The Gatekeeper

5

Alistair couldn't stop glancing over at Niko during breakfast. The other boy was eating steadily, calmly. There was no sign of any lingering after effects of his breakdown, which for Niko was almost unheard of. He usually jittered for days after one of his episodes.

Alistair caught Macquary's eye and mouthed, 'What did you say to him?' The butler just grinned.

The cook had allowed the two boys to eat in the kitchen rather than the formal breakfast room. One of her first dictates after this magnanimous concession was to utterly ban Niko's notebooks at the table. Her second was to insist that he actually chew his food rather than bolt it down as fast as possible, so as to be sooner reunited with his beloved notebooks. A little intimidated by the tall blonde Frenchwoman, Niko had grudgingly agreed.

The cook also kept piling more food on Niko's plate whenever it began to empty, claiming that he was far too skinny for a growing boy. Niko meekly accepted this imposition and kept eating. Alistair wanted to beg her for her secret. Niko would have killed him if he tried that.

Eventually though, she stopped filling up his friend's plate and went off to do something that involved clanking pans. Macquary took a seat at the table with Niko's stack of notebooks before him. 'You mind if I take a look at these?' he asked the still munching teenager.

'No, go ahead,' Niko replied and shoved another forkful of sausage into his mouth. Alistair felt rather like the world had tilted off its axis. Since when was Niko willing to let anyone look at his research? He stared blankly, a forkful of eggs halfway to his mouth, as Macquary cracked open one of the notebooks and started leafing through.

The butler sighed and gave Niko a Look. 'Your handwriting is appalling, lad.'

Niko just shrugged, instead of flinching or looking down as Alistair would have expected him to do. 'I'm usually in a hurry.'

Alistair had no idea what Macquary had said to Niko while he was in the shower but the man had his undying gratitude, whatever it had been. It was totally worth the horrible waterlogged feeling that had dogged him ever since he'd finally been free to leave the bathroom. Surely he'd eventually dry out.

'Alright,' said Macquary after a few minutes of puzzled looking perusal of the notebooks. 'So you think that hundreds of years worth of lore about the Black Dogs is wrong and silly and you're going to prove it by walking up to one of them and giving it a pat on the head. That about it?'

Niko paused. 'Well, a great deal more thought went into it than you're making it sound like. And I will be bringing offerings. So... there's that?'

The butler closed his eyes briefly, in a fairly obvious prayer for patience. 'What sort of offerings?'

The temple was an old one. Perched craggily at the top of a steep hill, it loomed over the valley below. It had been a watchtower once, a round construct of roughly-hewn stone blocks some twenty feet high. Half-ruined now, an old oak tree grew through a hole knocked into the northern side of the tower, its leafy boughs stretching out over the remains of the roof. As Alistair finally crested the hill, he could see the path they walked along leading away to encircle the deep pool set before the heavy double doors of the tower. To the right of the doors, in the south, a firepit was dug, with logs already laid out for the fire. And Alistair knew that inside a huge window had been cut into the stone wall behind the altar. All four elements, with the fifth, the spirit, being brought by the worshippers themselves.

Alistair had been to the great temples and churches in London, had felt the power moving through those places, had boggled at the beautiful statues representing the elements and the gods. He preferred this one. He had always found it easier to see the divine in nature itself, rather than the cold constructs other people found so comforting. But to each their own, he supposed.