Darkest Hour (Age of Misrule, Book 2)

by Mark Chadbourn

  “But Protestants might have got it in a Catholic city.”

  “Of course, and I’ve damned them both to hell many times.”

  Veitch tried to read his face. There was a seam of ancient emotion fossilised just beneath the surface. But he kept smiling, his eyes kept sparkling. “What happened to her?” Veitch asked.

  “Ah, you see which way the story is going. We kept our romance a secret from my family and friends for as long as we could, but in a city as watchful and atrociously gossipy as Edinburgh it was bound to come out sooner or later. To say it was a scandal would be to overstate the case. In the wider sense, no one cared about a thing like that, and that is to the general population’s merit. The people of Edinburgh are good people. But in my own particular circle …” He sighed.

  “You got a hard time from the folks,” Veitch said with understanding.

  “My father was apoplectic. My mother took to her bed for days. The rest of my family treated me as if I’d developed some severe, debilitating mental illness. My close friends, who came from the same social circle, were acidic in their comments, but they directed most of their vitriol towards Maureen, who must, quite obviously, have led me astray.”

  “And there was trouble.” Veitch took a long swig of his lager, trying to delay what he knew was coming.

  Reynolds’s face crumpled, but only for an instant before he brought the smile back; in that tiny window Veitch saw something that made him flinch. “There was blood. They found her with her head stoved in on the edge of Holyrood Park. She’d been raped, several times, they said, not just murdered, but humiliated. Taught a lesson, in the good old-fashioned way.” His words were bitter, but his tone was as gentle and measured as ever.

  “God Almighty!” Veitch went to take another drink, then had to put his glass down. He was overwhelmed by a terrible sense of injustice against a man he was sure, in the short time he had known him, was better than most. He felt a surge of anger, a desire to rush out and gain retribution in the most violent way possible, forgetting the crime had happened decades earlier. “Who did it? Who fucking did it?”

  “Oh, no one was caught. Understandably. The rich and well-to-do are always protected by the law. There was an outcry in the city, but it blew over when the next scandal came along, as these things do. Who did it?” He raised his eyebrows thoughtfully. “One of my friends, several of my friends, all of them, my family. I would suppose they are the prime suspects. They were all guilty, whatever the detail.”

  “Didn’t you try to find out who it was? Didn’t you try to get them?” Veitch felt the heat rising up his neck to his face.

  Reynolds shook his head dismissively. “No, of course not. It didn’t matter, you see. Nothing mattered. Maureen was gone. My life was over.”

  The baldness of the statement made Veitch bring himself up sharp.

  “I loved her, you see. I loved her in all the cliched ways-more than life itself, more than myself. We’d devoted ourselves to each other in a way that, I think, people find hard to understand these days. The night before her death we’d spent six hours talking about our life, about what we meant to each other, about the here and now and the sweet hereafter. In all the world she was the only person that mattered. And a few hours later I was more alone than anyone could be.”

  There was a long silence which Veitch couldn’t bear to fill. After a while the emotions between them became unbearable too, so he said in a quiet voice, “How did you carry on, mate? I don’t know what I’d have done … Blimey … His words failed him.

  “Why, I carried on. As Maureen would have wanted me to do. But I carried on a different person, as you would have expected. I went into the law, which made my family very happy. And I never married, which was better than they feared, but not what they hoped. I never kissed another woman. I never smelled another woman’s perfumed hair. I never touched a woman’s skin.”

  Veitch felt a lump rise in his throat. He thought he might have to go to the toilet before he made a fool of himself.

  But then Reynolds said, “Come up to my room for one last drink. I have a bottle of malt that is quite heavenly. I retire early these days. It gets lonely when the night falls.”

  They moved slowly through the quiet, deserted hotel, their thoughts heavy around them. “You’re a better man than me,” Veitch said as they reached the lifts.

  “No,” Reynolds said assuredly. “I lived a life without hope and thus wasted it. In what you told me I can tell you have hope, or at least the potential for hope. And perhaps I can help you.” They entered the lift and he punched the floor number. “I lived a life with nothing to believe in,” he continued. “How could I believe in anything? Family? Friends? Religion? What kind of God would let a thing like that happen? What kind of God was worshipped by the people closest to me?”

  The thick carpet muffled their footsteps. It was comfortingly bright in the corridor.

  “There is a gun in the drawer of my bedside table.” It seemed like a non sequitur, but Witch was suddenly alert, Reynolds was going somewhere. “An old service revolver. A family heirloom.” He laughed. “Fitting, really.”

  Veitch looked at him, but he kept his pleasant gaze fixed firmly ahead. “I’d made my plans, composed my mind and a few nights ago I was ready to kill myself.” His smile made it sound as if he was discussing attending a picnic. “I’d had enough of the drudgery of days. The emptiness of thoughts. The coldness of life. It seemed time for a Full Stop. Wrap things up neatly. The end of my story.”

  “So why didn’t you do it?”

  Reynolds looked at him in surprise. “My, you are a blunt man. I like that. You wouldn’t get that in my family. They’d just pass the brandy and someone would see fit to mention it a few days down the line. Why didn’t I kill myself? Why didn’t I?” he mused, as if he had no idea himself. “Because of my very last conversation with Maureen, that’s why.”

  Reynolds unlocked the door and they stepped into his suite. It was spacious and well turned-out, but still a hotel room; there were no personal touches to show it had been his home for so long. It spoke of an empty life lived for the sake of it.

  “Nice place,” Veitch said uncomfortably.

  Reynolds poured two large glasses of twenty-year-old malt and handed one to Veitch. “It’s a place to rest my head.”

  Veitch perched on the edge of a desk. “So, are you going to tell me, or punish me for a bit longer?”

  Reynolds laughed heartily. “I wanted you to hear my story before I got to the crux of the matter. Stories are important. They provide a framework so we can’t easily dismiss the vital messages buried at the heart of them.” He pulled open a bedside drawer and took out the service revolver, which he tossed to Veitch so he could examine the archaic weapon.

  “Blimey, that’s a museum piece. You’re just as likely to have blown your bleedin’ hand off as your head.”

  Reynolds gave a gentle laugh. “The last conversation with Maureen has never left me.” He lowered himself into a chair on the other side of the desk, put his head back and closed his eyes. “All those years and I can still smell her hair, feel exactly how her hand used to lie in mine. And I can remember every word we said. Most of it, I’m sure, would seem nauseatingly cloying out of the context of our lives, but it held meaning for us. But there was one point …” He drifted for a moment, so that Veitch thought he had fallen asleep, but then his voice came back with renewed force. “The only thing left to discuss was what would happen should one of us die. We knew our situation, that anything could happen. And we made a pact that whoever went first would send a sign back to the other that love survived, that there was hope beyond hope, a chance, at the end of the long haul, of being reunited. Love crosses boundaries, that’s what we felt. Our feelings were so strong, you see. So strong. How stupid you must think we were.”

  “No-” Witch began to protest, but Reynolds held up a silencing hand.

  “After her death I waited every day for that sign. Weeks passed, months.
Of course, there was no sign. Two people in love create a fantasy world where anything can happen, one that has no connection with reality. In reality there is no hope. Love does not cross boundaries.”

  Veitch stared into the golden depths of his drink, his mood dipping rapidly. Gradually he became aware that Reynolds was staring at him and when he looked up he saw the elderly man was beaming.

  “And then the other afternoon, when I woke from my nap, I found this on my pillow in a slight indentation.” He dipped in his pocket and held up something almost invisible in the light.

  “What is it?” Veitch said squinting.

  Reynolds summoned him closer. Between the elderly man’s fingers was a long, curly red hair. Reynolds brought it gently to his nose, closed his eyes, inhaled. “And here I am, all those years ago.” When he opened his eyes they were rimmed with tears. “Her scent was on the pillow, and again this morning.”

  “You’re sure-?” Veitch began, but he saw the answer in Reynolds’s face.

  Reynolds traced away one of the tears with a fingertip. “I wasted my life believing in nothing when there was everything to believe in. I wasted my life by not holding hope close to my heart. Don’t make the same mistake, my boy. Don’t wait until you’re too old and wrinkled to appreciate what life has to offer, and don’t wait until you’re nearly on your deathbed before you gain some kind of salvation. There really is a bigger picture. We might have no idea what it is. It might not fit any of our past preconceptions. But knowing it’s there changes the way we look at the world, the way we deal with each other, the way we face up to hardship. It changes everything.” He smiled as another tear trickled gently down his cheek.

  Veitch took a hasty swig of his whisky as another lump rose in his throat.

  “In the last few weeks nothing has changed, really, truly, apart from a way of seeing the world. An old way, made new again. We forgot it for so long, settled for a new reality that seemed better, but was much, much worse,” Reynolds said quietly. “There may be a lot of trouble that has been introduced into the world in recent times. But everything is defined by its opposite, and with the fear and terror have come hope and wonder. These times are not all bad, my boy. There are a lot of wonderful things out there. And perhaps, for all the suffering, this new world is better than what existed before: all its machines that made our lives so easy, yet no wonder, no magic. This is what we need as humans, my boy. Hope, faith, mystery, a sense of something greater. This is what we need. Not DNA analysis, faster cars, quicker computers, more consumer disposables, more scientific reductionism. This is what we need.”

  “I’ve been thinking,” Witch began; he struggled to find the right words. “Maybe it’s not all as bad as people have been making out. You know, for me, personally, I think it might be better.”

  “Then go into your big quest with a strong heart,” Reynolds said, “but don’t try to make things back the way they were, for all our sakes.”

  Veitch drained his malt slowly, thinking about Ruth, about the terrors they were facing. “Something to believe in,” he said quietly, almost to himself. “That’s all we need.”

  chapter seven

  good son

  n her deepest, darkest, most testing time, Ruth plumbed the depths of her character for reserves she never knew existed. Every hour seemed torturous, trapped in a minute world that encompassed only the claustrophobic confines of her cell, the ever-present darkness, the chill that left her bones aching to the marrow, the foul odours that occasionally drifted through from beyond the door. Part of her resilience, she knew, came from her ability to view her crucible of pain as a chrysalis. She would store up as much learning from her invisible companion as she could and when she emerged she would be wiser, more confident, stronger; no longer the weak-willed Ruth Gallagher who was living her life for the sake of other people. When she emerged.

  She had grown numb to the regular periods of suffering inflicted on her by the Fomorii. Her body bore numerous wounds which would scar over into a mural of pain that would never leave her. The stump of her missing finger ached constantly and sometimes she almost imagined it was still there. But in a way the routine was almost comforting: the dull sounds of bodies moving towards her door, the insane shrieks and grunts growing louder, the feeling of nausea as the door was thrown open to reveal the almost unbearable visage of a Fomor. And then the long drag to the chamber where the instruments were kept, where the furnace burned in one corner, the atmosphere sticky and foul.

  This time it was different. When the door burst open, the first face she saw was the corrupt beauty of the hybrid Fomorii priest Calatin, his expression contemptuous and cruel. He wore a filthy white shift top and leather breeches; his long hair was greasy and infested, a parody of a sophisticated aristocrat.

  “Serith Urkolhn,” he said in his guttural dialect as he nodded to Ruth. “I thought I had seen the last of you. You proved a minor irritation until your grand failure exposed how truly pathetic you were. An insult to the very essence of the Pendragon Spirit. Oh, how your world must have mourned and wailed and cursed your name into the cold void. In that most important hour, you proved yourself as insignificant as the rest of your kind-we needed waste no more time on you.

  “But then there you were, delivered to our door, at a turning point in our plans.” He chewed on a fingernail and giggled. “And a notion came to me of great irony. Oh, to strike a blow against the feeble order of nature! To throw up an abomination! To show our contempt for all existence!”

  “Just get it over with,” Ruth spat.

  This time they dragged her to a different room. No furnace, no torture instruments; it was almost stately by Fomorii standards. Rough wood and stone, a tapestry hanging on the wall depicting scenes Ruth couldn’t bring herself to examine, and, in the centre, a strange curved bench which appeared to be made of polished obsidian. Flickering torches cast a sickly, ruddy glare over the room.

  Ruth was so weak she could barely stand. The Fomorii strapped her to the bench with harsh leather straps that bit into her flesh. Her head was spinning so much from her fragility she couldn’t begin to understand what was happening. Instead she focused on the small joy that came from the knowledge there would be no torture that day.

  Through watery eyes she watched Calatin pacing the room, suddenly intense and serious. He examined the bench, the straps, and then gently stroked a long, thin finger down her cheek and smiled cruelly. “You have proved you are ready.”

  He stepped to one side and motioned to the rear of the chamber. Two Fomorii emerged from the gloom carrying an ornate wooden chest which they placed somewhere below her feet. Through the thick stone walls Ruth heard a deep, slow rhythm, as if an enormous ceremonial drum was being hit. Every few beats it was followed by the grim tolling of the distant bell she had heard before; there was something about the relentless sound that made her very frightened.

  “What are you going to do?” she croaked.

  Calatin merely smiled. He motioned to the other Fomorii, who bent down to open the chest. A second later they rose with a purple velvet cushion on which lay an enormous black pearl, the size of a child’s bowling ball. When Ruth saw it, she was overcome by an irrational wave of terror. Unable to control her feelings, she tried to drive herself backwards and off the bench, but the straps held fast.

  Two more Fomorii moved in on either side of her and held her head fast. “No,” she gasped.

  One of the Fomorii forced some kind of metal implement between her lips and then ground it between her teeth. With a snap he forced her mouth open so sharply pain stabbed through the tendons at the back of her jaw.

  Almost tenderly, one of the other Fomorii lifted the pearl and brought it towards her.

  Ruth had a sudden flash of what Calatin intended. Her eyes widened as panic flooded through her system, but she couldn’t move, couldn’t even scream; the only sound that emerged from her throat was a desperate, keening whine.

  “If it will not go in, break her jaw,” Ca
latin said curtly.

  Ruth watched in terror as the pearl came towards her. It was so big it would choke her instantly. She thrashed from side to side, but the Fomorii held her fast.

  And then the pearl was so close it was all she could see; the darkness engulfed her every sense. Her lips touched it and it felt as cold as ice, but it tasted of nothing. It pressed hard into her mouth, grinding against her teeth. Her muffled gasps grew more laboured. Her panic obscured all rational thought. There was simply the constantly increasing pressure, the pain as they forced her mouth wider and wider still, the thought that it would never fit, the horror if it did.

  And then somehow her mouth was around it and just as she waited for them to retreat, they increased the pressure and began to ram it further, trying to force it down her throat.

  She choked, felt her lungs protest at the lack of oxygen. And still they pressed and rammed and forced.

  And then a strange thing happened. Through her overwhelming anxiety, she felt an odd sensation deep in her throat; it seemed like cotton wool at first, and then as if her throat was coming apart in gossamer strands.

  And then the black pearl began to go down.

  The last thing Ruth felt was an enormous pressure and a terrible coldness filling her neck. And the last thing she saw was Calatin’s face swamping her vision, grinning triumphantly.

  Shavi and Laura woke at first light, entwined together as if they were desperate lovers afraid to face the world. No words were exchanged as they crawled out into a land of drifting white mists and thick greenery. The morning was chill, despite the season, and an eerie stillness hung over all, punctuated only by the occasional mournful cry of a bird and the regular drip of moisture from the leaves. The nagging atmosphere of lament and loneliness had not dissipated in the slightest.

  They ate a breakfast of beans and bread in silence against the dull rumble of the river which was so unceasing they no longer heard it. Laura kept a surreptitious eye on Shavi, who still appeared pale and drawn, but whenever he saw her looking he flashed his open, honest smile; even so, she could tell the weight of the night and what was to follow lay heavy on him.