The human couple were visibly startled to find themselves confronted by these pale, beautiful strangers. The man looked up at Maximillian with some relief, for it was evidently he who had brought them there. At last he said in a stammering voice:
“Might we… I mean… might you be so kind, sir, as to tell us some of the duties we should be called on to perform, sir, in the position you have in mind for us?”
The revenants remained silently staring. Now the woman grew frightened and whimpered slightly. The man at once reached out and gripped her hand, his eyes bewildered and fearful as he looked up at the row of white, expressionless faces.
“Is… is anything the matter, sir?” he stammered, swallowing hard. Still there was no reply.
By this time both had realised that something was wrong. The man stood up, and helped the woman to her feet.
“I think… I think we must go, sir. I think there has been a mistake… ”
“Possibly!” agreed Maximillian, moving to him, placing a hand on his shoulder, his face full of mock concern. “It is possible that you have made a mistake. Oh, yes. Yes. I should say that is very possible. I have made none. I said I needed you. And so I do. As for your duties,” he grinned, “you will see them soon enough.” And he laughed, an ugly, exaggerated laugh.
Now the woman burst into frightened sobs and the man grew angry.
“Stand aside,” he told Maximillian, his eyes wide, his fists clenching. “You’ve got no call to treat us like this. We don’t want the job now. We want to go.”
“Oh! You want to go. You don’t want the job anymore. Well, I must admit that most people would not regard it as the ideal position.” Maximillian smiled and nodded gently. Then he reached out and grasped the woman’s bodice, ripping it quickly to expose one of her small white breasts. She screamed and tried to force his hand away as the man bellowed in fury and lunged, fists flailing, at Maximillian, who eluded him effortlessly, then with a contemptuous grin grasped him about the neck and threw him heavily to the floor. The woman screamed again and Hermione moved behind her, grabbing her and hurling her down beside her husband. Now both Maximillian and Hermione stepped back, allowing the terror stricken couple to struggle to their feet, making no more moves towards them, as if inviting them to run and escape. Desperately the man looked all about him. Behind him, on the far side of the small attic room, was another door. Grasping his half senseless wife he pulled her to the door and threw it open.
At once the room was flooded with the sickening stench of decaying flesh. Beyond the door was another small room, and there, slumped on the floor inside lay the withered, naked corpse of a man dead for several days. The throat had been brutally slashed and was caked with black dried blood. The eyes were wide open, frozen in a dreadful expression of final pain and anguish, and the face was swollen and black while the mouth hung open, filled with blood. Behind lay two other corpses in a similar state of mutilation.
The human couple stumbled back, clinging to each other for support, gagging at the foul smell, then collapsed together onto the floor to the accompaniment of echoing ripples of cold laughter, filling the chamber. And I heard Maximillian speak in a low hissing whisper.
“Now they see their heritage. Know their fear. Their despair. Their hopelessness. The horror of death. Feel it. Taste it.”
Now the revenants closed in, running their hands over the faces and bodies of their helpless victims. And in the midst of it all the man clutched at the woman and began to cry: great rolling sobs, calling on God to help and save him, which only delighted his oppressors all the more, raising them to what seemed a kind of delirious ecstasy.
Maximillian’s voice boomed out now all about the room.
“You fool!” he cried, his tone on the verge of gleeful laughter. “There is no God! There is no help! There is only death! Show them, my loves. Show them their birthright. Show them their destiny.”
All this time I had stood, knowing what must happen, yet rooted to the spot by some macabre and numbing sense of fascination. Now at last feeling flooded back and at once I turned away with a cry. At once Maximillian was standing beside me.
“Join them if you will!” he said blandly with a graceful gesture towards the hideous proceedings. I gazed up at him speechless. He arched his dark eyebrows. “It is the only way. The only way we may understand men. Understand death. Understand ourselves.”
I shut my eyes. I could not speak. To kill the innocent was bad enough, but to precede it with this evil and brutal terrorising – this was monstrous beyond belief. Maximillian drew closer to me and said:
“Do not be shocked. Can you not see? This is the reality of our lives. This is the ultimate beauty. Try to understand.” He wrinkled his lips in a slight expression of contempt. “Through those creatures” – he pointed casually to the struggling victims – “we may know death. We may feel again the moments of death and of rebirth. We may know the fear, the desperate but – ah! – so useless struggle for life. And then the final sublime experience of death itself. The death we bring. Our minds, our souls, become joined in death to our victims. Through them we may journey beyond life itself, pressing farther and deeper into the unknown realms with every life we take. Oh! But you cannot know, cannot begin to imagine the power, the vision, the excitement – to experience death when you cannot die!”
Behind all my dread and disgust I understood him totally. I remembered how, in that instant I had become what I was, and again when I had taken the life of the young prostitute, I had known Death; glimpsed for the briefest moment the vast, fabulous regions that were but the beginnings of His Empire. I saw now that I had barely yet begun to realise the true experience of taking life.
Slowly I glanced back inside the room. The boy-revenant and the fair girl were crouched over the prostrate body of the woman, while Hermione held the fainting man from behind and the dark girl clung to his chest. Their lips were red and their bodies quivered as they glutted themselves; their gaunt, beautiful features transformed, made gross and vile with their pleasure. But their eyes were blank – cold and ruthless – devoid of emotion like the eyes of mindless ravaging sharks. And it was a terrible, tragic sight, to watch the pink, glowing bodies of the humans turn gradually withered and white, as their life flowed away to bloat and colour the wan, bestial faces of the revenants who had before seemed to me almost god-like. But the worst, the most obscene thing of all! The poor victims, dazed and overcome beyond any further power to struggle: for all their terror and distress their bodies were excited. They were physically aroused. I turned away, burning with a horror, anger and indignation I cannot describe.
“Come along!” Maximillian was leading me away now, pulling me by the arm, taking me downstairs again. He led me to a small door and, taking a key, unlocked it and pushed it open. He pointed inside. It was a cupboard, dark and cold, and sitting inside, hunched in a corner, for there was no room to stand, was an infant, a tiny fair haired boy who looked up at us, his eyes red and dull with fear and misery. He began to cry and plead to be released, but Maximillian paid him no more notice than the attendants in a slaughter house might give a bleating animal. He simply turned to me and said with a mischievous smile:
“I save the best for myself.” And then he said: “Take the child with me. Let us know death together.”
A cry escaped my lips. I could take no more. I knew only that I had to get away from that place. I ran, through the hall to the back door, and I heard Maximillian coming after me, calling to me in that strange whisper that echoed in my head and would not cease, even when I covered my ears with my hands in desperation.
“Wait!” he called. “Stop. Listen to me.”
I threw open the door and ran into the garden, blundering into the bushes, battling my way through branches that reached out, scratching my face and clawing at my clothes. Maximillian’s hands grabbed my arms, pulling me back. We struggled for a moment but his grip was unbreakable, so I turned to face him. His black eyes stared into mine, and I cou
ld not help thinking for a moment that there seemed much sadness there.
“Why do you run? Is it really because what you have seen appals you? You should have seen yourself in there, John. You should see yourself now. Your eyes gleam. Your limbs tremble. You are excited. Excited nearly beyond your control.”
I wanted to shout at him, to tell him he was mad, but the muscles in my throat tightened, the words would not come, and I just groaned.
“It is true,” he went on. “You cannot deceive me. You cannot even deceive yourself.”
I turned from him. I hated him. He pulled me back to face him.
“Do you not understand? Do you truly not understand? Can you not see why Helena brought you here? Your reaction. Your fear. Your revulsion. They are as she intends.”
I stared at him stupidly. I was almost beyond any state of reason.
“You are yet very young,” he sighed. “You do not begin to understand the endless life that is yours. You are still frightened by what you must do to live. And Helena must keep it so, or she knows she will lose you.” He studied me closely and smiled, as if at some grim secret joke. “There is much you should learn about Helena,” he said. “Much indeed.” He shook his head and his face grew grim again. “But I will tell you this much. She denies all that is natural in herself, but can no longer bear her deprivation, or the anguish it brings, alone. And so she will burden you with a conscience that is redundant and useless to you. She will bind you to her in an eternity of torment.”
“No!” At last I found my voice. “She allows me to choose… ”
“Choose!” He cut me off with a loud laugh. “Indeed! But I see she has you firmly in her power. You do not feel her fetters about you.”
“No!” I cried again in fury.
“Listen to me. I have lived longer than you. Longer than Helena.” He drew a deep breath. “It was I who initiated Helena. She is my daughter. You are my son.”
A shudder passed through me. He saw the horror in my eyes and laughed again, but this time it was a cold, hurt laugh.
“I was betrothed to her. I installed myself into the graces of her family. I find such games amusing. And then I took her for myself from under their eyes. I wanted her for her beauty. For all her remarkable qualities. But at last her qualities proved too remarkable for her own good. In truth she knows, as you know, that the greatest compulsion, the ultimate satisfaction and excitement, is to kill. For men as well as for our own kind. But men must have doubts, must invent trite standards and laws which are unnatural, to compensate their mortality: fostered by their fear of death and the vengeance of God. We are different. For us desire is the only law. Desire and nature – they are one. How could they be separate? And to suppress desire is to give it unendurable strength. This is true in the space of a human lifetime – in the space of a year – even days. Then how much stronger, how much more unendurable do these desires become in immortality? Can you imagine the torture? And the sheer destructive force when the hidden passions of centuries can no longer be contained and break free. All the vast power of Nature herself. Do not allow such evil to build up in yourself, my friend. For in the end it will crush and trample your poor scruples underfoot without mercy or restraint, and breed horrors beside which the things you have seen this night will seem insignificant. The poet Blake expressed it clearly in his ‘Proverbs of Hell’, which we heard tonight.
‘Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires’.”
“Blake was in many ways a man of great penetration. More, I think, than he himself could always have known. Some believed his works to have been inspired by the Devil. Think of it! A man unafraid of his own imagination. He might have made an admirable revenant.” He nodded slowly then went on: “All life must feed upon life. And if beast and bird and crops in the field grow on the earth to glut the appetites of men, then what should be the purpose of men but to satisfy the needs of we who are more than men?”
Tears were welling in my eyes now; tears of hopelessness and misery. I could not bring myself to listen to any more of this. But I could not break free from his terrible grip.
“I must go now!” I said at last, my tone low and trembling.
“Go!” he said. “But remember there will be nothing for you. Not the way you have chosen. Your existence will become a timeless torment. A curse that cannot be ended. A Hell of your own making. Will you breed your own children? Time will come when you wish to. Or you will find beauty and love and watch it fade into death and decay, leaving you to face the centuries alone. It is only our power to preserve these things, that they will exist with us forever, that makes our lives a blessing, not a torture. But you will lose your children. Or you will exist with them in strife and hatred when you try to bind them with your own outworn and misguided conceptions – the miserable remnants of your lost humanity.”
At last he let me go and I stood for a moment looking at him. A tear ran down my cheek and I felt like a foolish humiliated child. Then I turned and went, wading through the bracken. Maximillian’s whisper continued to ring in my ears, even after I had left him far behind.
“Go and learn,” he said. “We must each find our own path through infinity. But when you have learned, as you surely must, return to me. I will teach you.”
VIII
I ran blindly until at last Maximillian’s ghostly whispers faded into silence. But the memory of his dismal, frightening words remained, echoing relentlessly in the mind. Suddenly I stopped and stood still, staring ahead. Although I could not see her I knew at once that Helena was there, watching and waiting for me. Anger flared in me now. Anger and hurt as I saw how she had used my trust and dependence to lure me unsuspecting into that terrible encounter. I was in a frenzy of confusion and fear. I did not know what to think or believe. I remembered all that Maximillian had said or implied about Helena and began to wonder if it might be true. Whatever else he might be, I could not believe Maximillian a fool. And what reason had he to lie to me? I shook my head, my thoughts vague and spinning, then, half-mad with fury and grief I shouted into the dark:
“Keep away! Keep away from me! Leave me alone!”
I hurried on through the cold night without any sense of direction or purpose; like Jan Tregeagle, pursued by devils in old Sally’s tales, my own devils of doubt, fear and misery hard on my heels.
My head hanging, my eyes cast down, I felt rather than saw people passing all about me as I drifted on towards town. At last it began to snow, and it grew heavier as a bitter wind rose and swirled the flakes about me, until at last it seemed like a spinning white fog. I walked on barely able to see anything around me, beginning to know some of the blindness and helplessness men feel in darkness: feelings I had all but forgotten in recent months. At once I turned up my collar and pulled my coat tight about me, though in truth the cold meant nothing to me. Passers-by loomed out of the clouds of white, then faded back into them, and a feeling of utter hopelessness engulfed me as at last began those first dreadful pangs of hunger.
Then I heard footsteps behind me and stepped to one side, to see the vague figure of a man walk past. My need to feed was growing strong and I followed, stalking him instinctively. He went very slowly and carefully. I could easily have caught him, and the falling snow yielded perfect cover in which to take him, but for some reason I held back.
I moved after him, keeping him just in sight until at last he stopped outside a doorway, produced a key and leaned down, searching for the lock in the gloom. I crept up silently behind, ready to pounce before he opened the door, but again at the last moment I hesitated. He pushed the door open, stepping inside as a flood of light and warmth came out. Then he turned and saw me. He looked at me, smiling, trying to make me out through the screen of drifting snowflakes, with no apparent surprise at my being there. He was young with dark, straight hair and a pleasant, bright face. I stood rigid, staring back, more startled than he.
“You look lost,” he said then in a friendly tone. I made no reply. “
Are you lost?” he persisted.
“Yes,” I mumbled at last. “Yes. I am lost.”
“I’m not surprised,” he grinned. “I’m lucky to have found my own way home. Where are you trying to get to?”
“Nowhere,” I answered at last. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Well,” he said, “that’s about the only place you will get for the time being.” He hesitated a moment, and seemed about to close the door, but then he said: “You’re welcome to come inside for a while. Until the snow stops. This is no night to be wandering about lost on the streets.”
I nodded and thanked him, stepping through the door and following him inside. I could not really explain it, but at once I felt a powerful sense of attraction to this bright, cosy dwelling – I, who was by now well accustomed to the cold and dark.
He took me along a narrow passageway to his rooms, which were small and basically furnished but filled with books, on bookshelves all about the walls and in several piles in the corners. I guessed he must be a student of some sort. He lit a lamp, then started a fire, after ushering me into a chair. Then he removed his hat and coat and sat opposite me. For a few moments we sat in silence, and I stared at the floor, my mind still vacant and numb. Then he began to talk. I cannot remember the things he talked about, for I was too absorbed in myself, and just sat and allowed him to run on uninterrupted, hardly listening to what he said. And yet his voice, his smile, his very presence brought me comfort and reassurance. He seemed warm, straightforward and friendly. And his manner brought home to me the thought that never in the past had I truly known friendship – equal friendship with someone my own age. And I stared at him as he sat finding trivial things to talk about. But what he said seemed barely important. It was so long since I had had any kind of conversation with anyone. It was so different from Helena’s aloofness and distance. Suddenly he laughed, and I, not even knowing why, laughed with him. And as I did so I felt inside a vague, wistful stirring of half-known and half-forgotten things. Of things I had never known, and of things I had, but that I hardly remembered since in human life they had always seemed so plain and commonplace. Things a whole existence away, denied me now forever.
The Revenants Page 9