David T Craggs

The year is 1997 and David Grant, a retired Games teacher, is watching a rugby league match between two of his local schools, Eastfield High and Thornes Lane Comprehensive, in the West Yorkshire city of Calderton. In the previous matches he'd watched between the two schools the Thornes Lane teams had always been too good...but not on this occasion. In September Eastfield High had had an intake of excellent rugby players from its three main feeder schools and this game is far too close to call.One boy in particular catches Dave's eye...the Eastfield scrumhalf. Everything about him reminds Dave of a player called Michael Black, or Chimney as he'd been known to his mates because of his tall stature and mop of jet black hair, who had played such a prominent role in Dave's 1962 team when it won The Three Counties Cup. The boy is a brilliant rugby player. He leads by example, expecting his team mates to follow, and expresses annoyance when they don't. And, dare I say, he shows an arrogance way beyond his years, if indeed such a word is appropriate when referring to a schoolboy. He is even tall in stature and also has a mop of jet black hair. In fact the similarities between the two players are uncanny.The Eastfield High team goes on to win, and at the end of the game the young scrumhalf is joined by a man with already greying hair who has also been watching, but from the opposite touchline. As both cross the pitch and approach Dave, he finds the man's features strangely familiar. The greying man is in fact Chimney Black himself, who reveals that he is the young boy's grandfather.Dave cannot help but allow his mind to drift back those thirty-five years to the year 1962, allowing him to re-live those glorious two terms that culminated in his team winning The Three Counties Cup, with a certain lad called Chimney Black playing a `blinder' of a game.

When Leonardo da Vinci painted his Last Supper he did not know that on the table in front of Jesus Christ was a shallow wooden tray, not quite square in shape and measuring about the span of a hand across. Laid out in the tray in a special pattern were thirteen pieces of pot, varying in both colour and shape, and each one with a Greek letter engraved into it. During the proceedings Jesus gave out the pieces to his disciples, keeping one for himself. Over the next half century the pieces travelled far and wide with their owners, then became lost to the world.A chance finding of a Dead Sea Scroll almost two thousand years later revealed an account of the Last Supper. It also revealed that if mankind did not 'mend its ways' God would destroy the Earth and all that lived upon it. But he did give mankind a get-out. All thirteen pieces of pot had first to be located then re-assembled in their origin positions within a wooden square by the leaders of the thirteen most powerful nations in the World to show their commitment to making the world a better place.The task of locating the pieces fell to a professor of archaeology at an English University. Once done 'Christ's Holy Square', as he called it, was re-assembled at the UN. But that wasn't the end of the story for mankind did not keep its promise. God was about to wreak his revenge when he discovered a threat from far beyond the Sun's boundaries.