The Kings of Eternity (10 page)

“Oh, my God...” Carnegie whispered to himself.

I felt an excited grip on my elbow: it was Vaughan, his face washed in the electric glow.

Together, transfixed, we could do nothing but gape at the great swirling oval of sapphire brilliance that hung in the air before us.

Only then did I become aware, by degrees, of the low droning sound which accompanied the light: it was the almost sub-audible note of an electric generator, an effect felt more in the diaphragm of the torso than in that of the middle ear. It seemed to throb to a steady rhythm which, I noted, had its counterpart in the steady pulsing brightness of the light itself.

Carnegie was on his feet now. As I glanced at him, he stretched out his arm and pointed. “Look!” he cried.

“Christ Almighty,” Vaughan breathed.

I was struck dumb as I beheld that which had provoked the cries of my friends.

There was no doubting it: I could discern a series of shapes moving behind the membrane of the light. Tall, humanoid figures passed back and forth, like the grotesque, elongated caricatures in an Indonesian shadow play. They were fleeting, and faint, but indubitably present - perhaps as many as four distinct figures moving with mysterious and ill-defined purpose behind the illumination.

Then, before I could stop him, Carnegie had stepped over the log and was approaching the light.

“Get back here, man!” Vaughan cried, transfixed, like myself, by either fear or fascination.

Carnegie entered the clearing, dragging the deerstalker from his head and clutching it before him. In an effect at once terrifying and comic, I saw the little hair that he possessed stand upright in the strange energy field created by the supernal oval.

He was moving ever closer, his right arm raised as if to shield his face from the intense heat.

“Carnegie!” I yelled, and then forced myself from the paralysis that had pinned me to the spot.

I vaulted the log and sprinted forward. The energy belting from the light was intense. I felt my hair stand upright, and the heat burn my exposed face. I raised an arm to protect myself and staggered forward. Behind the light, I fancied that I saw the singular figures pause in their business and turn to peer through at us. I reached Carnegie and grabbed at his arm; he resisted me, shrugged off my hand.

“Don’t you see!” he yelled, beside himself in some transport of ecstasy. “Don’t you understand, Langham? They represent all that is powerful, all that is knowledgeable! If only I could join them!”

With a strength that seemed super-human, he pushed me off again and strode on. His absurd brandy glass physique was silhouetted against the light as he sought to leave this place for good. Behind me, Vaughan called at the top of his lungs and dived forward. He caught Carnegie just as he was about to step into - or maybe even
through
- the field of light, and I have no doubt that Vaughan’s timely intervention saved Carnegie from an unknown fate.

At that second, as Vaughan wrestled his friend to the ground in front of me and we tumbled over, the light collapsed with a great inrushing roar of air, diminished to a tiny point no larger than a mayfly, and then popped out of existence.

A profound stillness obtained in the clearing, a silence that rang deafeningly in the aftermath of so much expended energy. We held each other for what seemed like a long time, for all the world like the benighted survivors of some catastrophic shipwreck.

What followed, the events of the next hour or two, are unclear in my mind. In a daze we left the clearing and somehow made it across the snow-covered downs to the Grange. We collapsed exhausted in the library and sought resuscitation in copious drafts of wine.

“The light,” Carnegie said. “I almost...”

“Be still,” I counselled, forcing wine past his lips. His face was red and raw from the heat of the light, and Vaughan and I took turns in bathing his exposed flesh with wet towels.

“I saw figures behind the light, moving figures!” he cried. “Tell me I’m not dreaming, man!”

Vaughan said, “We saw them, too. There can be no denying that.”

I shook my head. “But what were they, Vaughan? What on Earth did we experience back there?”

Vaughan smiled to himself. “What on Earth, indeed. Or what not on Earth...”

“There were intelligences behind the light,” I went on. “We cannot deny that. It was no mere natural phenomenon, such as we speculated before.”

“But what
was
the light?” Carnegie asked.

“Perhaps,” Vaughan offered, “it was a portal between worlds, between this dimension and the next, and the figures we saw were the dwellers in that mysterious realm.”

My head swirled; I had the urge to laugh and cry at the same time. “What in God’s name have we stumbled upon!”

“What indeed,” Vaughan said quietly.

Carnegie stirred himself. “Next week... in eight days from now, the process will repeat itself, perhaps. Promise me that you’ll return! We must investigate this further!”

Vaughan glanced my way, then nodded to Carnegie. “We’ll be here, rest assured on that score, old friend. We’ll be here.”

It was almost dawn before we talked ourselves into exhaustion and retired to our rooms, and midday when we awoke and gathered in the library for a late breakfast. Once again we went over the events of the night before, and made plans to return within the week.

We resolved to keep our discovery to ourselves, and at two o’clock Vaughan and I left Carnegie - scarred and battered from his encounter with the inexplicable, but otherwise unbowed - and arrived in the capital as darkness was falling.

My life in London, the cares and concerns which had weighed so heavily upon my thoughts just two days ago, now seemed distant and unreal, the stuff of another life entirely.

Chapter Five

Kallithéa, July, 1999

Langham did not take up Caroline’s invitation to call round and see her until three days after the exhibition. Had she dropped in and accused him of staying away, he would have claimed pressure of work, made some excuse about the novel not going too well. In fact it was progressing at a steady thousand words a day. What prevented him from calling on her was fear.

He found himself attracted to Caroline Platt; she was a lovely woman, warm, friendly and intelligent. There was something about her that was deeply humane, and it came out in the essence of her paintings. He could not look at the still life of oranges on his wall without seeing in their colour and vibrancy something of her life-force.

He was attracted to her, and it frightened him. He had been so long without a lover, had adapted himself very well to his solitary lifestyle, and while his heart craved her company, his head counselled caution.

Since the exhibition, his head and heart had battled, and on the third day his heart won. He completed his thousand words by midday and decided to call on Caroline and invite her to take lunch with him at Georgiou’s taverna.

He set off along the track to her villa, pausing to stare out across the sea. A tiny fishing boat puttered away from the island, reduced to the size of a child’s toy in the blue vastness. The sun was at its height and hottest, beating down with a relentless dry heat that smote the skin with something like a physical blow. In the shade of his vine-covered patio, he had been spared the sun’s intensity; out here he was aware of its force. It was a good day for sitting in the shade with a simple meal and a glass of retsina.

Caroline was not at home, and he had looked forward to her company so much that he felt deflated. He knocked on the front door, and on receiving no reply stepped from the path and peered in through the big plate glass window that overlooked the pine-clad hillside and the sea.

The lounge was comfortable and homely, lived in rather than exhibiting the stark functionality of so many modern rooms, which looked like set-pieces for interior design magazines. He saw a big, battered sofa, woven rugs, bookshelves...

He squinted. On one of the selves he made out a hardback copy of every one of his novels. The sight should have gratified him, perhaps, but instead - something of his habitual paranoia resurfacing - he felt vaguely threatened.

He moved from the villa and continued along the track, feeling guilty for having pried.

Caroline had mentioned reading one or two of his books, but never the fact that she had every one of them. She had obviously built up the collection over time, which begged the question: why she decided to buy the villa next door to his own?

Perhaps she had heard of his legendary reclusiveness, and resolved to write a feature on the man... He was convinced now that she was a
bona fide
painter, but that did not exclude the possibility that she also wrote as a side-line.

He cursed the treacherous course of his thoughts, but, once in his head, they could not be dismissed.

By the time he reached Sarakina, he knew what he should do.

Instead of taking his table in the shade, he entered the taverna and slipped into the telephone kiosk at the back of the room. It was small and cramped, and reminded him of a confessional booth. He phoned the local operator and asked for an international line, and five minutes later dialled the London number of his agent.

In a day or two, he would know if Caroline was indeed who she said she was.

“Daniel!” Pryce exclaimed, as he did on the few occasions that Langham phoned. “This is a pleasant surprise. You’re not in London, by any chance?”

“What do you think?”

“Somehow I thought it unlikely. How is tropical Kallithéa?”

“Well, it isn’t tropical, for a start. But otherwise it’s as beautiful as ever. I’m ringing to ask a favour.”

“Ask away.”

“I need some information on a painter.”

“Now, if you were connected to the Internet...”

“Sod the Internet. Have you got a pen?”

“I’ve a keyboard, will that do?”

“I want to know about a painter called Caroline Platt. She’s had exhibitions in London, and a gallery on Great Portland Street handles her work. What I really want to know is if she writes. Features. Essays. Even books.”

“Got it. You want copies if I can get them?”

Why not? “Whatever you can get hold of.”

“Why the interest, Daniel?”

He made up some story about admiring her painting and wanting to know more. “I’ll ring back same time tomorrow, if that’s okay?”

“Fine by me,” Pryce said. “And how’s the latest coming along?”

“It’ll be on your desk in December, Pryce.”

He rang off and remained seated, feeling guilty at what he had done, as if the kiosk were truly a confessional and he had withheld a sin from the priest.

He took his table beneath the awning and ordered lamb with butter beans basted in olive oil and tomatoes, with a big chunk of white bread.

He ate slowly, considering Caroline Platt. If she turned out to be another hack after his story, then his disappointment would be colossal. She had taken him in, made him believe that her interest in him, her friendliness, had been genuine - not prompted by the need to muck-rake for profit.

And yet, if she turned out to be what she said she was, and her friendship genuine... then that eventuality was almost as troubling. He was not prepared to admit anyone into his life: it was doomed to failure, tragedy and regret. He took out his note-book and wrote:
The process of living seems to me to be nothing but a gradual accretion of sadness
. The line would find its way into the mouth of one of his characters, sooner or later.

He had given occasional thought to the fat Englishman over the past few days, since seeing him at the exhibition. The fact that he was researching a biography on him surfaced in his mind from time to time like a recurrent headache.

It came back to him now, in a rush, because approaching the taverna from along the waterfront was the overweight hack himself.

Langham watched him with a mixture of loathing and trepidation. There was something obnoxious about every aspect of the man. Even the way he walked managed to annoy. He slumped along, marinating in his own sweat, weighed down by his hold-all which hung from his shoulder and gave him a decided list to starboard.

Langham slipped a hand into his pocket and rubbed the smooth surface of the mereth.

The man reached the taverna and stood beside a table, placing his hold-all on a chair but making no effort to seat himself. He did not acknowledge Langham, but gestured to Georgiou and ordered a beer. As Langham watched, the man rooted through his hold-all and pulled out a book - Langham’s
In Khartoum
, which he had been reading a week ago.

He then surprised Langham by approaching him and holding out the book. “Daniel Langham? I wonder if you’d sign this for me?”

His manner was abrupt, peremptory, but his tone more educated than Langham had supposed it would be. He took the book and leafed through it. The man supplied a cheap biro, slick with his sweat.

Seen at close quarters, Langham noticed how the man oozed perspiration. It popped from every pore and trickled, soaking the collar of his white shirt and creating dark patches beneath the arms of his beige polyester suit.

“Who is it to?”

“Just the signature will do fine.”

Langham looked up. “I like to know the name of the person I’m talking to.”

“Then call me Nick.”

Langham scribbled his signature in the front of the book, taking his time, while the man waited, mopping his brow.

He passed the book back to the man and said, “I understand you intend to write my biography?”

The man - Langham could not bring himself to think of him as Nick - pulled out a chair at Langham’s table and seated himself with one arm on the table-top and the other resting on his knee. Langham wondered if the performance was designed to intimidate.

“I’d like to talk to you about that.”

“I also understand that I’ve given you permission, which is news to me.”

The man maintained a blank expression. It was as if he had decided, long ago, that he should give nothing away facially. Instead, he used body language to communicate: now he leaned forward, threatening, like a Gestapo interrogator.