The Ice Fair

Chapter 1 Old Father Time

The London that was then is different from the London that is now. In that distant place the spring breeze filled the air above the City with gossamer spider threads blown over from St Martin fields, each as fine as silk, each glistening like sunlit diamond dust in their dew filled glory. In summer the river folk said they watched elves playing on the shoreline by Gibbets Head at Wapping. In autumn the woods were avoided in case of encounters with the wild boar that came in from the country to forage on the mountains of wild acorns that fell large as ripened apples around the weathered trucks of mighty oaks. That winter the first snow fell on London for two hundred years, it hung in the air like sea spray burning the lips and stinging the eyes of those who made their living in the streets.

 In that winter society talk was of majic, the frost fair, a young girl found frozen to death in the Thames and ....... of a dragon.

T'was not the London you or I know.

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Deep in the folds of Rochester Cathedral's cemetery strange lights flashed from the stained glass windows of the ancient crypt of St Peter the Pauper sending kaleidoscopes of colour chasing themselves across the snowbound churchyard. In the darkness hedgehogs sniffed the air and scurried away through the ice capped tombstones. 

Badgers and foxes sensing the presence of something unearthly turned from their well-worn paths and trotted silently back the way they came. Underground, the burrowing things feeding on the bodies of the recently interred, stopped as if frozen by an unseen hand. Far off, deep within Mad Horse Wood, a wolfe howled and villagers locked their doors and gathered their kindred close to them round their roaring heaths, even though they knew no wolves had lived in those parts for hundreds of years.

A green fire leapt through the crypt, candles flickered, shadows bent under its will. A rancid odour seeped from the lichen covered pillars that supported the low ceiling. The smell of sulphur ran over the floor clutching at everything it found and smothering it with its evil intent. Strange shapes danced round the walls and a chill ran through the air that touched the iron cross on the St Peters stone sarcophagus and edged it with a ring of frost. It was if the door the Underworld had opened and the effluent of the all the hell bound demons within were seeping into this earthly realm.

Around the edge of a salt circle stood the four members of the Magi's Guild chanting an ancient incantation. At its centre a funerary vase issued fourth a foul bubonic stench of such nauseating proportions it made the eyes run and the phlegm stick like gobs of poisoned toads in the throat.

With a sudden WHAP the green inferno sucked itself into the vessel. The eyes of the Magi darted ferociously to and fro, their chants rose to a crescendo and then fell into a confused rambling of verses that shuddered and crumpled to silence in bewilderment at the vision they'd summoned.

The source of their bafflement stood before them. Where the urn had once been a hunched form had appeared, wrapped in a monk's habit tied in a hessian rope at the waist. A long beard floated to his waist, in one hand he grasped long bladed sickle whose form seemed to hold a semi permanence in the gloom.

The assembled Magi shivered under the sinistrous intensity of the phantom's gaze.

The spectre cast his livid black eyes critically around the sanctuary. Cluttered in the stone alcoves were the trappings of the Magi trade. In the shadows a series of dust laden water tanks balanced precariously upon one another. Mercurial fish tails flashed, flickering cuttlefish bobbed, a blue hued lobster luxuriated in stream of silver bubbles unaware of the fragility of its own existence. On the wall, hanging with the other taxidermical curiosities a devilish, hairy boar's head adorned with putrid yellow incisors peered down, and for a moment in a trick of the light seemed to blink its button eyes.