If You Can’t See, Hear, Touch or Tax It It’s Not Real
The outskirts of Edinburgh, Scotland
There are some government facilities that the politicians don’t want you to know that you’re paying for, and one of those is the Department for the Quantification and Utilisation of Luck, which was why they hid it away in an unmarked three-storey warehouse in a modern business park filled with equally unremarkable buildings.
The small, crowded car park in front was nowhere nearly big enough for the nine-hundred staff and there was an underground one as well with a lift to the lobby.
Inside, the ground floor was usually a hive of activity, but it was quiet that morning with over three-quarters of the staff missing, normally the cubicles were filled with statisticians, researchers, mathematicians––and one mythologist: Cassie Sloane, a redhead who hid her prettiness with an unflattering hairstyle and librarian glasses.
She looked like any dowdy, bespectacled woman in an old movie who took her glasses off and let her hair down, prompting the leading man to say, “Why, you're beautiful, Miss Jones,” she was thirty-eight years old, five foot three inches tall, wearing baggy blue jeans and an orange T-shirt with “Myth Or logical?” in big, blue letters on the front.
“Mr Crowhurst!” she shouted as she hurried along with a purposeful stride, a small laptop open in one hand as she waved frantically with the other.
She was trying to attract the attention of a man in a dark-grey suit, on the far side of the room, who’d made a beeline for the stairs to his office on the third floor the moment he spotted her. She caught up to him easily, given that she was two decades younger and a few stones lighter.
“Ms Sloane,” he puffed out of breath, “regardless of who your father is, or how on earth he shoehorned you into my department, I thought that at least, by now, you understood the chain of command,” Benjamin Crowhurst said, he was a man who never let an opportunity for pomposity pass him by.
“I-I-I’m sorry, sir,” she stammered nervously, “but this is very important.”
Crowhurst sighed as he pulled a handkerchief from a trouser pocket of his expensive suit and cleaned his glasses before mopping the sweat off of his bald head, “Is this about your fairy tale theory?”
“Listen to what the witch Agnes daughter of Angus wrote a thousand years ago,” she said, looking at the laptop screen. She started reading from a seventeenth-century English translation of the original Scots Gaelic parchment, “Ten centuries hence, shalt niggling and bothersome squabbles auger the return of the Supreme Celtic goddess of war. Then friend shalt fight friend in an all-consuming battle. Thou must summon thine most powerful witches and warlocks on that dread day, for only their great magick canst defeat her.”
“A goddess, witches and warlocks, do you hear yourself? All that proves is that Scotland had its own version of the Brothers Grimm,” he said, checking his watch.
“What about the squabbles that broke out all over the city yesterday? It’s happening just like Agnes said it would,” she tried to show Crowhurst the screen of her laptop again, but he brushed it aside.
“Your proof,” he said, waving a hand dismissively, “is that people are being rude to each other. Have you not spent any time on the Internet, at all?”
“It’s far more than that,” she said, “lifelong friendships ruined, careers irrevocably damaged, marriages destroyed, and all without any of them being able to say why. Look around you, when did you last see seventy-eight percent of the staff missing when Scotland wasn’t in the World Cup? I know it doesn’t seem like much, but that’s how it started last time and if we don’t act quickly enough…”
“So there’s been more fights than usual, city-wide riots, perhaps?”
“No, but there will be…”
“And yet you want me to recommend to the first minister that we, what? Call the Ghostbusters?”
“If we don’t nip this in the bud, before she grows strong enough she’ll drag Scotland back into the Middle Ages, and then swallow up country after country until she rules the world,” she said defiantly, knowing that, as obnoxious as he was being, he had a good point.
“When you have something more concrete, file a report through the correct channels, in the meantime show it to your supervisor,” he said as he walked away.
“I did, she wouldn’t listen to me,” Cassie said to his back.
“Then I was right to promote her,” he said without turning around.
The rest of the day dragged, as she didn’t fit in, professionally or personally, with the rest of the office; she knew they laughed at her behind her back. They dealt in cold, hard facts and thought being presented with what they saw as her childish daydreams was a waste of their valuable time. As for Cassie, she had long since decided that you can lead a horse to water, but clubbing it to death is frowned upon.
When five o’clock arrived, it was with a sigh of relief that she climbed into the driver’s seat of her old, red Fiat Panda and started on the short drive home.
The walls of her one-bedroom flat were covered with bookshelves filled with weighty volumes on alchemy, necromancy, pyromancy, theurgy and even more obscure forms of magick and piles of books and papers high on the floor in unsteady columns, making her zigzag just to get to the kitchen.
Rummaging through a mess of printouts scattered over her coffee table, she found the TV remote and turned it on before putting a frozen dinner in the microwave.
“… minister insisted that he was resigning to spend more time with his family, and that the scurrilous rumours concerning him, a prostitute and a fidget spinner would be dealt with by his solicitors,” said a disembodied, female voice-over on a video of a harassed, mid-sixties man in a pinstripe suit hurrying to a chauffeur-driven limo, pursued by reporters and photographers.
“To recap our top story for those of you who have just joined us,” the camera switched to the owner of the voice, a pretty, young, blonde in a red top. Her mouth was smiling, but her eyes were empty. “Following the chaos yesterday caused by city-wide breaches of the peace, Scotland’s capital city erupted in violence late this afternoon.”
Behind her a screen showed dozens of people of all ages bursting out of a pub onto the street, faces contorted in rage, as they attacked each other with whatever came to hand.
“Turnhouse airport was closed at 1.30pm today after fights broke out in the main terminal and flights are now being redirected to Glasgow Prestwick. Authorities have declined to comment on when normal service will be resumed.”
The newsreader paused as a picture of a self-important looking man in a police uniform flashed up behind her, “Police Scotland chief constable, Sir Keith Blake has called for calm and urged the public to avoid unnecessary travel, while the police and security services carry out a search for canisters of hallucinogenic gas planted by terrorists.”
As the microwave pinged, Cassie muted the television, so it wouldn’t disturb her, but she could still look at the subtitles from time to time.
She absentmindedly ate with a fork right out of the plastic tray, as she flicked through the pages she’d printed off before work. It was a collection of articles garnered from a mixture of mainstream and Internet media, but on further inspection what at first had looked promising turned out to be a waste of paper.
After she dumped the empty food container and papers in the pedal bin, she made herself a cup of coffee, and picked up a big a pile of A4 printouts off the floor and dumped them on the table next to her drink, rocking the cup and splashing some coffee onto the bottom pages.
What she had taken barely dented the pile of promising articles she hadn’t managed to check yet, although many a night she’d fallen asleep sitting on her couch trying to. She took off her glasses, rubbed her tired eyes, putting them back on before starting to read.
Disappointingly, most of the miracle escapes and extraordinary good luck stories came down to misleading titles and over-exaggeration.
She started to read a three-day-old newspaper piece with the banner headline, “No Parachute, Skydived and Survived!”
Hyperbole aside, it was a well-researched item that said that the subject, one Callum Cooper, had been dismissed with disgrace from the army, for reasons redacted because of national security, which she knew meant it was too embarrassing to reveal.
It also stated that he had spent almost six-months in hospital abroad, but was planning to return to Scotland on… she looked at the date on her phone and realised that he would be back in the country by now.Researchers at the department wouldn’t have picked it up yet, and it would take a few weeks for them to catch up with the backlog and start the investigative process. After a deep breath, she picked up the phone to make the call that would change history.