Grim Expectations

by KW Jeter

  “Don’t be an idiot, Dower – or at least not as much of one as you’ve been before. Think a moment; why would the More Loving Embrace send its agents to shoot you, if they wished to coerce your assistance in whatever it is they’re planning?”

  “That is a puzzlement to me, but I have learned from bitter experience not to attribute a great deal of rationality to those who seek me out with such designs in mind. Your history of this organization indicates that they have fallen from the path of righteousness, however noble their intentions might have been when they started out on it; it would not surprise me to discover that they have departed from the precincts of sanity as well. Such seems to be the invariable effect on people, when they spend too much of their time thinking about my father’s creations. Their ability to destroy seems to be only exceeded by their capacity to derange.”

  “They’re not crazy, nor do they seek any assistance from you. Face the obvious, man – if the More Loving Embrace seeks to end your life, then obviously they have some other intent. And of that, I am able to inform you: they are in possession of an item of considerable importance – or at least they know where it is, as do I. The reason why the More Loving Embrace’s agents are in pursuit with such lethal intent is that they wish to prevent you from finding it as well.”

  “But I am not looking for anything, other than a modicum of peace and quiet.” I voiced my protest as strenuously as I could. “Least of all am I seeking another one of my father’s creations – my past experiences have more than convinced me that it’s best not to have anything to do with them at all. I have no ambition other than to be left alone, free of any entanglement with all the malign conspiracies which inevitably revolve around everything that my father set his hand to while alive.”

  “You have made an understandable mistake, Dower – for which I am at fault.” The Brown Leather Man lowered his voice to a confiding tone, while at the same time bringing his masked face closer to my own. “It is not one of your father’s creations that occasions such concern; it is your own.”

  “Then the mistake is not mine, but those others’ – I have never created anything, other than excuses as to why I am not the equal of my father in that regard.”

  “And this is where you’re wrong.” He almost sounded sad in his assessment of me, as though he viewed with regret some injury I had done to myself. “You’re responsible for more coming into being than you give yourself credit for. Those mechanical creations of your father – sure, they’re great. But your mind has been poisoned by this constant thinking about them, just as the minds of others have been – so that you believe that no other kind of creation is possible. For them, that might be true; they have willingly, and happily, bolted themselves to the iron rails they hope will carry them to the Future. But it’s different for you; there’s another possibility.”

  “I very much doubt that–” My words were spoken with numb habit, less rueful than resigned. “Possibilities are for fools, or at least those more foolish than I am; if you care to weary yourself with them, as others do, then by all means – proceed. But I have neither interest in or desire for such.”

  “Perhaps I can spark a little enthusiasm.” Once more, he reached out and dragged his glossy leathern pouch toward himself; unsealing its flap, his dark-gloved hand reached inside again. Withdrawing an object, he extended it toward me. “Here – try this on for size.”

  It was nothing more than a doubled sheet of paper, but one that possessed an odd sense of familiarity for me. Unfolding it, I was struck by memory; not far-distant ones, but recent – I might well have been in the parlour of my inn, surrounded by the Cornish night, as I gazed upon a similar missive. That previous letter, so reminiscent of the one I now held, had been delivered by one of those aqueous couriers that had so eerily crept about that rugged coastal landscape, the gelatinous messenger then having been rudely dispatched by the same assassins who had turned their attentions toward me. There had been other letters as well, all held in the ticking box that had been my late wife’s mysterious bequest to me. All had been addressed to Miss McThane, as was the one that my gaze now fell upon; further, all had been inscribed with the same ink, and in the same distinctive, scrawling hand. A distinction existed with the one that the Brown Leather Man had just given me: it was unfinished, the final sentence trailing off incomplete, and there being no signature initial of its author below.

  “What is the meaning of this?” I continued my ruse, looking up with artfully widened eyes at the figure sitting close to me. “How did you come by it?”

  Not by murder and theft,” he replied, “as others have intercepted similar communications to you. Let’s just say… by other means.” He reached out his hand and tapped a finger on the words written on the paper. “Read it.”

  I did as he directed, and examined the lines over which I had merely glanced before. No surprise came to me, as I quickly discerned that the contents of the letter dealt with the same subject as had those I had perused upon taking them from the box in which Miss McThane had carefully preserved them. The author expanded upon his having concluded his search for some unnamed individual, detailing his efforts in that regard and the often dubious locales through which he had prowled.

  “Am I to assume that this has some significance for me?” I lowered the missive and studied the figure opposite. “If so, I fail to discern it – and whatever meaning it would have had for my late wife is equally as obscure.”

  “Your incomprehension astonishes me,” said the Brown Leather Man. “Do you not know who wrote these letters to her?”

  “How could I? The letters which were completed and sent to her, and which she kept, were only signed with a single initial. What was I to make of that?”

  “All of them?”

  I pretended that his question took me aback; frowning, I might have in truth been trolling through my memory, seeking any exception to the statement I had made…

  Did any actor ever give such a performance, unseen by all but one? I jerked myself straight, as though an invisible bolt of lightning had coursed upward in my spine, stronger than the shock evoked by any previous inward revelation. My eyes shot open wide; I stared straight before myself, as the flat of one hand struck the side of my breast. Within but a few seconds, the same hand darted inside my jacket–

  And withdrew from its pocket another letter, within the envelope which had been given to me by that eerie courier, the night outside the inn.

  “What an idiot I have been…” I held the letter in both my elabourately trembling hands. “I forgot all about this…”

  “There was a time, when I might’ve found that hard to believe.” The Brown Leather Man’s voice was tinged with arch smugness. “But given what I know about you… yeah, I can imagine that happening. It must have – since there’s so much that you don’t seem to know, and that you should.”

  I bit my lip, to stifle a shout of triumph. To gull the one who sought to make me the victim of his pretence – I savoured a considerable satisfaction from this moment.

  “Perhaps…” I expanded on the absence of mind I had falsely confessed. “If it had been in her hand – I would’ve read it immediately, so that I might have heard her voice again in my thoughts. But it was written by another’s…” Lifting my gaze from the letter, I met the other’s gaze with my own. “What might be revealed here – I could not contemplate! And so it was expunged from my thoughts.”

  “Sure–” A trace of sympathy was heard in his voice. “Completely understandable.”

  I shook my head, conveying an apparent dismay at my own stupidity. With no further prompting, I proceeded with the task at hand. This supposed Brown Leather Man’s slit-eyed scrutiny weighed upon me as my fingers opened the envelope; he did not notice that its seal had already been breached. Its contents were damp, but not sodden; whatever exposure to the waters the letter within might have suffered had been lessened, it seemed, by both my coat and my shivering body; perhaps time and what corporeal heat I could su
mmon from within had dried it out a bit. I extracted and unfolded the single sheet of paper; the lines inscribed upon the page were blurred, as was inevitable given the duress of its exposure to the elements, but still readable–

  But I did not bother to read them.

  Instead, I placed the tip of my finger underneath the final word, the name inscribed at the bottom of the sheet of paper, and held it unmoving there.

  “I take it,” spoke the Brown Leather Man, “that you’re surprised?”

  “Yes.” Lowering the paper in my hands, I looked over at the figure beside me. My voice was low and quiet, and of an uncharacteristic firmness. “I am surprised. That you had a low estimate of my wits, I was well aware. But that you think me so dull-witted as to be unaware of the identity of he who wrote this and all the other letters to my wife – and that you are that same man–” I slowly shook my head. “Often have I been a fool, Scape – but never that much of one.”

  Behind the slits of the leathern mask, his eyes widened with his own sudden realization.

  A surge of anger overwhelmed any further desire for concealment on my part. That furious rage impelled my actions as I threw myself upon the other, my hands grappling for his throat, the force of my lunge toppling us both upon the sands of this artificial cove.

  That I wished to murder him, I confess – there is only so much knavery that a man can endure, before some hindering restraint snaps inside him. And perhaps I might have, had my fingers not found the seam of the mask, as I knelt upon his chest. It was the work of a moment to grasp that edge and pull it upward from his throat, then toss aside the flaccid empty form, revealing the face that had been hidden within–

  I pushed myself back and away from him, a startled cry escaping from my mouth. For only a second I had thought there was another mask revealed, of a coarser and nearly as darkened substance – then I realized that it was an actual human visage, but one that had suffered hideous scarring from fire.

  He got onto his knees, resting his weight upon his gloved hands, then swung his gaze toward me. His eyes were the only aspect of him that was still recognizable in the ruin of his face.

  “You’re right,” said Scape. “I should’ve known better. When did you figure it all out?”

  “From the beginning.” I spoke with bitter satisfaction. “From the very beginning.”

  TEN

  What Is Found Must First Be Lost

  “Guess I’m not surprised.” Scape flung another stone across the water. “Pretty dumb to have underestimated you.”

  The stone – a small pebble, really – possessed enough substance to skip a few times, with attendant small ripples produced, before disappearing beneath the surface. Perhaps Blightley and Haze, in the efforts to reproduce the island of Groughay, had not bothered to manufacture the tiny rocks as they had the larger outcroppings, from plaster and pasteboard, but had resorted to the simpler expedient of strewing about a few cartloads of such genuine bits. The ocean, however, that had been slowly lapping at the artificial shore no longer seemed as convincing as before; whatever machinery driving the shallow waves from below had ceased its operation, rendering the water flat and lifeless.

  “I should have never believed you dead.” I stood next to him, gazing toward the constructed horizon. “Even when I saw you fall to your apparent destruction, long ago on the banks of the Thames. Your tenacity seems to have no more limits than your rascality. I might well have stood upon your corpse, with it devoid of breath and heartbeat, and leaned down and sawn off your very head; I might have buried your remains not six feet but six leagues deep, and made my camp upon your grave for years, to prevent your rising – and still I should not have been astonished to answer a knock upon my door, and find you standing there with that perpetual, insufferable smile of yours.”

  “Well…” His shoulders, still garbed in the darkly glistening outfit that had driven my first identification of him as the Brown Leather Man, lifted in a shrug. “It actually did come as kind of a surprise to me. When it happened – I mean, when I discovered that I wasn’t dead – what a shock, eh?”

  I kept my gaze averted from him and the massively scarred features that masked him as thoroughly as had the garment’s slit-eyed hood, now abandoned and lying flat and empty on the sands, like a jellyfish that had been cast up, if any such creatures were so darkly hued. It was not a physical revulsion on my part that prompted my looking elsewhere – after seeing what had happened to him, the result of those fiery explosions in which I had believed him to have been consumed, I felt no further horror at the sight. Rather, it was a feeble attempt at kindness on my part; he had not been a notably handsome individual in that former existence, but had been decent enough in appearance as to have given Miss McThane no pause in being his partner in more than their various criminal enterprises. But now I could not imagine her or any other woman looking upon him with anything other than pity or disgust, so thoroughly disfigured was he. He could not have been unaware of the effect his appearance evoked in others; thus I figured it best not to let any scrutiny of mine weigh upon him, however inured I might already have become.

  “When I fell from that stupid walking lighthouse – the Colossus of Blackpool, or whatever it was called – I was sure it was the end. And I was OK with that.” Scape continued talking as he bent down and picked up another pebble. “And maybe that’s what I wanted – you know? I’ve really screwed up a lot of stuff in my time – not like I have to tell you about that – and so if finally doing something good for other people got me snuffed, too…” He straightened up and tossed the stone in the same trajectory as the previous one. “Maybe that wasn’t so much a bug, as it was a feature.”

  His discourse raised some uncomfortable memories; for a moment, the artificial vista before me was obscured, replaced by visions of those eruptive conflagrations that had left so much of London in smouldering wreckage, and from which I had barely managed to escape alive. The indisputable fact that Scape had also done, and now stood beside me, might well have reinforced a more religiously minded person’s belief in miracles.

  “You’re right about that,” replied Scape, after I had told him as much. “Believe me, there was a long time after I got fished out of the Thames – half drowned, half burnt to a crisp – that I wished I had died. When you’re lying in a charity ward, they don’t give you much to ease the pain.”

  “Did you make any effort to act upon that wish? To bring an end to your suffering, by way of your own hand?”

  “Thought about it.” He shrugged, as though to dismiss the notion now as easily as he might have before. “For maybe a day or two.”

  “Amateur,” was my wry observation. “I’ve made nearly a lifelong study of the matter – killing oneself, I mean. Not with any great consistency, perhaps, but returning to it often enough as to make its contemplation seem familiar.”

  “Yeah…” Scape warily regarded me. “You’re kinda creeping me out, talking like that.”

  “Any concern I have for your feelings would be minimal.” My round for a shrug; my momentary, idle curiosity on the point had been more than satisfied. “So… having determined to continue with your miserable existence, why did you make no effort to communicate with those who knew you? I myself might have made some effort to assist, even if I could have done no more than direct some of your former associates to your side.”

  “Right – like any of that bunch would’ve helped. Most of ‘em would more likely have come around to the hospital and stood on my throat, just to off me while I couldn’t defend myself.”

  “There was one,” I spoke quietly, “who would have been glad to know, at that time, of your still being alive. But she is dead herself now.”

  “And what would she have said if I’d turned up, the way I am now?”

  “I do not know. But I think you underestimated the depth of her feeling for you, by not giving her that opportunity.”

  “Maybe so.” Scape silently regarded the dull expanse into which the stones had
disappeared, without even a ripple apparent now. “But I kinda figured she deserved better – and you seem to have taken care of that all right.”

  It was a subject I did not care to pursue, and I said no more about it – being painfully aware, as I had been while the woman had been alive and had resided with me as my wife, that there had been another with a prior claim to her affections. Had been, and now was, as he stood next to me – and this had been part of the last secret that she had kept hidden from me, that he still lived and was in correspondence with her, while I slept on unawares.

  “But why such masquerade on your part?” This was my attempt to turn our conversation to other matters, of which there were so many that I desired explanation. “What was the intent behind disguising yourself as that other, the one I knew as the Brown Leather Man?”

  “Are you kidding? Jesus Christ, Dower – you were about ready to kill me just now.” Scape rubbed his throat, chafed by my recent grasp upon it. “And that’s pretty much the reaction I was expecting. Not like we’ve ever really been friends, is it? Plus – I admit it – I’ve been sneaking around behind your back, writing to your wife and her writing to me. That’s usually the kind of thing that gets even a mild-mannered type like you all riled up. Which I can understand. But there’s still stuff I needed to talk to you about – so I figured, hell, why not pass myself off as somebody you wouldn’t be so set against? Leastways in the beginning. If things had been going well between us, we’d been hitting it off all buddy-buddy – then I could’ve shown you who I really was. That was just about as much of a plan as I had.”