by John Burke
The light faded as though it had never been, and the noise died away into a faint, musical whisper that shredded away into the morning sky. Dawn stretched sweetly over the earth, and a clean, frosty smell drifted up from the valley.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
As they approached the blackened heap that had once been the castle ruins, they walked not on snow, but on charred grass and hard earth. The battlefield was uncannily still.
Lying on his back, staring up with sightless eyes at the flushed sky, was Mr. Morris—like a burnt-out fuse, thought Nora.
Denis kept close to his mother. She went without faltering to her husband’s body, and knelt down beside it. If tears choked in her throat, she made no sound. His tranquil face, lit with a rapture that had not faded in death, made the thought of weeping seem incredibly foolish.
Denis said: “It was too much for him—too much for any man. Whatever acted through him wore him out in a wonderful flash.”
“That’s why we came to live here,” said his mother. “Now I see. Driven here, we were—he told me we had to come, and no reason there was for it, but he felt it like that and knew we had to come.”
Nora looked around, but there was no sign of the corpses of Simon and Jonathan. Surely they had not escaped? Then she looked into the small mound that had once been such an impressive ruin, and in her mind’s eye she saw the shape of the arch, and bit her lip fiercely, thinking of two human beings, one almost surely dead, the other possibly alive, being dragged in with the retreating spawn of evil.
“Your father was chosen,” said Frank quietly, bringing her back to clean reality. “Perhaps now, but more likely a long time ago, it was decided that he should be the instrument for the saving of mankind. He might have been a descendant of one of the families of White Adepts, just as Simon was one of the Black Adepts. Or it may have been something slumbering in his mind, ready to be awoken when the time came. Or perhaps it is something that is in the minds of every one of us, waiting for the day when it is needed. We do not all respond to the call when it comes.”
Nora said: “Father was chosen—”
“Because he was the best of us,” said Denis. “He was a good man.”
They looked down on that ennobled face.
“Where can we take him?” said Nora.
“No house there is any more for him to lie in,” said her mother.
They stood on the hillside, coming slowly to appreciate the magnitude of their loss. Nora did not feel forsaken, with Frank beside her, but she realised that difficult times lay ahead. He said in a low voice: “Don’t worry: it will work out all right.” She looked up at him gratefully.
“Let him lie until we have been to the village,” said Mrs. Morris with sudden decision.
“But mother, out here—”
“Where else, girl? And what has he to fear now? He is being watched over—as we all are.”
They bowed to her wishes and left Rhys Morris with his face to the heavens.
Nora, conscious of the cold and the inadequacy of her attire, looked down apprehensively towards the village. People were coming out of their houses and up the slope to investigate the strange phenomena that had brought them from their beds or from their breakfasts. Breakfast…the thought of it, with all its everyday associations and the normality it implied, affected Nora more strongly than the sudden realisation of her hunger. The ordinary world, shaken more than anyone down there could realise, was stable and unchanged. In another moment they would be in the middle of it, fussed over, commiserated with in their loss, and subjected to innumerable kindly attentions.
She said: “What are we going to tell them?”
“That’s a thought,” said Denis, halting. “Who’s going to believe the true story?”
“We all know it’s true.”
“That won’t help,” said Frank. “It’s still incredible. If a dozen people had told me a story like this one a couple of weeks ago, I wouldn’t have hesitated in declaring them all insane. No, it’s too much to expect them to accept it.”
“So we’ve got to think up a pack of lies?”
“Whatever we say,” Frank pointed out, “the scientific know-alls would say that it was all an electrical storm, and that we suffered from mass hallucination. That’s reasonable—or that’s what they think. Far more reasonable than gods and such wild fantasies.”
Someone shouted up to them. They waved back.
“Well?” said Denis. “If they’re willing to accept an electrical storm, it would certainly dispose of all questions about Brennan, Jonathan, and Simon. We can just say they were—well, lost.”
“Don’t sound so cold-blooded,” Nora protested.
“We’ve got to be honest about it. There’s going to be an enquiry. Do you want to be grilled as a suspected lunatic—even as a suspected murderer, if we persist in telling improbable yarns—or are you willing to bow to the people who can always pop up with an explanation for weird natural storms and associated phenomena? Mother”—he appealed to her seriously—“what do you think about it? If you want us to go ahead and tell the truth, we’ll do it. It’s up to you.”
She shook her head. “Asking my advice, is it? There’s not often you do that, Denis bach. You know best…there’s right you are, I’m thinkin’. We wouldn’t be believed. We know what happened, and it’s inside us that we’ll remember, and perhaps that is best. Tell them what you like—there’s no matter.”
“We can tell them it was something strange we didn’t understand,” said Frank. “We don’t know what happened. We were dazed. They can hardly complain about that.”
They looked at one another and accepted this without a word. Then they continued down the hill towards the party of villagers who were coming up. Unthinking, they passed through what had once been a barrier—that impassable force that Jonathan had brought into being to keep them imprisoned and to keep out anyone who might intrude on his schemes: those schemes, thought Nora, that had come to such a shocking end for the warped little man.
The isolation of the weekend was gone. They were surrounded by friendly, questioning faces—faces that became grave when the news of death was told. There was friendship and warmth, and Nora found the assistance that was offered more welcome than she had expected. She felt tired now that the strain of the night was ended, and saw that her mother, too, was pale and haggard. There were friends on all sides: some of them had in the past seemed stupid or uninteresting people, but when they came forward like this in a time of stress she realised how much a part of her world they made up. It was easier and so much more comforting to succumb to their eager attentions.
Mr. Morris was brought reverently from the side of the hill to the village. Of Brennan and the other two there was no trace.
“Burnt up, isn’t it?” said many of the villagers who had stood in awe at their windows and watched the incredible lights playing about the castle. “A storm like that there has never been here before, not in our memory nor the memories of our fathers and grandfathers.”
It was better to leave things that way.
Men went up to study the charred ruins and to make wild guesses. They turned over stones that had been subjected to such an intensity of heat or pressure that they had become mere blocks of compressed powder. And where had the bulk of the ruins gone? The whole affair was fantastic, and only a fantastic explanation would have been truly satisfactory; but the people who could give that explanation knew better than to attempt it.
The books had gone. A blackened leaf drifted down on to the snow every so often, but it was unreadable. There was nothing left of that ancient lore.
Nora, walking with Frank across fields in springtime, when the snow had finally been coaxed away by the warm sunshine, thought sometimes of the books and the adepts who had sought them across the centuries. Perhaps, she thought, there are other copies, and it’s only a matter of time before more seekers come to this place and perform their rites before the place where the archway stood. What then? She could
not repress a shudder, and Frank would look down at her with concern. “What’s the matter, Nora?”
“Nothing. Just unpleasant memories that pop up every now and then.”
“You must forget them.”
She forgot them…except for occasional moments of doubt and fear for a future in which the adepts came again, searching for the dark gateway.
In spring and summer the trippers and visitors came and lamented the destruction of the old landmark. The ruins had been so picturesque. They wandered disconsolately over the grass that was already beginning to establish itself over the shattered mound, hiding the last vestiges of the ruins that had been more than an ordinary landmark. The ruins that had been a beckoning, alluring signpost across generations of blackness and evil, were now no more, and in their place the clean breezes played over the grave of Rhys Morris, lying at peace in the unconquered earth.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
English writer John Burke was born in Rye, Sussex, but soon moved to Liverpool, where his father was a Chief Inspector of Police.
Burke became a prominent science fiction fan in the late 1930s, and with David McIlwain he jointly edited one of the earliest British fanzines, The Satellite, to which another close friend, Sam Youd, was a leading contributor. All three men would become well-known SF novelists after the war, writing as Jonathan Burke, Charles Eric Maine, and John Christopher, respectively.
Burke’s first novel, Swift Summer (1949), won an Atlantic Award in Literature from the Rockefeller Foundation, and although he went on to become a popular SF and crime novelist, all his work was of a high literary standard.
During the early 1950s he wrote numerous science fiction novels that were published in hardcover as well as paperback, and his short stories appeared regularly in all of the leading SF magazines, most notably in New Worlds and Authentic Science Fiction.
In the mid-1950s he worked in publishing, first as Production Manager for the prominent UK publisher, Museum Press, and then in an editorial capacity for the Books for Pleasure Group. In 1959 he was employed as a Public Relations Executive for Shell International Petroleum, before being appointed as European Story Editor for 20th Century-Fox Productions in 1963.
His cinematic expertise led to his being commissioned to pen dozens of bestselling novelizations of popular film and TV titles, ranging from such movies as A Hard Day’s Night, Privilege, numerous Hammer Horror films, and The Bill. He also did adaptations of Gerry Anderson’s UFO TV series (under his pseudonym, Robert Miall). A member of the Crime Writers’ Association, he published many crime and detective novels on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1960s. He also edited the highly successsful anthology series, Tales of Unease.
Burke went on to write more than 150 books in all genres, including work in collaboration with his wife, Jean; and also published nonfiction works on an astonishing variety of subjects, most notably music.
After finally settling in the Scottish countryside, Burke continued to write well into his eighth decade, and in later years many of his best supernatural and macabre stories were collected and anthologized. His latest collection, Murder, Mystery, and Magic, was a Borgo Press original, as was his powerful final novel, The Nightmare Whisperers, completed shortly before his passing. He died on 21 September 2011, aged 89. He is survived by his wife, Jean, and seven children, and is sorely missed by his many fans and admirers. His writing is destined to live on, however, with Borgo Press reissuing some of his classic SF and macabre stories in the near future.