All at once I became aware that there was some other presence with me in the room. My hand reached out slowly, grasping the curtain drawn across the other side of the bed. I hesitated. I was frightened. Something was beyond that curtain, something I feared instinctively. Something I knew would be beyond my every comprehension. I did not want to see it or know it. But it must be faced. Whatever it was it lurked in my home. In my room, behind that worn curtain. And it must be confronted.
In an instant I tugged at the rotting cloth and it tore between my fingers as I ripped it aside.
A thousand visions of Hell could never have found anything more dreadful than the figure I saw stooping over me. Its eyes bulged at me, sunken in bluish sockets, its yellow skin dry and scaly, stenching of death. Its shrivelled lips and chin were smeared with black dried blood, and tufts of hair were gone from its head exposing flaking patches of scalp. A vile resurrected corpse that rotted as it stood.
All this was frightful enough, but my real terror came as I stared deep into the face of this heap of animated corruption. For beneath it all, the horror and disfigurement, the face I saw was easily recognised. It was my own. A terrible distorted image of myself. What I had always dreaded most – to see myself as I feared I truly was: the hellish remnant of what was once human. A twisted parody of man and of God; tainted with blood and guilt.
I sprang to my feet, stumbling across the room, crying out and covering up my eyes like some terrified child, inwardly praying to God or the Devil or to any divine power that might hear me and deliver me from the sight of this abomination. My own sobs rang in my ears as I half-swooned against the wall, choking and gasping. Then, gathering some strength and control from somewhere inside me, I looked up again. It was gone. I stared into the gloom, trembling, my heart pounding. Then I saw it again, emerging from behind the curtain drawn about the foot of the bed. It leaned towards me now, gibbering, dribbling, stretching out its shrivelled, shaking hands as if to grasp at me. I cowered back as it approached me, a look of astonishment on its obscene face to mirror my own. Then they fell open, those distorted lips, wrinkled in a deranged grin and omitted a few slurred sounds; the voice hoarse and quite unintelligible, as if dredged from some great murk of inner turmoil. I watched transfixed as it tottered forward. But then I saw and I knew. On the wall behind it I saw that old portrait I had found and hung there all those years before; the discovery of which had been the start of it all. The portrait from which my own features seemed to stare imperiously out at the world. The portrait of my own ancestor, of Helena’s brother: William LePerrowne.
XIII
For long moments we both stood and stared at each other in silence. It must be William. It could be none other. And the knowledge of this rendered me incapable of any other thought. I simply watched him there, nodding and sighing at me, until I heard movement behind me and spun about. Another figure was there, hurling itself upon me, another revenant, gripping my shoulders with frantic strength, clinging to me as it thrust me back hard against the wall. In an instant I struck out, a terrible rage starting to grow in the midst of my confusion, knocking my assailant to the floor; but only for an instant, then he was back upon his feet, crouching down ready to spring at me. A brown haired man, young in appearance, in plain black clothes and overcoat. I raised my hand to stay his attack. Although my body was ready to fight, some part of my mind seemed scarcely present there within the room. After several moments the stranger drew back and spoke.
“He. .. we. ..” he pointed over to William “… have been waiting here. We came to find Helena. Someone called Helena.”
His voice carried a gentle accent of some sort, but I was in no mind to identify it. At the mention of Helena, William showed some signs of excitement, mumbling, shaking his hands and swinging his head back and forth; but then it all died as rapidly as it had begun, his face contorting miserably, as if he were about to burst into tears or throw a fit. Then he fell silent, staring dejectedly down at the floor.
“Too late!” I mumbled blankly after a pause, the words at first sticking in my throat. “It is too late. She is dead. Helena is dead.”
William looked up, seeming to frown and glare at me momentarily, as if he were quite sane and I was a lunatic who failed to understand any of this. Under other circumstances the expression might even have seemed comical. But then he grinned again and turned away, muttering incoherently to himself.
His companion still stared at me, studying my face. And when I looked back at him he shook his head and said bewildered:
“Dead! Dead, did you say?”
“Yes. Dead. Do you understand? The number of interpretations you may apply to the word are limited, even in our unfortunate condition.” I spoke with a sudden vehemence. The memory of Helena was at once more acutely painful than it had been for many years.
He looked at me a moment longer, then went over to William, taking him firmly by the shoulders, staring into his poor mad face and speaking to him sharply.
“No. Listen to me. She’s dead. Can you understand? It’s over. Helena is dead.” He turned back to me, shaking his head. “I don’t know if he understands. Or ever will. Not now. His mind has gone. There is nothing left.”
But I barely heard him. I was no longer able to contain that rush of gathering rage.
“Why did you come here?” I cried, turning on the mad, gaping creature, seizing him by his collar, pulling and shaking him. “Why? Why did you have to come back?” And I hurled him flinching and whining from me, turned and fled the room, hardly yet knowing why I did so.
By the time I had hurtled down the stairs and crashed through the door of my study, I understood. And I sat at my desk, clamping my hands over my face, crying out aloud:
“It was him. All the time. Oh, you must have loved him. Your precious brother. Loved him so much you couldn’t bear to lose him. Not to humanity. Not to death. So you infected him with the disease, with the evil. Took him in your arms. Worked away your forbidden lust upon him. But you did lose him. He left you. Then when you found me, his very double, you plotted and schemed from the start to hold me, giving me all your fear and guilt, moulding me into what you wanted. Blinding me and binding me to the tortured thing you were. Maximillian knew. My God! He warned me. He was always right. Idiot! How have I never understood? It was never me you wanted. It was William. It was always him.”
And in a moment came the memory of something Helena had once said to me, on that bleak winter night in London, long, long ago; after she had taken me to Maximillian.
“I should never have made you like myself!” she had said. “It was weakness. I pray you will never know what weakness it was!” Subtle, insidious words.
I sat absorbed in total misery. It was not only hurt pride. Not only rejection and broken illusion, though that was painful enough. It went far deeper. For the memory of Helena, of the love and understanding I believed we shared, had long been my only strength. My last hope that there could be any goodness or redemption in my existence. But now this too was swept away, and nothing remained but desolation.
“We are all the same!” I whispered. I was thinking of my own unnatural line. Of the repellent hypocrite Maximillian, who could convince himself that any atrocity might be justified with perverted sophistry. Of Helena, struggling hopelessly for purpose and reason in the face of chaos. Of myself, with my ridiculous pretensions to human morality. And of Elizabeth, who cared for nothing but her own desires. Each of us from a different century and age, representing the ways and thoughts of a different time. Yet each of us finding our own inevitable path to evil. It all seemed like one of those grim Greek tragedies my tutor Soame made me read as a boy. Cursed by a tainted line, pursued throughout centuries by a black and relentless fate; by vengeful furies that gave no quarter.
I do not know how long I sat before there came a faint scratching at the door. Wearily I looked up. The other revenant, William’s companion, stood there.
“I must speak with you,” he said.
> “Enter!” I told him abruptly, indicating a chair. “Sit. Speak.”
He sat, staring at me, then all about the room in agitation. He looked at me again. He seemed lost for words. Plainly he feared and distrusted me, though that was hardly surprising. I stared back, raising an eyebrow.
“I want you to help me!” he blurted suddenly. “I don’t … I can’t understand any of this. And the more I see and hear, the less damn’ sense any of it makes. Ever since he made me like I am …”
“How long ago did it happen?” I interrupted.
“A few months. At my home in Ireland. He was mad then but he’s got much worse since. He was obsessed with getting back here and finding Helena. But he couldn’t have made it alone. He needed me.”
I nodded. I began to appreciate all his fear and confusion. When I had become a revenant I had known similar feelings. But I had had Helena to guide me. To have been ushered into this existence by that mad, shambling thing upstairs – and for no better reason than to help him get back home – must have been terrifying indeed.
“I had no choice but to follow him and do as he wanted, until I could begin to understand. I had to come here with him, to try and find some other like me.” He scowled with disgust. “He can’t do anything for himself any more. I even have to help him feed.”
“But his condition,” I said. “What happened to him? Do you know? What made him the way he is?”
“I don’t know!” he shook his head, staring downward. “He didn’t speak of it. Never. He was raving mad from the start. He told me almost nothing.” He paused for a moment. “He told me … he told me that we do not grow old. And we do not die.” His eyes grew wide as he looked up at me suddenly.
“Did he?” I replied.
“But …” he spread his hands in a gesture of bewilderment “… it seems that he is dying. Something in him lives on, but I’ve watched as his body withers and dies. And I’ve thought: is this it? The immortality he speaks of. Living decay? And now you tell me that Helena is dead.”
“Yes,” I said with a quick harsh laugh. I believe that something within me found a cruel pleasure in his distress. “Ah, yes. Death. The supreme terror of this modern time. The Antichrist of your age. With their medicines and machines the men of today cling to a few extra years of life. Fewer babies die in the cradle, fewer women in childbirth. And so they try to forget death. To regard it as a distant unreal thing. In my time death lurked about us, young and old, in a thousand forms, and we could not ignore it. Even in the nursery we were urged to reconcile ourselves to it, prepare ourselves for it.” Then I said: “No, the Great Beast of my age was sensuality. Dark disruptive passions. And frivolity. Those things which have become the delights of today. And it is a strange thing, but to me, who has lived in both times, these alternate fears and obsessions – passion and death – they are the same. They are one.”
He looked entirely confounded, and I dismissed all I had said with a wave of my hand. These were my private reflections, voiced only in bitterness, and doubtless he would think them trivial. I was simply struck suddenly by the sheer irony.
“As far as I know,” I went on, “our lives cannot be measured in human terms. Perhaps we really are immortal. Certainly we may exist for centuries, and we are not susceptible to natural ageing. Helena died violently. By dismemberment. The brutal destruction of a vascular system powerful beyond belief.” I rolled the words out flatly, my voice conveying nothing. “But what is happening to William is unlike anything I have ever seen or heard of. It is as you say, as if something has brought death upon him, but because of what he is life will not finally desert him.” I frowned. Once again anger was seeping uncontrollably into my words. “Death is not so terrible. It is like anything else. It seems much sweeter when you know you cannot have it. We exist in a void between life and death. This creates a void inside ourselves. And within this void lurks a devil who drives us to his will, into endless misery and corruption. The longer it lasts the more terrible it becomes. So! If you come to me seeking hope or comfort I must disappoint you. I can give you nothing.”
My bitterness rose again, but now I lacked any will to restrain it. I stood, walking swiftly to the shuttered windows, peering through a crack into the grey wilderness outside. From the corner of my eye I saw him sitting, regarding me solemnly. Then his eyes blazed suddenly with all the power of his lost humanity.
“But what of God?” he said faintly. “What are we to God?”
I began to laugh now, as I turned to gaze at him fiercely.
“I have existed for more than one hundred and fifty years,” I said, “and I have known less of God with each passing day. I know nothing of God. Yet in spite of this, I feel that I know God better than He knows me. We do not concern each other much any more, the Almighty and I.”
He did not answer, but simply stared at me, his poor face white and aghast.
“What did you think?” I told him. “That we are angels placed upon the earth to spread joy? Well! Have you learned now what you needed to know?” I laughed again. “Do not worry. You cannot offend me. You look upon me and see everything you must fear. You see what is worse than disease or death, what is more dismal even than the condition that William is in. In me you see what you may become. And if you look to God, being what you are, then I am surely what you will become. Beyond this I am hardly fit to advise you. Find your own answers. They can be no worse than mine.”
He looked back at me, but still said nothing.
“It will not help us to talk any more tonight. No doubt you have noticed that I am not in a bright mood.” I glanced again through the crack in the shutters. Outside thick morning mist was forming over the high grass. “It is dawn,” I said. “Leave me now. Go and attend to William. Then rest. We can talk some more later, if that is what you wish.”
He rose and departed at once.
* * *
Over the following nights, William’s companion – whose name was Niall – and I circled each other like wary felines, speaking together of little but William’s condition, which seemed to deteriorate visibly as we attended him: his form growing ever more shrunken, his eyes more lost to reason. William remained an enigma.
Soon afterwards Elizabeth arrived. When she knew the situation she drew the same conclusions as I, and threw back her head with a burst of laughter.
“Aha!” she cried. “So the pure and wonderful Helena turns out to be a fraud after all. Incest of all things. That’s something I never tried. Should I be jealous?”
“My dear,” I told her with a shake of my head, “it isn’t any use. You cannot antagonise me any more. I should have thought you would have realised it. I am beyond caring.” And this seemed the truth. What I felt now was just an immense weariness. A vague wish simply to lay down and sleep peacefully throughout eternity. A futile wish, indeed.
Nevertheless there was one thing that astonished and almost amused me. That was Elizabeth’s reaction to the presence of William. She – whom I had thought beyond a sense of physical disgust for anything – regarded him with intense revulsion. When she looked upon him she actually appeared to shudder. And she could not bear to remain in the same room as him for even the briefest time.
But I, on the contrary, found myself increasingly fascinated by him. I could not exactly explain it, but rapidly I lost all the initial horror I had felt for him. I found it remarkable to sit and observe, hour after hour, this supposedly eternal being decaying, stenching, dissolving like any human corpse before my eyes. And this macabre fascination soon grew to become intense. I wanted to know why. I wished to understand how it could happen, and what could have caused it. I tried again and again to speak to William, to make him understand me. But it was no use. His mind was as dead as his body. Only the supernatural life force remained.
So the question of William came to haunt me more and more. An idea had formed somewhere in my mind, yet it was so awful that I hardly dared realise it. But it returned to me constantly, this shadow of a thoug
ht. I felt drawn to it in the way I had been drawn against myself to the notion of invading my family tomb and opening the coffin of Helena all those years before.
One night I sat alone with William in the master bedroom, where he stayed most of the time, just gazing into the gloom. I looked at him and wondered how much longer he could endure. How long would it be before his body utterly disintegrated? How might even his life continue in such a form? Occasionally Niall would feed him – an unpleasant duty which Niall seemed to accept as his – by returning from feeding himself, then letting William suckle drops of fresh blood from a vein in his arm. But this brought no improvement to William’s condition. And as I considered this, and listened to him breathing hard and painfully, there came a strong sense of urgency. If my attempt was to be made, I felt it must be done at once.
At last I rose, moving to him, taking his shoulders and pushing him down onto the bed. His eyes looked up at me, but did not seem to see me as I leaned down towards him, clasping him to me, ignoring with difficulty his fetid skin and breath, his dreadful proximity, his burning cold. And I lay beside him, flinching with disgust, forcing myself to draw forward, placing my lips on his neck and gnawing slowly at the dry, rank flesh, until at last I tasted the polluted fluid in his veins, clotting and vile. I had no idea of the effect this lifeless blood might have on me. It might make me ill. It might even poison me. There was no flood of power, none of those hot waves of strength and relief that came from human bodies; only the icy blood, oozing onto my tongue and down my throat, making my stomach shudder and heave, and then a sense of darkness spreading before me, a bleak winter land that pulled me rapidly towards its lifeless wastes. Every instinct urged me to draw back, to spit and vomit out the filthy blood, but I resisted, drained him harder still until it felt that my whole body was consumed by cold, like the cold that was hunger, but worse; more sickening, more painful, as his body shook then grew limp beside me. Then, gasping and choking, my head pounding as if to split, I felt myself thrown back, as if by a great force, rolling from the bed, crashing down onto the floor. I lay there a few moments, groaning and clutching at the pain that writhed in my stomach. Then I rose and staggered forward, sitting on the bed beside the twisted, motionless form there. He remained still as I studied him closely. His eyes were half-open and glazed. A thrill passed through me. In his weak state it seemed I had succeeded in throwing him into that trance-like condition into which my human victims always fell. I bent over him, looking for a moment at the brown blood that fast congealed about his small neck wound.
The Revenants Page 16