by F. G. Cottam
She slid something across the table, an envelope, which Adam picked up, worrying at the glued flap with his thumb.
‘He was renting the barge at the end from the man to whom he sold it. That was a practical arrangement well suited to both parties. This is your legacy.’
The envelope contained a cheque made out to Adam by his father in the sum of ninety thousand pounds. Adam put it into his pocket. When he got back to England he would bank the cheque and make out one for an identical sum to his mother. It would provide him with much relief to be able to do that and he felt grateful to his father for his inheritance. It was not proof of love. He had been given that already.
‘I have a half-brother.’
She nodded. ‘Rabanus Bloor. They would not send an assassin for you, I do not think. You are too important. They might think you too strong. They could send Bloor. He would relish the challenge and Dray would enjoy the symmetry. You might merit, in their thinking, the distinction of a blue-blooded execution. If they sent an assassin for you, it would likely be Proctor Maul.’
Adam observed as her face grew pale and her lips bloodless, and her fists clenched on the table top. She reached for her cigarettes. He would not ask her questions about this assassin, Proctor Maul. He would not put her through the ordeal of recalling him. Her pallor and the dread in her voice when she said his name had pretty much told him what he needed to know.
‘Did my father help you cross?’
‘He did. Your father found the eighth gateway. He was sailing alone, for pleasure, manning a yacht single-handed in the Aegean Sea. It was almost seven years ago. He thought he found the gateway by chance.’
‘Chance is what we call events when we don’t yet know their purpose.’
‘Good,’ Delilah said, ‘you’re learning.’ She smiled. Her eyes narrowed and sparkled. Her teeth were very white between ruby lips. Her expression was sultry in repose. When she smiled, she was simply beautiful. It was the sun announcing itself at the centre of a glorious sky. ‘Your father was immune to the charms of the Miasmic Sea.’
‘Tell me what that is.’
‘It is a wilderness of water where men become trapped, their thoughts frozen and their actions no more than a slavish routine. They are aware but have no will. It is a kind of hell for mariners. It is the effect of some spell conjured centuries ago. It was designed to protect the eighth gateway from intrusion, but the spell went wrong and a sort of contagion spread.
‘On Endrimor it is treasonous even to speak of the Miasmic Sea. It is one of our world’s shameful failures, a living, spreading symbol of the corruption of magic. The people of earth are not the only species guilty of polluting their world.’
‘But my father was immune.’
‘He was. It did not intrude upon his mind in the slightest. Though he saw some strange and haunting sights there, they did not impinge upon his sanity. Once he made landfall, he looked for the son he had fathered. Not a happy discovery, though he spoke little about it. He found me. And in him, I found my escape.’
‘Do many cross?’
‘No more than a handful, Adam. It is very dangerous. And I have told you of the penalty once discovered and confronted, if you are successfully pursued.’
‘The shadow world sounds a terrible place. All cruelty, corrupt magic and political tyranny, and that’s without its natural monsters.’
‘They are not really very natural.’
‘I am surprised more people don’t try to escape from there. They wouldn’t have that much trouble. On the contrary, looking like you.’
Delilah studied him for a moment, as though careful of how much to confide. She said, ‘Some people are drawn to darkness. The traffic, slight and secret as it is, runs both ways and always has.’
‘Who is this Dray?’
‘Sebastian Dray is a politician and plotter, a diplomat and disseminator of what passes in the shadow world for news. He takes responsibility for the gateways. Bloor would not have been able to come here without seeking Dray’s permission.’
‘Bloor didn’t use a gateway, did he? He turned up at the place where I received the clarion call. He was seen in the forest at Cree, in Scotland.’
‘He would not need a gateway, you are right. But the sorcery that delivered him to where he was seen would not have been accomplished without Dray’s consent. His presence there, however brief, was a signal of the escalation.’
‘Not very clever of him, was it, to warn us?’
‘He arrived after the clarion call. It was after you found the artefact, which warned your professor and resulted in you coming here after McGuire told you to. His purpose was not to warn but to intimidate. He was flexing his muscles.’
‘He sounds like a wanker.’
‘You don’t run a harbour bar without gaining some understanding of English slang, Adam, so of course I’m familiar with that insult. But you should not underestimate him. He is cunning and brutal and he can fight. You are a taint to him, no more. Do not expect sentiment from Rabanus Bloor. You will not get brotherly love.’
‘That’s all right,’ Adam said. ‘He won’t be getting any in return.’
They were silent together for a while. She had seen him unmanned in his grief of the previous evening. She was glamorous in a way that was so exotically potent he thought that it should have felt dangerous, but actually he felt very comfortable with her. He liked her enormously. He had thought her particularly attractive the first time he had ever seen her and nothing had happened since to make him feel any differently.
‘Will you attend the funeral?’
‘I dare not,’ she said.
‘Will anyone?’
She shrugged, but did so with her eyes averted.
‘I will go,’ Adam said. ‘I will honour my father. I will not have him go to his grave alone, unlamented.’
‘He does not go unlamented. Please don’t go to the funeral.’
‘I’m nothing if I don’t.’
‘You sound like a de Morey.’
‘Well. I am one.’
‘Bloor might be there.’
‘We have to meet eventually.’
‘Jesus, Adam. They might send Maul.’
‘I’m going. I’ll not be scared away from the funeral of the man to whom I owe my existence. I loved my dad. They can send who they like. I might not win, Delilah, but whoever they send, they’ll know they’ve been in a fight.’
Martin thought building a website the best method. He could have gone to the press, but in the first instance it would have to have been one of those crank publications that survived by publishing sensational conspiracy theories.
His new friends were averse to technology, but the internet was a necessary evil. What did they expect him to do, hawk hand-printed pamphlets on street corners? He was not some agitator from the eighteenth century. He was charged with treating the world to some select revelations about the Great Lie and he would quite reasonably do so in the most effective way possible.
The web designer he was paying for the job had finally finished his tweaks. They were ready to launch the site. Martin scrolled through the pages feeling quite proud and satisfied, with a mounting sense of excitement at just how convincing it all was. Well, of course it was. Sensational and shocking as it appeared, it was the truth. He gave the techie his three hundred quid in cash, considering the money well spent, and showed him to the door.
He was back in London, in his father’s house. His father was away on a round-robin business trip to Brussels, Monaco and Berne. He had told his father by phone of his decision to leave university. He had not been precisely honest about the reason. His father had sounded philosophical.
Martin looked at his title page. He liked his picture byline: it made him look like one of those dashing foreign correspondents from the golden age of newspaper reportage. He scrolled through the story, trying to view it as objectively as he could and considering, as coldly as he was able to, the sensational claims it endeavoured to substantia
te.
The Spanish influenza epidemic that had followed the Great War and devastated Europe was the consequence of a scientific blunder. The virus was a mutant strain created in the medical facility at Fort Bragg in North Carolina shortly before the Americans entered the conflict as participants.
They had been concerned about tetanus. It was a common problem among the wounded in the filth of the Western Front trenches and once contracted, it was almost always fatal. The infection spread quickly and the patient died of shock before he could receive effective treatment.
Sebastian Dray had isolated the outbreak of infection to a carrier from Chicago, a volunteer called Harry Doyle who had survived the war. He left Fort Bragg in July of 1918 having been given his inoculation on the sixth day of the month. He had a fever on the crossing, but it was not thought a matter of concern when the ship’s doctor examined him. He was fine when he reached Le Havre on 17 July, from where his unit marched through the lanes of a dusty Flanders summer to Ypres.
They were involved in heavy fighting, during which Doyle’s infantry unit distinguished themselves. They were physically robust men, mostly from the Midwestern States of America. They were well trained, well equipped and for the most part, saw the war as something of an adventure.
It wasn’t until after the Armistice and the return aboard troopships to the eastern seaboard of the United States that doughboys began to become ill and die rapidly and in bewildering numbers. Aboard some of the vessels, the mortality rate was sixty per cent. The men died drowning on their own phlegm in the twenty-four hours following the appearance of the first symptoms of what history came to call the Spanish flu.
‘An existing tetanus vaccine was first made available as early as 1890,’ Dray had told Martin. ‘But the American Department of War did not want to pay for stocks of it on the scale that would have been required for their soldiers in 1917. Their mistake was to make responsible for the manufacture of their own serum a second-rate chemist called Oscar Freemantle, working out of a third-rate medical facility at Bragg. Their sin was to administer what Freemantle had concocted before carrying out the necessary trials.’
‘Hubris,’ said Slee, ‘or penny-pinching. Either way, what the Americans did cost fifty million lives in Europe alone. Imagine the grief, Martin. Imagine it.’
Martin had looked at the documentation spread out on the table in Dray’s library, at Freemantle’s research log, at the formula he had concocted described in a chemical equation, at the pattern of infection, at Doyle’s corresponding movements and the smiling image of the uniformed infantryman, photographed in black and white at the centre of his happy troop. It was convincing, but it was still circumstantial. It wasn’t solid proof.
‘They would have to exhume Doyle to provide the most damning evidence of all,’ Dray said. ‘He prospered in the peace, becoming one of Chicago’s leading business figures, and he was buried with some ceremony in a lead-lined casket. He carried a mutant virus that for several weeks and perhaps even months of his life was horribly virulent. Its exact character is a mystery to which his well-preserved remains hold the key.’
‘We think your world ought to know the truth,’ Slee said.
And Martin had nodded, because he did too. He had nothing against America as a nation. He had little appetite for conspiracy theory generally. But he did think a deliberate attempt to conceal such a vast and significant historical truth an insult to anyone with any intelligence.
The truth would out. He would tell it. To do nothing would be to perpetrate the Great Lie. When he made this parting observation to Dray, he could see the pleasure in the man’s face and it made him feel proud to see it. In the shadow world, he was in no doubt he had enjoyed the company and confidences of two great men.
After launching the site, Martin waited for an hour before counting the number of hits it had scored with curious browsers. The number was modest, at twenty-five, but the comments were encouraging. His room at home occupied the attic. His dad was not due back for three more days. He went down to his father’s basement den and rooted around among his old vinyl albums until he found the one he was looking for. The album was by King Crimson and its title was In the Court of the Crimson King.
His dad had a stereo system worth several thousand pounds, with a turntable precisely engineered by the Scottish high-end audio company, Linn. He put the record on the plinth and switched the power on.
It was over an hour before he went back up and discovered he had registered 500 hits on his site. Almost all the comments were approving of his having exposed a shocking truth. Very few questioned his findings.
That was at three o’clock in the afternoon. By seven o’clock, the site had scored almost half a million hits. Hostility to its claims was marginally higher, but the general tone of the comments was complimentary. Some he was obliged to translate from Arabic languages to read. It was clear that not everyone held the world’s most powerful nation in great regard.
At eight o’clock he went to the Flask on Flask Walk, a few hundred yards from his father’s house, for a pint of beer. He thought that he might enjoy a couple. He was feeling pretty good about himself. He’d sunk most of his second when his mobile rang at eight forty-five and he gave his first considered comments to a national newspaper.
He had done all the research himself, he said. For an amateur historian, he acknowledged it was quite a coup. Yes, he agreed, it had happened almost a century ago, but that did not invalidate the facts.
Just wait, he said, until he revealed his findings concerning the hushed up nuclear disaster in Tashkent in 1973. That was a lot more recent, and its impact was still being felt. Because the Russian Cold War scientists who had devised the hasty serum used to strengthen the immunity of those exposed to radiation had in fact achieved the opposite. They had given the world AIDS. Could he prove it? Watch this space, said Martin. My friend, just watch this space.
In the severest moment of the winter, in the last week of January and the first of February, the Miasmic Sea would very likely freeze. It had done so every year for more years than men could recall. When it froze it lost its potency and I would be able to walk to the eighth gateway across its petrified wastes in happy solitude, my senses unimpaired by the madness sewn within its depths as I escaped from the Crimson King’s court with my duty accomplished.
The count was a gracious host. I could not have wished for a better companion. To my utmost delight, he was truly a champion at arms. He was spry, skilled, cunning and exceptionally strong. He was in the habit of schooling his sons, Arthur and Morgan, and it was my pleasure to vary their practice at combat with frequent tests against myself. He believed the variety would make them better accomplished and the proof of this was plain to see after a few weeks, which brought the count evident pleasure and pride.
It is ruefully said and often by some men in England that the poor are always with us. So it was in the count’s domain with the parasites that protected him. They were not generally abroad by day, but once night fell their cold and menacing presence could be felt. Since the nights in winter grow longer and encroach upon the days, awareness of them became ever more acute as the season progressed.
This was their effect on me. I did not discuss them with the count. They were a necessary evil and I did not want to offend him or slight his hospitality. I was his guest and grateful to him for his advice, his shelter and his most welcome company.
They fed on Vorps. They lacked the wit to hunt down the feathered creatures for themselves, but the count had lures and traps placed at intervals to catch the great birds. He told me this himself, saying that both breeds were the consequence of sorcery gone wrong. The notion of monsters nourished on monsters appealed, I think, to his ironic turn of mind.
‘Don’t the feathers impede their capacity to feed?’
‘They have become adept at plucking feathers. Nothing interferes with the satisfaction of their thirst.’
I assumed the birds endured this ordeal still living. Bl
ood in a dead creature would thicken and congeal. Plucking would not kill them. Having seen the dimensions of the Vorps in flight, the size and sharpness of their beaks and talons, it sounded a hazardous way to feed. But I did not pursue any greater detail from the count.
He raised the subject only once. ‘They are an aberration,’ he said, to a question in my mind I had not asked of him. ‘They know this. They are doing what they can to adapt to the world in which they abide, but their thirst prevents the kind of advancement of which men seem capable. Their physical and intellectual progress is painfully slow, and their failure encourages anger and frustration. They are not capable of independence. Anger is no ally, though, of subservience.’
‘You fear they might rebel against you?’
‘Do not credit them with the intelligence for rebellion. They would turn on me gleefully, however, if they could think of a way to live independent of what I provide them with.’
At the end of January’s second week I took my leave of the count and his household. I bade a fond farewell to my host and his goodly wife and held and kissed the boys to whom I had become close and whom I would miss most grievously, thinking my own son Simon would do well to find such boon companions back in the land I hoped to see once again. Firstly, though, there was my duty to discharge.
Lastly, the count approached me and gave me a pendant to wear about my neck.
‘No magick,’ he assured me, ‘simply a charm that might bring good fortune. Your adversary is clever and watchful and an alchemist of great potency. Promise me, sir, you will wear the charm.’
I put it about my neck and swore that it would remain there. Finally we embraced, as ardently as brothers might, and I mounted and turned about the horse he had given me with tears pricking at my eyes. I felt I had lost a family anew, the second to be sundered from me in one lifetime. I rode on from that spot believing my spirit and character the better for having met and shared the weeks and months I had with that one true monarch of the shadow world. Writing this, in my dotage, I believe it still. And I still think often of that noble friend.