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Prologue
I had been here before. Hadn't I? Yes: long before, with Sebastian, in those long summer days before the strike, the alcohol, the war. Before Julia; before Blanche; before Mottram.
So why did it all seem so different?
The war,I told myself. It was because of the war that the mansion looked so strange. So empty. So different. But could it just be the war, in the end? Could the war have given to the mansion that strange glimmering, that otherworldly sheen, that fluid light it now possessed? I tightened my grip on the revolver, and wondered...
Suddenly, I heard a noise behind me. I wheeled, revolver in hand, ready to face the enemy I knew was surely there: but there was nothing.
Nothing, for the longest time, and then...That laugh. A laugh I'd last heard years ago, before the war, in London. A laugh I'd thought long drowned in Brandy Alexanders. Blanche.
'Really, Charles,' he intoned, with his grotesque insouciance, 'what are you going to do? Shoot me with your little gun? Honestly.'
He seemed to take one step, and yet in an instant we were face-to-face. 'How very like you,' he sneered. 'To claim to be an artist, and yet to rely, in the end, on that most dull and English of approaches: brute force. Just like your paintings.'
'What the devil do you mean?' I asked, aghast.
'I mean, dear Charles, that the same urge which led to your shallow, shallow paintings has led to you drawing your gun. You've always been too busy reacting to things to ever perceive them completely. Or even correctly.'
A thought struck me, suddenly. 'What happened to your stutter, Blanche?'
'Exactly, my dear Charles. Exactly.' The fiend patted my cheek. 'You got it all wrong, dear chap. You were standing in the thick of things beyond your perception, and you chose to concentrate on t-teddy bears and st-stutters. Oh well. Can't be helped now, I suppose.'
With that, he withdrew, reached into his jacket pocket, and pulled out some contrivance the like of which I'd never seen. It bore the same resemblance to the pistol in my hand as Durham Cathedral bears to a Methodist chapel, but its purpose was obvious.
'Goodbye, Charles. You never really understood what it was all about, and now you're going to die. You're a moron. Your life was a waste. Cheerio.'
And with that, he fired -
and I woke up, with a jolt, back in my camp bed, in the grounds.
'Good Lord.' I rubbed my eyes and looked around me. I took in the scene: the good, crude, honesty of war. Not, thank god, that shining, oily cruelty of my dream. What did it mean? After the arrival yesterday...To dream of Blanche again, after all these years?
A crunch outside. The grass. I was not alone. I reached for the revolver again, reminded myself that I had not truly held the gun before, and took comfort in its absolute solidity. I sat up in bed, and prepared to make for the tent-flap, when it opened, and another figure from my past shimmered through. It wore leather, polished to an onyx sheen, and hair slicked back, and tinted glasses, but it was not Blanche, this time.
'Did you ever have a dream, Charles, that you were so sure was real?'
I had heard that voice before, on the Atlantic. Julia. |
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