From Darkness Comes: The Horror Box Set (125 page)

I was nearly seventy years old, and my bones and muscles had started to show the signs of my age. For some reason I had taken to using the summerhouse to spend the day r
eading in. I would take some tea in a thermos, and some sandwiches, and walk the hundred yards down from the main house, to sit there for most of the day. I don’t think I ever did this consciously. Just one day I sat down in there and decided that I liked it. I imagine that this is what had happened to Marie those many years ago. She had found the summerhouse and taken to it.

It was something I did most days when the weather was good. Except this one day it had turned cold while I was down there, I thought
a wind had come off the lake and skimmed up through the trees, but when I glanced down towards the lake, the sun was blaring down hot as anything. If you had been down by the lake that day you would be roasting.

Then as I turned back towards to my book, pu
lling my gown over my shoulders, I noticed something strange over near the ruins of the old house, something very odd.

All across the grass it was spreading, out from where the trees met the lawn, slowly creeping out like tendrils from the central point, t
he archway.

It was frost.

I put my books down, picked up my walking stick, and hobbled my way over to the edge of the lawn. Once there, I stood leaning on my stick to save me from falling over onto the grass, where I probably would never have managed to get up.

It was creeping out across the lawn, like a living thing, like an army of pure white ants making their way across some vast terrain. The edges split, and split again, long thin tendrils winding their way through the blades and across the lawn.

My eyes drifted upward towards the source, that old archway that had been there almost for ever, long before the manor house, dating back to god knows when. The stonework was so rough and chiselled it could have been millennia old.

The frost had nearly covered t
he ivy that grew up over the archway. The leaves were even now curling back in on themselves, strangled by the creeping cold. As I watched, the space between the ancient stonework burst into life, the brightness of the light almost blinding, causing me to look away for a moment before turning my gaze back.

There, between those ancient stones, was a view into another place. As I stood in awe, the landscape inside the archway changed. First it was a blur, a wavering mist, swirling and difficult to focus on, b
ut then the mist settled.

All round the archway it was midsummer, the trees and the foliage were still green, life bursting forth, but between that curved stone barrier was a place of cold winter.

I could see a slope, leading down into a valley, similar to the one that swept away down into the lake, into those blue clear waters, but there in that small doorway was a frozen place, one that had no lake, no hills rising across the valley and into the fields beyond, no town of Temperance. No, in that place there were just endless dry, cold plains. The trees, what few there were, were dead and devoid of foliage. The ground was cracked, and frost coated the land for as far as I could see.

And then it was gone.

In the few moments that I had been given a glimpse of another place, in that short time that the door had been open to me, I had just stood and stared, unable to grasp what was before me, unable to act with what little time I had been offered.

The mists came once more, spewing out like the exhalation of a sm
oker’s breath, and then they were gone. I was left standing on that pathway, watching the frost slowly melt off the ivy, off the grass.

I took a careful step forward, wishing that I had it still in my bones to rush forward, to run through the door, through
to that other place. Would I have been able to survive very long? Would I have just died there in the cold? I probably would have, but for a moment I had been given a glimpse of the place where Marie had gone, and I had failed to follow, failed to act, utterly failed to save her, and failed to at least go there and die the way she might have died. Of course, I didn’t believe she had even died. I thought that she had gone to that place to escape. To be finally free of her prison, the prison, whatever its nature, that kept her from leaving the grounds of the house. That prison that kept her memories from her.

Had she found them in there, in that barren wilderness? Had she somehow released herself? Or had she just taken a single step away from this world, only
to find that the walls were just as high, just as forbidding, as they were here?

That was the last chance I ever had of finding out, and I didn
’t take it. I was too slow to realise, and too old and frail to move like I might once have done. If only it had happened when I first bought the house from Laurence.

Too slow and too old.

Every day after that, I sat and watched that archway. Right up until the doctors told me that I was dying, and that soon I would be gone. They said it was hereditary, that my mind would slowly go, and with it the control of my body. I don’t know if that was true, but I do know that it wasn’t how my mother had died. I barely knew my father, so I couldn’t know if it was how he went.

I don't believe it myself, hereditary my ass.

My story ends here.

I can
’t think of anything else to say, only that I have done things in my life that I’m not proud of, and have missed the chance to do things that I should have.

Sometimes life grabs you by the collar and reels you in, just puts you where you are supposed to be, shows you what you are supposed to do, and other times
it just dangles the prize in front of you and laughs as you fail to notice. I failed to notice too many times I guess.

Maybe in death I might be with my Marie once more, maybe I can be with other folks that I remember from my life.

Looky and Winter, those two old soldiers from whom I had learned so much and listened to so little.

Joe Dean, who I wished so hard that I could find again, I
’d dearly love to know what happened to him. Now maybe I will.

My mother, that lady who gave me life, the one that folks sa
id was the nicest person they ever met, the one who I still feel I stole the life away from. I wish that had been different.

And of course, my Marie, that kind and gentle creature who had, for such a short time, been the centre of my world.

Maybe now I’ll get to see them all again, get to see her again.

I don
’t know how long it will be, but I will welcome it. There is only so much wishing a man can do before he has wished his whole life away.

Someone once said to me that we leave a little bit of ourselves b
ehind with every step we take in life. We leave footprints, and sometimes those footprints cross, the paths cross, and the people you meet at those moments will change your life for ever. I wonder how many lives I have changed, and I wonder if I had turned a different corner at some time, if there had been some decision I could have made differently, that things would have changed.

I have a lot to be thankful for. I have lived a long life. I have met a lot of folks along the way that I liked, and I can sti
ll hear my wife sometimes when I go to sleep, can still hear her perfect voice.

At least there is that, I can still hear her in my dreams.

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Books by Glynn James

Diary of the Displaced Series

There is a place where nightmares are real. It is a dark and terrifying place, hidden from the world we know by borders that only the most unfortunate of souls will ever cross.

James Halldon woke up in the dark, alone, without any food or water, without a clue where he was, and with no memory of where he came from.

It only got stranger.

Diary of the Displaced - Book 1

"The Journal of James Halldon"

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Diary of the Displaced - Book 2

"The Broken Lands"

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Diary of the Displaced - Book 3

"The Ways"

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Other Displaced Books

The Last to Fall

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In 1926 Joseph Dean was just getting ready to hang himself when the man named Joshua stepped into his cafe and changed his life.

He made Joe an offer - one that would mean travelling through the door to another world to find something that had been lost fo
r nearly two hundred years.

Joe would discover a lot more than that in the years that followed.

The Last to Fall is a short novel, and the first in a series following Joseph Dean's travels.

Whispers (Short Stories)

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A companion book to Diary of the Displaced - a collection of Dark Fantasy and Horror Short stories.

Arisen Series

A world fallen - under a plague of seven billion walking dead.

A tiny island nation - the last refuge of the living.

One team - of the world's most elite special operators.

The dead, these heroes, humanity's last hope, all have...

Arisen, Book One - Fortress Britain

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Arisen, Book Two - Mogadishu of the Dead

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Arisen, Book Three
– Three Parts Dead

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License Notes

First published 2011 by Glynn James

Copyright
© Glynn James

The right of Glynn James to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the
authors’ imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval sys
tem, or transmitted, in any form, or by any other means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the authors. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.