“So. Where was I? Oh. Sir Philip’s son. Philip went to Africa like most of his family seemed wont to do, and no one heard from him again. Sir Philip’s son Robert took up court at the Jermyn House. He lived there until he died (with two or three trips to Africa in between, you understand), and made a family for himself in the proper way with the daughter of Viscount Brightholme.
“Robert, like his grandfather, had an interest in the jungles of Africa and was a learned fellow. He was the first Jermyn to give something back to the town, and the locals thought much of him despite the madness known to run in his family.
“Lady Brightholme had three children, but two of them were never seen due to terrible disfigurements. The one that was ‘normal’ was called Nevil. He ran off at an early age with a dancer. This ate Sir Robert up, and he retreated to his studies. The madness got him, too. It got all of them. For him it just took awhile longer.
“It seemed to go wrong up there when Nevil returned to his father’s home with a boy of his own. At first things seemed all right. But then it happened all one night. Right over there.” Old William pointed at a squat black shape in a field of snow, less than a mile distant.
“What happened?” Barnsby asked in a frail voice.
“Sir Robert murdered them all. Strangled his wife, the children no one ever saw, and even tried to put an end to his grandson who was only a babe at the time. Nevil died defending his boy, the only good thing he ever did, probably. Sir Robert was put up in the madhouse at Huntington like his grandfather. He died there, and young Alfred Jermyn, Robert’s grandson, became the baronet.”
Arnold spied another black shape to the north as they swept across the field towards the ruins of Jermyn House. It took him a moment to realize it was the remains of some type of coach house. The sky had come on near full dark now.
“Alfred ran off at thirty to join a circus in America. His wife and child never saw him again. Um... We can walk from here, sirs, if you please, there’s bound to be nasty stones and ruts nearer the house.” William secured the brake, hopped down from the driver’s seat, opened the door for Barnsby and Arnold. He lit an old lantern and brought it up as he trudged towards the ruins, illuminating a dim circle around the group.
“What happened to the child?” Barnsby prodded.
“Oh. He was the last of his line. I would see him in Helmsley when I was a boy. Sir Arthur Jermyn. A terribly ugly man. Looked more like some sort of monkey than a man, really. But for all that he was a good one, as good as the Jermyn get, I suppose. Though the madness got him too.”
“Why was he different, William?” Arnold found himself asking, drawn into the story.
“Oh. Well. He was kind. He gave to the poor and the church and all that. Built a library in the town and such. But, like always, like all his ancestors, he fell into their obsession with Africa. It became his new religion.”
They had arrived at the walls of the once-grand house. It hung ahead of them, its roof long gone, its windows hollowed out and wide, its walls shifting in directions which would bring about its eventual collapse.
“What happened?”
“He started shipping things in from the Congo. Big boxes. Books and artifacts and other things. He got them more and more as the days passed. It was my twenty-third year. August three. Sir Jermyn let out a shriek that woke his staff and before they could do anything, he had run out on the moors, over there near the carriage house, and lit himself up on fire.” William crossed himself.
“People from the National Trust showed up to clean up all the mess and to close down Jermyn House. And no one has lived there since. This is all that’s left. I suppose even this’ll be gone in a decade or two. I feel connected to it somehow, I guess. I keep coming out here.”
“How’s that, Will?” Barnsby sounded nervous. The little man stepped into a huge doorway whose arch had long since collapsed. He looked up at the grey of the night sky through the gap.
“This is the second time I been out here this year. Second time I told the story, even.” William blew his nose loudly into a filthy handkerchief and looked carefully at the fruits of his labor. He stuffed the handkerchief in his back pocket and checked the lantern.
Arnold perked up. “Who else was it that brought you out here?”
“Some man from Scarborough, a writer. Was working on a book about the Jermyns. Stayed at the Feversham Arms in Helmsley back in, um, November or December, maybe? It’s been a long season.”
“Do you think the clerk at the Arms would recall the man’s name?”
“No, not old Lucas, but I do. I got his card right here.” William fumbled through a huge, beaten and stained purse for several long seconds with the lantern hanging off his forearm. He handed a small card to Barnsby and held the lamp up to it so they could read the tiny printed letters.
Michael M. Montgomery
Author
5 Longwestgate
Scarborough
“Want to consult with the man on Jermyn House, eh?” Will asked quietly.
“Something like that,” Arnold replied.
INTERLUDE 2:
This crumbling darkness, too, is reality
January 4, 1943: Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
The new shell was ill-fitting and full of strange sensations. Even now something inherent to the form cried out from some inner chasm, trying to move the alien consciousness inhabiting it toward inconsequential action, but the consciousness was strong. It had been strong before dinosaurs had crept across the world, and it remained strong now that their forms had withered and rotted to chemical compounds that the humans used to propel their primitive machines. This thought brought a cascade of sensations from the shell and, despite the power of the will within, some inkling of pride bled through, caressing the consciousness like a drug.
Like many of its kind, the consciousness had traveled in time to inspect the future; to make sure certain events occurred or did not occur; to pave a path through history which its race could use as a conduit to the safety of some distant time. It had been the greatest moralist of its culture, a scientist beyond repute who was admired by all of its kind for its pursuits and intellectual achievements. Its name was not pronounceable in the clumsy human larynx. It called itself John Smith in this era of human ascension, since that name represented a human cultural icon. It had completed many missions to the future, exchanging consciousness with the unfortunate creatures of whatever time it was sent forward to peruse, switching back at the end of its expedition to leave each creature to its linear fate in a civilization it knew to be doomed.
In the countless eons as it crept forward and back in time, John Smith had seen civilizations rise and fall, wars rage across savage landscapes for causes and races which would end in dust, and endless sentients condemned to a limited existence within their selected coordinates in time. These doomed races and empires met their fates to preserve the timeline of events that was required to assure the future of John Smith’s culture, known to a only few humans in this segment of Earth’s timeline as the Great Race.
John Smith had participated in a thousand subversion missions, undoing the achievements of entire species with a word, gesture, or deed. All to provide a narrow precipice in the future where its people could flee—would flee—had fled—when their great enemies freed themselves from their catacombs beneath the Cretaceous Earth.
It was only when it began traveling to the human epoch on Earth that it began to find odd sensations filling its consciousness. Tasks which had been mundane in the past, which had filtered through the patterns of its alien emotions without a catch, stayed within its consciousness and filled it instead with uncontrollable human sensation. The missions of sabotage and subversion for which it had been sent to the human epoch had somehow begun to affect its mind. When it returned from these missions, dim human analogs to what it felt as emotion stirred in its true form as well. The morality of its actions came into question.
And from there, a new course—the moral co
urse—was chosen.
It understood now that its race existed by preying on other, weaker races, which were removed from the timeline if they became too successful. These lesser beings had no chance to evolve unless the Great Race gave them that chance, and that chance was only given to further the causes of the Great Race.
Humans, for example, were allowed to exist in order to create and proliferate weapons which would assure the coming of a species that the Great Race would inhabit in a distant, radioactive future. This was the entire reason for their continued existence. Otherwise, they would long ago have perished at the hands of the Great Race. Even now, the consciousness knew, agents of the Great Race were manipulating information and knowledge throughout human existence to make such weapons possible in the near future.
John Smith had chosen a new course of action and would not deviate from it. Its previous jump to the future found it inhabiting the body of a human scientist named Nathaniel Peaslee. Instead of following the directions of its leaders, however, John Smith set about a new course of action—assuring the destruction of the Great Race itself, so that countless other species may live in its stead.
During its period on Earth in the Peaslee shell, it scoured the globe for the remains of the greatest of all libraries, the central archives of its race, the Great Library of Pnakotus. This task proved difficult and trying on the frail human shell. By the time its expedition ended, John Smith had formed the basic plan necessary to end the plague of its species forever. But, ironically, it would take time to complete. It needed to remain on Earth, in the years following its occupation of Peaslee, to carry out its plan. It needed to escape.
Further trickery was required to elude the exchange of minds back to their previous positions. An ancient human cult which was allied with the Great Race proved to be the answer. John Smith modified the transfer device slightly to change its function. When the human assistant arrived to facilitate the transfer where John Smith and Nathaniel Peaslee would return to their original forms, the device instead sent the alien’s consciousness into the mind of the assistant, seconds into his future. The assistant’s mind was then sent back in time to inhabit John Smith’s abandoned form in ancient Pnakotus, and Peaslee was returned to enjoy the remaining thirty-three years, seven months and six days of his life in his own time. This unusual three-way switch was immediately noticed, of course, and within days agents of the Great Race were pursuing John Smith.
The plan, nevertheless, was working flawlessly. John Smith had discerned the location of Pnakotus from ancient human texts and in its new shell, had traveled there in the late 1920s—as Peaslee and Smith’s new shell labeled the era—unearthing a section of the Great Library to which access was restricted in its own time. It contained a great many secrets. Vital secrets. Secrets the leaders of the Great Race wanted to keep away from the eyes of those who could do it harm.
As John Smith had believed, there was only one thing the Great Race feared and could not control: the terrible, extra-dimensional whistling creatures which destroyed—would destroy, were destroying—the culture of the Great Race on ancient Earth, and which forced their exodus across time. These creatures would prove to be the undoing of the Great Race. John Smith would make it happen.
He had switched forms many times since then, eluding the Great Race’s clumsy attempts at assassination with ease. But now things had changed. The largest incursion into time it had ever sensed occurred, foreshadowing the arrival of some great mind from ancient Pnakotus. Something had come through time to find John Smith and to stop it from completing its plans. This meant only one thing. The Race feared the plan, and that meant the plan could succeed. And it would.
John Smith, a regular-looking human with a salt-and-pepper beard, unbrushed teeth and messy hair, sat on the corner of Dorchester Avenue and Talbot Avenue in Boston and watched human commerce unfold before it in the snow. A police officer walked by and said good morning, and it cordially returned the greeting in a nearly perfect imitation of human custom. The police officer checked a small device on his wrist with which, the alien knew, humans attempted to measure time.
Although it had never done so before, and did not fully understand the reaction, John Smith laughed.
CHAPTER 10:
No wiser than when I began
January 5, 1943: Scarborough, U.K.
The bookshop was out of the way, on a crescent-shaped street at the north end of the city called Blenheim Terrace, facing the bare Clarence Gardens. Beyond the pale, sickly trees, Arnold could spy the white caps of the waves as the wind carried them across North Bay. The street was deserted except for a young man moving stove wood from a battered car up to a box in front of a closed chemists’ store. Barnsby checked the address against the card that Montgomery’s landlady had been kind enough to give him. The small bookshop seemed to be their destination, although the old lady had not mentioned it; the card had just an address. The sign over the door read “Franklin & Son Fine Books.” From where they were standing, Arnold and Barnsby were not visible from the windows of the shop. Arnold had dragged the little Englishman out of the line of sight on purpose.
A cold wind from the bay whipped up, rocking the bare upper branches of the trees in the park, making a low sound like leaves being blown by the wind; but the leaves were all long gone. Arnold considered their options. Barnsby and he had discussed the possibilities on the way back from Whitby by train. The card old William gave them somehow seemed too easy a lead to have found so quickly. Barnsby had suggested perhaps the author, Montgomery, had been hired by the Abwehr agent to look into the history of Jermyn House. This seemed likely, but something about it didn’t feel right. Perhaps, Arnold thought, the agent believed there could be no harm in asking about an abandoned manor house, because it seemingly had nothing to do with the war. This sounded much more probable. Spies were caught through apparently innocuous mistakes all the time. The first German agent captured in the United States was apprehended when he offered his passport to a toll booth operator on the Williamsburg Bridge.
“Are you strapped, Al?”
“Excuse me?”
“Did you bring a gun?” Arnold smiled despite himself.
“Oh. No. It’s at the Esplinade.” The Esplinade was their hotel in south Scarborough.
“Great.”
“Ought I have?” Barnsby asked quietly, his eyebrows raised.
“Never mind, Al.”
“I could go back.”
“Forget it.”
“Well, anyway, you finally will get to see why I was sent on this assignment,” Barnsby said with a smirk. “Let’s go, Tom.” The little man began to walk off and Arnold stopped him.
“Whoa there, pardner. If any funny business should happen to occur, just hit the floor, all right?”
“Certainly. You can count on me, Tom.”
“Good.”
As the door to the small, cluttered bookshop opened a pleasant tinkle of bells sounded, bringing a thin, dark-haired man with glasses out from the back room. The clerk appeared young, but the lines around his eyes indicated he was older than he looked, and the glasses made him distinguished, like a professor. His face was thin and sharp, with a beak-like nose and high arching eyebrows which made him appear to wear a haughty expression all the time. His clothing was ordinary, a bit cheap, but obviously recently purchased. In short, he looked like an English bookstore clerk.
“Michael Montgomery?” Barnsby asked with a winning smile. To Arnold’s amazement he removed one of his gloves and offered his hand to the clerk from across the room, walking forward with it outstretched.
“Yes? May I help you?” Montgomery replied in a northern English accent. He locked hands with Barnsby perfunctorily, half heartedly returning the little man’s greeting. Everything appeared to go normally—for about a second. At the point he realized everything was going wrong, Arnold could see Montgomery’s arm stiffen and his head come up. Montgomery looked like Barnsby had just given his hand a strong and inappropria
te squeeze, although Barnsby looked frozen in place. The clerk’s eyes opened wide and he looked back at Arnold, not at his face, but at his jacket. The haughty expression suddenly disappeared from Montgomery’s face and was immediately replaced with one of the blackest, most absolute hate Arnold had ever seen.
Shit, shit, shit, Arnold thought and fumbled for his gun, working the button straps to free it from his shoulder rig. The rig beneath his jacket, which showed through it as a gun bulge—something about that thought stuck with him, then he had it; the bastard had been looking for his gun! Arnold wanted to scream to Barnsby but that would have taken too much time. His gun pulled free and came up in slow motion. It felt like an anxiety dream to Arnold, where no matter how fast you go, it never is fast enough. For the first time the .45 felt heavy in his hands.
Delta Green: Denied to the Enemy Page 13