Nightmares of Winter Dreaming

Prologue (Or Rather, the Beginning of Bad Things to Come)-4

The slender old man who was showing them around spoke in a tone so unapologetically posh and grandiose that every utterance sounded like a stilted warning not to follow him too closely behind lest the fine heels of his handmade George Cleverleys accidentally kicked the top of their foreheads. Because that was how highly he regarded himself vis-à-vis everybody else atop his stuffy little museum mole hill.

"Might I ask, Agents - " the gentleman was initially unfamiliar with the badges they showed him. " - exactly what are you looking for?"

Byrd kept stoically quiet. Flit answered, "Just a routine inspection of the building, we do it once every few years." As she spoke, her left hand was in her pocket, fondling a red cloth pouch filled with an assorted of ingredients: dried herbs, a lapis lazuli, bits of a candle made from beeswax melted in moonlight.

The spell worked. The old man shut up, nodded his big head and lead them through the exhibits.

"Stop!" shouted Byrd.

Flit had never heard Byrd raise his voice.

"What is behind this door?"

"Our new exhibit," said the man whose nametag proclaimed, "Fimkins". "It's not ready yet".

"We need to see it, sir," Byrd was beginning to look agitated. Flit was considering reminding him to watch his face lest it started to shift. The charmed Dr. Fimkins fiddled with a set of keys.

Once the door was open, Flit felt it, like a phantom sledge hammer pounding at her solar plexus.

Byrd took a step backwards.

"What is this ...," Flit had trouble enunciating. "... an exhibit?"

Dr. Fimkins beemed proudly. "Precisely. This is our new exhibit on bigotry, racial discrimination and inter-religious violence through the ages."

Flit's head was spinning. She did not want to look inside the huge room.

He continued, "We shall have on display the largest collection of items from four continents going back at least three thousand years. All the items come from cultures that have experienced gross discrimination and bigotry at the hands of conquering civilisations." He stepped into the room. "Over that corner we have actual artifacts, including a chicha bowl from the borderlands between Brazil and Bolivia, dating from the late nineteenth century. It belonged to a powerful jaguar shaman from a tribe of cannibals. Sadly, most of their people, together with neighbouring tribes, were decimated by diseases brought by the Portuguese and Spaniards. Or else they were enslaved."

He did not seem to notice Flit rubbing her forehead and wiping a tear from her eyes. Byrd stayed silent.

"There are remnants from a Basque pagan temple, torn down by the Inquisition and converted into a church. The village surrounding it is reputably haunted. And on that side," he pointed with a trembling finger, "parchments containing hand-written accounts by Jewish refugees from Spain and the Balearics fleeing persecution, desecrated icons from Turkey dating from the fall of the Byzantine empire at the hands of the Turks. Idols from a pre-Roman rat cult in southwest France. Fetishes from the East African coast belonging to sorcerers struggling under Muslim regimes."

"I think we get the idea," uttered Flit. So much hate and oppression, the negativity spilling out to surround her like a blanket of pure unwashed suffering. Byrd coughed, a fake gesture from someone who had no lungs. He wanted to leave.

"And not just racism or religious intolerance," Fimkins was on a geeky roll. "There are items here from the house of one of the earliest recorded transvestites in Germany. A contemporary of the Brothers Grimm. She was rumoured to have been the real inspiration for story of Red Riding Hood."

"That’s enough, Dr Fimkins,” Byrd said. That was something Flit had never seen: an annoyed Byrd.

“Oh, and I haven’t started on the Tibetan relics! They’re sacred yeti bone fragments and scalps almost destroyed by the invading Chinese Red Army when they plundered a village high up in the Himalayas. An escaped monk managed to save some of them before coming over to the UK. Donated everything to the us.”

“Are they real?” Now Flit was intrigued, despite the feeling of being smothered by invisible clouds of distilled anguish.

“We’ve taken DNA samples, turned out to be mostly bear and Himalayan antelope. But some of the bones came back as human. Very ancient human.”

“I said, enough!” Byrd was visibly shaking. Time to get out.

Flit's phone rang. She took a while to dig it out from her jacket, trembling fingers and all. "Yes sir," her voice sounded exhausted. She explained that they were following a lead at the British Museum. After a few minutes, she turned to look at Byrd, who had retreated to a corner. "There's been two more attacks."

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