The Spark (White Gates Adventures Book 4) Read online

  The Spark

  Titles available in The White Gates tetralogy (in reading order):

  The Kicking Tree

  Ultimate Justice

  Winds and Wonders

  The Spark

  Available to download free:

  Cutting Edge

  (A bonus White Gates adventure that occurs between

  Winds and Wonders and The Spark.)

  http://trevorstubbs.com

  Non-Fiction:

  WYSIWYG Christianity: Young People and Faith in the Twenty-First Century

  This book is dedicated to the people who live in the darkness of poverty, war, oppression, hunger and fear – wherever they live in the world. Against all expectation, many of them shine as beacons of hope when all around them is destruction. Although subject to hatred and exploitation, they continue to share the reality of love and forgiveness. May we all be inspired by such as these.

  Material from the Taizé Community copyright © Ateliers et Presses de Taizé, 71250 Taizé, France.

  I could run into the shadows if I choose.

  “Yes, let’s hide,” I say. “Awesome. We could do anything we wanted if no-one were looking. And all that is bad in me would remain secret… if no-one really cared…”

  But it is not like that; they do care… and so do you. Even on a starless night you are there, watching over me, a spark in the dark. Even if I elect to dwell in the emptiness of death, you are there; there is no place you cannot be.

  Yet you do not pursue me against my will, you do not deprive me of my choice to tell you to be gone – I can banish you, reject your light. I, and I alone.

  But why should I flee from you when all you want to do is keep me safe, make sure I am who I am – free to be me?

  With you, it’s good to be me.

  So, Lord of the light, Lord of the darkness, Lord of everything there is, let my heart be set on fire with your indestructible spark; all that is bad in me burnt away.

  Give me courage to hide no more; I am me – I have no need to hide.

  1

  It was the screaming that convinced them they had to leave. Over the past twelve hours they had become used to the crunch of heavy weapons and the crack of small-arms fire; but because they had been attending to the immediate needs of the patients, they had learned to ignore it. Then, suddenly, it was upon them. Out in the street people were shouting in languages they knew not. Retreating soldiers in government uniforms ran past the hospital and melted into the maze of streets and alleyways beyond. The doctor yelled at his assistants to keep their heads down. Military vehicles turned the corner and began trundling down the main street of the town, spewing bullets as they went. The rebels were intent upon looting and killing. This is what they had come for. They had already entered the market and were ransacking every building – plundering goods and lives without mercy.

  “Surely we’d be safe in the hospital. We have no weapons here!” shouted Kakko over the din.

  “No! Nowhere is safe. They will kill all… steal… burn. You run,” instructed a young nurse.

  “But what about the patients?” demanded Dah.

  “Leave them. Now come… You want to be killed?!”

  Before they could protest further, John, Tam and Shaun dragged the two girls out through the double doors at the end of the long ward. They had to jump over the many patients who lined the walls of the corridor, and they followed the hospital staff, and as many of the patients as could move themselves, out through the rear doors.

  Dat-dat-dat-dat-dat!

  The crack of gunfire sounded in the hospital grounds. The five aliens, led by Tam and Kakko from Planet Joh, ran like everyone else with their heads low. As they crossed the road they heard the screams of the women and babies who had come to the hospital as some sort of sanctuary, somewhere safe away from the war which had already driven them from their homes in the villages. Kakko turned to see one woman jump from a window and then fall under a hail of bullets.

  To his surprise, from the gardens at the rear of the hospital, Shaun found himself shouting obscenities he didn’t know he knew. They cleared a low hedge and ran. Dah was a picture of terror. One of the nurses tripped and fell full-length on the ground; Shaun lifted her to her feet – her hands, elbows and knees red with blood – and propelled her forward into a patch of scrub that surrounded a wall on the far side of the street. An iron gate beckoned. The group streamed through it and behind a wall out of sight of the hospital. They hugged the rough bricks and listened while they took stock of where to go next. They were joined by a dog who decided to tag along with them. A dog who did not want to be alone. The rebel army was occupied with sacking the hospital. The air was filled with smoke from burning buildings somewhere beyond it.

  “The church,” said a nurse; “maybe they will not attack the place of God. We go to the church.”

  They crossed the garden to a deserted house. The dog followed. Shaun tried to dissuade it but it was not going to go away. It was quiet enough. Like all the dogs here, it was thin but athletic and wanted company.

  The house was well appointed; it clearly belonged to a well-off family. They had probably taken their car and left at the first signs of trouble. Unlike the hospital staff and those in the church, they had felt vulnerable and exposed – certain targets of any army, however disciplined.

  Beyond the house, the half-dozen hospital staff, together with their five foreign volunteers, jogged along the road that led towards the church. As they came within sight of it, however, a truck bearing rebel soldiers came from a road that joined from the left and they ducked down. The truck rammed the gate to the church compound. Soldiers charged through the gap. Shaun signalled for the group to creep back the way they had come. As they retreated, they heard the same sort of screaming as they had heard at the hospital – the spine-chilling screams of victims of unthinkable horror. The rebels were attacking the women church workers and the children they had taken in to protect. Later, they were to learn that all had been killed. This so-called army was no more than a bunch of psychopathic criminals bent on violating anything that moved, wherever they were, no matter how weak and unable to defend themselves. Men emotionally damaged as children from the years of civil war had been given guns and heavy weapons and they were wreaking their revenge on the world that had let them down. If they had arrived just minutes earlier, Shaun, Kakko, Tam, Dah and John, together with the rest of the fugitives, would have been among those who’d died in the church.

  ***

  Mercifully, within half an hour, the sun had set and the moon had not yet risen. Although it was dark, the nurses knew the way to the river well enough to find it by starlight.

  Shaun looked up at the stars and thought of home. He had arrived in this awful place via a new special otherworldly white gate in the hedge of their peaceful cottage garden on Planet Joh. Only the day before, they had been joined there by their friend Da’yelni Lugos – Dah for short – and her boyfriend, John. These two, despite hailing from different planets light years apart, had become inseparable over the past two years. John had decided to say goodbye to the United States on Planet Earth One and move to Atiota, Dah’s planet, so that they could live together. They had thought about staying in Connecticut but to live in the USA was fraught with too many obstacles – not least the laws pertaining to immigration. Dah had no acceptable papers – and never could have. On Atiota, however, papers did not matter – all the police were interested in was where a person lived and, as Dah had an address, so did John.

  Four days ago, however, in the yard of their lodgings in Gulaga, their city on Atiota, they were presented with an unmistakable white gate. It was shiny
and new, smooth to the touch and waist high with a gentle curve in the top bar. All these special white gates had the same appearance – and each one was an invitation to those who saw it to step through into another world – a world in which the Creator had a task for them. No-one seeing a white gate, though, felt compelled beyond choice to open it – but the Creator is not someone to resist. Once you have encountered Her, you can never really say no. You knew She would not have invited you if She didn’t feel you could cope and contribute to someone else’s need. Shaun had grown up with the understanding that life was not just about pleasing oneself but making the planet – or in their case, the universe – a better place for someone else. This often entailed danger but the Smith family had long since learned to go with the flow and trust the Creator.

  So, as long as John and Dah could stay together, neither of them gave stepping through this gate a second thought. And they had been overjoyed at finding themselves on Planet Joh in the very cottage garden they had heard so much about. There were four siblings in the Smith family: Kakko at twenty-one was the oldest, followed by Shaun and Bandi, two and four years her junior. Despite being only three, the youngest, Mahsnyeka – Yeka as she was always called – had already been on a white gate adventure but mercifully, this present horror was not for her. Kakko was engaged to Tam, whom she had known since first school. Her mother, Jalli, her father, Jack, and Matilda, her father’s mother whom they called Nan, were very pleased to meet these two friends their children had often talked about. When John and Dah arrived they had spent a wonderful evening catching up and telling stories.

  But then, a day later, another white gate had appeared in the hedge of White Gates Cottage. This led them straight into the grounds of the hospital on the edge of a war zone. The five friends had immediately got down to helping where they could. The one doctor and several nurses there were impossibly stretched and were extremely grateful for their help. It was not every day that five fit and energetic foreign aid workers just walked in. Those who went through the Creator’s gates were used to finding themselves in difficult places. They had survived being bombed, falling down cliffs and being kidnapped, among other things. They could never be absolutely sure they would survive in this life – but one thing they were sure of was that the Creator was with them. All the security She offered was that She loved them. And that was all that really mattered. Shaun’s great-grandmother, Momori, had died in the faith that God would take her into a new world, where she would be reunited with all her loved ones who had gone before her. Shaun had watched as Momori had placed herself into the Creator’s hands.

  Shaun was not frightened of dying – but, now, the thought of his sister and friends being treated violently by vile evil maniacs terrified him. His mother had been attacked by a dissolute monster on her home planet, Raika, and it had taken Jalli years to come to terms with it. His father, Jack, had been blinded in the same incident. Why had the Creator brought them to this dreadful place? God always seemed to lead them into difficult situations, and here they were again.

  Kakko was not the sort of person to go anywhere quietly and Shaun heard her calling God names under her breath. He began to think of this planet as God-forsaken. Could it be that even God had been driven out of this awful place? In the face of so much evil, you couldn’t blame Her for giving up on it. But if they were here through a white gate at the Creator’s bidding, then clearly She had not forsaken these people. What amazed him was that the terrified nurses never doubted the presence of God; they trusted She knew all about it, and cared. They never ceased calling on Her. Kakko learned that they and the doctor could have fled days before but they had felt it was too soon to run; they did not want to abandon their patients. And now at least one of the nurses had failed to escape with them. They had lost her in the panic. Shaun found himself hoping that she had died instantly, hit by one of the bullets that had whizzed around them. But the thought that this caring nurse was lying somewhere in pain with nobody to care for her was horrible. And to what end? Despite all this nurse had done for her patients, armed psychopaths had come and killed them.

  Kakko had experienced the deliberate killing of women and children before. On that occasion she had managed to rescue a little girl from a bomb dropped from a plane. That family, too, had fled. But this time the evil had not come from the air but from the land.

  The group retreated beyond the wall, slid down a steeply shelving bank and hid in the scrub that lined the river. This place was not without its dangers as many-toothed predators up to three metres long lived here.

  As the night progressed, all was still. Rebel soldiers could be heard drinking and singing somewhere in the town. The fugitives were too thirsty and shocked to talk; they were silent. As the forces of evil drank stolen beer and altar wine, all the five friends craved was a drop of water. Shaun’s stomach felt taut and hollow – no doubt so did everyone else’s. But the hunger and thirst were as nothing compared to the fear that the haunting scenes they had seen instilled in them.

  The moon rose and they explored the riverbank looking for a boat. They found none. Then the nurse in the lead spotted the outline of a canoe drawn up on the dark bank. She turned and smiled. “Boat,” she whispered. But then, suddenly, the boat sprang into life. The nurse let out a blood-curdling screech. The dog, who had up to now been their faithful silent companion, began growling and yapping defiantly. From the former silence of the night, the air was now filled with the cries of people, the barking of the dog and the wild hissing of the enormous scaly creature. Shaun stood still, too stunned to move. They were trapped. Should they retreat? Were they being heard in the town behind them?

  Then the creature lunged, grabbed the dog in its huge tooth-lined jaws and swung backwards into the water with a great splash. One moment the dog was there, barking, and the next it and the creature had vanished; and the water flowed on as if it had never been disturbed. The party were stunned. No-one uttered a sound. After what felt like an age but what was in reality perhaps less than a minute, someone began to sob in the darkness. Then Kakko spotted something. At first, she thought it was another of the creatures, and was about to sound the alarm but, in a shaft of light from the moon now rising above the waters, she made it out more clearly; this time it was a long, narrow fishing canoe.

  “A boat.” She pointed. “There.”

  “Ah-eeh,” said one of the nurses. They crashed their way towards it. It would be safer on the river than the bank. Shaun spotted a second canoe and found a couple of paddles with it. Their luck was in. Eleven people boarded two canoes.

  They pushed off and the current quickly took them downstream but the nurses knew the river. Shaun and Tam paddled hard at their directing until they were in the lee of an island. The nurses took them round the other side of it. Then they found themselves in calmer water, and straight in front of them was a little landing. They pulled in alongside and disembarked.

  Five round mud huts with thatched roofs stood a little way back from the water’s edge. They called but all was quiet. No-one. Hidden among the houses they saw a stump with a handle – a pump! Shaun did not want to raise their hopes but he strode over to the well and pumped the handle until he felt the satisfying resistance of water. Three strokes more and it was splashing out of the pipe.

  As he drank the cool, clear water, Shaun felt that it was among the greatest gifts he had ever been given.

  Refreshed a little, the group of eleven sat together in the moonlight, their clothes torn and dirty. The rebels would not cross the river that night. They were safe for now – apart from the mosquitoes that attacked in droves. After all the din of the battle, the silence was palpable. Some of them wept. Some moaned. Dah clutched her John. Tam and Kakko sat opposite each other with both hands interlocked. Shaun sat alone and reflected on how unjust he thought life had been when he had received a yellow card on the football pitch and the coach had substituted him. On that occasion, he had thought life was so unfair – but he had had no idea what fairnes
s really meant. These people that day had been forced not just off a football pitch but out of their homes, out of their town, leaving behind those they were tending to be killed. He smelt the smoke as it drifted across the river from the burning buildings glowing against the gathering clouds. How could people behave like this? What could have got into them to fill them with so much evil? It seemed that the Creator, if She still cared, was on the back foot.

  2

  “Mummy. Can I go and talk to Jay and Kay?”

  “Of course you can, Yeka. But finish your breakfast first,” said Jalli.

  “But it’s just stopped raining. Jay and Kay will go away when Daan comes up too high.” She pointed to where the Johian sun would top the trees.

  “Oh, alright. But just say hi, and then come back.”

  “Thanks, Mummy.”

  Yeka didn’t have a pet dog like some of her friends in Woodglade. Jalli was a working mum, and her dad, Jack, found he had enough to do without looking after an animal. Being blind, things took longer and, to tell the truth, he wasn’t really interested. He had never had a live-in pet as a child. And now with the white gates being active, no-one – not even his mother, Matilda – could guarantee to be around all the time. Yeka, however, had not been short of creatures to talk to. She had made friends with all the wildlife in the garden and had called them all by name. Jay and Kay were amphibians who lived by the pond beside the greenhouse. Somehow, although they were wild, they did not object to being prodded and stroked by a three-year-old. To give her her due, Yeka was very gentle and talked to them in a calm voice. She told them stories that included all the creatures in the garden, from the vivid orange flame-birds that were never quiet, to the tiny willy-beetles that crawled silently up and over the grass and stones.