Flux

sticky post-it notes and string. The music coming from the speakers was someone singing about ‘the eve of destruction’. Tell me about it, he thought to himself, humming along under his breath.
    In the sparsely decorated room there was no problem in finding a bare patch of wall. Iain pinned up the map, taking extra care to make sure it was straight. Then, squinting to read the small writing, located Yemen and pushed in a pin right over the capital city. He then took a post it note and stuck this to the wallpaper at the edge of the map before scrawling ‘riot’ on it and pushing another pin into the top of the note. Cutting a length of string to fit tightly between the pins, he joined them up.
    The pile of newspaper clippings still sat on the table and he picked them up, sifting through them; pushing more pins into corresponding places on the map where some disaster or trouble was happening. With these, he put the carefully trimmed articles onto the wall, the scrawled post-it notes on top and pushed another pin through both to hold them in place, before joining them with string.
    Apart from a number in Asia, most of his pins were clustered in the Middle East and North Africa. The Holy Land! He mused, contemplating why that might be. In his mind, there was no longer any room for coincidence; social, political or historical reasoning found no place either. Iain looked for the deeper meaning.
    He was thinking about this, locked into his own mind and almost oblivious to the rest of the world as he set out across the common to the newsagents, where he purchased all of the papers for the day. They were plenty enough for him to need a bag to carry them home in. Upon his return he set to work; flicking through the papers to find new stories, new disasters and conflicts. Many of the reports were details of things he already knew about but anything fresh got snipped out and added to the pile on the table. The parts of the newspapers he didn’t need for his work went into an untidy pile on the floor in the corner of the room.
    Most of the stories were surplus, only relating to pins and notes already marked on the map but he found himself gravitating towards an article about declining bee populations, right here in his own country too. Maybe they know something we don’t? He pushed a pin in the right place just in case the missing bees were important, even though he couldn’t yet work out why.
    Iain stretched and yawned, suddenly realising how tired he was. A quick look out of the window still revealed no waiting gargoyle but he closed the curtains tightly, just in case, and went to his room, climbing straight into bed. He was asleep within seconds after such a busy day.

    In his dream, Iain crouched in the sand behind a low wall. Somewhere in front of him, in the desert, the baby cried. Iain knew he had no choice but to follow its call but still didn’t know why. The significance of the child, even after all this time, still eluded him even though he knew it was of the utmost importance.
    It was a moonless night and he could see lights coming down the road. As they approached, it became apparent that they were headlamps, the sound of an engine carried to him on the breeze, getting louder as the vehicle neared. Sinking himself lower into his hiding place, he watched through a small gap in the brickwork as the jeep passed. In the back were half a dozen men, all wearing headscarves wrapped around their faces, presumably to protect them from the sand whipped up on a desert wind. All men carried machine guns and whooped loudly as they bumped along the rutted track.
    Waiting until they were well past, Iain tentatively stepped out from his spot and crossed into the barren landscape in search of the child. The sand was soft underfoot and the going tough but the cries got louder as he carried on walking towards them. Even though this was no place he recognised, Iain followed the sound without thinking. Gusts of wind blasted his face with coarse desert sand, stinging his eyes and cheeks. Raising a hand to protect his face he continued. It was freezing cold.
    Half buried in the side of a dune stood a structure of massive stone blocks, not much more than the entrance showing. Ancient hieroglyphs adorned pillars which framed the gaping orifice; inside was blacker than the night itself. The child’s cries came from inside, echoing from some hidden chamber. Pausing to take a deep breath, Iain entered.
    The air was motionless and no