The Dream II
The room, as it has always been, is in darkness, until the moon reappears from behind a great bank of night-time cloud.
Silence surrounds the room; the silence a physical entity, such is its power.
As her eyes grow accustomed to the darkness, she is able to take in her surroundings. She sees the bed; she sees the desk, covered in parchments. She crosses to the window, staring out across the desolate Sussex Downs. They look vaguely different, yet still so familiar.
This is no dream! It is patently altogether more real. She can hear the nocturnal sounds wafting in through the open window; she can smell the clean countryside beyond; this is not her time!
The door opens and she ducks away from the window, seeking refuge in the shadows. She feels foolish. This is just a dream, she reminds herself, in spite of her previous thoughts.
The short, robust black haired woman who has just entered the room pauses, staring into the darkened corner. ‘Who is there?’ she asks softly, holding aloft her candle.
Gloria’s heart skips a beat as she stifles a gasp. The woman heard her! She is in the dream!
‘Yes, Isabella, my dear,’ responds a cold, hate filled voice from beyond the room. ‘I be here!’
Gloria frowns as she recognises the voice.
She is not alone in her recognition. Gasping in terror, Isabella turns back to the door. Her retreat into the centre of the room brings her closer to Gloria’s hiding place.
The black cloaked figure, his face concealed beneath a deep hood, steps into the room. He walks with a limp, his back hunched. Illuminated by the moonlight, the dagger he holds gleams, as wicked as his cruel laughter.
Gloria covers her mouth to stop herself crying out as the man throws back his hood. She obtains for the first time a clear view of Samuel Wylams, the Master of the Scrolls.
Her eyes widen in shock.
The familiar face is dirty, covered in an unkempt growth of stubble, a mask of evil; the nose is crooked, clearly once broken; his left eye is missing, a scar running all the way down that side of his face; his mouth, twisted with hatred and pain, leers at Isabella. ‘The time for retribution has arrived!’ he croaks, and despite his limp, lunges at her with unnatural speed.
So fast does he move that Isabella has no chance to evade him. The knife finds its mark, buried to the hilt in Isabella’s chest, and the candle falls from her grasp, extinguished before it hits the ground. A look of bewildered shock passes across Isabella’s face momentarily, and then she falls to the floor, dead.
Samuel Wylams removes the knife, licking clean the blade.
Gloria cannot help but whimper behind her hand, clasped ever tighter against her mouth.
Sensing he is not alone in the room, Samuel Wylams looks to the darkened corner that is Gloria’s refuge.
Samuel Wylams cannot see her, but his remaining eye bores directly into her soul.
Samuel Wylams lunges at the shadows, brandishing the weapon he has just used.
Gloria screams as she ducks to one side to evade him. The knife slashes though the flesh of her left arm, causing her to cry out in pain.
She stumbles and falls.
A maniacal gleam in his eye, Samuel Wylams approaches her once more.
Gloria shuffles back, until pressed against the wall she has nowhere else to go.
Samuel Wylams lunges at her.
Then everything is plunged into blackness.
June 1987
Gloria awakened to find herself cowering on the floor beside the door that led to the ensuite bathroom. She stopped screaming, but could not stop her body shaking. For several minutes she just sat on the floor, sobbing, rocking back and forth. Eventually, once the tears dried up, she wiped her eyes and slowly stood.
She immediately clutched her left arm in pain. Wincing, she stumbled back to the bed and snapped on the bedside light.
Her nightgown was ripped, her arm oozing blood through the bandage placed there by Doctor Garrett.
Changing into a fresh nightgown, Gloria returned to her bed a little calmer and sat, deep in thought. Had she ripped her nightgown during her brief dream induced sleepwalk? Had she knocked her arm heavily, causing the healing wound to open and bleed freely once more? Alternatively, had she somehow travelled back in time and actually witnessed Isabella’s murder? The sane part of her mind told her that was not possible.
At least she now knew why the voice, distorted with hatred and rage, sounded so familiar. She realised she should have put a name to it when it issued forth from Wilma’s lips.
Samuel Wylams – revealed to her for the first time: the spitting image of Allan Barncroft; so like him, despite the evil disparity; so like him, yet still so different.
Was it Allan then, not Wilma, who was the reincarnation of Samuel Wylams? Maybe she was after all destined to live out Isabella’s last hours and die a horrible death – at the hands of the man she loved.
Gloria felt that someone, somewhere, possessed immense power. She felt suddenly positive that someone was manipulating her in some way. This person – whoever they were – wanted her back in the past. They had been giving her clues as to the purpose, but she had not been able to understand them.
As she twisted her fingers around the chain of her grandmother’s locket, she wondered whether she was thinking insane thoughts. Were events finally starting to make sense? She sensed she could find the answers she needed in the handwritten manuscript – probably in the last chapter.
Events were getting out of hand. Whether it was all in her head, or as frighteningly real as it seemed, Gloria decided she wanted to know exactly what faced her.
She picked up the manuscript, and in spite of her exhaustion, turned to the last few pages and started to do what she had not done since she was a child: she read the end of the book without reading the rest of it.
As she settled down, the temperature plummeted further in an instant. Booming laughter echoed all around her as she leapt to her feet, glancing fearfully in every direction. She recognised the laughter. She would never forget that maniacal laugh.
Samuel Wylams!
The laughter came from nowhere, yet was everywhere. It grew louder, more hysterical, until it was all encompassing.
‘Why won’t you leave me alone?’ she screamed. ‘Be gone from this time. You don’t belong here. You belong in the past!’
The only reply was the increasing volume of the laughter.
‘Well if you are in this time, then I wish I was away from you! I wish I was back in your time…’
Still the laughter increased in strength.
Gloria tried to drop the book and clasp her hands over her ears in a vain attempt to eliminate the noise.
Oh my God, I can’t move!
Suddenly Gloria felt sick to the very pit of her stomach. The room seemed to spin, almost as though she was very drunk. Her skin once again prickled and burnt, almost as if electrical surges arced agonizingly through her body. The air around her sparked and sizzled.
Oh Jesus, what’s happening?
All of the painful, bizarre sensations she had felt once before increased in intensity. The room spun faster and more erratically, became unfocussed, then began gradually to dissolve, receding dimly into the distance. Her entire body felt as though it were aflame. It hurt so much that she was screaming, yet no sound came from her lips. She felt as though she were floating, that her feet seemed not to touch anything.
The somersaulting of her stomach increased.
A roaring in her ears obliterated all other sounds.
Then blackness engulfed her.
Part Three
Future’s Past
Autumn 1536
Isabella Neville, Mistress of the Scriptures, had been reciting stories to various gathered groups of adults since she was eleven. Storytelling had always been a natural and much envied talent, which in 1508 had won her the admiration and enduring devotion of Prince Henry. As a temptress of sixteen, Isabella, one year the Royal
Prince’s junior, kept their friendship secret. Though they met in person only a handful of times amid a great deal of secrecy, nobody discovered their all too brief, but very passionate, illicit interlude of romance. Isabella’s talents at spinning believable stories had paid dividends on more than one occasion.
She vowed never to forget the days of bliss she and her Prince spent together, and though the pair seldom saw each other after he ascended to the throne, they remained friends. Now they rarely communicated, but Isabella knew the King still loved her in a platonic capacity, and it could only be thus, for the King had found the true love he had always yearned for in the arms of his lovely young bride, Jane Seymour.
Isabella was delighted for him, as he had been delighted for her some years earlier when she had married James Trevayne. She had known it was hopeless waiting for King Henry to marry her: theirs was a doomed relationship from the very start. They had both known he could never marry her, for the singular fact that she was not of noble blood.
When Isabella married James in the summer of 1520, the King sent his blessing, an act that caused many questions, all of which remained unanswered. There remained a profound sense of mystery surrounding the King’s reputed friendship with the woman.
Of course, Isabella felt duty bound to divulge the information to her new husband who, although shocked, agreed it best kept secret, and he promised not to tell a soul.
When he discovered his wife’s natural talent for storytelling, James Trevayne persuaded her to write down all of her stories for future generations to enjoy. Thinking this a wonderful idea, Isabella immediately set about doing so and James, in a rare moment of humour, had called his wife Mistress of the Scriptures.
Eight years into her marriage, Isabella met Samuel Wylams, a dangerous, bewitching man whom she discovered, too late, to be a powerful warlock originally named Sawyl Gwilym. Inextricably ensnared by the preternatural sorcery of this evil man who claimed to be a disciple of Merlin, Isabella enjoyed little of her enforced participation in the rituals of Black Magic. She tried to escape his clutches on numerous occasions, but such was the enormity of Sawyl’s power, as if compelled by some indescribably powerful and unbreakable spell, Isabella found she was unable to stay away from him.
Eventually her cousin Peter and James rescued Isabella, their unilateral love for her finally breaking the Warlock’s spell. When Sawyl tried to snatch her back again, James fought him off valiantly, thankful for the fact that the powers of Sawyl Gwilym were, apparently, limited rather than limitless. In the ensuing fight, James mortally wounded Sawyl, who staggered off into the night.
He had not been seen nor heard from since.
*
One fine day in the autumn of 1536, Isabella swept into the Great Hall of Neville Manor, her long raven hair cascading in glorious ringlets over her shoulders and down her back.
Situated on the northeast outskirts of the village of Ashfield, which itself lay some miles southeast of Hever in the Weald of Sussex, the Neville’s ancestral family home was an impressive stone manor house set in extensive grounds, surrounded by a moat. It was the only place Isabella had ever really felt to be home. Having returned there once more to live with her husband following her father’s death, Isabella had tried to persuade Peter to live with them, but personal etiquette decreed that they deserved privacy as a wedded couple, and so he remained at his own house in Surrey. He would not even intrude upon their privacy when he came to visit, choosing instead to take a room at the local inn.
At a little over five feet, Isabella was a good deal shorter than the majority of her husband’s guests, whom she greeted cordially. What she lacked in stature, however, she made up for in charm, exuberance and beauty. She could never enter a room without everyone therein becoming instantly transfixed and aware of her presence.
‘I beg forgiveness for keeping you waiting, kind sirs,’ she smiled, her loud voice echoing above the idle chatter. ‘Time passes with such speed when I am writing.’
The guests nodded in accordance with the request, and Isabella strode swiftly across the Great Hall to the enormous open fireplace that dominated the far wall. There she greeted a young man who stood, meekly observing the others.
Peter and Isabella both inherited their looks from their mothers, who had been sisters. Isabella’s mother had died in childbirth, whilst Peter’s mother married Richard Neville after her own husband’s death, shortly before Peter’s birth.
A wild and beautiful woman, Isabella was not particularly slender, although her proportions were near perfection, with broad shoulders and a robust waist. Peter was a shy and handsome man, small of shoulder, lithe and trim. Despite each being the antithesis of the other, extraordinary similarities were there for all to see, and the cousins were often mistaken for siblings.
With eyes that sparkled like sapphires, iridescent in the afternoon sunlight that streamed through the windows in the west side of the hall, and barely an inch taller than Isabella, Peter was the odd man out amongst the gathered guests. As he turned at her greeting, a smile formed on Peter’s lips. ‘Isabella, my darling, I began to fear you might not grace us with your presence.’
‘I am truly sorry. You know how it is when I write. I lose all track of time.’
‘Indeed I do. Have I not often waited long hours for you in the dark of night?’
Isabella shot him a warning look. ‘Take care what you say, Peter. Speak not of such things when so many prying ears might hear. You know not who might be listening!’
Though Isabella loved her husband without question, she had not lain with him for some years. She told James this was because she did not wish to disturb him when she wrote long into the night. However, the truth was that following the rescue from her incarceration with Sawyl Gwilym, she and Peter had developed a much closer relationship than might be considered decent.
Isabella and Peter saw nothing wrong in their illicit relationship, although they knew others would not share this opinion. If declared heretics, they would certainly be condemned to death for witchcraft, and because of such views, they made certain nobody discovered their secret, especially James.
Admonished, Peter cast his eyes to the floor. ‘My apologies, I did not think.’
‘No matter,’ smiled Isabella. ‘I am certain nobody here heard your careless words.’
Peter hurriedly changed the subject. ‘Where is James? I have seen nothing of him!’
‘He is here somewhere, probably with Sir Henry Fitz-william – you remember how those two are when together!’
Peter nodded, leaning close to whisper softly in his cousin’s ear. ‘I have taken my usual room at the inn for the night. Shall I see you later?’
‘Of that there can be no doubt! You know I look forward to your irregular visits. I shall place a candle in the window of the parlour to let you know when James is abed. When you knock I shall admit you.’
‘Fear not. I shall be here!’
Isabella smiled, glancing around. ‘There is James. Now I must circulate, afore loose tongues gossip.’
*
That night, as Isabella waited for James to retire to his bed-chamber, she thought for the first time in an age of Sawyl Gwilym. That dangerous heretic, who had seduced her into his vile beliefs with his glib tongue and bewitched her with his potent sorcery, now seemed once more to ensnare her mind. She fought against thoughts of him. If she thought once more of him as Samuel Wylams instead of Sawyl Gwilym then his powers would be dead to her. He must surely be dead, she reasoned, else he would certainly have attempted retrieving the parchment scrolls she had stolen from him.
James and Peter rescued her just in time. By stealing the scrolls before he had the chance to either use or commit to memory the intricately worded formulae and incantations, she had prevented Samuel from becoming a hideously all-powerful man. No one would know just how close the world had come to enslavement by the evil Warlock.
It was possible Samuel was still alive, though with each passing day, less pro
bable, and he would surely not rest until he had retrieved the scrolls from her possession, by any means, and punished her for her betrayal. If he did still live, then time was surely running out for him.
Two years ago, during her first few days of freedom, before his disastrous second attempt at abduction, Samuel made terrible threats against her. James insisted the threats were nothing short of idle, lacking in commitment and substance, made in desperation. Isabella knew the evil man far too well to remain complacent. She knew that somehow he would carry out his threats of vengeance, from beyond the grave if necessary.
She thought of his threats, and then of what she had written. From her journals and her short stories, Isabella had progressed to full-length works of fiction, whose basis lay in truth. She had discovered the written word could be a potent force, as powerful as any evil spell cast by the Warlock. If used to reveal truths which some people might prefer to remain secret, it could also wreak revenge on the unwise and unwary.
Already she had completed two full-length tales of concealed truths. King of Saints, she called the first, revealing her love for the King, while Realm of Dark Knights concerned her love for her cousin.
Isabella wished to be remembered when she was gone from this world, though there was little chance of her being forgotten for many years yet. She concealed the two manuscripts, their whereabouts revealed only in a wax-sealed letter to James, who promised to open and read them only upon Isabella’s death.
Upon completion of the second tale, she had decided to set down on paper the strange and dangerous tale of Sawyl Gwilym. If he committed any act against her, if he still lived, then he would regret it. Even if he were dead, when she too left this life, everyone who was wise and who read the third tale, which she decided to call The Master of the Scrolls, would know exactly what kind of man he had been. There was no way his maleficence could escape the clutches of the truth.
The written tale was not yet complete, however, and Isabella prayed nothing happened to her until it was.
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