From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (124 page)

"A
few weeks before she had started to have nightmares, visions of things that were horrific. I don’t know where they came from, but she told me of barren landscapes, and creatures that defied any form of nature, terrible things. Then she started visiting the old ruins and the lower garden more often, disappearing for nearly the whole day sometimes. I tried to find her a couple of times, but she wasn’t there. The first time I was worried that she had left, but she turned up every time, after a few hours or even as late as the evening. She had been doing it since the dreams had started. The last time, the time that she didn’t come back, I just presumed she was doing whatever it was that she did down there. I didn’t like to ask, I was just happy that she hadn’t left. Maybe I should have asked."

"You said that wasn
’t it."

"Yes, that wasn
’t it. After she disappeared completely I didn’t hear anything for months, but then one night as I slept I heard her voice in my dream. She was talking to me from wherever it was she had gone to."

"And where is that?"

"I don’t know. The conversations were never that clear, dream-like. I never heard her in the day, or even while taking a nap, it was always during deep sleep. She only came to me in my dreams."

"And then what?"

"I started having nightmares. I thought they were just bad dreams, but they weren’t. Strange visions of dark landscapes, monstrous creatures, just like she'd had before she went, and then I would hear her voice, far in the distance, calling out to me, but I could never find her, never catch up."

"That
’s all I can tell you Reginald. I never found her in the dreams, never saw her alive again, and never spoke to her properly since that day."

"You
’re telling me that if I slept in this house that I might be haunted by my wife?"

"I don
’t know, it may be that she just haunts me, but maybe."

"Ho
w did you come to meet this demon that brought her too you?" I asked him.

"He came looking for me."

Sitting in the kitchen, my gun pointing at him, Laurence Miles was a different man, a troubled one. I don
’t know if he ever really wanted to harm anyone by his actions, or whether his actions had been just the same as mine - the crazy acts of the desperate. In a way I guess he was just like me. His love for a woman had driven him to the extreme, and I hadn’t done much different had I? That didn’t change my hate for the man, but when it came down to it, I didn’t think I wanted to kill him.

"Are you going to kill me?" he asked.

I sat for a while, watching him, as he watched me, trying to decide what to do next. The man had stolen my wife from me, and lied to her, kept her for himself, and probably never once considered the pain and torment that he had left me with.

"No I
’m not going to kill you. But you are going to sell me this house."

"The cottage? But it
’s been in my family for generations. I don’t think I could."

"It
’s your choice Laurence, but that is the price for your life. I will buy it for a fair price, and you will leave, never to come back here. If you don’t, then I guess I’ll be buying from the local authority when they claim the un-owned land, unless you have an heir?"

"No, no heir."

"Good, otherwise I would have to kill them too. I don’t really want to have to wait while they declare you missing and then dead, and trust me when I say that they won't find you."

Two weeks later I moved into Temperance
Vale cottage. Laurence took his money and headed I don’t know where, back to London maybe, I didn’t care. I was just glad that he went. In the end he seemed relieved to be rid of the house, and even shook my hand before he climbed into the carriage that was sitting outside the front of the house, waiting to take him away. My last words to him were a warning to never return unless he wanted to die.

It was strange for a while. The house was quiet. I’m not sure what I was expecting when I slept there for the first time. A visit from an apparition of my wife, or strange other-worldly dreams? Maybe, but there was nothing.

The second day I walked down to the old ruins that were nestled half hidden in the trees down the slope towards the lake. I hadn
’t been round all fourteen acres of the gardens yet, and when I came across the old chapel and the family graveyard in the bottom corner of the gardens, just where another path led off down to the lakeside, I was quite surprised.

I had a walk around the tin
y, enclosed burial ground, and inside the building. Most of the graves had hard stone slabs pulled over the top of the earth, decorated, carved with flowers and other symbols, but one amongst them was just a simple headstone and grass. Carved into the stone was just one simple word, no epitaph, no last words, just the name.

Marie.

It must have been strange for him, for Laurence, to go through the pretence of burying her even though he knew that she wasn’t dead. I guess he had to go through it. Otherwise folks might have talked.

Apart from just two more momentary incidents, my strange experiences ended there in those gardens back in 1934. The first was ten years later, almost to the day.

They don’t always tell you everything in the newspapers. They don’t now, and they certainly never did back in 1944, during the Second World War.

The accounts were there of course. It was quite a while before I was back in London and able to find the time to read a newspaper, and when I was, the war had torn the city apart s
o badly that it was difficult to find a newspaper to read in the first place.

But it was there, glaring at me in black and white, somewhat slimmed down and hidden in a small column, right in the corner of the page, dwarfed by the invasion headlines.

I don’t think that I was the only one who saw it that day, but I’m pretty certain I was amongst a very few people. You see, D-Day was one of the most chaotic experiences of my life. I would imagine most people who were there would say the same thing, except their reasons would probably be very different to mine.

I was posted the year before onto HMS
Warspite.
I’d like to say I stood aboard that ship heroic and everything, but as part of the ships fire crew, standing up on the deck looking out across the Channel that day, I must profess it was one of the most terrifying and awe-inspiring moments of my life. When you are carrying a roll of fire blankets and a tool kit, it’s very hard not to feel small when faced with a sea full of ships, stretched out across the Channel as far as you can see. I was told afterwards that nearly seven thousand ships took to the sea that day, and I can well believe that. It was an amazing sight.

Early that morning, we started the bombardment of the coast. No, not the famous Omaha Beach
that all those films are about, though that wasn’t too far along the coast from us. No, we were supporting the invasion of Sword Beach, which was further south, and as the time came for the landing craft to hit the shores, we were busy providing covering bombardment to try and pin down that damn defence line that was the bane of the invasion.

I had been in quite a few engagements aboard the ship during the war, but nothing compared to the bombardment we inflicted upon the coast that day.

Just before they sounded the all quiet, and the guns ceased firing, there was an accident up on the deck with one of the ammunition cases, and a fire broke out as a result of it. We got our alarm and went running across the ship as fast as we could.

It turned out it wasn
’t an accident at all, but when ammunition for the guns was involved we had to presume the worst. It was nothing to do with ammunition when we arrived there. One of the smaller turrets had overheated and caused a bit of panic.

It was as I backed out of the fir
ing bay that I saw it. The others in the crew were heading back into the ship as fast as they could go, and I was at the rear, moving slightly slower than the rest.

I was up on that small stretch of deck alone, and I caught a glimpse of the vast panorama t
hat was the invasion fleet, all those hundreds of landing craft heading toward the shore. The air filled with a chilling silence as all the support ships ceased firing, allowing the landing craft the space to approach the beaches in those quiet few minutes, without fear of being hit by their own fleet as well as the enemy. The defence guns were still blazing but we were far enough out that the noise wasn’t that noticeable.

The fog and the rain that had been causing such poor visibility during the whole of the morning cleared, and the sun came out. For that brief time it was as though there was no war going on, and that the guns that had fallen into silence would never fire
again.

This might sound like a surreal thing to experience, but it wasn
’t the silencing of the guns, or the clearing of the weather that made my jaw almost hit the ground. It was what I saw in the water.

From my position up on that deck I had a pretty clear
view of at least three quarters of the water surrounding the ship. I would say that very few people were looking where I was looking at the precise time something I’ve never been able to speak of before turned up at the Normandy landing.

I can only guess
as to why it was then that it appeared, swimming underneath the ship. And my guess is the sheer volume of traffic across those waters, and the constant booming of the shore bombardment must have roused it from its sleep, because I sure as hell don’t think that anything quite like it would have ever been seen swimming in the waters on a nice summer day down at Brighton Beach.

No, I wouldn
’t be surprised at all to hear that I was the only living human being ever to set eyes on it. Everybody with any sense was looking east, towards the coast, towards where every personal hell a man could have was coming true for many of those brave souls that would take to the beach during that miserable day.

What was strange about our guest? Well, let me tell you this. I think
that if you took every ship on the ocean between England and France that day, and you placed them all together and bunched them up real close, the creature that I saw swimming away into the Atlantic Ocean, as quiet if it was just a six-pound cod, could have risen up and carried them all to America without even blinking an eye, if it even had any eyes.

When I first saw it at first, I thought that it was a shadow of a storm cloud, and one that had appeared right out of nowhere. But I glanced up at the sky, a
nd frowned back down at the water, because like I said, the sky had cleared, and the sun was shining. I think it was only the glare from the sun piercing the sea and shining off that thing’s back that showed its presence at all.

It was gone as quickly as i
t had arrived, speeding off underneath the water, leaving just a little back current and a thin white line of foam as the ocean tried its best to handle something the size of a small island deciding to move faster than a ship.

No one from that day on ever
mentioned seeing anything strange, and for fear of being ridiculed I never said a word to anyone, I just ducked through that doorway, back into the ship, and carried on about my duties, barely even thinking about the creature until the war was over and I was back onshore in London.

I was standing in Piccadilly, drinking a hot cup of broth and wondering what the hell I was going to do with m
yself now that the war was over, other than go home to Temperance Vale. I had found the remains of a half-decent copy of the newspaper from a few days after the landings. it was nearly a year old, and I didn’t expect to find anything in there, but damn it if I didn’t see a small caption, right in the corner.

Local folks along the southern coast and all the way up to Cornwall reported strange tidal-wave activity that lasted no more than an hour. Only a few small fishing boats were damaged.

I guess my friend took a trip all the way round the south coast and then took a left at Tintagel.

You know, the creature I saw in the water wasn
’t the only leviathan present that day. You can’t but remember that beauty of a ship,
Warspite
. She was one of one of the most magnificent things to see.

Did you know there were seven other
Warspites
before that lady sped across the ocean? I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more.

She was a strong one as well, with a heart of fire. I heard a few years later that that old girl refus
ed to crawl into the breaking yard and be torn apart. After all she had been through, they finally decided it was time to retire the old girl, but she wasn’t giving up, and certainly wasn’t being put down without one last show of strength. She grounded herself a few miles from the yard and forced them to take her apart piece by piece.

The one remaining moment, and it was just the slightest of moments, didn’t happen for another twenty-five years, in 1969.

Almost to the day that Marie had vanished on the ban
ks of the canal, and so many years later, I think I caught a glimpse of another world.