The Severed Man

by George Mann

  For a moment they were all blind.

  Light seared Honoré’s eyes, burning them to dry, hot stones that ached in the harsh, baking incandescence. He tried to cover his face with the crook of his arm, but to no avail. Beside him, he thought he could hear Emily screaming. The strange music had changed in tempo, picking up rhythm, increasing greatly in intensity. He felt as if his eardrums would burst at any moment.

  Then the light changed shape.

  It was the most bizarre thing that Lechasseur had ever witnessed. Suddenly there was a different texture to the light, and the pain in his eyes subsided. He wiped at his streaming face. It was as if the whole room had shifted, or something had altered, and now he could see again.

  He blinked and looked around, still struggling to see against the intense brightness, but able now to make out more of what was going on. The music still rang loudly in his ears.

  His first sight was the room itself. It was a great hall, a huge, expansive space, created by the void beneath the two felled trees, which still appeared to prop the building up, resting against each other as they had done for centuries, holding everything in place. There was no furniture anywhere to be seen.

  The first thing that really struck him, however, inspiring a moment of stunned inaction, was the sight of a hundred or so people crowding around the edges of the room. They were all shuffling their feet like animated zombies, all entirely consumed by the bizarre music, all facing towards the light as if it were warming their faces, washing into their very souls. Their faces were images of rapture, or religious ecstasy, and Honoré was utterly appalled by the sight of it.

  He looked up towards the source of the light itself.

  The creature was both exquisitely beautiful and horrifyingly obscene. It hung amongst the rafters like some kind of archangel or hovering ghost. At first, Honoré could make out nothing but painful, shining light, but the more he looked, the more detail he saw.

  The entity was almost gaseous in nature; an amorphous, globular body of shifting intensity, shining out from a central nucleus like a miniature sun or an atomic explosion. Yet inside the body of the alien thing were strange, interlocking, geometric shapes, patterns of differently textured light, drifting around, colliding with one another to form new patterns, new helix-like shapes and strands of what Lechasseur assumed to be signs of life, of intelligence. He watched for a moment, entirely caught up in the sight of it.

  The dissonant, discordant sound continued to float around the room, captivating him. It was as if his mind had begun to fill in the blanks in the patterns, predicting what would happen next, filling in the spaces between sounds with the missing notes. It occurred to him how entirely clever it all was, how easily it had arrested his attention and drawn him in. The music played out all around him, a symphony of ecstasy.

  He studied the shapes for a moment longer. He thought, for a moment, that he had caught the flicker of a face in the patterns, a disembodied human visage looking down at him, its mouth moving in a silent, imploring chant. He looked harder now, trying to search it out amongst the storm of chaos.

  And then he caught sight of it again. Only it wasn’t a human face at all, but something far, far worse. Something indescribable, skull-like, utterly terrifying. It screamed, and the whole world came crashing down around Honoré’s ears.

  He was back in the fields of Normandy, fishing for his rifle amongst a putrid pile of warm body parts, trying desperately to reclaim his only defence against the oncoming swarm of enemy soldiers. His hands were slick with blood, his eyes stinging with the smoke and the sweat and the sight of his lost companions.

  He was standing on the riverbank back in London, struggling against Abraxas, the horrible man-thing with his rasping, ragged breath and his stench of old, worn leather and blood.

  He was a small child in New Orleans, struggling desperately to save himself from drowning in the bayou, where his foot had become trapped in the reeds after a secret night-time swim. The water tasted foul on the back of his tongue as he lapped at the air, trying to stay afloat. His parents were asleep inside.

  He was at his mother’s bedside as she died of a wicked cancer, her entire chest eaten away by the growth, as if she were so much cattle feed, a thin bag of flesh and bones stretched out on the bed. He didn’t want to kiss her, as her skin tasted of salt and stale urine.

  He was dead, lying in a quiet grave, unmarked and heaped with cloying soil and dirt. He couldn’t move, couldn’t even turn his head to see the worms that were crawling beneath his skin, burrowing into his flesh as his body became one with the earth once again.

  He was...

  Lying on the floor in the great hall, Emily slapping his face hard with the palm of her hand, screaming his name at the top of her lungs.

  ‘Honoré! Honoré! Wake up, damn you! Honoré!’

  He looked at her with a start.

  ‘What the...?’

  ‘It’s killing him. It’s tearing him apart.’ Emily sobbed and allowed herself to slip to the floor beside him. He scrambled to his feet. This time, his view of the entity was entirely different.

  It was like trying to take in the view of a million years all at once. The time streams around him were wide open, whipping around like some complex shape devised by Escher, a universe of time and space. The time-snake of the entity was like a broiling, complex web, and Barnaby was at the centre of it, thrashing against the flow like some tiny child trying to stop the revolution of the world. All around him, terrifying skeletal faces screamed at him, tormenting him with their aeons-worth of agony. And Barnaby continued to be consumed by the thing, to be dissolved by the sheer weight of its presence, the sheer pressure of time, to dissipate into nothing but a few broken strands of severed time.

  But Honoré could see it now, could see the entity for what it truly was, and he knew he could do nothing to save Barnaby from his misdirected last gasp.

  He reached out and grabbed hold of Emily, pulling her hard to her feet.

  ‘Come on! We’ve got to get back to 1950. We have to stop him; we have to stop him killing it there! We need to go now, before it’s too late. There’s nothing more we can do here.’ He spun her around, still sobbing, and together they traced the dissolving shape of the severed man from amongst the searing chaos and disappeared in a haze of blue electrical light.

  Part Four: The Light Of Other Days

  Severence

  The darkness was a respite after the painful light; a blanket of calm, soothing away the shock of the last few minutes. Honoré slowly became aware of his surroundings.

  It was raining, hard. The water lashed at him, stinging his upturned face. He looked around, stumbling momentarily with the disorientation.

  1950. The graveyard.

  The step through time had left him tired and drained. He rested his hand on a nearby tombstone and looked around for Emily in the dark storm. The wind was howling, driving the rain at him from a sharp, almost horizontal angle. Honoré could feel the water penetrating his clothes, soaking him through to the skin. He opened his mouth to call out for Emily, but the sound was carried away by the wind, and the rainwater flowed into his open mouth, causing him to hack and splutter. He could barely see a thing.

  He pushed himself away from the old grave, trying to steady himself. He couldn’t see Emily anywhere. He staggered over to a clump of nearby trees, realisation dawning on him that the grave he had been standing beside had been that of Barnaby Tewkes. He wondered whether it was empty or not.

  Behind Lechasseur, the ruined church stood like an old monolith against the night sky, holding steady against the severe weather. He figured Emily might have tried to make it inside to find shelter. He clambered around the tree trunks, feeling his way so as not to fall. He staggered from gravestone to gravestone, catching hold of each one as he passed, to stop the wind from stealing his footing in the muddy loam. In the distance he could see
the street lamps glowing with a dull electrical haze, washed out by the insistent rain.

  He steadied himself. Just as he was about to try and make a run for the church entrance, he caught a glimpse of some dark blue fabric from around the back of one of the larger gravestones. He circled it, finding Emily slumped in a heap on the ground, her face muddied and her hair pressed into the dirt. She looked pale, cold and wet.

  Lechasseur knelt down beside his companion and scooped her up in his arms, staggering under the extra weight. He felt his feet sinking into the mud. Emily was unconscious, and he needed to get her to safety as soon as possible. He made a concerted effort to jog towards the church doorway and ducked inside, bringing them out of the harsh conditions and into the relative shelter of the burnt-out building.

  There was no door left on the old church, and a huge part of the ceiling had collapsed in on itself, so the building was still exposed to the elements, but Honoré managed to find a sheltered corner to place Emily down on the ground. He took his coat from around his shoulders and gently laid it over her, resting her head carefully on the flagged stone floor.

  She looked like she had been attacked; she had a large red welt across her right cheek and it was clear she had been battered and pushed into the mud.

  Lechasseur punched the side of his leg in frustration.

  Someone had obviously been waiting for them when they arrived back in 1950, and had either attacked Emily whilst she was still disorientated or had been provoked by her into defending himself. There was no doubt in his mind who was responsible.

  The severed man.

  The crazed, bewildered incarnation of Barnaby Tewkes that inhabited this era.

  He shook his head. Barnaby had got it all wrong.

  When Lechasseur had seen the magnificent, twisting time-snake of the entity back in 1921, he had been afforded a singular insight into its bizarre, formless mind. It had seemed, at the time, like a hot needle lancing him between the eyes, burning into his brain; a series of elaborate, flickering images being forced into his mind’s eye, playing out like a long sequence of film. It was almost as if the creature was trying to speak to him, to communicate through its pained expressions, forcing him to witness its own plight first-hand, to suffer its agonies and trade its memories for his own. He had been dragged painfully through his own timeline, forced to relive many of his own difficult experiences, even to witness what he thought was his own death, or at least his post-life, his decomposition. Yet the entity had given as much as it had taken, providing insights into its own existence, trying to make him understand.

  It was dying, just like the severed man.

  Honoré had witnessed a terrible glimpse of the future, had seen the entity tormented by nightmarish, ghostly figures. The figures had been slicing away at its time-snake like ethereal butchers, carving the alien creature into ribbons of pain. It had fled into human history in an attempt to hide, to flee its torment, but its enemies had pursued it and sought it out, bending it to their will.

  It was a victim, not an accomplice; as persecuted as the bastardised remains of the soldier he had helped to die in the glowing flames of the cultists’ godforsaken house.

  He had to find the boy before Barnaby did. The boy was the key. The boy was the entity, its manifestation in this time period. If he could only try to talk to it again, to explain somehow the pain and hurt that its continued presence was inadvertently causing, the danger that it represented to all the other time sensitive people throughout history, Honoré was convinced he could make a difference.

  But if Barnaby got to it first...

  He looked down at Emily to see that she was stirring. He wiped her brow with the edge of his sleeve.

  ‘Emily? Emily, are you okay?’

  Her eyes flicked open with a start, and she tried to sit up, suddenly frantic. ‘Where is he? What has he done?’

  ‘You’re okay, Emily, we’re alone. What has who done?’ He knew very well to whom she was referring.

  ‘Barnaby.’ She gasped for breath, her eyes flicking from side to side as if she expected him to reappear at any moment. ‘He was waiting for us when we arrived. I tried to talk to him, to ask him if he was okay, if he remembered what had happened back in the village, but he just attacked me, went for me like some sort of monster, slashing away at me with his grubby hands. The last thing I remember is hitting the ground in the rain, banging my head on the gravestone. He must think we abandoned him to that horrible time creature in 1921.’

  Honoré nodded. ‘He’s got it all wrong, Emily. Horribly wrong. The creature isn’t trying to hurt anyone. It’s running away, trying to hide from its own execution in the far future. It’s just like him, like Barnaby. Someone – or something – is trying to kill it.’

  ‘How do you...’

  ‘I saw it. I saw its time-snake when Barnaby was trying to fight it. I think there must be some sort of connection between them, something that links their deaths.’

  ‘The time-cult?’ Emily was trying to sit up, her head aching and her body slick with wet and mud.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘But what about the Devil cult? And the villagers? How do you explain them?’

  Honoré helped her to her feet as he spoke, placing his coat around her shoulders. ‘The Cabal were holding the creature prisoner, tormenting it and forcing it to make contact with the time sensitives in that era. They were using it as a compass, an unwilling navigator of the time streams, to help them locate their victims. It showed me all this as it tried to prevent Barnaby from obliterating himself.’ He sighed. ‘The villagers were something different again. I think it was trying to protect them, wrap them up inside a bubble of time and stop them from witnessing what was really going on. I guess it must have failed to keep them contained.’ He shrugged. ‘But we have to go after Barnaby and stop him. If he’s found the boy, it may already be too late.’

  Emily met his gaze. ‘So you’ve worked out the connection to the boy, too?’ She looked a little bewildered.

  ‘The boy is the entity.’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘We have to go after them.’

  ‘But the boy was there too, in the graveyard, watching in the rain.’

  Honoré’s expression changed. ‘When Barnaby attacked you?’

  She nodded. Honoré put a hand on Emily’s shoulder. ‘Wait here.’ He charged out into the pouring rain.

  Outside, the rain was cascading from the heavens, veiling everything in a watery mist. Honoré put his hand to his head, wishing that he hadn’t lost his hat. He scanned the graveyard, trying to catch any sign of the crazed Barnaby or the child.

  Nothing.

  He staggered out into the full force of the storm, looking from side –to side, stopping every few feet to check behind him. Emily was standing in the doorway of the old church, shivering, his jacket pulled tightly around her small frame. It was then that he had the idea.

  He ran towards the edge of the graveyard and scrambled over the wall, nearly slipping on the old, moss-covered stones. He dropped to his feet on the other side and, just glancing around to check he hadn’t missed them in his haste, made his way down toward the marketplace.

  One of the streetlamps was buzzing with electricity as he stood beneath it for a moment, waiting, hoping. The rain continued to hammer down on him, thrumming on the top of his head as he tried to catch his breath.

  And then he heard it. The scuff of a heel from just around the corner. He looked up from sheltering his face. The boy was running across the marketplace, heading in the direction of the churchyard.

  ‘Wait!’ he called after the entity-child, hoping it would stop. It kept on running, its scarf flapping in the wind and the rain as it went.

  Honoré took off after the boy, throwing himself along the street, his feet skidding dangerously on the wet cobbles, splashing in the shallow puddles and the streaming cha
nnels of water that ran along the roadside like miniature rivers.

  He rounded the bend, not sure what he expected to see. He hoped it wasn’t going to be Emily in her pink pyjamas...

  Barnaby was there, standing in the pounding rain, his long, bedraggled hair loose down his back, his beard wet and shining. He looked like some sort of monster, laughing to himself, his hands wrapped around the throat of the child, attempting to squeeze the life out of it. The boy was flapping his hands, trying to wriggle free.

  Honoré charged towards them, shouting as he ran. ‘Barnaby! Leave him. It’s not what you think.’

  Barnaby’s head flicked to one side to regard the charging man. He continued to laugh like some deranged hyena, his hands tightening their grip.

  Lechasseur crashed headlong into the side of the other man, sending them both sprawling onto the pavement. Barnaby let out a harsh wheeze as the air was knocked from his lungs. They both lay there on the damp street for a moment, trying to regain their breath.

  Honoré climbed to his feet. The other man was folded in half, clutching at his belly. Honoré nudged him with his foot, deciding that he was safe for a moment. He scanned around, looking for the entity-child.

  The boy was standing a few yards away, watching him intently. Honoré hesitated. Last time he had tried to approach, the boy had taken flight, hurtling off down the street at a phenomenal pace. He took a short step forward towards the boy.

  It continued to stare at him.

  Lechasseur edged closer, trying not to spook the creature into running away. He didn’t know if he had the energy left to chase after it again.