Khronos and Kairos
A speculative short story
This is a bit longer than my usual short stories, but it didn’t feel like one I could easily split into two parts. It’s speculative fiction, but doesn’t fall easily into either sci-fi or fantasy. Read on and decide for yourself!
“Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Khronos House!”
The chatter of polite conversation faded like a flock of starlings settling to roost. I straightened up from the photo I’d been peering at; the wall of framed prints, from the earthy stain of early daguerrotypes to the glow of Kodachrome, had drawn me like a magnet.
“Welcome!” Our host was coming down the great staircase in the middle of the hall. Westering sunlight burned through a stained-glass window at the half-landing, a classical motif showing a muscular old man, white-bearded and naked, with wings like a swan’s and a scythe in his hand. The light, jewelled and scattered by its passage through the glass, fell on our host as he descended so that for a few seconds he looked like the king of Tyre in all his splendour, before he resolved into a suave middle-aged man in a Black Watch kilt.
He stopped a couple of steps above the bottom of the stairs, and spread his arms wide.
“Allow me to introduce myself. I am Sorley Campbell, and it is my great pleasure to welcome you to the Ardnamurchan peninsula and to Khronos House.”
His voice was deep and rich as peat, with an RP accent that spoke of the stuffiest of public schools. I forced myself to stop picking the torn skin around my thumbnail. I was still suspicious of why a reclusive millionaire philanthropist would invite a junior historian at a second-tier university to take part in an exclusive workshop, all expenses paid, with the promise of three years’ generous funding for any projects sparked by the event. I’d been able to find almost no information about Sorley Campbell, Lord Sanna. There were whispers and ghosts of rumours about people who’d gone to Kairos Workshops in the past, but nothing else. I might have turned down the invitation if my old friend and rival Jasper Harris hadn’t taken such a sharp and envious breath when I’d mentioned it.
“You may be wondering why I’ve invited you, this particular group of eight people from six countries, here to the edge of Europe. Ladies and gentlemen, this is a special place. My family has held Kairos Workshops here for over two hundred years. If you look around the hall here, you might recognise some familiar faces.” He waved at the array of photographs. “Our historian has already been examining them, I see.” He smiled at me, and even from where I stood, the depth and warmth of his dark eyes swallowed me. I blushed like I had as a twelve-year-old at the school social, dancing with that teacher I’d had a crush on.
“You’ve all been invited,” our host went on, “because I believe you’re among the brightest and sharpest thinkers, creators, practitioners in your fields today. But you’re the ones who’ve been overlooked by the Oxbridges and Harvards and Royal Academies. I’ve invited you here because this meeting of hearts and minds, this feast of reason and flow of soul, can catalyse great things. A Kairos Workshop is held here just once a generation. The last was in the year 2000.” He nodded toward the far end of the photo gallery. “You, the members of the 2025 workshop, are the next generation.”
I glanced at my fellow-guests, wondering if they all felt as uncomfortable as I did.
“Some of you are academics,” he went on. “Some of you are artists, musicians. We have an aspiring politician, and a carpenter and a beekeeper. You are drawn from different fields, different cultures not only in terms of where you were born and what languages you speak, but different ways of thinking about the world. Over the next three days, all I want you to do is talk to each other. Talk, and really listen. And see what comes out of that.
“You’ve had a long journey. I’m sure you’re eager to tuck in to the banquet we have ready in the dining room. But just before we go through, let me remind you again of some of the house rules. First, you’ll have discovered that there’s no mobile telephone signal here and there’s no internet in Khronos House. This is intentional. You should be fully present, in the moment.” There were nods around the room. The instruction letter had told us that. “Second, you are free to take photographs in the house and grounds, but please do not try to photgraph myself or any of the staff. You’ll understand that I value my privacy.” Again, we nodded.
“Finally, please note that the front door of the house, the south door over there, is not open. To enter or exit the house, you may use the north entrance where you came in, or one of the side doors. We have a tradition at Khronos House that the south entrance is only opened at summer and winter solstice, so you will walk through it in three days’ time, on your way out, but until then the door is locked.”
Lord Sanna smiled again. We had all stepped closer to the stairs, closer to his flame.
“Now that’s out of the way, let’s get some food in your weary bellies!” He nodded to the butler, who’d been standing in a doorway, and from somewhere the wail of a bagpipe rose. A young man in full Highland dress appeared, playing a lively march, and we followed him into the dining room like so many mice behind the Pied Piper.
After dinner I slipped out a side door into the grounds. The grandfather clock in the hall had struck ten, and the sun, a bright flat pendulum, was skimming sea and golden sky. I took a path down to the beach. My unease had evaporated. Over the meal, conversation had begun to flow as we’d relaxed over Lord Sanna’s hand-dived scallops and aged beef, as we’d sipped rich Minervois then moved onto port while we nibbled oatcakes with Blue Murder, as we’d dipped silver spoons into gooseberry fool with Amaretti biscuits. I was chewing a thought, a passing comment from the Japanese physicist, like it was treacle toffee. I was eager for what the morrow would bring.
It was high tide. I walked a little way along the narrow crescent of sand, stepping over stranded clumps of bladder wrack. I’d taken a cigar from the humidor in the lounge and lit it to keep the midges at bay, though I now realised that late in the evening there were fewer of the insects around. Still, I enjoyed the taste of the tobacco, the sense of adventure, of subverting expectations, of standing at a border, preparing to cross. The sun slipped behind the low silhouettes of the Uists, the sea crunch-hissed on the shingle, and the cigar smoke slid slowly behind me as I watched the sunset. To my surprise, I was happy.
I turned back, and only then realised I wasn’t alone. Lord Sanna was leaning on a rock near the path. He might have come just to watch the sun set, as I had. But as I passed with a polite greeting, I felt those dark eyes boring into me. He was handsome, the way a golden eagle is; close up, the eyes looked older than the wealthy middle-aged body. They were sharp and wise and full and hungry all at the same time. He didn’t move, but his gaze prickled my shoulderblades all the way back to the house.
There was very little structure to the workshop, other than that after each sumptuous meal, one of the group gave a twenty-minute talk about their work. The rest of the time we were free to wander, to chat, to discuss the deep or trivial questions that arose from hearing about a field so different from one’s own. The first day was bright and warm, and after breakfast and the first talk — a reading from her work by a Finnish poet — most of us wandered into the garden. I fell into step with the Colombian sculptor.
I’d noticed the south-facing front of the house when we arrived, but in the light of a June morning it had a radiance like a Turner painting. The pillars and curlicues of pale sandstone were almost luminous against the steep heathery hill behind, the formal rosebeds in front glowing like tongues of fire. We wandered to the great locked door at the centre. It was flanked by two titanic figures in high relief, winged and nude, carved from a marble that matched the colour of the building’s façade. We stepped back, wordless, to admire the sculpture. The figure on the left was that of a young man, every detail of sinew and musculature leopard-lithe. His left arm reached over the arch of the door to meet the right arm of the figure on the other side: an older man, bearded and grandfatherly, the hint of a stoop in his powerful frame, marble skin hanging loose in folds and wrinkles. The sculptor’s skilll was extraordinary.
Where the two hands met at the top of the arch, they held between them an intricate globe carved from a much darker stone, so dark that it was like the void that is the pupil of an eye. I paid it little attention at first, because I was drawn to the long scythe the old man was holding in his left hand. The shaft was something like bronze, and it stuck out from the façade like a flagpole so that the head of the scythe was directly in front of the door but a couple of feet out from it. The scythe blade was of the same black stone as the globe at the point of the arch. At that time of summer morning, the shadow of the blade fell in a dark crescent on the pavement to the side of the door.
“I would give my eyes to carve something like this,” said the sculptor in a hushed voice.
I looked again at the object the titans were holding. “I think that’s an armillary sphere,” I said.
“Well spotted,” said a voice behind us, startling me. Lord Sanna was standing on the grass by the path. “Not many people would recognise that.”
“Excuse me, please, who was the sculptor?” asked the Colombian.
Our host half-chuckled. “I’m afraid that’s lost in the mists of time,” he said. “It came from Greece. In the nineteenth century, when this house was being built. Ruined temple, don’t you know, abandoned, left to the sheep. Not saying I condone that sort of thing, but it was brought back, cleaned up. Put back to its proper use.” His eyes flicked towards us as he said that, as if judging our reactions.
“Extraordinary,” said the Colombian. “I tell you, I would give my eyes to make something like this.”
“Oh, I hope that won’t be necessary,” said Lord Sanna, laughing quietly as if at a private joke. “That won’t be necessary.”
By evening, a thick haar had risen from the water. Although the day had been warm, we were glad a fire had been lit in the central hall, and after dinner all eight of us gravitated there. Lord Sanna was nowhere to be seen. I sipped an excellent Glenfarclas and went back to examining the photographs.
There seemed to have been a Kairos Workshop every twenty or thirty years since the early nineteenth century; the first group photograph, from 1838, bore the title The Second Kairos Salon at Khronos House. There were ten young men in that group, and two women, all solemn-faced and soft-edged. One of the men looked familiar, dark hair swept back from a face punctuated by moustache and penetrating eyes. I looked for a list of names, but there was none.
“Anything interesting?”
It was the mycologist, a tall Ugandan woman.
I pointed to the man in the photograph. “Don’t you think he looks like Lord Sanna?”
She leaned in to look. “I do see a resemblance. But I find it hard to tell. Perhaps there is a familial connection? An ancestor?”
“Perhaps,” I agreed. We wandered on to the next few photos. From the dates, it seemed that the time between workshops had got longer as time went on, but the number of participants had decreased. The later ones did all have name lists beneath. I was surprised at some of them. Dmitri Mendeleev in 1855. Robert Louis Stevenson in 1873. Emmeline Pankhurst in 1901.
It was impossible not to let the fire and the whisky carry my daydreams to a place where my name was as well-known as theirs. My attention drifted from what the mycologist was saying. I suddenly realised she was waiting for a response to something.
“Sorry, say again?”
“I was asking, do you have a spouse, a family?”
I flinched. “No,” I said.
The mycologist gave me a speculative look, her head on one side, heavy golden earrings catching the firelight. “Me neither,” she said.
“I’m not…”
She put a hand on my sleeve in a placatory gesture. “That’s not what I mean. What I mean is, all of us in this group that I’ve talked to so far, all of us are unattached.” She lowered her voice. “Do you think there is something unusual here?”
The mycologist’s question prickled the back of my mind through the next two days, but I dismissed it as paranoia. There was far too much else happening. Conversations shuttled and knotted, warped and weft a tapestry, a honeycomb. I paced the garden or the beach, in sun and mist. There was a hum of bees. The outline of my next monograph condensed from the haar. I was excited as I hadn’t been for years. The politician and the carpenter argued about social housing. The poet took to standing on the shore declaiming, rolling rhythms on her tongue like rhubarb rock.
None of us wanted it to end, but we all knew the effervescence of that first fermentation would have to settle to the sweat and gristle of maturation. On the last morning, the summer solstice, we exchanged numbers and email addresses over breakfast, and the mycologist volunteered to set up a WhatsApp group when we were back online. At eleven o’clock, we gathered for the group photograph. Lord Sanna appeared, the first time I’d seen him in a day or two, with a camera and tripod. A Nikon F2, someone said. I didn’t realise it was a film camera until Lord Sanna told us that he’d post us a print when the pictures were developed.
We trooped back into the house for a light lunch. We were to gather in the hall, ready to leave, at precisely 1:15, so that we could walk out the south door at 1:25 BST. Local noon.
At 1:20, Lord Sanna came down the great stairs as he’d done the first evening.
“Ladies and gentlemen! Friends, I can now say! It has been my great honour to host you this week. On this summer solstice day, in time-honoured tradition, I will now invite you to step out through the south door of Khronos House. From there, Sandy will pipe you to the boat and John the boatman will take you round to Sanna. There’ll be a minibus to take you from there to Glenfinnan in time for the train to Oban.”
From outside, we heard the stuttering of a set of pipes starting up. I glanced at the grandfather clock: 1:23.
“I trust that your work in coming days will bear fruit that testifies to the fertile soil of your time here,” Lord Sanna went on. “My secretary shall be in touch with each of you about your funding in due course. I shall follow each of your careers with interest, and I hope that many of you will stay in touch with each other, as many alumni of previous workshops have done.”
The clock ticked to 1:24. Lord Sanna crossed the Persian carpet, took an ornate brass key from his pocket, and unlocked the door. The key turned easily in the lock and when he swung the door open it moved lightly, silently. Sunshine and the warcry of the pipes dazzled into the hall, glinting off the face and pendulum of the grandfather clock, gliding on the dark furniture, gathering and scattering the hidden galaxies of the air. A butterfly, a Cabbage White that must have blundered in another door earlier in the day, caught the light in its wings and danced out into the gold and green.
It was 1:25. Lord Sanna stood inside the door and shook hands with each of us as we stepped out. There was a lightness in the air, a bubbling of talk and laughter, back-slapping and well-wishing. I took Lord Sanna’s hand, the warm flesh of it, the soft salted pressure of fingerprints and palms, and did my best to match his grip and gaze. Then I stepped across the threshold, Old Khronos to my left and Young Khronos to my right. The shadow of the scythe lay directly on the path, just in front of the door, and I perhaps imagined the cold slicing my neck and shoulderblades as I passed through it. Just beyond the shadow I saw the butterfly on the ground. It had died.
I didn’t notice Lord Sanna close the door again after the last of the group was out. The piper was marching in slow measured rhythm towards the jetty. Our bags had already been taken to the boat, so we had only to follow, a loose column, two by two like Noah’s animals.
“My goodness, I am tired,” said the mycologist. Her face was ashen. I felt my own energy draining. The centre of my visual field started shimmering. I hadn’t had a migraine in years, and not until the jagged glitch expanded outward did I recognise it.
The twenty-minute ride in the RIB, bouncing in soft Atlantic swell, was agony. My head was on my knees, the halo spreading out until it hit the edge of my vision and disappeared, and then the pit of the headache began. Somewhere behind me, someone threw up.
“It didn’t feel that bad on the way over,” the beekeeper said as we docked in Sanna.
“I must have drunk more than I thought last night,” said the physicist. “The Scottish whisky…”
“Big night?” asked the boatman. “Don’t worry, pal. There’s some tea and stuff waiting for you.” He nodded up towards the carpark where the minibus was waiting.
Sure enough, outside the minibus was a little table with an urn and eight little cups. The driver — a different chap from the one who’d driven us three days earlier — told us it was a traditional herbal tea, good for nausea and hangovers. A bright bitter smell came from it. We downed our cups, and as we set off on the twisty road east most of us dozed. My headache faded. By the time we clambered out of the bus at Glenfinnan the conversations and plans for collaboration were re-awakening.
The train to Oban was quiet, and our group were the only passengers in our carriage. The rolling stock was old, and it was no surprise that the wi-fi wasn’t working. I was a little more surprised that even now, no-one had any phone signal. Indeed my phone, as well as a few others, seemed to have been completely drained and refused to turn on. We shrugged it off. The purple-brown of the hillsides and the dark slashes of forestry plantations passed the dirty windows, and as the train rattled on we settled into relishing the last few hours, freighted with promise and wistfulness and fire.
At Oban we got a connection to Glasgow. The new train was busier. As we settled into our seats, I picked up a discarded Metro. The front page showed nightclub photos of some celeb I didn’t recognise. I flipped through, skipping the headlines about Trump and Putin and Xi.
“Looks like nothing has changed in the world,” joked the sculptor, looking over my shoulder.
But I had stopped at a page showing Team GB athletes on their way to the Olympic Village in Los Angeles.
“I didn’t realise this was an Olympic year,” I said.
“What?” said the mycologist.
I pointed to the page. “I pay so little attention to sport. I suppose it’s going to be all that’s on TV in a couple of weeks.”
“That can’t be right,” said the mycologist, leaning in for a closer look. “The next Olympics is not until 2028.”
I handed her the paper.
“Someone is playing a trick on us,” she declared after a minute or two. “Look.” She pointed at the date on the front page. 21st June 2028.
We passed the paper from one person to another, some of us silent and some twinkling in merriment at the joke, pointing out one headline after another.
FIGHT NOT OVER, DECLARES TAIWAN GOVERNMENT-IN-EXILE
TRUMP-VANCE CAMPAIGN HITS TURBULENCE?
ROMEO BECKHAM TO WED GIRLFRIEND KIM
“It’s a psychological experiment,” said the mycologist. “I believe this whole thing is an experiment.”
“It can’t be,” said the politician. “I mean, how could something like that possibly be orchestrated?”
The argument went on, in hushed voices lest the other passengers think we were crazy, until we reached Glasgow. It was late in the evening then, the sky in the west glowing over the city. I looked around the station for a newsagent, but there was none. The barista at a Tinderbox concession was packing up. I marched over to her.
“Sorry, this is going to sound weird,” I said. “But can you tell me the date?”
The barista looked up from tying a bin-bag. “Twenty-first of June, ’s far as I know,” she said.
“What year?”
She straightened up. “2028,” she said, in the cautious tone kept for drug addicts and crazy people.
“OK,” I said. In the background, the disjointed voice of the tannoy was announcing Platform 3 for the 2115 Scotrail Express service to Edinburgh Waverley. A flock of Rangers fans were shouting something I couldn’t make out and there was the whirr of pigeons. Across the station, the mycologist was talking to a couple of Transport Police officers. I sat down heavily on a cold metal bench. The sounds of the station faded, until all I could hear was an ice-sharp singing.
The police didn’t believe us, of course. Who would? I went back to London to find my job and my flat gone. The letting agency had dumped my possessions at a Red Cross shop. My old colleague Jasper had packed the contents of my desk into a box and kept it in a storage cupboard in the crumbling concrete shell that housed the History Department. I picked through the dead biros and gummed-up USB sticks and excavated my books. The rest I stuffed in a bin.
Three months later, I was on a train back to Glasgow. A single hard-shell suitcase held all my worldly possessions, but my bank account (which had remained unaffected) held a decent chunk of money, the first installment of the promised grant. I was painfully free. The ribs and femurs of my book burned within me, but I sipped a can of Punk IPA and looked out the window at the rain and sheep. There was something I had to do before I could settle to my work.
From the Holiday Inn, I phoned my ex-boyfriend’s cousin, a scallop diver, in Oban. I’d met Finn a few times before Neil and I broke up, and had always got on well with him. He was waiting at the station when I arrived the next day, the wind from the sea scourging the dregs of London from me.
“Boat’s ready,” he said, leading the way.
It was a longer sail from Oban, following the path of the ferry past Mull then veering north and around Ardnamurchan Point. The autumn water was swelling and shivering with the westerly wind. Yet I felt no nausea this time. I stood with Finn on the deck of the flat-faced little boat and watched the coastline sliding from the sea and gannets like needles stitching wind to water.
By early afternoon, we were tying up at the jetty at Khronos House. Finn asked if I wanted him to go with me. I shook my head.
Rain started spitting as I walked up from the beach. For the first time it occurred to me that Lord Sanna might not stay at Khronos House all year round; he could be in Edinburgh or London or Nice or wherever the landed gentry went in October.
I walked up to the south door, the two statues of Khronos leering at me. I banged the ornate brass knocker as hard as I could, its dull report scattering through the hall on the other side. I walked along the front of the house, and peered through the windows into the lounge. The leather armchairs were swathed in dustsheets. The side doors and back door were locked.
A greyness settled in my stomach. I trudged back to the south door and examined the lock. I leaned in to the arch, running my finger over the pale sandstone, wondering if there was something hidden in the doorway itself. I looked up at the scythe then, the dark stone blade at the end of the metal shaft. I took a photo, zooming in as closely as I could with my mobile. I did the same with the armillary sphere.
As I was about to leave, I saw a gardener’s secateurs on the ground at the edge of a rose border. I picked them up, feeling the heft in my hand. In the greyness, a rage condensed and gritted. I took a few steps back and swung my arm, judging weight and distance, aiming at the blade of the scythe.
“I wouldn’t do that if I were you.”
I froze mid-swing. I knew the voice, but when I turned to see the speaker I didn’t see the middle-aged man I’d expected. A young man in an old-fashioned mackintosh and tweed bonnet stood in the path. I recognised his face, although he was clean-shaven now.
“You’re in that photo,” I almost whispered.
He shrugged. “What are you doing here?”
The rage in me rose like puke. I gripped the secateurs hard, and took a step closer to him. “What have you done to us?”
Closer, I could see his face was younger, but the eyes were the same. Ancient eyes, like a bird of prey’s.
Unexpectedly, he sighed. “This happens once in a while. You’d better come in, I suppose. Though I imagine your friend with the boat might want to get away before the tide gets too low.”
Lord Sanna led me round to a side door and into the kitchen. He sat me at a heavy oak table and gave me a cup of coffee, then disappeared into the depths of the house. He came back with a heavy leather-bound book and laid it on the table in front of me.
“It’s always the historians and the classicists,” he grumbled. “Not to mention that I’m usually away for the winter before anyone manages to get back and poke around.” He opened the book, turning the thick pages carefully until he came to an engraving. A tumbledown Greek temple on a forgotten hillside. The statues of Khronos half-buried in earth and rubble.
“Before I go on,” he said, “you should know that legally, this is all covered in the agreement you signed when you accepted the invitation to the workshop.”
“The agreement?”
“Don’t you people ever read the fine print? The clause about being compensated for your time.”
I said nothing, and he carried on. He told me the whole story. How he’d met Georgie Byron at school in Aberdeen. How he’d joined him in Greece in 1810 and found the temple with the statues. How he’d deciphered the hidden text that told of their function. How he’d had them excavated and built into the house. How he’d experimented over the years, learning how to use them. How he’d taken slices of people’s khronos and in return given them kairos, their critical moment, their perfect opportunity.
“You see, if people still knew their Greek,” he said, “or if English had more than one word for time, more people would probably catch on. But everyone wins with this, really.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but shook my head instead. I felt dizzy, but even then I recognised it as an ambiguous and shape-shifting dizziness.
“No, really,” he said. “Think about it. You’ve got an idea now for a new work, and I’ll bet you a thousand pounds that it will be a bloody good book, that in five years’ time you’ll be lecturing at Oxford or hosting your own television programme or whatever you want to do, seeing your work make a difference. That’s come from your kairos time here. In return, I’ve got three years of your khronos, you and all your cohort. I’ve helped dozens of people make an immeasurable impact on the world. That seems reasonable to me.”
“But…”
“But you might live three years less?” He shrugged and sipped his coffee. “How do you know that? What if staying in that godforsaken pillbox another three years meant you developed a brain tumour from London smog?”
I said nothing. My fury was transmuting into something more complicated and less righteous, surfacing huge and slickly glistening, the tangled offspring of the white whale and golden calf. I could see my book, the shine of my name on the cover. I could see the reviews and hear the comments about major new breakthrough and rewriting the field.
He stood up. “Well, I think your boatman there is probably getting anxious. I’ll escort you back.”
He walked me through the garden as far as the beach, the west-slanted rain drumming the skin of the umbrella he carried. He was right; Finn was pacing the jetty.
“It’s been a pleasure, Miss Price,” he said, shaking my hand. Muscular fingers still pressing mine, he leaned in so close I could feel his warm breath on my ear and smell his musky cologne. “Remember the agreement. Read the fine print.”
“Dr Price to you,” I snapped. The muscles around my eyes tensed as I examined his face. There was a gleam of humour in the depth of his dark irises.
I swallowed. “Thank you,” I said stiffly, though later I regretted that. Then I turned and walked to the boat. It was time to catch the tide.
Thank you for reading! If you enjoyed this story, let me know with a like, comment or share!
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Knockansheen
When I was little, I loved reading the ancient folktales of the Scottish Highlands. This is written in homage to those tales, re-weaving some of the stories in a modern setting. This is the first of three episodes.
Khronos and Kairos was a wonderful and very evocative story. As I read, it played like a movie in m imagination and I was there...in the house! Thank you for an excellent and thoughtful read.
Great story. Thought provoking. I’ve been thinking about it the last few days. Would I trade a few years of my live to achieve a goal. When I was younger I probably would have said yes but looking back the journey is the reward. There is no sense of achievement when things come too easy - back to the grind 😀