The Relic Keeper by N David Anderson Read Free Book Online

been out for at least three or four days, which was bad, but was in keeping with the constant pain. In fact it could also explain why the hospital looked kind of odd. Maybe he’d been transferred to a specialist unit. The girl had said that everything financial was being looked after, so perhaps he was in some private ward somewhere, although he couldn’t think who might be paying for it.
    So what did that all suggest? He’d been out for a while, perhaps in a coma. God! That must be it, he thought. So how long? What was the date? He couldn’t think. What was the last thing he remembered? Talking to Paula about something while Jessie was playing in the front room. But what it was all about was sketchy, something important. Something about his health. That was it, he was ill. Something was wrong with him, something serious. He moved his right hand up his body and through the folds of the robe he’d been dressed in. He touched his chest and traced the scar. It hadn’t been an accident; it was heart surgery. But he felt sure that he remembered being moved from the theatre. Shit, why was his memory so fucking sketchy. He looked around for anything personal by his bed to jog his memory. There was nothing. Nothing at all. Which was a bit weird. He moved his hand across the small table to feel for anything that he hadn’t seen in the subdued light. It touched nothing. He moved it to the cabinet by the side, stretching as far as he could. He swung the door open, but stopped before he felt inside. On the door was a mirror, and the face that stared back at him was wrong. He was skeletally thin, with patchy hair and skin that looked like it was stretched too thinly over a canvas.
    “Jesus,” he said out loud. “How long have I been out?”

9
    Philip Brading was fucked off. He had a monster hangover that had given him a headache that throbbed persistently behind his eyes. What he had wanted to do today was to lie in bed and think about nothing until early afternoon and then get up and carry on thinking about nothing until he was able to eat, and then, maybe, start work on a story. He had some notes he was putting together: an analogy of Eastern commercialism and the collapse of Western supremacy. He was going to link this to some half-baked ideas he had on secularisation in major trading powers, but the idea was stuck like a jammed machine, and he needed time to think things through in the single-minded way he found worked best when fuelled by large amounts of alcohol. But it hadn't worked last night, and he ended up flicking through channels on his c-pac before falling into an uncomfortable sleep on the futon that dominated the main room in his apartment. He had been rudely awakened at about 6 am by a call, and although he tried to ignore it, it had been prioritised and patched through. He’d had a shit journey through the countryside from Woking and now he was here. At eleven thirty in the fucking morning in Nowhere town in the middle of Shitshire, on a story that he really hadn't wanted to cover. He was really fucked off.
    He parked in the makeshift yard to the front of the grey buildings and made his way through to the guarded entrance of the complex. He registered his press pass and walked past the police cordon. The road went straight towards the dark grey outer wall and then veered right to follow its contours. This led around the perimeters of the site before doubling back on itself through a 15-metre gap in the outer wall of the building that had been inserted in 1940 courtesy of the Luftwaffe. As Philip passed into the inner courtyard the dark, foreboding walls with their bleak and grassy ramparts towered above him. The road took another turn and he was inside the complex. Within the star-shaped outer wall was a second barrier, this time circular, and within this a series of buildings. The structures had mostly been erected between 1780 and 1840 and had the cold red-brick look that so often went with military