The Revenants
Page 1
Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback
THE REVENANTS
Geoffrey Farrington was born in London in 1955. He has combined a career in the theatre with helping run the family business.
Geoffrey Farrington is also the author of The Acts of the Apostates (Dedalus 1990), a historical novel about the emperor Nero’s last days and the editor of The Dedalus Book of Roman Decadence: Emperors of Debauchery.
He is currently working on his third novel.
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Epilogue
There the manuscript ended. With trembling hands he gathered it up, then placed it in a drawer, shutting it out of sight.
He was very tired. He rose, but felt that his legs would not even carry him upstairs, and slumped into the armchair. The narrative had completely unnerved him, plunged his mind deeper into darkness. The night silence and his own sense of lonely isolation obstructed his efforts to convince himself that it must be some elaborate, deranged hoax.
Sleep was bearing down on him gradually. He felt afraid, knowing that it would bring no peace, just restless insane nightmares; yet slowly he began to imagine that he might not escape those nightmares by remaining awake. His eyes closed. Before he knew it his thoughts were floating away.
Sleep crept over him like a pall, and somewhere deep in his drowsiness he felt a vague sense of panic, as if he were being smothered. Far away, beyond the reach of his near dormant mind, he could hear something. A rattling, a scratching, as if something outside was trying to reach him. He felt himself stir and cry out faintly. There was another sound. Something animal and frightening. A rasping breath that rose above the faint persistent scratchings. There came then the overwhelming sense of something pained and mad: a shadowy thing deformed and driven by nothing more than a mindless instinct to survive. Desperately he tried to will himself awake.
And as he began to emerge from sleep, the noise seemed to die mercifully away. And yet the sense remained, the stifling sense that he was no longer alone. Until at last, on the brink of consciousness, despite his fear of the memory, his wish to shut it out, his thoughts drifted back to when he had stood by the smouldering shell of the old house. It had been as he finished reading that first page of the manuscript that he was startled by a sudden crash from inside the ruin. The picture formed vividly in his mind. A pile of fallen masonry, lying far away, had suddenly collapsed. And as he pictured it he saw more clearly that which at the time he had dismissed as a trick of the dull light amongst the many blackened shapes in all the burned debris. Now he knew better. Now he knew his eyes had not deceived him. That what he had glimpsed, propped between the fallen rubble, really had been a horribly charred and twisted body, its head sliding down with the rest of the toppling remains. But then rolling upward, contorting at an unnatural angle, coming to face him as the black burned skin on one side of the face appeared to disintegrate, revealing greyish bone and a single discoloured eye that seemed to stare at him as he turned and hurried away into the gathering daylight.
THE END
Contents
Title
Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback
Epilogue
Introduction
Prologue
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
Copyright
Introduction
The sub-genre of vampire fiction, though it’s such a vast field that it’s hard to think of it as a sub-genre these days, has been dominated for a century by one book, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Almost every vampire novel, film, TV show, opera, play, commercial or breakfast cereal is either an adaptation, imitation or mutation of Dracula, or defines itself by the way in which it differs from the Stoker uber-text. Even Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1975), which plays a radically different game and created what might be classed as another school of vampire fiction, is compelled to keep referring to Stoker’s rules of the undead even as it establishes its own, and draws at least as much – the key notion that vampirism is passed not merely by the vampire drinking the blood of the victim but the victim responding by tasting the blood of Dracula – from the book it tries to replace as it jettisons.
But there were vampire stories in English before Dracula, from which Stoker drew his own inspiration, most notably Dr John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) and J. Sheridan leFanu’s Carmilla (1871). In the novel you are about to read (or re-read), we are back in that world before Bram Stoker, before Nosferatu, before Bela Lugosi, before Hammer Films, before Dark Shadows, before Louis and Lestat, before Blade and Buffy. As the title establishes, the vampires of The Revenants haven’t even decided what they should be called yet, and their practices aren’t yet set in the sort of stone required by a TV series Bible. Like the protagonist/narrator, we must feel our way in this world, never quite understanding all the ramifications of his post-death situation, apart from the rush of human history, always questioning not only what has happened but also what it might mean.
Geoffrey Farrington’s novel begins in the mid-19th Century, and its style remains close to that of leFanu or Wilkie Collins, so that the mentions of white feathers in the First World War or motorcars as we near the present come as niggles that show how estranged from progress the revenant John LePerrowne has become. But this is not a comforting pastiche novel, an evocation of bygone sensational or gothic fiction designed to evoke a safer world bordered by oak panelling and the tidiness of the traditional fireside ghost story. The style is there to show how frozen the character is, and the incidents are more disturbing than exciting. Expectations that this might explore a vampire society as decadently attractive as the goth nightworld of Rice are interestingly frustrated by the thrust of the story, which keeps holding up exemplars of inhuman behaviour.
This slim, sharp novel is a major achievement in its field. And a welcome reprint.
Kim Newman, Islington, 2001
Prologue
As he drew the curtains he looked out into the dark and shivered slightly. He was unusually cold. The silence outside, the absolute stillness which normally he found so pleasant, put his nerves on edge. He almost felt that the night itself was watching him. Then he switched on the light in the kitchen, and the lamp on the table, though the main light was already on. The brightness gave some comfort.
He lit a cigarette, then turning around realised that he had one already burning in the ashtray. Tonight for the first time he did not care for the solitude he had come to this isolated cottage to find. It was making him morbid. It seemed he could not trust his own mind anymore. Perhaps it was time to leave this place.
He sat at the table staring at the bundle of papers that lay before him. He had found the manuscript that morning. It had been he who discovered that the old house had burned down. He was walking across the fields to visit the local village, when he had seen the smoke rising above the trees in the distance. He made his way to it as quickly as possible. There had been no one else around. There was no reason why anyone should be. It was early. And anyway, the old house was very remote, and to all certain knowledge had been locked up and deserted for years. Local people stayed clear of it.
When he had reached it the house was no more than a smouldering shell. Most of the walls had collapsed, and what remained looked as if it would not stand long. It was all a chaos of charred scattered debris. It had been a large house, but nothing had escaped the fire.
He had stood there staring at it for a time, in the dull light of a cloudy autumn dawn, unable to imagine how the fire could have started in this lonely tranquil spot, amongst the tall trees, over-grown grass and bushes that had virtually hidden the house from all outside notice. In a more superstitious age it would probably have been supposed that the place was blasted by the hand of divine wrath, for some past unexpiated evil, for it had suffered a bad reputation locally, as old deserted houses often do. At last he had thought he should best go on to the village, where he could telephone the local police and inform them.
It was as he turned to walk away that it caught his eye. It lay on the cracked face of an ancient sundial that jutted above the forest of weeds which he supposed had once been a lawn, when the house had been inhabitated, and a very fine residence, long ago. An old black leather bag. Going to it, he found it did not seem very damp or weather beaten. He assumed it could not have been there long. Inside the bag he had found the manuscript, wrapped in a large cloth. At once it had struck him as odd. The pages were flimsy and yellow with age, the paper an odd assortment of different types and sizes, bound together, as if someone had ransacked a dozen old drawers or cupboards in a frantic, constant search for something more to write on. Yet the writing itself, a small precise hand, was quite clear, unfaded as if written only yesterday. He sensed at once he had stumbled upon something very strange.
Standing there by the ruin he had read the first page, which he re-read now.
Narrative of John Richard LePerrowne
Here follows my story. If it is ever read I know it is unlikely to be believed. But that is nothing to me. I am alone now, as I have often been; alone with my thoughts and memories, and I would give these ancient companions some concrete form. I do not know what to do next, though I know what I should do and fear it is inevitable. But for now I shall write. Perhaps the past has yet some wisdom or strength to give me. And then when this document is completed perhaps I will leave it to be found and read. Why not? It shall be my legacy to mankind.
Let men make of it what they will!
And what happened then, as he had looked up from the manuscript, back at the blackened remains of the house; what he had seen – rather what he had imagined – he preferred not to think about. But he told himself again that it was time for him to leave this place.
In spite of his unease his curiosity had been aroused enough to say nothing about his discovery of the manuscript to the police, or to anyone in the village, but to bring it home with him.
And now, as he prepared to read on, he grew suddenly more aware than ever how he was cut off from the world outside – as at first he had wished to be – his lonely cottage a single speck of light surrounded by several miles of black, wild and virtually uninhabited countryside.
He shivered again as he looked back to the manuscript, and read.
I
It started with a dream. A haunting recurring vision that pervaded the sleep of my youth.
I was a weak and sickly boy. It was thought remarkable that I ever survived to adulthood. My parents were wealthy, and I their only child, for they married late, my father having been married previously to a woman who bore him no issue and who died in middle age. When, in the year 1830, he and my mother discovered they were to have a child they were naturally delighted, for they both had long since resigned themselves to childlessness. But I gave my mother a troublesome pregnancy and an awkward painful birth – worsened by the fact that I was born feet first – from which she never truly recovered. The solitary child of elderly doting parents, feeble and much prone to all sorts of illness, I was kept sheltered and protected through my young days like some fragile, priceless piece of glass, and I grew up a lonely, withdrawn and rather sullen boy in the large and remote old house where we lived, in Cornwall, to the west of Bodmin Moor.
I was not sent to school. My parents considered me too delicate for the rigours of a public school education, and I daresay they were right. Instead they employed a tutor for me, an elderly and rather seedy looking man called Soame. He, and my nurse-maid, Sally, a plump jolly old woman with sparkling eyes, a thick Cornish accent, and perfectly white hair which she wore in a huge bun, were the only real companions of my youth. But they were good companions, kindly and well meaning, and I found much in common with them both. Mr. Soame was a keen historian and classicist. He would sit for hours on winter nights and relate with relish countless exciting, abstruse or absurd anecdotes regarding great figures of the past. He must have told me hundreds upon hundreds of these stories – spanning the entire course of human history – but over a period of ten years I do not recall him ever repeating the same one twice.
But where Soame confined himself to the documented records of the history books for his stories of Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Constantine, Charlemagne and innumerable others, Sally would delight in telling me of those wonderful antique legends in which Cornwall is so rich, and all its simple inhabitants apparently so well versed. Tales of the ancient King Arthur and his knights, who sleep somewhere in a deep and hidden cavern, ready to rise again at the time of England’s greatest need; of Woden, the pagan demon among whose descendants on earth was the great Christian King, Alfred, and who sometimes still rides by night in deep forests and over dark moors accompanied by a fearsome pack of devil dogs, pursuing the wretched spirits of those who were sinners in life. Like the notorious Jan Tregeagle, a Cornishman who, more than two centuries earlier, it was said, had sold his soul to the Devil, and whose ghost was now pursued relentlessly across the lonely wastes of nearby Bodmin Moo
r. Stories of warriors and spectres, giants, heroes, faeries, changelings and kings; more stories than I could ever remember.
All this had a potent effect on the fertile mind of a bored young recluse such as myself. I grew to see the past as a rich tapestry of romance and excitement. I had little love for the world of the present, which to me consisted of my home, the countryside and the few villages surrounding it, and the bed to which I was so often confined. In childish simplicity I grew to love the ideals of heroism and justice, and to despise treachery and tyranny; to exalt virtue and disdain wickedness, although of course, I had not the remotest real knowledge of either. It became my delight to imagine that I had lived back in distant days: to suppose that I was with Alexander, defeating the Great King Darius at the battle of Guagamela; or alongside Arthur, locked in mortal combat with the villainous Mordred. Fantasies of this or a similar nature must be common enough in the young, but to me they were of special importance, for the strength of my imagination was my only defence against the weakness of my body. And the more I grew to love and admire those great and mighty men of history and legend, the more I grew to despise my own feebleness, and the dreariness of my existence.
I was twelve years old, and all the feelings I have described were still growing in me, when I first had the dream. From that time onwards it came to me at least once, sometimes twice a year. It was always identical in detail, and immensely vivid. But let me describe it.
At the start I found myself standing in a large, crowded room – I had no idea how I came to be there – decorated all about with candles and the branches, leaves and berries of evergreens, hung from the ceiling and walls. There was a big table to one side, upon it dishes filled with all sorts of pies, cakes and comfits, and in the centre there was a huge silver punch bowl, filled with steaming mulled wine. A blazing log burned in the vast fireplace, and I was standing close to it, keeping warm. Outside the windows I could hear the shrill, chanting voices of children singing a Christmas wassail.