her as a woman, and not just a colleague, though marriage was yet to be eleven years away. I am not a fast mover as you can tell! Her daughter, Lucy, was as close to an angel as one could find on earth, with kind and intelligent eyes, and a thick fan of short, golden hair that shone like a halo in the sunlight.

The three of us went on the honeymoon. It was to be a holiday steeped in history and art, and a break from science at Florence’s insistence. The trip was to take us from Alexandria to Jerusalem, Istanbul, Athens, Rome, and in the end, to Florence itself. Florence, a romantic conceit on the name of my beloved, but also that place where she could feast on the art of her favourite painter, Botticelli. And in recognition of my rational nature, and to satisfy a longstanding wish, we were to visit the huge, brick, cathedral dome, the engineering marvel of the Renaissance. I would be in my own heaven there. I’ve always wanted to go to Florence.

But on that first day in Alexandria our lives changed. We were in an open-air market. I had managed to find a place on a stone bench for lunch. As I set out the food, I sent Lucy to buy some pomegranates at a fruit stall, and I encouraged Florence to go and get the cloth she’d been longing to buy; cloth that could have come from China across the Arabian Desert. I watched her joy as she handled the shimmering fabric, and I could also see Lucy standing at the fruit stall tasting a pomegranate. Lucy was laughing with the seller and those around her as the seeds and soft, red pulp dribbled on her chin. She could be at ease anywhere and could make friends with anyone.

Then the modern world intervened. The sound of sirens brought us back to the 21st century, and two motorcycles appeared from around the corner of a building further up the road. Two Egyptian policemen were driving toward the crowd, which had already changed from the sound of its chatter to a pitch of alarm. I saw a man in richly coloured, flowing robes running through the market, his hands across his broad chest as though he were embracing a child. He shouldered people aside and brought the alarm in his wake. Even at a distance I could see a look of intense purpose; a look which I now know was full of hatred. Florence must have seen it too, for she dropped the fabric, gave me an anguished cry from across the small space between us, and started toward me. Her brow was drawn together in deep furrows, as though she already knew exactly what was about to happen. I had never seen such clear dismay in a human face. I spun to see Lucy standing alone at the fruit stall, still smiling with happy oblivion, and with pomegranate juice on her chin. Then with one last turn I saw the running man again..., and I began to drop for cover behind the bench.

It all happened in those seconds of my act of self- preservation. The man stopped in a small clearing of terrified people. He closed his deep eyes, bellowed something at the top of his voice, and then threw his arms apart. In that same instant a shot rang out. One of the officers had fired at him, for he seemed to crumple. But it was too late. The gesture of his arms was the act of detonation. He exploded.

Twenty-three people died that day, some instantly, some slowly from gaping wounds and severed limbs. Others, like myself, survived. We were all victims of political fanaticism. What are the chance vagaries of our choices and actions that I would be shielded by the bench? Florence, I’m told, died instantly. I was never allowed to see her, and was left to wonder at how horrific her mutilations must have been. Lucy died without a scratch to her body, and that remains a mystery. As for me, I recovered slowly in an Egyptian hospital, my faced peppered with glass shrapnel, but my sight miraculously untouched. My body was spared because of the bench. My legs, however, were badly shredded, and only through skillful surgery was I able to keep them.

But I had dropped to save myself at a moment of choice when I might have sought to save another. And in that choice I had shredded my own heart, something no surgery could ever fix. My honeymoon had become a funeral, my living became a sham..., and that was the start of my own long journey.

Before that day I had never questioned my existence, nor that of any other. As an academic scientist I had enjoyed a career of self-indulgence. Life had unfolded with an ease that I took to be a right. Money and possessions had become such a habit I had ceased to be grateful, and I presumed my atheistic take on life was the natural outcome of being a scientist in the modern world. Then the destruction of the terrorist attack changed all that. In the wake of such senseless death and loss, the silence of a dead or non-existent God was no longer sufficient. The ripping of Florence and Lucy from my world, and my failure to stand for them by crouching behind the bench, created a demand for answers and purpose greater than I could ever have imagined before. Out of my physical pain, the grief of my heart, and my deep shame, grew a longing I had never known was possible, and I found a need to embark on the pilgrimage. I knew Florence had been deeply touched by that venture, and Lucy born of it, and I wanted, now, to share something of her quest in the hope that I could regain those ineffable qualities which had been her gift to me. And so, following Florence’s path on the journey to Santiago de Compostela in Spain consumed me as my final hope – as a means of healing beyond the skin grafts, the metal bolts, the gruelling therapy, and beyond my own self- condemnation.