From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (121 page)

But after a few moments, the tears were no longer born of pain and regret, they were tears of hopeful joy, born from the new knowledge I had gained speaking to the stranger.

You see, I hadn’t just found out who he was that last night on Casey Street, not in the least. The questions had gone on for hours after I brought him back that drink, and another a little later on, a double of whiskey that I found in the back of Joe’s office, with a pour of water from the tap.

H
e had coughed as he threw the whole drink back, and then I began to ask the real questions, the ones that would give me answers I really craved, the ones that could change my life.

The stranger, Andre, had sat there on that bed, his wounds gradually vanish
ing before my eyes to become yet more scars on his already ruined skin, and as the night slowly passed, he listened patiently to everything that I cared to pour out at him, and he answered everything I asked him as best he could.

Every question.

He answered them all.

"There are other places aren't there? Places other than this world?"

"Yes, there are many."

"Is that where you followed Nua'lath, to another place?"

"Yes, I followed him to another world. I have followed him to many places."

"How do you go to t
hose places? How could I go to those places?"

"You are a mortal, my friend. You could not open the way to other places without help. I am not one of your kind."

"You're not human?"

"I was human once, but not now."

"I don't understand."

"I said that you pro
bably wouldn't. Let us just say that I was once like you, a mortal human, but I have changed. That is all I am willing to answer about this."

"Understood."

"My wife. She disappeared, just like that, years ago, right in front of my eyes. How could such a thing come to be?"

"Did she step through something visible? Was there a change in the air around her?"

"No, nothing, she just vanished."

"Then I would say that she did not travel to another place. I would guess that someone had a hand in her disappearance. W
ithout more detail, I cannot help. But if you wish to find her, I would first try to discover who would want to teleport her away from you."

"Teleport?"

"It is a means of travelling from one place to another, instantly."

"But, I don't know anyone who would want to do that."

"Then you may have to accept that you might never discover this."

"This creature, Nua'lath. Could he have had something to do with it?"

"Very doubtful. Nua'lath would have very little interest in removing one individual. His activities are on a much grander scale."

"How so?"

"You cannot conquer and destroy worlds with just one minion."

"He has conquered worlds?"

"Yes."

"What? Entire worlds?"

"He has destroyed more worlds than you could imagine, and stripped them of nearly every form of life."

"And he is here now, in my world?"

"No. He has merely visited this world a number of times to increase the numbers in his army."

"How many people has he taken from here?"

"Millions. The war that you were fighting provided countless new recruits to his army. There have been many times in your people's history that vast numbers have been taken."

"Just how big is his army, Andre?"

"If you were to take every person that has ever lived on your planet and placed them together, you may have something close to the number of his minions."

"And you fight these alone?"

"No, I am not the only one. There are many, but we do not fight as an army. There are not enough of us anymore. Once we were one of the greatest forces in existence. Now, most of my brothers and sisters stand amongst the army of Nua'lath."

"They defected?"

"No, they died, and were reborn as more of his abominations."

"Why, Andre? Why do you still fight him, when it seems to me that you stand little chance against so many?"

"If I do not, then he will one day find a way to awaken his kin. When that happens, nothing will stand against him."

You know I don't remember at what point it was that I lost that knife. I generally have the most vivid of memories, but that is one thing I can't place.

It would seem that I am to go home. I no longer have to sit in this hospital. Part of me is happy with that, but part of me is strangely sad.

You know, there is a nurse on the ward who reminds me so much of Marie. She doesn't look like her, but she has the same bright eyes and the same smile. Most mornings she is there, making her rounds. She visits all of the patients to see how they
are doing. She came to visit me this morning, but she was with one of the doctors. I should have been listening to the doctor as he told me that they were going to release me, let me go home, as I had requested. I nodded a few times, but really I was only paying attention to the nurse. I was going home, which was really where I wanted to see out my last days, not rotting here in this hospital bed, but I would miss seeing that nurse every morning. You know what I think she really reminds me of? I think it is of a painting that I saw of Marie, many years later.

In 1934 I sold the shop and the yard at the back for what could be considered a small fortune. I was a very wealthy man.

People I knew asked me why I suddenly sold the business and the building and moved clear out of London, to the north, to Northamptonshire to be precise. Well I saw something in a newspaper that steered my life in a completely different direction.

I was sitting in the office just at the back of the shop, reading a newspaper, when I turned the page, and there, looking back at me, was a young woman’s face. She looked a little different, maybe just a couple of years older than when I had last seen her, but there was no mistaking those long dark locks and the curve of her chin, and those deep, penetrating eyes.

It was a picture of Marie.

Marie, who had been lost to me for more than a decade, was staring back at me from the frame of a black and white painting. How she got to be in a painting that was up for auction in one of the most prestigious art galleries in London was something that took me quite a time to track down, but I did eventually.

I started with the auction house, bidding on the painting. I couldn
’t let just anyone have the picture, the one with Marie’s face on it, the one that was simply called
My Marie
.

It had to belong to me, as she had belonged to me, but I also had to find out who had painted it, who had thought, had the gall to think, that she co
uld be theirs. It had been over ten years since I had last seen that face on the banks of the canal in Edinburgh, and I knew that much could have happened to her during that time, someone would know the answers, and this was my first clue, somewhere to start, the first real link that I had ever had to tracing her.

The trace led me to the town of Temperance once more. Of all the places in the world, it took me back to that tiny village where I had been born, to the home of an artist, a man by the name of Lau
rence Miles.

I had to be careful. I couldn
’t just walk up to his door and ask him where in the hell he had met my wife, and how he'd come to paint her. More than anything in the world I wanted her back with me, but after more than ten years of her missing from my life, I wanted more than that, I needed more than that, needed to know the why, and the how.

That day on the bank of the canal, she just vanished, and almost right before my eyes. There had to be an explanation, and by whatever means, I was going
to find it.

Tracking Mr Miles down was easy. I moved into a hotel in the middle of town and just started visiting the local places. Bookshops, galleries, the library, even the heritage centre, which was a tall thin building with arch windows and a door tha
t was much too big for it. I asked people, and folks started telling me with no little amount of pride, about the town’s sole famous person, that wonderful artist who lives out along the vale lane. He had moved into the town ten years before, with his beautiful wife.

His beautiful wife?

She couldn’t possibly be, couldn’t have married again. Who the damn did he think he was calling her his? I didn’t show my anger in front of the town folks though, I kept it bottled up inside until I could take my car a long way out of the town and into some woods. That Holcroft shotgun tore apart about fifteen trees, and a deer that was unfortunate enough to cross my path. I had to get it out of me like that, because otherwise I would have walked right up to his front door and blown his brains out all over his drive. Some people might say that is just what I should have done.

So I waited, and I stayed in that hotel. I waited until I knew enough about Laurence damn Miles that I could approach him.

I had the time, and I had the money to do it. Money wasn’t a problem for me anymore. I had so much of it from the sale of the shop and the business that I could have lived for three times my life without running short.

Temperance had changed since I was born. Of course, I'd never seen
it back then. But I remember my aunt telling me how small the place was, and that she had been glad to get out of it. There had been fewer than two hundred people living there when I was born, or so she said, but now, the fields had been built on. Overspill, they called it. Men returning from the wars, from many different countries, folks moving out of London and heading north, away from smog and the slums. According to a man I met in the heritage centre the town had grown to nearly twenty thousand people since the end of the war, and all because the mayor had said that land was to be cheap.

I went for a walk the day before I knocked on Laurence Miles
’s front door, along the lane that led up to his house.

Vale Lane, it was called. It was a long lane that led
down to a lake, mostly surrounded by farming fields, apart from the circular path that went all around the water. Along there was a boathouse and half a dozen houses.

The same man had told me where the artist lived, up the lane he said, round the lake and
you’ll see it, perched up on the hill away from the rest of the homes up there. It was up near the forest that spread out towards Wellingborough, the next nearest town, though that was a good three miles away.

So I went on a walk round that lake, passing
only one person, an elderly gentleman with his walking boots on and his walking stick banging the ground in front of him as he trudged his way round the lake in the opposite direction.

I asked him if he knew where Laurence Miles lived, and he did, pointed
right up the lane not twenty yards from where we were standing, and then abruptly said "Good day to you sir". He looked troubled, lost in his own thoughts.

I guess most folks usually are.

Just up the path, about a quarter of a mile, was the edge of the tree line, the one that marked the boundary of the cottage's land, though I was to discover the next day that 'cottage' was not exactly the word you should use for such a place.

Temperance Vale Cottage had been the first building in the area, and dated to way
back in Victorian times. I’m not sure how old it was exactly, but it was old all right, and the building was quite impressive. The man in the heritage centre told me all about how it had been built by the first true Temperance family, the Stensons.

They w
ere rich landowners who had inherited the whole of the valley, all the way to Wellingborough, but they lived in Scotland. Sometime during the Victorian era, they sold up all their land and moved down south, to the Nene Valley. And that was when the original house had been built. He showed me some pictures, sketches they were, of the original house, a vast mansion built mainly of massive, grey granite blocks, with iron-stone eaves and columns. Three floors of monstrosity, and the biggest observatory I had ever seen on a domestic building.

They were star watchers, the Stensons, and Richard Stenson was somewhat of an astrologer as well.

Well, when they built the house, they did just what the mayor had done a century later, and sold off a whole chunk of land over near the flatland that rose from the valley, and this was what became the town of Temperance. Folks moved from miles around to buy their cheap land and start their farming, industries and shops, and Temperance was born, named after the wife of Richard Stenson, Temperance Stenson. There was a photograph of her in a gold-trimmed frame, up on the wall in the heritage centre. To me, she looked like a fine woman, if not a little stern.

As I stood there on the edge of the water, looking
up at the cottage, I realised that something was amiss. It wasn’t the same place that I had seen in the sketches at the heritage centre, and I wasn’t in the same place either. From what I could make out, and my view from down by the lake was obscured by trees mostly, the original grand building had been further down the hill, by a hundred yards.