The Last Days of Magic: A Novel - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mark Tompkins is the founder of the Aspen Writers’ Network and serves on the board of Aspen Words, a program of the Aspen Institute. Born in Texas of Irish ancestry, Tompkins lives in Boston, Houston, and Aspen. The Last Days of Magic is his first novel.

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***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected proof***

Copyright © 2016 Mark Tompkins

Prologue

Manchester, England

2016

When Sara Hill’s body washed up on shore, the police concluded— logically, given the lack of injuries— that she must have accidentally fallen overboard and drowned. The previous day she had taken a train from Manchester to Liverpool to catch the ferry to Ireland. The police ascertained that she’d boarded for the overnight passage across the Irish Sea but did not disembark.

On the morning she was to take the ferry, Sara watched the sun emerge above the dreary city, chasing away some of Manchester’s November gray. She had not slept since yesterday’s unsettling call from her grandmother in Ireland. Sweet milky tea had been abandoned for strong coffee until her whole body vibrated, though she knew it had little to do with the caffeine. She leaned back from the desk that dominated her cramped attic bed-sit and rolled her shoulders to ease the knots of tension along her neck and spine.

Her Grandmother O’Trehy was like a second mother to her. She had left her Irish homeland and moved into the family’s London flat for the first fifteen years of Sara’s life, when it turned out that Sara’s workaholic professor parents were woefully ill equipped to keep up with their energetic infant daughter. Over the years Sara and her grandmother became best friends, tramping through the parks of London while her grandmother recited rich and elaborate tales.

“Sara, do you still have the books I gave you when I left?” her grandmother had demanded over the phone the previous day, without so much as a hello.

“Of course,” Sara responded, struck by her grandmother’s unusual tone. “I would never lose those.”

“Well, get them, right now. There’s something you need to see.”

“Okay,” Sara agreed, recalling where she had stashed them. “Let me call you back in a few minutes.”

“No! No, I’m not in Dublin anymore. I’m not anyplace where you can call. I’m sorry, Sara, to be so abrupt. Please, just do this for me. I’ll wait on the line.”

Sara had never before heard her grandmother sound rattled. She fished the two battered boxes out from under her bed, still sealed as they had remained since her arrival at the University of Manchester as a freshman, six apartment moves ago. She tore them open and, one by one, removed the beautiful books of her childhood, placing them on her desk—books full of Celtic myths, legends, and faerie tales.

“Got them,” she said.

“Good. Now get a knife and pry open the paperboard of their covers.”

“What? Grandmother, no. You can’t be serious. What’s this about?”

“Please just do as I ask, Sara,” her grandmother implored. “You’re not going to believe me until you see for yourself.”

Sara didn’t respond, dismayed at the notion of destroying her treasured books. She picked one up and examined it carefully, touching its broken spine and tattered pages, recalling that her grandmother must have read it to her a thousand times. The cover featured a faerie prince, tall and handsome, holding the hand of a shy human milkmaid. Their love was ultimately doomed, of course, their children to be transformed into swans—a story Sara had always found strangely appealing.

“Listen carefully, Sara,” her grandmother said, breaking the silence. “People came for me, and I barely slipped away. They will come for you, too. They’re after those books. There’s a whole other set of faerie stories, much older, as old as it gets, hidden in them. You have to look in their covers to understand.”

Sara feared that her grandmother must have fallen into some sort of dementia and tried to humor her. “Okay, if that’s what you really want.” She reluctantly took her knife, cut through the linen covering of the front hard cover of the book, and split apart the interior paperboard. To her surprise, a photograph was hidden inside, showing dense Hebrew script elegantly hanging from an invisible line. It was a portion of an ancient scroll—she knew that much from her studies.

Back when Sara was deciding on where to go to university, she had chosen Manchester because her grandmother had studied there. And just as it had with her grandmother, Sara’s major in Middle Eastern Studies led to a graduate program in the region’s historic languages, for which she had a flair—a trait that apparently ran in the family.

As dusk gathered outside, Sara, no longer convinced that her grandmother’s mind was slipping, hurried to disassemble the covers of all the books while pressing the phone to her ear with her shoulder.

“Grandmother, how did you get these?”

“John—Dr. Allegro—and I . . . were . . .” her grandmother stammered, and Sara could practically hear her blushing. “We were more than friends when I was in grad school.”

“The Dr. Allegro?” Sara exclaimed. She knew the name well. Decades ago he’d been a professor in her department who had become legendary when he was appointed as the British representative to the international team assembled to study and translate the controversial Qumran scrolls.

“The same,” said her grandmother. “So I saw the whole debacle unfold from his perspective.”

Sara knew well the events her grandmother referred to. Christened “the Dead Sea Scrolls” by the press in the 1950s, the ancient documents were discovered accidentally, along with the remains of a shelving system and an index, in secluded man-made caves located in a hotly disputed area on the West Bank near Qumran. It did not take long for it to become clear that the caves held a carefully arranged, cataloged, and preserved collection of works making up the earliest biblical library ever found—all the books of the modern Hebrew Bible and the Catholic Old Testament were present.

Sara’s grandmother recounted the initial, exciting days when the team worked well together as they began the slow, methodical process of translation, publishing completed sections as their mandate directed. The early results dazzled scholars and the general public alike, and newspapers worldwide reeled off a steady stream of stories devoted to the discoveries being made. Working from text a thousand years older than any previous source material, the team began to fill in gaps in the Old Testament, places where grammatically or structurally there was obviously a missing word or sentence or paragraph.

Soon, though, the publications slowed, then stopped altogether. The press started spinning theories that more than missing paragraphs had been found.

“That’s when the Vatican began to take over and John became frustrated,” Sara’s grandmother said. “By chance, the UN official in charge of the scrolls was Catholic, and he had them shipped off to a Church facility. Unfortunately, John’s letters to another team member were leaked to the press and became headlines.”

Everyone in Sara’s class had seen reprints of those reports. Too interesting for the students to ignore, they seemed to recirculate every year. Allegro wrote, “I am convinced that if something does turn up which affects the Roman Catholic dogma, the world will never see it.” And then, “The non-Catholic members of the team are being removed as quickly as possible.”

“The next year, only four years into the...