Future Is Red

Cook Ian

Description

Two meteorites from Mars land on Earth. Nothing will ever be the same again... Dr Mary MacDougall, red-haired NASA meteorite specialist, witnesses a terrifying supernatural event at the Great Serpent Mound in Ohio. Meanwhile, close to the prehistoric Rollright Stones near Oxford, Holly Fraser, another redhead, experiences a vivid flashback to a girl being sacrificed 60,000 years ago to a sacred stone.Both events are traced to two recently discovered meteorites from Mars. While one meteorite provokes sinister phenomena and a macabre death, the other leads Mary to have strange visions linking an ancient tribe of redheads to the Stone of Scone, used for centuries in the coronation of British kings and queens. But is this Stone really a fake?Together with her colleague, Dan Gallagher, and Charles Gresham, professor of archaeology, Mary is determined to track down the real Stone of Scone, exploring mystical sites in Ireland and Scotland, and is drawn into a primaeval religion and an age-old feud that could decide the future of the human race.

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 28 août 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781800466739
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

about the author

Ian Cook was born in the county of Devon, England, grew up in Hertfordshire and took a degree in crop science at the University of Reading. During his subsequent worldwide travels, he became intrigued by the universal mythology associated with red hair and acquired more knowledge about the subject than is strictly necessary for everyday social purposes. His first novel, Redhead , was published in 2012 and a revised second edition in 2018. He lives in London with his wife, Maggie.






Copyright © 2021 Ian Cook

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

Matador
9 Priory Business Park,
Wistow Road, Kibworth Beauchamp,
Leicestershire. LE8 0RX
Tel: [phone]
Email: [e-mail]
Web: www.troubador.co.uk/matador
Twitter: @matadorbooks

ISBN 978 1800466 739

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.


Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd



To Maggie,
with love
and thanks



“The Sun is God.”
J. M. W. Turner

“Start with the sun, and the rest will slowly, slowly happen.”
D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse

“… and this stone which I have set up as a sacred pillar shall be a house of God.”
Genesis 28: 22–24, New English Bible


Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
Appendix
Acknowledgments


1
Great Serpent Mound, Ohio, c. 350 BCE
Shrouded by a blanket of mist, the Serpent slept under a brilliantly clear, starlit sky. High above, a crescent moon was hanging as if suspended by an invisible thread and it seemed to be watching the scene below in anticipation of the events ahead. Far below the head of the Serpent, at the base of a rugged cliff, a river flowed languidly, indifferent to the affairs of mortals.
As the sky lightened along the eastern horizon and the mist began to lift, they started to arrive for the ceremony they believed could save their lives. A single sparrow chirped and broke the silence, but no dawn chorus followed. Hovering above, an owl in desperate search of prey eyed the vast, undulating earthen body of the Serpent stretched out on the landscape, then sensed a powerful energy awakening in it and veered away.
Groups of dark-haired men and women were approaching the three coils of the Serpent’s tail. After reaching the tip, they continued along its length on both sides, positioned themselves and waited quietly.
As the procession came into sight, all heads turned. It was led by the medicine man of the tribe. Dressed in full ceremonial regalia, he wore a bark-cloth coat decorated with designs inspired by the wild animals that had once inhabited the surrounding woodland. His headdress was bizarre: a helmet fashioned from copper, surmounted by a pair of copper antlers. He stopped at the tip of the Serpent’s tail and waited for the others to catch up.
Grim-faced, the six elders of the tribe then arrived, richly attired in long, decorated skirts and wearing necklaces of animal bones and coloured beads over their chests.
But it was the next figure who commanded the most attention. A giant of a man, nearly seven feet tall, strode up behind the elders. His head held high, he gazed impassively with pale green eyes over the heads of the others at the colossal earthwork snaking into the distance. His hair made him seem even taller. A fiery red in colour, it was arranged in a coil on top of his head to reveal long, stretched earlobes, studded with the jade stones passed down by his ancestors. He was dressed simply in a plain buckskin coat and trousers, his only ornaments six copper bangles on each wrist. The more perceptive of the onlookers would have noticed that he was holding something hidden in his clenched right hand.
Six warriors came next, wearing loincloths and adorned with bone necklaces. Each one armed with a stone axe, they stood back at a respectful distance.
The medicine man waited to ensure that everybody was ready. He then nodded and stepped up onto the very end of the Serpent’s tail. The others followed him and proceeded slowly in a twisting line for nearly 400 long strides. As they passed by, the onlookers lowered their heads in deference.
By the time they reached the Serpent’s gaping mouth, the sky was glowing red behind them. Now an expectant silence fell and all eyes turned towards the east. The tip of the golden orb broke over the tree-covered hills, bathing the scene in a soft light. Instantly the onlookers knelt down and raised their arms, reaching upwards towards their god. The chant of “Ra… Ra… Ra…” echoed around the landscape.
The medicine man held up his hand and the crowd instantly fell silent. Beyond the Serpent’s wide-open jaws, as if it were poised to swallow it, lay an egg-shaped embankment, fully forty strides in length and with a mound of stones at its centre. It was a sacrosanct place, which only a chosen few could enter.
With a further nod from the medicine man, the procession climbed over the embankment into the sacred area and stood there looking at the sun as it cleared the horizon.
The medicine man now reached up, placed his hand in the small of the red-haired man’s back and guided him to the mound of stones. Feeling a little more pressure from the medicine man’s hand, the red-haired man unprotestingly knelt down and lowered his head.
With an increasing sense of foreboding, everybody waited, facing the sun and shielding their eyes as they watched it rise slowly in the clear sky.
The red-haired man knew what was about to happen next. He had foretold that on this very morning there would be a full eclipse of the sun.
Closing his eyes, he thought about the fate of his own tribe and yearned for its lost glorious past. The tribe of tall white men had been here long before the newcomers arrived from the land of the Pole Star. He thought about the legends of his tribe and how they had arrived long, long ago in boats from an island across the Great Sea to the east. Renowned for their tall stature and red hair, the island civilisation had thrived in peace. They had learned how to grow crops and domesticate wild animals, so that they had time to study. They had built a great city, studied the movements of the sun, moon and stars, and constructed magnificent temples to their glory, believing their souls would return to the heavens when their bodies died. Using their knowledge of the skies, they had taught themselves advanced navigational skills, which enabled them to trade across the known world.
The catastrophe had occurred without warning. They had felt the tremors days earlier, but only a few had managed to prepare and board their ocean-going boats before the massive earthquake finally struck and the resulting deluge engulfed the island.
His distant ancestor, a priest-king, had sailed to the west with his wife and children and discovered a vast uninhabited land where they had decided to settle, cultivating crops of the useful plants they found. Here they had led peaceful lives. They had no need for the arts of war; the only weapons they kept were those to defend themselves from wild animals and predators. His priest-king ancestors had preserved their sacred understanding of the heavens, passing it on over the generations.
Then the others had arrived: men who hunted wild animals for food while their womenfolk gathered berries, fruits and roots.
There was no problem at first; there was plenty of land and the newcomers were in awe of the white men’s learning. Worshippers of the sun, the new tribe had feared the eclipses, believing that the sun could disappear forever. Not only did the white men seem to know in advance when an eclipse would occur, but the incantations of their priest-kings always made the sun reappear.
Over the generations the power of the white men had grown. Their tribe had built the great Serpent at this sacred place where the earth was alive with energy. For them, the Serpent was the embodiment of that energy: an energy his people could sense and use to communicate with their ancestors. But the newcomers saw the egg-shaped enclosure as representing the sun and the Serpent as threatening to swallow it. For them, it was a symbol of the power of the priest-kings over the eclipse.
The terrible disaster had spared nobody: the drought had lasted for ten long years now. Slowly the rivers had dried, the wild animals had almost disappeared and the land had become so parched that when the wind blew, everything was covered in a fine dust. Everybody was hungry and had looked to the priest-king for help. But he could do nothing. The newcomers became angry and turned against the white men. One day, when the white tribe was holding a ritual at the Serpent to beg for guidance from their ancestors, they had been attacked and slaughtered. He alone had been