The Orb of Zemelchus

By David Pearson

Twins Peter and Josh had no idea their strange uncle belonged to another world; a world of vampires, strange beasts and powerful enchantments. They were unaware aware of their own powers and their destiny. Helped by a vampire bat who turned into a beautiful girl, the fate of an entire world depended on their decisions and their actions.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Strict Publishing International
• Release date: Oct 20, 2009
• ISBN: 9781452369983

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The Orb of Zemelchus

by David Pearson

The Chronicles of Errin

book one

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2009 David Pearson

Published by Strict Publishing International

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

For my sons Callum and Elliot

The twins of truth and justice, the inspiration for the goodness in this book.

David Pearson.

Chapter 1

Trolley, Train and Car

Make no mistake about it, this is the chance of a lifetime, said Josh as he bit into the triple-decker sausage, cheese and marmalade sandwich, watching the crumbs fall onto the Star Wars duvet on his bed.

Peter did not look convinced. He carried on staring out of the bedroom window, across the playing field on the opposite side of the road that ran past their little two-bedroom terrace house, and out into empty space. He was always the thinker, and he was regularly to be found deep in thought. Josh was used to his brother’s absences. Peter was the thinker, but Josh was the impulsive one of the twins.

I mean, just think of it. For three whole weeks, we get to stay up late every night and we don’t have to tidy anything away. Heaven!

Peter noticed the old man shuffling along the street, pulling a two-wheeled shopping trolley behind him. It was raining, and it was so dark that it felt as though it was late in the evening, while in fact it was only half-past twelve in the afternoon. The old man always kept to the same routine. Every Saturday morning at 8 o’clock, he would take the number 59 bus into town, and then at noon, his shopping trolley neatly packed with the week’s groceries, he caught the number 63 bus back to the end of the street. From there, he walked the remaining hundred feet or so to his own small two-bedroom terrace house, number 73 Church Fields. It was on the opposite side of the road and ten doors down from Peter and Josh’s home. Josh’s words now registered in Peter’s head.

Yeah, and he might agree, said Peter, nodding in the direction of the old man, before adding, but then again he would, because he hasn’t got a life.

Peter felt sorry for the bent old man who he thought must have lived on his own for the last hundred years or more. To Peter, it seemed logical to suppose that highlight of the man’s week was the Saturday morning shopping trip, because he never seemed to leave his house at any other time. For some unfathomable reason, the old man made Peter slightly uneasy. Perhaps it was because he was always there, or perhaps it was because he so often looked in Peter’s direction. Whatever it was, Peter felt uncomfortable about it.

Right on cue, as the old man reached his front door he turned round and looked up at Peter’s bedroom window. The boy could never be sure because of the distance between them, but he always thought that the old man gave a slightly sinister smile before turning away and going into his house.

The crust of bread that hit him on the back of his head made Peter turn away from the window, to face Josh who feigned a look of complete innocence. Josh pushed at least half of the sandwich into his mouth and took a big swig of coke. He mulched the mixture around in his mouth, swallowed it, and then let out an enormous burp.

Peter shook his head. You really are gross, he said. I have to tell everyone that you were dropped on your head at birth so you can’t really help yourself. That is how embarrassing you are!

Josh pointed his backside in Peter’s direction and brought out a fart that seemed to go on forever.

Well, I tell everyone that you’re not really my brother but a switchling, he replied before opening up a Mars Bar, his fourth of the day, and shoving it into his mouth.

Peter looked confused.

A what?" he asked.

Josh just about managed to spit out the reply, but the words became caught somewhere in all the chocolate and sticky stuff, so it came out something like this:

Yoush knowhs. Shumbodish elshish baby. Not mumsh and dadshes. Shumbodish elshish

Peter stared hard at his brother. He wondered how on earth they could be twins when nothing about them, not their looks, not their mannerisms, not their personalities, were even remotely the same. That is, nothing except the one thing that they would both willingly change in an instant: their surname. It was Rose. Everybody gave them strange looks whenever they said it. The boys knew that regardless of age or gender, they all thought the surname would have been better belonging to a girl. Peter and Josh were at that age when things like that mattered, and they agreed one day they would change it to something like Smith or Jones or even Brown. Anything plain would suffice, provided it did not have a distinctly feminine ring to it.

Anyway, the name was not the issue of the day. No, that was the wedding, although not exactly the wedding. It was more the fact that they were having to stay with you know who whilst their parents went half way across the world to their Auntie Elizabeth’s third wedding in some place they could hardly pronounce, Saint Lucia, supposedly the place of romance and the only place where she could get married. Therefore, they were obliged to stay with him while their parents had fun. It was not as if he was cruel or rude or anything unpleasant, but he was odd, and that made them feel uncomfortable. The option of going to stay with the old man down the street would have appealed more to Peter, but unfortunately the old man was a stranger, whereas he, Uncle Silas, was simply stranger than anyone else in the entire world.

As Peter started to turn back to the window, out of the corner of his eye something caught his attention and he quickly twisted round to get a better look. It was too late. Surely, his eyes must have been deceiving him? There was nothing on the street except the pair of empty wheelie bins waiting to be put back in their places by the two single men in their mid-twenties who lived at numbers 68 and 56. Peter did not like the man at number 68 very much. He was always staring around, as if determined to scrutinise everything and everyone in the vicinity, and it seemed to Peter that this man took a particular interest in him. Peter told Josh of his uneasiness but his brother replied he was just paranoid, before mischievously adding that perhaps the man was planning to abduct Peter and sell him into slavery. Peter was not amused. He was firmly convinced that there was something very odd about the man from number 68. The man from number 56 seemed okay. He always cracked a joke, which made Peter laugh. He seemed distinctly ordinary, and not at all like the man from number 68.

I could swear I’ve just seen the old man from number 74 sprint down the road, said Peter, shaking his head and closing his eyes at the same time as if he were trying to clear his head and come to his senses.

Josh made a mental note that he must tell their mother to stop giving Peter Smarties, as the ‘e numbers’ were doing strange things to him. A man who must be close to a hundred years old had just sprinted down a road? Yeah. Right.

Perhaps he was chasing those other guys away from our door, Josh sarcastically replied. You know, the ones plotting to kidnap you. The old man is really Obi Wan Kenobi and he is here to protect you, oh great Luke SkyWalker.

He turned on the television, pumped up the volume and settled down on his bed to watch the Sci Fi channel.

Peter wondered if there was just even the slightest bit of truth to his brother’s words, but he decided not to dwell on the thought because it was time to do his homework.

Josh watched his brother open his textbook. He shook his head and simply turned up the volume. He loved American Wrestling and hated English Literature. Peter put on his earphones and started to listen to Mozart as he read. He never heard Josh mutter he was a freak.

The fateful day soon came round and the boys found themselves on the London to Edinburgh train heading to dull, dreary Yorkshire, away from the variety, hustle and excitement of the London city life they both loved. Under other circumstances, a train ride could have been fun, but not when they were travelling to stay with Uncle Silas. So today the boys just sat in silence, staring blankly through the window as the countryside sped by, hardly speaking to each other and not even bothering with the magazines their parents had bought for them to look at on the journey. To make matters worse, it was another grey English day, with a canopy of heavy dark clouds and constantly driving rain. Worst of all, there was the man who was sat across from them, and whose very presence made them both feel ill at ease and strangely lethargic. It was almost as though he was draining their energy from them.

Without being able to work out the reason for it, Peter was reminded of the man from number 73 Church Fields. He figured it was the piercing eyes, the longer than average nose, and the over-large pointed ears. Both men had these features in common, but the man on the train was much younger. Peter thought he was probably in his fifties. He was very tall and thin, dressed strangely, wearing a large fedora-type hat that from time to time he removed to scratch his head with overgrown fingernails on the end of the longest fingers that Peter had ever seen, and a full body-length black cape that he kept wrapped around him. His appearance prompted Peter to think of a vampire in horror films. Behind the long beak-like nose, the man had slightly bloodshot, cobalt-blue eyes, which seemed to Peter to be watching him and Josh all the time, although the man was periodically turning the pages of a paperback book. The book was entitled Things that go bump in the night and other scary monsters. Peter considered it an appropriate choice of reading matter for such a ghoulish creature who he imagined would probably be an undertaker or employed somewhere else in the death industry. Peter was sure that the man was not actually reading the book because at one point he was holding it upside down but then, as if he had read Peter’s thoughts, in the blink of an eye the book was the right way up. The man’s hands never seemed to move. It was then that Peter noticed something else to make him feel uneasy: the man had marks on his forehead that looked as though they had been made by someone or something gripping his head very hard. It was very strange indeed.

The train reached their journey’s end, Leeds Central, five minutes early and, as Peter had feared, there was no one there to meet them. Fortunately the boys were travelling light, each with a holdall crammed full with clothes their mother had thrown together the night before. This was typical of Mrs. Rose, who was, to put it politely, domestically disorganised and always seemed to be on the last push. She was not a woman for whom housework and domestic chores were priorities. Consequently, the house was well lived-in as she put it, though some might have been so unkind as to call it untidy.

Mrs. Rose was effervescent, but not a natural homemaker. She did not like washing, cleaning or cooking, much preferring to be at social events. Her personal organiser was full of charity meetings and work commitments. The boys’ mother was a reasonably successful businesswoman with her own company, selling fruity smelling soaps and sizzling bath products from her study. Father was, well, he was simply father. He did not do much work at all, because he did not need to.

Mr. Rose had come into money when someone rich in the family died, leaving him quite a fortune, although not millions. He had a small bookshop, and employed a former librarian, who looked exactly as a former librarian ought to look, to run it. In truth, the Book Shop was a profitable concern, specialising in those almost impossible to find first edition volumes.

Josh and Peter had never been particularly close to their father. He was not inspirational. When he was not socialising, he just sat around the house all day, reading some dull book about history, surfing the Internet for books to add to his stock, or watching documentaries and wildlife programs. All young boys need heroes and, unfortunately, Mr. Rose was not the swashbuckling type, although he did play war games with his closest friend John Downes, the boys’ Godfather, in the attic until the early morning hours. When the two men were busying themselves re-enacting the battle of Waterloo, the two women, Mrs. Rose and Mrs. Downes, spent hours watching Inspector Morse on television. It was hardly an action packed life and sometimes it got the boys down. At that stage in their lives, Peter and Josh really needed a great adventure to avoid the unthinkable risk of slipping into a life of mediocrity and routine.

Monday to Friday, it was school, home for tea, homework, chiefly for Peter and of far less importance to Josh, before going onto the playstation computer games or watching television or listening to music with friends. Although Peter never admitted it to anyone, he was starting to worry that one day he would grow into his father. Josh did not really think about it because thinking about it would have taken up brainpower, and he had promised himself he would not do half as much work in life as even the laziest person in the world. For Josh, life was all about freeloading. He had no time for scholarly or industrious types, and that was why he would not have named his own brother as one of ten people he would take in a lifeboat with him. No, given the choice Josh would save only people who, like him, were dedicating themselves to a life of leisure. His attitude did not endear him to many people, and Josh was not nearly as popular, with grown-ups at least, as his brother. Because of this, Josh was deeply jealous of Peter.

When the train reached its destination, the boys grabbed their hold-alls, pushed past the vampire man and joined the queue of people waiting to leave. As he almost fell out of the train, Josh shoved his hand deep into his holdall and started to feel around. Totally in character, he had, without his mother’s knowledge, packed a ten-bag of the larger sized Mars Bars and a litre bottle of Cherryade. His hand found what it was looking for and he pulled out one of the Mars Bars, which he had finished eating by the time he took his second step on the platform. When the crowd of commuters had almost gone, the boys found themselves standing by a drinks vending machine on the platform. Suddenly, and seemingly from out of nowhere, the vampire man from the train appeared by their side.

What’s a couple of young ones doing travelling so far on their own? Bet you can’t be more than ten years old, he said in an inquisitive and slightly high-pitched voice that sent a shiver down the boys’ backs, the sort of sensation you get when dragging fingernails over highly polished glass.

Josh could not help noticing a set of markings on the man’s throat. They looked like handprints, and Josh thought this very strange.

We’re twelve and our uncle is meeting us here, Peter answered sharply.

The man smiled. It was an unsettling sort of smile. The sort of smile that someone gives when you have been tricked into saying something they want to know. Josh instantly felt that he and Peter were in danger.

A loud crashing noise caused both boys to turn and look to the opposite platform, where a fat man had spilt the entire contents of an even fatter suitcase over an angry looking commuter; his laptop lay broken. The commuter mouthed a few profanities before the fat man punched him on the nose and a railway policeman ran over to the pair. Both Peter and Josh felt somehow comforted by the presence of the policeman, and they turned back to look at the man from the train. There was no sign of him.

How did he do that? Where did he go? asked Josh. He was weird. Did you feel it as well? he asked his brother.

Peter nodded his head in agreement and looked along the platform for the man. He was nowhere to be seen but their great uncle was striding towards them. Striding was not really the right word because he seemed to be taking remarkably few steps to reach them. He was bounding! Peter even thought that at one point his uncle had covered over twenty feet or more in two steps, but he knew that was not possible. Or was it?

Oh God! He looks like something from another planet, said Josh as he noticed