The Revenants

by Geoffrey Farrington

  “That!” I roared, pointing to it. “Take it off. Take it off now.”

  “This?” she fingered it, held it up towards me. “Well, make up your mind. One minute you want me to put something on, the next to take more off.”

  “Take that off!”

  “No. Why should I? I like it.”

  She jumped from the bed and stood before me, still holding out the cross, still laughing. Cursing in fury I turned and stormed to the door. But then she called after me, her voice at once loud and harsh. Startled I turned back. She stood, her eyes blazing at me, her laughter all gone.

  “I never knew,” she said in a cold flat tone. “Until yesterday I never knew how much you hated me. You shouldn’t. You have no right to hate me. If I’ve disappointed you it can’t be more than you’ve disappointed me. You abducted me. You were strong and ruthless and you didn’t care about anything but me. You brought me pleasure and power. More than I ever knew could be. You were everything I dreamed of and much more. But what do I find now? You are as weak and timid and contemptible as those you took me from. You deny your own desires and hold back from your prey as if you are afraid of them. And you ask me to do the same. You give me power and need, then tell me it is wrong to satisfy them. It is lunacy. I didn’t ask you to make me what I am. But you ask me to be other than you’ve made me. And you ask too much.”

  Now she went to where her clothes lay, picked up her short frilly dress and slipped into it. Then she stepped into her shoes and went over to the mirror where she began to brush her tangled hair.

  “When I’ve tidied myself,” she called to me, “you’ll have to help me get rid of the empties.”

  “Help you! You are insane. Why should I help you?”

  She shrugged, went back to the bed and sat beside the corpse.

  “Well, we can’t leave him here. How disgusting.” She reached down, patting the cadaver’s head, smiling up at me. “Although I’m sure you will get tired of him before I do. But we must dispose of him carefully. We cannot allow a body to be discovered close to the house. It might cause us trouble. You will have to help me.”

  Furiously I saw that I must agree. The body must be bound and weighted, then thrown into the river nearby. It would then be advisable for us to leave this place at once.

  “I will help you,” I relented, “if you promise me never to do such a thing again.”

  “Another sermon?” she said in her most malicious tone. “You are becoming as bad as my brother. Next you’ll be giving Sunday school lessons. But can’t it wait? At least let’s get rid of the body first. Or would you sooner stand here and argue about it all night?”

  Together we wrapped the body in some sheets. At the back of the house stretched a small heath, and beyond this passed the Thames. Having gathered several heavy stones by the riverside and made sure the way was clear, I threw the corpse across my shoulders and we set out, stumbling through the mud and over the lumpy ground. As we approached the river the bushes all about grew tangled and dense. Our progress became difficult as my burden snagged on the branches, and I slid and struggled to find my footing in the damp earth.

  At last we emerged into a small clearing, making towards the river bank ahead. Then together we froze. Elizabeth’s eyes caught mine. She nodded towards the thicket a short distance along the bank. Someone was hiding there, watching us, shifting uneasily. Glancing over I could make out his shape, well concealed though he was. And now I could hear his faint, fast breath; feel his body warmth carried on the breeze. I could not think what he was doing there – probably a housebreaker who came to reconnoitre the local dwellings. But a half-moon shone down on us. It was light enough for him to see us quite clearly. I became aware then that the bedclothes wrapped about the body I carried had caught on the bushes and come loose, and one limp, bare arm had dropped and swung in full view.

  “Catch him!” Elizabeth hissed at me. “He doesn’t know we’ve seen him. Catch him quickly. He must be silenced.”

  We moved away into cover behind a nearby clump of trees. Then I dropped my burden and went silently off through the dark. Our intruder had started to run as soon as he had lost sight of us. I heard him blundering through the undergrowth ahead, his breath coming in short, frightened gasps. I moved alongside him until at last he emerged from cover. He saw me the moment I closed on him, springing forward, my fingers tightening about his throat as he went to cry out. Then I held him fast as he fought and struggled. The next moment Elizabeth was at my side.

  “Do it,” she said. “Quickly.”

  His struggles grew ever more frantic as I pulled him around, my muscles clenching as I stared into his twisted face and wide terrified eyes. A very young man, little more than a boy, really.

  “Finish it!” Elizabeth urged, and she reached up, pulling back his head, exposing his throat. I pulled him closer. He was barely conscious now, but as I drew nearer his face grew gaunt, pale and stricken with the fear of death. I hesitated. Then I drew back. Again there flashed before my eyes the image of Helena lying mutilated and dead. I remembered that awful night in the vault when I had known death. Not the shadow, nor the illusion of death, but death itself. And I had feared it; its force, its dark endless unknown. It shocked me to realise suddenly that I still feared it. That truly I feared the thought of death as much as this luckless youth. As much as any normal creature.

  I bit down into the soft flesh. As the blood came I was aware that Elizabeth stood observing me, and I hated the feeling of this. As I felt the struggles of the boy grow still, and his strength dissolve into my arms, I pulled back and let him drop senseless at my feet.

  “What are you doing?” Elizabeth whispered sharply. “What is wrong with you? Kill him.”

  “It is not necessary to kill him,” I told her firmly. “He will remember nothing.”

  “We cannot be certain of that!” she said. “We are outside our own house, and we haven’t time to get away tonight. The risk is too great. He must be killed.”

  “No!” I replied in fury. What she said was true enough, but still I could not bring myself to do this, to murder in this cold and calculated way.

  “Coward !” she spat, waving her fists at me. “You must do it. I can’t. I have just drained the other one. I cannot drink any more.”

  In spite of everything I began to laugh. I was simply incredulous.

  “What are you suggesting?” I said. “Are you reducing this conflict between us to merely a matter of wasting blood?”

  I turned away. And in an instant she darted forward, kneeling beside the unconscious youth, digging her fingernails into the small wounds I had left, tearing clumsily at the flesh so that I winced at the ghastly sound as she exposed the artery, like a piece of cord, then severed it. A great jet of blood spurted out, drenching her.

  “There!” she said, looking at me with contempt, a dreadful sight, her clothes, face and hair all soaked with crimson.

  I looked down at the body, blood still bubbling from the awful gaping wound. Then I sprang at her, every vestige of restraint gone, grabbing her throat and shaking her like a doll. Her legs buckled and her eyes swam as I tightened my grip. She beat at me, clawed at my hands and tried to prize open my fingers, but I would not free her. Then her body grew limp and she breathed no more, and my rage was fading into despair as I loosened my hold and flung her down, staring in disbelief at her twisted lifeless form. I staggered back, barely able to comprehend what I had done. I was more monstrous even than she.

  But then her body trembled and sprang back into life, gasping and choking with shock. She glared up at me, then she smiled and all her arrogance returned.

  “Go on, then,” she said. “Kill me, if you really know how to do it. Destroy a life that you created. Hah! You haven’t the courage.”

  I strode off, back to the house, and she whispered taunts after me.

  “It is fortunate you couldn’t kill me. Then you would have been forced to dispose of the bodies yourself. And mine as well. I know how such
things distress you. But don’t worry. I am here to do your dirty work!”

  For the rest of the night I locked myself away in an upstairs room. I heard Elizabeth return shortly before dawn. I never learned what she did with the corpses.

  When at last she slept I emerged and went about the house, gathering my personal things. I knew the decision was weak and wrong, but I had to leave.

  The next evening when I rose I departed at once.

  XII

  Evil: for so long it had lay brooding close beneath the surface of my existence, a creeping amorphous thing. Now it had festered to find lasting form. Elizabeth had blasted my world like a thunderbolt, shattering its fragile structure, then taunting me as she stood amidst the ruins. Unleashed from the confinement of her human life, like a wild beast from a cage, perhaps twisted by an unnatural upbringing, she possessed no feelings of inner conflict or loss; none of the things I now realised had allowed me to see in evil a terrible depth, a vastness that amounted to a sort of monstrous grandeur. Spiteful and remorseless, it was her smallness of vision, her sheer brutal simplicity that I found hardest to understand.

  But what had first drawn me to her? This question plagued me most as I ran from her. Was it just a calamitous mischance? Or did it run deeper? Like going to like. Evil seeking out evil with infallible instinct.

  I made my way back to my house in Cornwall, where I had not been for some years. A long time before I had set up a trust to preserve it, although by now, for all I knew, it might simply have been forgotten by the authorities altogether. I had also sold various properties and possessions over the years, making investments with the proceeds to protect my finances. But as time passed I came to find them increasingly complicated and tiresome, these delvings into human matters.

  The old house and grounds had stood derelict for so long now they looked reminiscent of the palace of the Sleeping Beauty during its dormant century. But this in no way distressed me. In fact I preferred it so. I had little love for the modern world that was forming about me, with its frivolous, foolish new generations. It seemed this house was the only place that remained unchanged, and to which I truly belonged.

  Often I spent hours wandering in the gloom, deep in my thoughts, sometimes walking in the local churchyards and occasionally finding stone memorials to those who had been my human contemporaries. In some ways I was more miserable alone even than I had been with Elizabeth. At least while I had concerned myself with her I had been kept in part from the dismal, lonely reflections that assailed me now.

  Over the years, with Helena’s aid and example, I had come to convince myself that my kind existed naturally. Freaks, aberrations of nature, certainly, but belonging to the natural world. Yet lately I had begun to question this. Every old doubt, long banished, rose up to take new shape. That death ruled the world was a simple truth. But it seemed I stood immune. How could I pretend to be part of nature when I defied her most potent law? And yet if I was supernatural! Infested by formless evil, doomed to wander the earth as a parasite, a mockery of everything natural and good, feeding on destruction. Was I any of the things men had ever called me? Incubus. Vampire. Revenant. The name barely mattered. It did not change what I was.

  “The spawn of darkness!” I would speak the words in a low whisper, a fearful whisper that echoed through and through the house. Looking back it appeared that all I had ever done had come to evil – as if that were my inevitable destiny, and all else far beyond my reach. Again a host of devils seemed to form and gather and leer at me through the darkness. Perhaps, they said softly, I was but the child of the time and society into which I was born: that used its power to ravage the world, taking all it wanted, serving its own ruthless ends yet seeing always what it chose to see. Keeping intact its ludicrous delusions of morality and correctness.

  I was afraid.

  Several weeks after my return to Cornwall I sat one night in my old study, brooding over these and other things in silence, when I became aware of a light, familiar step outside. The door to my study swung open but I did not turn about, just sat staring down at my hands, clasped together on the desk.

  “How dare you!” Her voice was filled with anger. “How dare you leave me. What right had you to go away and leave me alone?”

  “None,” I replied, still staring down. “It was wrong.”

  “Did you think you’d lose me? Did you think I couldn’t guess where you’d come? That I never took the chance to search through your papers and things, to find out about you; who you were and where you came from?”

  “No, Elizabeth. I knew you would find me.”

  And as I said this I knew it was true. I looked up at her. And when she saw that I would not argue the matter she turned sharply and sat in a chair, facing away from me.

  From that moment there was forged an unspoken truce between us. For all the things that divided us, there was still more that bound us together. Apart from each other we were utterly alone. And despite the fact that my life with her was the perfect mockery and dark reflection of all that my life with Helena had been, there remained nevertheless a bond between us that was nearly as strong as that which I shared with Helena. I was responsible for her. And most certainly now I would never create another to be my companion. Without Elizabeth I would be forever alone. Had I deserted her, I would force her to create her own companion. And so the disease would spread. I imagined a tribe of revenants with Elizabeth its teacher and I its father. It was too terrible to contemplate. But while she sometimes taunted me with threats of creating another, she never did so. I doubt that her nature would easily have endured a dependant. I think that truly I suited her as a companion, and that she found some perverse satisfaction in our opposing natures, and the conflict between us.

  Yet it would be wrong to suggest that our companionship did not serve my own inward needs. The need to do penance. The need to suffer as I knew I deserved, and to seek within that suffering a distraction from the knowledge that my life would continue forever, which remained always terrible and unimaginable to me.

  So years dissolved into the past, bringing no change to Elizabeth or I, except for the gradual evolution of a weary half-tolerance for one another. She remained as ruthless as ever, spreading death as she chose, while I lived from day to day and bore the guilt for it all.

  The second war with Germany came and passed, and in the decades that followed it the world changed more totally and rapidly than I might ever have thought possible. And I hated it, more and more. Remote from it, yet trapped in it, it held nothing for me, meant nothing to me, this new world with its swelling population, its frantic pace, glaring lights, blasting noises; its roaring, stenching machines, foul air, hard grey streets and towering buildings. Its growing irreverence and careless sensuality. And all with me was hopeless and static. The purpose, the growth of understanding I had sought with Helena was gone. Alone I was not strong enough to keep sight of it. I was lost and drifting, seeing nothing ahead but the desolation and madness I feared. And I no longer pretended to understand anything.

  Now I sought more and more the sanctuary of my remote Cornish home. Often I went there alone while Elizabeth lingered awhile in some town or other, for she was always as fascinated by humanity as I had once been, and soon grew restless and tired of the quiet lonely places I now preferred.

  On one such occasion I returned home, taking a train to Bodmin, then arranging for a car to drive me to the outskirts of a village near my house. I walked the last couple of miles in the very early hours of morning. I would travel in trains and cars no more than was really necessary, and a walk though quiet countryside afterwards was pleasant.

  Walking through the fields and woods approached the house from the back, past the small cemetery and tomb, across the overgrown garden, along a cracked, narrow stone pathway that stretched between the high grass on the lawn. The night was dark and stormy as I stood awhile, gazing up at the tall Gothic towers and spires, dark and eerie against the heavy sky, but familiar and comforting f
or all that. And it was as I looked on the house from a distance that at once I thought I saw movement in the shadows near one of the back doors. I stiffened and stared hard. For an instant it seemed that a vague figure moved swiftly, then stopped momentarily, as if suddenly aware of my presence, before vanishing completely. At once I rushed forward, fast as I could, to the spot where I believed the figure had been. But I saw nothing more there.

  At once I felt an urge to go and search inside the house; to make sure my sanctuary was not invaded or disrupted. I produced the key, turning it with trembling fingers in the rusty lock, and entered quickly. I wandered all about the ground floor, then down into the cellar where my father’s high racks of vintage port and brandy still stood, coated with inches of dust. All appeared as it should be. As I had left it. Curiously, though the property was badly dilapidated, it had never suffered any human invasion, not even from adventurous local children. No doubt it had acquired a reputation for being haunted.

  Now I climbed the wide staircase to the upper floor, walking across the landing, staring from a window down into the back garden, rubbing thick dirt from the glass.

  The wind whipped at the grass and trees and the night seemed alive. From all over the house came sounds: rattlings, creakings, scufflings. These things were not unusual. But that night was unlike any other. A sense of inexplicable strangeness hung all about. It was not just what I thought I had seen in the garden. In fact for the moment I pushed that to the back of my mind, dismissed it as another of those shades my imagination was at times inclined to conjure. But something unsettled me.

  I walked down the long corridor, to the door of my old bedroom. I pushed it open and it swung back with a discordant creak. Inside everything was familiar, but yet strange. It was years since I had ventured into this room. And nothing there had been touched for virtually a century. Bed, desk, chairs, books; everything was as it had been when I was a young man; except that now it was all damp and crumbling, covered like the rest of the house in dust and mould and cobwebs. A hidden remnant from more than a hundred years ago, stagnant and forgotten. But it brought such memories, of my human life, of Helena, of my dreams of passion and power – the prelude to immortality. And as I sat caught up in these recollections I became gradually aware of something – a faint but unpleasant odour that clung to the air of the chamber. It was not just the cloying mustiness that filled the house. It was sharper than that. More pungent. It was the smell of something starting to decay.