The Gemini Effect, page 29
Gave thanks that for now, at least, they were happy, safe.
And the nightmare was over.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
It was only just beginning.
This part of the story, this final chapter of the whole thing. Mayor Tierney looked out over her city (the one she controlled – CCTV and all) then took a sip of the single malt, and grinned. Power. That’s what she had, that’s what she’d been granted in return for certain… favours. Tasks she had to complete, was happy to do so. She’d already arranged for the buffoon who’d got himself caught to have an unfortunate accident on his way to the SCI prison. Wasn’t hard, their people were everywhere, after all. Shouldn’t have been overstepping his mark in the first place. His job had been to observe, not get into a fight with the person being observed!
All of this had left a bad taste in her mouth, what had almost happened. And all because of another one of their kind who hadn’t been able to follow orders. That woman Clark! A rogue Geminite who’d taken it upon herself to try and birth their leader, got herself pregnant by the twin of their one, true god.
She’d had to stamp on it, of course. Had been riding that useless Inspector Glover, pushing him to end this faux Gemini’s reign before it began. She’d even had to send that anonymous message telling him where he could find Richard, never expecting him to go there alone – prat!
Luckily it had all worked out. Yardley Street police station had burnt to the ground, Robert and Richard Clark with it. Would save them having to demolish the place, because it had already been bought by a shell company. They had plans to build on the site, firming up the foundations not just of the church that would follow but the schemes they had in mind for the future.
Already their scientists were harvesting the DNA they’d need and were preparing the volunteer. Hand-chosen, good breeding stock, such as They deserved. The twins. Genetically engineered, replicating the originals down to the last cell.
This wasn’t just the endgame they were playing now, it was a long game. She’d received the message that Deborah Harrison had given the inmate, the one she thought was a Geminite priest. Pah! He was far from that. But she and her family would remain untouched, not because of any threat that woman had issued, or because of her newfound fame. Simply because it wasn’t the time yet.
Their one, true god was coming back. He would decide what to do with her, with her own children. The Mayor had a feeling she knew what their fate would be.
She wandered over to the robes hanging up in her chambers, reached out a hand that was not currently occupied holding the fiery liquid.
Mayor Tierney touched the chains of office she was proud to wear. Not because she ‘served’ this city – this special city of Norchester – but, as she turned them over and saw the symbol on the underside of the medallion there (two horizontal lines connected by two vertical ones) because of who she actually served. Like her parents before her, and their parents as well, stretching back and back. They were everywhere, but especially here.
And they could wait. Because He was rising, would one day be risen again. The one, true Gemini. Her lord and master.
Then they would all see, oh yes.
This was only just beginning. But one day it would end.
One day it would be…
The end.
EPILOGUE
Inside the womb, changes were taking place.
Since seed had first encountered egg, energising it with life. It had survived, against all the odds. Then the egg split: a consequence of the conception taking place under such conditions, as artificial as they were. Everything guided, everything controlled and manipulated.
Suddenly there were two identical eggs, genetically indistinguishable. Exact duplicates that would emerge in something like eight or nine months’ time. Twins. They would be the same in appearance, in looks if not in personality… though they would be more alike than either of them might ever realise. And no matter how ‘individual’ they grew up to be, the fact remained that they’d started off as one.
Inside that womb the developing foetuses interact.
They nudge and kick each other, communicating in their own distinct and secret code. Working out which one would be the dominant of the two, as if that was ever in any doubt; who would take the most sustenance from the mother. And also probably trying to get back that which they had lost. The wholeness. Nevertheless, they would share a bond with each other that could never be broken. Not by time nor distance, nor even by the blackness and finality of death itself – which they had already experienced once, both of them.
But all that was in the future. For now they were nothing but clusters of cells, forming. Waiting, patiently waiting.
Because the miracle, the marvel that still remains a mystery especially in these times of scientific wonder and technological achievement, was only really beginning.
The miracle that some refer to as:
The Gemini Effect.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
If I can, I always try and link stories together – I’ve done it with the crime novels and novelettes, I did it with the Hooded Man series, and even in my Sherlock Holmes entries (see if you can track down Enola in Sherlock Holmes and the Servants of Hell)… And long-time readers of my work especially should be able to spot more than a few nods to some of my other characters and yarns in this sequel to The Gemini Factor.
I know that a few of you clocked the fact that in The Storm the main female protagonist – Gemma – referred to events in the first Gemini book, because her cousin was, is, of course, Deborah; something that gets another mention here (plus Bernie Noble mentions the other half of that pairing, Keegan, in his army reminiscences). Similarly, the strange things that went on in Armitage Bay with the blue-eyed man are a reference to Before and the antics of The Infinity.
I was able to tie together the history of both the RED and Life Cycle werewolf tales in a novelette called The Curse of the Wolf, and that gets another airing here when Vinny is talking about the history of Norchester. As does my Controllers mythos, when Vinny’s spirit is being absorbed into The Gemini. While the SCI, only mentioned briefly in books like Blood RED or short stories such as ‘To the Power of…’ (read this if you want a little bit of background on Charles Mansfield and the X killer), plus at the end of The Gemini Factor and in ‘Gemini Rising’, get to take much more of a centre stage here. I’m hoping to write further tales about them in the future, because there are lots of uncanny cases they’re up to their necks in.
I even chucked in The Wanderer’s Rest, from my short story ‘The Procession’ and my play One for the Road – which sees the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse gathering there on the eve of Doomsday to have a pint and a natter.
You don’t need to have read any of this material to enjoy The Gemini Effect – you don’t even really need to have read Factor, though it will help, naturally – it’s just a fun little thing some of us writers like to do sometimes. Interlinking stuff in what my old mate Steve Volk – he of Afterlife and Ghostwatch fame – has termed in the past ‘Kane’s World’.
Oh, and I wonder if you can guess which books Deborah writes? If so, give that person a cigar!
In any event, I hope you’ve enjoyed reading Effect as much as I did writing it. This is the first novel I wrote after a two-year gap (during which we had the pandemic, lockdowns, a house move, and my better half Marie O’Regan and I finally managed to put on the ChillerCon UK event in Scarborough – or perhaps that should be Scareborough?). A sequel to a novel I wrote over twenty years ago, it’s felt a lot like coming home in many ways.
And, as you’ve no doubt now seen, I’m not about to leave it there. As they say at the end of the Bond movies, The Gemini will return…
Paul Kane
Derbyshire
March 2023
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Kane is an award-winning (including the British Fantasy Society’s ‘Legends of Fantasy’ Award), bestselling writer and editor based in Derbyshire, UK. His short story collections include Alone (In the Dark), Touching the Flame, FunnyBones, Peripheral Visions, Shadow Writer, The Adventures of Dalton Quayle, The Butterfly Man and Other Stories, The Spaces Between, Ghosts, the British Fantasy Award-nominated Monsters, Shadow Casting, Nailbiters, Death, Disexistence, Scary Tales, More Monsters, Lost Souls, The Controllers and The Naked Eye. His novellas include The Lazarus Condition, RED and Pain Cages (a #1 Amazon bestseller). He is the author of such novels as Of Darkness and Light, The Gemini Factor and the bestselling Arrowhead trilogy (Arrowhead, Broken Arrow and Arrowland, gathered together in the sell-out omnibus edition Hooded Man), a post-apocalyptic reworking of the Robin Hood mythology. His latest novels include Lunar (which is set to be turned into a feature film), the short YA novel The Rainbow Man (as PB Kane), the critically-acclaimed and award-winning Sherlock Holmes and the Servants of Hell from Solaris, the sequels to RED – Blood RED and Deep RED – Before from Grey Matter Press, Arcana from WordFire Press, plus Her Last Secret, Her Husband’s Grave and The Family Lie from HQ/HarperCollins (as PL Kane)
He has also written for comics, most notably for the Dead Roots zombie anthology alongside writers such as James Moran (Torchwood, Cockneys vs. Zombies) and Jason Arnopp (Doctor Who, Friday the 13th, The Last Days of Jack Sparks) and as part of the team turning Clive Barker’s Books of Blood into motion comics for Seraphim/MadeFire. His stand-alone comic The Disease, published by Hellbound Media, was also a 2016 Ghastly Award-nominated title in the ‘One Shot’ category. Paul is co-editor of the anthology Hellbound Hearts (Simon & Schuster) – stories based around the mythology that spawned Hellraiser – The Mammoth Book of Body Horror (Constable & Robinson/Running Press), featuring the likes of Stephen King and James Herbert, A Carnivàle of Horror (PS) featuring Ray Bradbury and Joe Hill, Beyond Rue Morgue from Titan (stories based around Poe’s detective, Dupin), Exit Wounds – a crime anthology featuring the likes of Lee Child, Val McDermid, Dennis Lehane and Jeffery Deaver – Wonderland (a finalist in the Shirley Jackson Awards), Cursed, Twice Cursed and The Other Side of Never, the last five also from Titan.
His non-fiction books include The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy, Voices in the Dark and Shadow Writer – The Non-Fiction. Vol. 1: Reviews and Vol. 2: Articles and Essays, plus his genre journalism has appeared in the likes of SFX, Fangoria, Dreamwatch, Gorezone and Rue Morgue. He also co-wrote the afterword to the latest edition of Stephen King’s Night Shift collection. He has been a Guest at Alt.Fiction five times, was a Guest at the first SFX Weekender, at Thought Bubble in 2011, Derbyshire Literary Festival and Off the Shelf in 2012, Monster Mash and Event Horizon in 2013, Edge-Lit in 2014, HorrorCon, HorrorFest and Grimm Up North in 2015, The Dublin Ghost Story Festival and Sledge-Lit in 2016, IMATS Olympia and Celluloid Screams in 2017, Black Library Live (Warhammer 40k) and The UK Ghost Story Festival in 2019, plus the WordCrafter virtual event 2021 – where he delivered the keynote speech – as well as being a panellist at FantasyCon and the World Fantasy Convention, and a fiction judge at the Sci-Fi London Film Festival. He is a former Special Publications Editor of the British Fantasy Society, served as co-chair for the UK arm of the Horror Writers Association from 2015 to 2022, and co-chaired ChillerCon UK in May 2022.
His work has been optioned for film and television, and his zombie story ‘Dead Time’ was turned into an episode of the Lionsgate/NBC TV series Fear Itself, adapted by Steve Niles (30 Days of Night) and directed by Darren Lynn Bousman (SAW II-IV). He also scripted The Opportunity, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, Wind Chimes (directed by Brad ‘Hallows Eve’ Watson and which sold to TV), The Weeping Woman – filmed by award-winning director Mark Steensland, starring Tony-nominated actor Stephen Geoffreys (Fright Night) – Confidence, directed by award-winning Mike Clarke (A Hand to Play, Paper and Plastic) which stars Simon Bamford (Hellraiser, Nightbreed, Starfish), and The Torturer directed by Joe Manco of Little Spark Films. Loose Canon/Hydra Films have just turned Paul’s novelette Men of the Cloth into a feature called Sacrifice (aka The Colour of Madness), starring Re-Animator and You’re Next’s Barbara Crampton. His work for audio includes the full cast drama adaptation of The Hellbound Heart for Bafflegab, starring Tom Meeten (The Ghoul), Neve McIntosh (Doctor Who) and Alice Lowe (Prevenge), and the Robin of Sherwood adventure The Red Lord for Spiteful Puppet/ITV, narrated by Ian Ogilvy (Return of the Saint). You can find out more at his website www.shadow-writer.co.uk which has featured Guest Writers such as Dean Koontz, Robert Kirkman, Charlaine Harris and Guillermo del Toro.
ALSO BY PAUL KANE
NOVELS
Arrowhead
Broken Arrow
Arrowland
Hooded Man (Omnibus)
The Gemini Factor
Lunar
Sleeper(s)
The Rainbow Man (as PB Kane)
Blood RED
Sherlock Holmes and the Servants of Hell
Before
Deep RED
Arcana
The Red Lord
Her Last Secret (as PL Kane)
The Storm
Her Husband’s Grave (as PL Kane)
The Family Lie (as PL Kane)
NOVELLAS & NOVELETTES
The Lazarus Condition
Dalton Quayle Rides Out
RED
Pain Cages
Creakers (chapbook)
Flaming Arrow
The Bric-a-Brac Man
The PI’s Tale
Snow
The Rot
Beneath the Surface (with Simon Clark)
Blood Red Sky
Confessions (as PL Kane)
Corpsing (as PL Kane)
Coming of Age (as PB Kane)
Murder on the Golden Sands Express (as PL Kane)
COLLECTIONS
Touching the Flame
FunnyBones
Peripheral Visions
The Adventures of Dalton Quayle
Shadow Writer
The Butterfly Man and Other Stories
The Spaces Between
Ghosts
Monsters
The Dead Trilogy
Shadow Casting
Nailbiters
Death
The Life Cycle
Disexistence
Kane’s Scary Tales Vol. 1
More Monsters
Lost Souls
The Controllers
White Shadows (as PB Kane)
The Colour of Madness: Official Movie Tie-In
Traumas
Darkness & Shadows
The Naked Eye
Tempting Fate
Nailbiters – Hard Bitten
Zombies!
EDITOR & CO-EDITOR
Terror Tales #1-4
Top International Horror
Albions Alptraume: Zombies
The British Fantasy Society: A Celebration
Hellbound Hearts
The Mammoth Book of Body Horror
A Carnivàle of Horror: Dark Tales from the Fairground
Beyond Rue Morgue
Dark Mirages
Exit Wounds
Wonderland
Cursed
Twice Cursed
The Other Side of Never
NON-FICTION
Cinema Macabre (Contributor)
The Hellraiser Films And Their Legacy
Voices in the Dark
Shadow Writer – The Non-Fiction. Vol. 1: Reviews
Shadow Writer – The Non-Fiction. Vol. 2: Articles & Essays
Leviathan – The Story of Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II (contributor)
Hellraisers
Paul Kane, The Gemini Effect
