by J. Thorn
But I didn’t have the chance to draw the gun. Laurence Miles beat me to it. You would have thought that with my years of fighting in the war, and living on Gallowshill, I would have seen it coming. I certainly think I should have, but as I watched him reach towards the kettle I realised that that wasn’t what he was reaching for at all.
Leaning against one of the wooden chairs that were tucked neatly underneath each side of the table that dominated the large kitchen was a shotgun. He reached down faster than I could react, picked it up, and pointed it straight at me. My hand, just at that moment creeping into the front of my coat at that moment, slid back out to fall at my side. I knew when I was beaten.
We stood there for a long time, me with my hands at my sides, and him holding the shotgun towards me, just sizing each other up, getting a grasp of the situation, before he finally broke the silence.
"So Mr Weldon, what have you really got to say?"
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
"Oh don’t look so shocked," he said, that same amused smile on his face that he had when we first met.
"I don’t know what you mean," I lied.
"Don’t play games, Mr Weldon. I know exactly why you are here, and who you are."
He moved round the edge of the table, backing me up against the wall next to the entrance.
"I don’t easily forget a face, and yours I certainly remember, oh yes, I remember you quite clearly, though I am surprised that you finally found me. I guess that selling the painting was a small mistake on my part."
"I’ve never met you before in my life," I said, trying hard to remember where I might have known him from. I knew he had something to do with my wife, and possibly her disappearance, certainly that he spent a long time with her, but other than that, there was nothing else to remember.
"I see," he said, "well it would seem that I am at an advantage after all. You can take your coat off, and put the holster down on the table, Mr Weldon, and if you have any foolish notions of trying to use the pistol I assure you that you won’t be successful."
I did as I was told, hung my coat over the back of one the chairs, and slowly, carefully, unclipped the shoulder holster and placed the gun on the table. He was watching me the whole time, pointing that double-barrelled monstrosity at my face. Even though I had seen death aplenty during the war, I had never forgotten that day when I was eight, and how I had been showered with bits of Mr Holcroft. The devastating power of a shotgun was not a new thing for me. If it had been a pistol, like my own, I would have been tempted to draw against him, I was sure that I could have dodged at least the first shot he would have made, but a shotgun? No, everything this side of the room would have been torn apart.
"Now let us get comfortable out in the yard again, if you would still like that cup of tea?"
Back outside, the tea brewing in a china pot that looked expensive, him sitting back down on his bench and me on the other, the one that was directly opposite him, Laurence Miles gave me exactly the answers I had been looking for, and the reason that I had lost my wife all those years ago. It wasn’t how I had intended it. I had planned for him to be squirming as I held him at gunpoint, not the other way around, but he told me all the same.
"I remembered your face immediately, Reginald. I don’t forget faces, and yours was one that I remember quite clearly, from that day on the way to Edinburgh. Oh don’t look surprised, you wouldn’t have known me. I was four seats back and across from you and your lovely companion, all the way from London. I watched you from across the way the whole time, or should I say, I watched Marie."
"That doesn’t explain how she vanished right in front of me."
"No, of course not," he said, "That really does require some explaining doesn’t it?"
He told me to pour the tea, and I did, just as he instructed, a little milk first, then sugar, then the tea, followed by a little more milk and then more sugar. He insisted that this small ritual was required to get the best flavour, and to ensure that the milk and sugar blended correctly. I thought he was a pompous idiot.
"When you went to relieve yourself on the train to Scotland, Mr. Weldon, I rose from my seat and went to introduce myself to Marie. Oh she was quite friendly, though a little shy. I just couldn’t help wanting to speak to her. Did she never mention that someone spoke to her while you were away?"
"No, she didn’t say anything."
"Hmm, no I would imagine that she didn’t want to upset you by mentioning another gentleman showing her any attention. Of course she wasn’t used to the attention of a real gentleman was she? Her being from a poor family and used to scrubbing floors in a hospital, and working in a mill. It’s a good job she didn’t end up selling her body to the highest bidder. Many others in her situation would have."
At the mere suggestion that my wife might have done such a thing, I felt my cheeks burn with contempt for this man who was taking such pleasure in my discomfort. Had I still been that young man who had headed off on the train with his new wife years ago, I probably would have let my rage get the better of me, and would have died there in that seat. But I was older, and stilled my temper for the right moment - it would come.
"Does this rile you, Reg? Me talking about her in such a way? I know it would me, and it riled me for a long time that I couldn’t have her. I had the image of her face burned into my mind, haunting me. The fact that a man like you could have such a beautiful creature as his companion, while I, wealthy and famous for my work, had no one. That riled me. That bothered me a lot."
He glanced away for a second, over towards the garden, nodding for me to look.
"You see that shelter over there, the wooden one, just down the path near those trees? Well, It‘s called a summerhouse, not that anyone for your upbringing would know. Well, she used to love that summerhouse, and spent hours sitting reading in it. I remember it very well, because I used to sit up here and watch her. I don’t think she noticed, or if she did, maybe she didn’t mind. You see I lived with her for three years Reginald, she was more mine than she had ever been yours."
"But you took her from me, didn’t you?"
"Yes, yes I did."
"How?" I asked, spitting my words. "She vanished right before my eyes, just the day after the train journey. How did you think about her for years and then just have her vanish like that?"
"Oh, I don’t think I want to tell you that, now do I?" he said, that amused grin returning. I wanted to rip that grin right off his face and stuff it down his throat.
He started to rise from his seat, and pointed the shotgun towards me a little further.
"Get up."
I did.
"Walk," commanded Laurence. He was nodding towards the summer house.
I rose from my seat and began to walk down the path, realising that if I didn’t take the chance and act soon, I wasn't going to get another.
We walked down the path, past rose bushes and fuchsia beds in full bloom. Across the other side of the garden was a small pond with a waterfall, a cherry tree growing up amongst the rocky clefts, surrounded by other, beautiful plants that I didn’t know the names of. Even though I could feel the timer ticking away towards my death, I couldn’t help but think that Marie would have loved this garden, and I understood why.
"Stop."
Laurence’s voice startled me back to the present. I was standing at the steps of the summerhouse, and he was barely ten feet away, still standing on the path. I tried to glance around, tried to see if there was anywhere that I could run to, and just as he raised the shotgun, I saw it. Just a few feet away, behind the summerhouse, was a low wall, barely three feet in height but thick enough to block the blast of a shotgun if I managed to reach it. I didn’t have time to let him be smug at me once more.
"Well I think that is enough answers for…"
I didn’t let him finish. I imagine that he was expecting me to just stand there in fear while he spouted off some more of his patronising drivel, but I had other ideas.
&
nbsp; I ran, stooping low round the back of the summerhouse, and dived towards the wall, desperate to reach it before he pulled the trigger. I think that second of surprise that I had gained was enough, just enough for me to reach the wall. I barely made it behind it, slamming into the damp hard earth just as the roar of the shotgun ripped through the garden. Birds rose in droves from the trees surrounding the cottage, the sound almost as loud as the crack of the gun. The top of the wall just above me exploded into a cloud of dust, stones showered the path and the lawn, and I could hear Laurence cursing as he started to walk round the summerhouse.
That was the first shot, and if I wasn’t fast enough the second would take me in the back nonetheless.
With barely half a second to spare I was up on my feet and running, feet pounding the earth across the lawn towards the corner of the wall. Behind me, I heard a footfall on the gravel that lined the bottom of the wall. I dived, up and over the corner, and to this day I’m not sure how I leapt what was easily ten feet, over the corner of the wall.
But I did, and even before I hit the hard stone path that ran behind the summerhouse, I heard the second boom of the shotgun.
I slammed into the path, cracking my right elbow and both of my knees on the stone paving, jarring my back in a way that sent juddering bouts of pain up my neck, across my shoulders and down my arms. The wind was knocked out of me, and for a moment the world blurred, the ground underneath me span. I thought I was going to pass out, and all of that running would have been for nothing.
I heard his footsteps on the path, fast and heavy, not the sound of a seasoned sprinter, but the noise an overweight and unhealthy man makes when trying to run for their life. It only took me a second to understand why he was running. He only had the two shells that had been loaded into the shotgun - now he was out of ammunition and he knew full well that I was going to come after him.
He didn’t even get as far as the door, let alone into the house where my loaded Berretta was waiting for him. He did get as far as the steps that led up to the patio though, and I was sure I heard ribs crack as he slammed into the stone paving after I tackled him sideways to the floor. He bellowed like a trapped animal, and tried to struggle. It was one thing when he had been facing me with a loaded shotgun, but when it came to fists and elbows I was way ahead of him. Years of living on the streets and my time in the trenches had given me that edge.
By the time I dragged him into the kitchen, pushed him onto one of the chairs and pointed my Berretta at his face, I had nearly beaten him to death. At first I just laid into him, nearly kicked him around his own garden twice, but I soon caught a hold of my rage when I remembered that there were things I still needed to know. As he sat there in that chair, barely able to move, blood seeping out of everywhere it could get out of, his face puffed up and his eyes nearly closed with the swelling, tears running down his face as he begged me for his life, I almost felt sorry for him. Smug, wife-stealing son-of-the-devil-spawned.
As he begged, I forced it out of him, every answer I needed, and with each confession he made I hated him even more, but as I calmed down, and took a seat opposite him, listening to his admissions, I also began to think that maybe he wasn’t much different to me after all - just a man who had done some stupid things in his life, all because he felt he had to.
"How did she just disappear?"
"Please, please don’t kill me."
"Answer my questions and I may decide to let you live. Now, how did she just disappear, right next to me, into nothing?"
"You wouldn’t believe me if I told you…"
"Try me."
"You will think I’m crazy, or lying."
"Tell me, or I’m going to blow your kneecap off."
"I made a deal with someone. Someone who could move people."
"Move people?"
"Transfer them, from one place to another."
"You mean like those science fiction tales, what’s it called?"
"Teleport."
"That’s the word. I knew I'd heard it somewhere before. Who was it that did this for you?"
"He is, well, I don’t know if you will believe me."
"You want that kneecap to stay on?"
His face had gone red by now, and he was breathing heavily. I was still deciding whether I was going to put a bullet through his brain or not, but at least now he was trying to explain.
"I made a deal with a demon. I didn’t realise that that was what he, or it, was at the time, and I didn’t believe that it could even do what it promised. But then there she was, standing right next to me."
"This was the day after you saw us on the train?"
"No, no, it was three years later. Don’t ask how, I really don’t know, I never got the answer to that. He…it…was gone, and Marie was standing before me, and she couldn’t remember anything, total amnesia, apart from her name."
"She forgot everything? Her past? Her life? Me?"
"Yes, like I said, complete amnesia. Please, could you point the gun away, just a little?"
I raised the gun back up to his face.
"I’ll point the damn gun anywhere I damn well want to, and you will carry on whether I do or don’t, and if you keep talking, I might not kill you."
"Yes, yes, it’s just…okay."
"So let’s get this straight," I said leaning forward, glaring at him. I was trying to be intimidating, but I think the Berretta was doing more than enough of that. "You made a deal with a demon, to steal my wife, and she arrived here, three years after she disappeared, with no memory of me or her life."
"Yes."
"How in the hell did you persuade her to stay?"
"I convinced her that we had been together for years and that she and I were engaged to be married. She didn’t believe me at the start, but she didn’t want to leave the house, she couldn’t even remember what was outside. I think she just grew to accept it. We never did marry though, and we were never close."
I watched him as he continued his story, trying to gauge whether he was lying or not, finally deciding that he had to be telling the truth. He didn’t come across as being a very good liar, at least not under this kind of pressure.
"Carry on."
"We lived here, in this house, and over the time we were together she relaxed, became more confident, more comfortable, she accepted what I had told her. She never did regained her memories in those early months."
"And what happened next?"
"Next?"
"How did she disappear?"
"She used to spend a lot of time in the summerhouse, reading, I used to buy her books whenever I went to London. As you know the gardens are quite extensive, and there are many places for someone to walk, to spend time just thinking, reading."
"One day she was just gone. I searched the grounds, looked everywhere, and eventually I found her shoes and the book she had been reading, down in the lower gardens, near the pond and the ruins of the old house. There is an archway down there, it’s old, part of the original manor, but older still, and it must have been part of a building that had been there long before Temperance Vale. Even when the old house was destroyed, back in the 1820s, that bit still stood. I could never figure out what was special about it."
"That day there was a faint smell wafting in the air, one that hadn’t been there before. It was an odd mixture of honeysuckle and maybe sulphur, and all round the archway there was frost. It was a summer afternoon, but there was frost on the grass and across the stonework, just round the arch. She was gone, and I somehow knew where, to another place somehow. I didn’t know that she disappeared from you that day in Edinburgh, and that it had been years. Maybe she had been there before. I always believed that maybe she went back to wherever the demon took her from, but that wasn't the case."
"You found her shoes, and the book?"
"Yes, her shoes were on the grass, just in front of the arch, and there were footprints in the grass, as though she had taken them off and walked across the lawn."
"T
hat was three years ago, and the county-wide search went on for six months before they stopped looking. Of course they didn’t need to look, but I couldn’t tell them that could I? The footprints stopped dead in that archway."
"She’s gone then."
"Yes and no," he said.
"What do you mean?"
He sighed, and I could sense resignation in it.
"I don’t exactly know how this came to be, but when the demon sent Marie to me, he must have bound her in some way to this place. I always wondered why she didn’t want to leave. Whenever I offered to take her into London, or to Northampton market, she refused, always saying that she couldn’t leave this place. I thought she meant she didn’t want to, but it wasn’t true. It just didn’t occur to me that she physically couldn’t leave."
"She was forbidden to ever leave this house?"
"This house and the grounds, I’m really not sure how far she was allowed to go, but not very far."
He paused for a moment, his eyes taking on that same glazed look once more. This time he wasn’t speaking to me - he was talking to someone somewhere else, someone far from that kitchen.
"A few weeks before she had started to have nightmares, visions of things that were horrific. I don’t know where they came from, but she told me of barren landscapes, and creatures that defied any form of nature, terrible things. Then she started visiting the old ruins and the lower garden more often, disappearing for nearly the whole day sometimes. I tried to find her a couple of times, but she wasn’t there. The first time I was worried that she had left, but she turned up every time, after a few hours or even as late as the evening. She had been doing it since the dreams had started. The last time, the time that she didn’t come back, I just presumed she was doing whatever it was that she did down there. I didn’t like to ask, I was just happy that she hadn’t left. Maybe I should have asked."