Roanoke: The Price of Power

The Journal

After leaving the governor with Swift's corpse, the Doc made a hasty return to the colony. He entered the palisades through the west gate, his black coat trailing behind and flapping in the damp wind.

He passed between the cottages and around the well that, three months ago, he'd used to help calculate how deep to dig the chillhouse. Nearing his cottage, he passed by three of the colony's young children; they'd interlocked their hands to form a ring and were now dancing in a circle.

They sang as they kicked their feet and twirled, and though Doc couldn't make out the words being sung in their youthful pitch, the rhyming tune sent a chill up his back. He stopped and slowly craned his head to look their way.

When his eyes met them, two little girls in dresses and a boy in short pants, they stopped their dance. All three of the children turned his way, staring through him in a wickedly contrasting silence.

"Bah," he muttered, and continued on to his cottage.

Once inside, he barred the door and doffed his hat, placing it neatly back on its hook. He stopped for a moment, staring idly at the wall beside his hanging hat.

Those children. What had they been singing? Doc scratched his ear.

The children of Roanoke had always kept a wary distance from him, just as those grown had. Likely, they just didn't want him watching their play.

The Doc went to the back of the cottage and made for the requisite book, though he didn't stop at his shelf of tomes that stood against the far wall. Instead, he crouched near the corner and drew his knife. With a flick of his wrist, he lifted a rough panel of dark wood from the floor with the blade.

Within the hollow where the plank had been, he rifled through an assortment of his most prized and private items. Pushing aside a few folded papers and a silver signet ring, he revealed the needed book, extracted it and sat at his modest desk.

The book was, in truth, the journal of his esteemed colleague in London. A fellow with similar scientific goals and means who had loaned him the book, that it might aid the Doc on his current adventure.

He opened the worn leather cover and thumbed through dozens of handwritten and charcoal-sketched pages.

He was looking for dates, astrological charts, lunar cycles. Some record of the past to indicate the timing of a proper killing, when a man was best laid pale in sacrifice. If the Doc was correct in his assessment of the slain Mr. Swift, a reckoning was coming and he himself would be the one letting blood before it was through.

The only matter that remained was the delicate question of "when."