Phantom File

by Patrick Carman

  DARK

  EDEN

  PHANTOM FILE

  PATRICK CARMAN

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Begin Reading Now

  An Excerpt from Dark Eden: Eve of Destruction

  Also by Patrick Carman

  Back Ad

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Begin Reading Now

  I’m Will Besting, and I’ve already told the unbelievable story of how I came to be cured. I’ve explained about Rainsford, the one who lives forever, the person who at once fixed me and cursed me in the space of seven days. And I’ve documented the insane fears of the Seven, an exclusive club I am, unhappily, a card-carrying member of. All of our fears were blown away by the power of one man.

  Before the cure, I couldn’t step into a room full of people without feeling like we were all crammed tightly into an elevator. I would hear my dead little brother’s voice in my head: This is bad. Better run before it’s too late. And so I’d move away into the comfort of empty space. Once I was by myself, I could breathe again

  But how does Rainsford do it? How did it begin? Where did this terrible power come from?

  I have a knack for finding hidden things, probably because I spend a lot of time searching. It’s an obsession. But even I’m surprised when I discover the truth. I have found the story of his beginning, and while I still hate him for what he did to me and my friends, there is a tiny corner of my soul that feels sorry for him, too.

  The power he wields came with a price.

  Before being cured by Rainsford, I spend a lot of time alone because I was afraid to be around other people. Now I just spend time by myself because I’m obsessed with discovering every detail about the person who cured me. I think I do it because I’m searching for a way to destroy him, but sometimes I wonder if it’s just morbid curiosity, because really, I don’t think he can be turned off. I don’t think Rainsford will ever come to an end.

  My memory of past events is clearer on some details than others, and this has made the material stored on my Recorder more important than ever.

  My Recorder, filled with material by Rainsford’s mortal enemy, Eve Goring. No one hates Rainsford like Mrs. Goring does (I run a distant second). Some of the files Mrs. Goring put on my Recorder when I left Rainsford’s domain are there because I was supposed to find them. But there is one file, a phantom file, I am certain I was not meant to see. I think she put it there by accident, erased it, and thought it was gone.

  I’m smarter than that, Mrs. Goring.

  If it’s been on my Recorder, deleting it won’t help you.

  A phantom file remains.

  No one knows the Recorder like I do, because I built it with my own hands. I know how to find things hidden in the dark corners of the flash memory, things other people assume are dead and buried.

  It took me three months, but I found it.

  Here is the story of Rainsford’s beginning, told by the only living person who could have known.

  Found file: Rainsford.origin

  Author: e.goring

  Origination date: 06/23/1971

  Stored at 9:21AM 08/12/2011

  Removed at 9:27AM 08/12/2011

  My mother, who died of bitterness and spite, taught me one thing well before she keeled over: a man is likely to betray you; be prepared to make him pay.

  I was a quiet child, always watching, always listening. I knew my mother was plotting against my simpleminded father long before he did. She would go through his pockets like a thief, searching for things that could be turned against him, should the need arise. If she discovered something juicy, my mother would squeal with delight, as if she couldn’t wait for the day this thing could be wielded in opposition. A receipt for bottles of booze, tickets from the horseracing track, random phone numbers scribbled on tiny pieces of paper—these were little treasures neatly organized, for my mother was a recorder of many things. If my father arrived home late with beer on his breath, she wrote it down. Date, time, infraction, all dutifully lined up in columns and tidy paragraphs designed to blow up in his face at the moment of her choosing.

  He never hurt me, but there were times when I hurt myself, as all children do now and then. If I fell down and cut myself or bruised an elbow, my mother would photograph the injured place and carefully paste the photo in the recording book. Date, time, infraction—my father would be held to account, even if he had been down at the corner bar when I’d fallen off my bike. When I walked through a closed screen door and bloodied my face, I had never seen her so happy. She was positively shaking with delight as she snapped the picture.

  She knew, and that is why she did these things. She knew her man was double timing her with another woman, and that was not to be tolerated. My father would have been better off if he’d come clean at the start, before the evidence of his betrayal—real or fabricated—piled up. My mother’s record book was exhibit A at the divorce proceedings and it left no need for any other evidence.

  I never saw him after that and only heard whispers that he had been lost. I didn’t cry for the loss, for my mother had taught me well. There is no comfort for the wicked, only shame and regret. These many years later I have to wonder what a different person he would have been without the specter of my mother’s shadow hanging over him all his days. I do confess, now that I am much older, that I miss him.

  Let this be a lesson to you, men of power and might: the world is full of lies. They can be used to inflict pain. A woman with the will to do it will turn the world against you.

  Is it my mother’s influence from the grave that made me search the hidden corners of my husband’s life, the places he would not willingly show me? Or was I simply destined to discover the truth? Either way, I too began to keep a record of things.

  I have discovered something about Rainsford, something I should not know. I had my suspicions, and they have led me to the truth. Fort Eden, this place he called my Eden, holds many secrets, but one is the foundation of them all.

  Rainsford is old, old beyond any imagining. My procedure made me wonder, but my eyes have shown me the truth.

  The story I share now is not fiction. It is a story written by a famous person of the past; her name is Mary Shelley. This story contains other famous people: her husband, the poet Percy Shelley, and the man Lord Byron. In the deepest part of Fort Eden, where I am not allowed to go, that’s where I found it. On yellowed paper at the bottom of a drawer, in the bleakest part of the bottom level of the fort. I found it! It is but one piece of evidence. It is the story of his beginning, and the very heart of the madman.

  I have typed out the entire story and carefully returned the tattered pages of the original into hiding.

  I have done you proud, haven’t I, Mother? I have recorded this hidden thing.

  I hope you’re happy.

  I take you now to the very night of a famous encounter between three writers, in which a contest was set in motion: who could write the scariest story? Certainly not a seventeen-year-old, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, a woman who would soon become Mary Shelley.

  Or could she?

  These are her words, not mine. The maker of Frankenstein speaks! How is it that the man she speaks of still lives?

  This man is my husband.

  This man is Rainsford.

  E. Goring.

  The Villa Diodati, Genoa, 1816

  I am Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and I do swear by the contents of this letter.

  My story begins with a terrible dream in the middle of the night, Percy sleeping soundly as I lay staring at the tiled ceiling. He would be riding with Lord Byron come morning, and I didn’t want to wake him, and so I crept out of the bed, into my nightdress, and crossed the roo
m in silence. The late evening was cool in the country and the windows were open, letting in the muffled sounds of night on a thick, rolling fog.

  I took a stack of blank pages in my hand. Down the darkened stairs, lit with flickering candlelight, I turned for the kitchen in search of some comfort—an inkwell, some cold tea. But I was not to find the peace I had hoped for. Upon opening the kitchen door, I beheld the form of a man sitting at the long kitchen table. He was hidden in the deep shadows, still as death, and though I could not see his eyes, I felt him staring at me. I was terrified, but the man spoke calmly, drawing me into the kitchen with a voice not of doom but of sadness and regret.

  I cannot sleep either. Will you join me?

  I must go back momentarily, to a few hours earlier, for I had met this man already.

  That evening, many terrible tales had been told, darker and more alarming as the hour grew late before the open fire, and I, taking my turn more than once, held my own against the men. There were four people besides myself: Byron, the Lord of the house; my beloved Percy Shelley; Claire Clairmont, who sat closer to Lord Byron than I thought sensible—she wouldn’t be the first to fall under his spell; and there was one other, though he was quiet to the point of rudeness. He was called Rainsford, I knew this much from Byron’s brief introduction, from which no other name or title was offered. Lord Byron called him a quiet old friend, traveling through, and we asked no more of him. After being introduced, Rainsford only brooded by the fire, sipping blood red port and, in turns, staring at the burning flames.

  As I entered the kitchen and sat down across from him, only a candle lay between us. The night was much older now and it was only us two. He was still, as if he might frighten me away, and then he spoke once more.

  You held your own tonight. How old are you? Twenty-three? Twenty-four?

  His flattery put me off my guard, for there is nothing a writer likes so much as to be thought of as a capable storyteller among the giants. I felt a small thrill as I said no, I am younger. My eyes, growing accustomed to the soft light, saw his surprised reaction.

  Really? And such a challenge. Are you worried?

  Rainsford was speaking of the wager that had been placed a few hours before. Lord Byron, ever the gambler, had thrown down the gauntlet: who among us can write the most terrifying tale? My own Percy, certain of his power over words and fueled by too much wine, did more than take up the challenge. He persuaded me to try as well. I was by far the youngest, but I told Rainsford I believed I would fare just fine against the two men.

  I believe you will.

  He fell silent then and I thought our night in the kitchen was through. I sat, staring at the candlelight with no story to tell, not a clue of what I would present when the time came. What would the men think? They would question my intellect and my cleverness. They would assume I was dull, stupid, lazy.

  Rainsford, having sat quietly as I troubled over my dilemma, saw my expression of concern. I expected him to say his good night and be on his way. But that was not to be.

  I wonder, he stammered, nervous in a way he hadn’t been before. I’ve a story of my own. It’s a secret story. And very old. I’ve never told it to anyone.

  My word, what had I done to this poor man? Was I his muse, come from the wood and into the Lord’s house to open his heart? He was, by all accounts, captivated by my youthful innocence (had he known my own story I doubt he would have been quite so enchanted). Well, if he wanted to tell, I was fine to listen. Maybe a thread of magic, a beginning, could be had from this mysterious creature.

  To further encourage him, I got up and sat in a nearer chair. It was the closest look I’d gotten of Rainsford yet, but I still couldn’t place his age. He might have been thirty or sixty—it was impossible to say. His eyes, blue and deep like the sea, were timeless.

  I will do my best, though I’m no Lord Byron.

  I waved him off and told him, lying of course, that Lord Byron was a buffoon, and begged him to begin.

  And so he did.

  This story is about two boys I’ll call Andrew and Howard, who grew up a very long time ago. Their real names are something else, but trust me, calling them Andrew and Howard will make things simpler. These boys were the kind that were naturally driven to extremes, and so one might sit quietly from morning until night, thinking secret thoughts, only stopping to eat, while the other might crawl around in the dirt for hours searching for bugs. They were always this way, unnaturally focused and powerful of mind. The older of the two, who was Howard, was also the smarter of the two. He was drawn to science and animals and the natural world.

  But the other boy, the younger one, Andrew, was by far the more dominant in spirit. He had the unusual trait of quietly contemplating the words of the mystics, sometimes for many hours in a row, at the age of four or five.

  When they were ten and twelve, Howard was already studying medicine and thinking of becoming a doctor, which pleased his extremely wealthy father. And Howard was becoming worried about Andrew, who told his brother of something living within himself. “What do you mean by that, what is this something?” Howard would ask. Andrew couldn’t say, only that the more time he spent by himself, contemplating the sacred texts, the less lonely he was. He was, or so he said, never really alone. The something was always there, like a beast prowling around the edges of his soul.

  When the boys were grown, Howard, with the help of his father, immersed himself in the study of nature and science and the human body. Books and more books, tools and instruments, a move to a larger township where he could find the materials and subjects he needed to expand his experimentation. Much was done in secret, until the parents passed away and the fortune was left to the elder son. A larger laboratory with bigger, bolder secrets followed. Strange machines, dark science, animals, and cadavers—all were torn apart, explored, and fashioned together again.

  Andrew took a different path, far from people, in the great desert to the north. It was said that he spoke to no one but Howard, and to him only rarely when the older brother would come to the desert for answers to his deepest questions. Andrew continued to tell his brother of the growing presence within, how it was calm but powerful inside him. It was his gift, fully formed in the desert, and he felt he understood it completely. It was, Andrew believed, the power of the holy within him, the reward for unending meditation. His own prized possession he would one day bring to the world.

  Years passed and the two men toiled in solitude. Howard worried about his brother, all alone and growing more wild every year. He ate and drank almost nothing, talked to no one, had only the sacred texts and the snakes and the bugs and the sand as his constant companions.

  Then a great war came, and everything changed.

  Here I stopped Rainsford, unable to hold my tongue any longer. What war was he speaking of? He must be speaking of Napoleon, of the terrible events in the recent past, but I couldn’t say for sure and he wouldn’t be drawn away into dates and details. What other war could it have been?

  I daresay it was Howard’s letter, sent by secret messenger, that finally brought Andrew out of the wilderness. Howard was at his wit’s end, doing his duty as a doctor and watching men die on the table a thousand times over. He begged for Andrew to come, to comfort him, to help if he could. “This war will drive me mad. You must help me!”

  It was the first time in the hearing of the story that I began to wonder if Rainsford was himself insane. His voice rose and I feared we would wake Percy or Lord Byron. If not for the abundant pouring of wine the evening before, I believe they would have woken and cut short our night in the kitchen. I would never have heard what next arose among the cupboards on that dark night, the very heart of a madman coming into full view.

  Howard and Andrew worked side by side for many months in the violent fever of men killing men. The great healer and the great physician, working in tandem, made for a frightening spectacle no sane man could bear to watch. So intense were these encounters, the two men were pushed deeper
and deeper into the basement of death, away from all others, the most catastrophic cases carried in and dropped all around them. There rose up a constant echo of suffering around Howard and Andrew, beaten back day after day. Many died, but not all, and mostly because Andrew really did have the gift of healing. A spirit resided within him and he had trained it, coaxed it, molded it for just such a time as this.

  Still, there was far more death than life in the dreaded basement where they were left in isolation. If a man was healed, he was quickly drawn away out into the land of the living, but for Howard and Andrew, there was only death upon death.

  “How could I have known?”

  I saw the madness rise in Rainsford’s expression. Did he think he was this man, this brother of the healer who toiled in the basement? Did he think he was Howard? The story couldn’t be true, and so it was clearly the most horrible of tales, where the teller has lost touch with reality. I looked to the door and thought I should leave, run to Percy, but Rainsford’s eyes pleaded for me to stay, to let him finish what he’d started.

  He repeated his words.

  “How could I have known?” Poor Andrew, so long in the desert, was slowly losing his mind. So much death and destruction, so much failure. My sacred brother had come to my aid and this was how I repaid him, by driving him with a whip as he stood by my side, speaking life into men who would surely die if all they had to count on was my earthly skills.

  And then one day the bodies stopped coming. The war ended and I returned to my secret place of work. I expected Andrew to return to the desert, to reclaim the life that was his. But I also wished he would stay and keep me from loneliness. I adored him—he was all I had. He said things I didn’t want to believe, that the power he had might have turned darker than it used to be, but that it was more alive than ever.

  We began to think mad thoughts.