Diary of the Displaced Box Set

by Glynn James

  Many years before, when I was a young man, a man named Andre had come into my life. Now he was a traveller, a traveller that could go across worlds and possible through time for all I knew. Well, on that day, as I sat dying out in my garden, he showed up again. Right in the spot where I suspected there was some kind of magical door that my wife had travelled through, and one that I couldn't open.

  That door just opened right in front of me. I tried as best I could to struggle to my feet. I had to get through there and follow her somehow, but I was too weak and nearly dead and I just collapsed on the grass.

  Then Andre stepped through the door and the door closed.

  "You're still alive," he said to me. "Good."

  Then I blacked out. I'd passed unconscious to the world. When I came round I felt sick as anything. I had never felt so bad in my whole life. Every muscle in my body was screaming at me.

  I was lying in my bed in the house and Andre was sitting in the chair by the window.

  "Just lie down and don't try to move. The feeling will pass. You will feel sick over the next few weeks, but then you will feel better," he said.

  "What happened? I passed out."

  "Yes, you did, well actually you died."

  "I what?"

  "You died, but don't worry. I fixed that."

  "You fixed it?"

  I couldn't get my brain around that.

  "How?"

  "I gave you a dose of a drug that will change you."

  "Change me? How?"

  "You'll become like me."

  It took a while for it to all sink in, but as the sickness passed over the next couple of weeks, Andre told me all about what he had done to me.

  They're called The Resistance, you see, the organisation that he belonged to. And now that he had given me this serum or A-17 as he called it, I was one of them. He had given me my life back. A-17 is some strange concoction that stays in your body and doesn't ever go away. It fights all diseases, reverses the aging process, all manner of outlandish and godly things. It's hard to grasp. But that A-17 stuff is why I'm so old and yet I have the strength of a young man again. And that won't ever change.

  It's an immortality drug.

  Can you believe that?

  Andre had a reason for coming back. He wanted something from me, and he wasn't going to get it if I was dead. He needed information that he believed I might be able to help him find and he said it wasn't until he remembered me that he realised that I'd encountered what he was seeking.

  Laurence's deal with a demon.

  Over the next few weeks I went back through all of my memories, and my memory is good I'll have you know. I told him everything I could ever remember. I was surprised how much of it there was.

  Then one day after about three weeks, during which time I had gone from dying of cancer to being in full health again, Andre discovered something.

  He called me down to the small cemetery that was on the grounds of my house and showed me what he had dug up.

  I was furious at the time. There in the middle of that cemetery was the grave that Laurence had laid for my wife, even though he had known, and I knew, that she wasn't dead. Andre had dug up the damn grave and broken open the coffin.

  I shouted at him, asking him why he would do such a thing. But then he pointed into the coffin, which was crumbled and rotten by now, after so long in the ground.

  There was a skeleton in there.

  "That, I think, is Laurence," he said.

  "What? How?"

  "The Laurence that you met when you came here was not the real person. Though whoever it was probably was the one responsible for burying him."

  We didn't have to look very far.

  Right in the middle of the cemetery was a small chapel, I had been there many times before, but I hadn't realised that there was a space underneath the chapel. The moment that Andre found the entrance and pulled the stone away, the creature came at us.

  At first I was just shocked. Out of the dark cove came a rustling noise, and then footsteps on stone, and then Andre jumped back as the creature shot out of the darkness and grabbed a hold of my neck.

  It was Laurence. Not the dead one, not the real, human, Laurence, but a creature that was masquerading as him.

  I thought I was going to die, but in reality the creature didn't stand a chance. I pushed back at it, expecting it to resist, but I hadn't realised just how strong A-17 had made me. It flew across the room and crashed to the floor, and by the time it was trying to get back on its feet, Andre had a hold of it by the neck and pinned it to the ground.

  "You will not be helping Nua'lath to influence this place any longer," growled Andre.

  "There are others," the creature hissed as it turned from the Laurence that I recognised into the creature it really was. A blood covered and hideously skinny wretch of thing with eyes as large and bright as the moon.

  "Yes, and you will help me to find them," said Andre.

  "I will never help you," it hissed. "Blud far Nua'lath. Kiy e Nua'lath."

  "Shut your crap," cursed Andre, striking the thing across its face. It cursed and spat at him. He then reached to his belt and took out some kind of device, which he put against the creatures head.

  "Oh I never said I would be asking nicely for your help."

  There was a cracking sound and the creature writhed for a few seconds, before collapsing.

  "Is it dead?"

  "No, just stunned."

  "Will you kill it?"

  "Yes, but not yet. I need to know where the others are."

  "What others?"

  "The others like it. Nua'lath's minions."

  "Who is this Nua'lath, really?"

  "As I said on our last meeting, he is what is known as an Old One. I'll tell you more in good time. Right now I need to get this thing somewhere where I can interrogate it. He is still using these creatures to cause havoc."

  "Interrogate?"

  "Where I can torture the information I need out of it. Look, Reg, you've helped more than you can know, so I'm going to help you in return. Come with me and I'll take you to where your wife went. I can't tell you exactly where she is, but I know which world she ended up on and I can take you to the place where she arrived there."

  *

  "So," said Reg, "that is how I ended up here, standing in the desert, all kitted out with my new Resistance weapons and gear, and on the trail of my wife. That was quite a few years ago now. They gave me that much grace. I could search for my wife so long as I also spent my time noting down the places where the survivors were, where people still managed to live on after all the devastation that killed this world."

  "That is quite a story," said Adler.

  "I'll say. And it leads me to ask something of you, James."

  I frowned.

  "What?"

  "I want to check the back of your neck," said Reg.

  "My neck?" I asked, puzzled. "Why?"

  "Because If I see what I think I will see there, I may be able to answer something of your past right here and now."

  I reluctantly pulled the collar of my jacket down and waited apprehensively as Reg came over and peered at the back of my neck. He didn't say anything at first, but went back over to his seat on the opposite side of the fire.

  "You have the same scar that I have," he said quietly.

  "What does that mean?"

  "It means, my friend, that you are a member of The Resistance."

  "I am?"

  "You say your name is James Halldon?"

  "Yes, that much I'm sure of."

  He nodded.

  "I knew it when I first saw you. It's in your face. It's a spitting image of his. It's so similar that you could have been twins, even though you aren't. And all these Maw around you, drawn to you for a reason that you probably aren't even aware of, even though you once would have been."

  "Who? Tell me."

  My heart was almost jumping out of my chest.

  "James Halldon, brother of Joshu
a Halldon, one of the commanders of the Resistance Outriders. He told me all about you after Andre took me to stay with him. They called you the 'Maw tamer'. On account of you being the one who could talk to the creatures. You're the one who made the pact between the Maw and The Resistance in the first place."

  "I have a brother?"

  "No, not one. You have four brothers, though I don't know the others, but they are all in The Resistance."

  Day 43

  We had talked long into the night and it was getting late when I finally went off to sleep. So much so that I was still tired when the sun rose the next morning, and I pushed open the door out to the desert. It was strange still, having sunrise to judge the days by.

  Reg was still asleep so I shut the door and left him there, stepping outside onto the cracked concrete and weaving my way through the weeds until I was out at the edge of the building's grounds. The desert was such a beautiful thing to see, endless barren sand and rocks that seemed to go on forever. Dotted in different places were some very strange plants that were a cross between a palm tree and a cactus. The bottom part of the trunk was round and fat, and covered with spikes, with the trunk of the tree rising from middle to climb maybe twenty or thirty feet before blooming into a mass of green leaves.

  They looked quite comical.

  The most amazing sight, of course, was the Maw. I hadn't considered that there would be so many of them. I knew that there may have been a few hundred that followed us out of The Corridor, but there were far more than that clustered in groups, which I presumed were families, all over the desert floor.

  "Others have come to join us."

  It was DogThing. I hadn't even heard him join me, but he was sitting on the ground just a few feet away.

  "Good morning."

  He whined and scratched the ground.

  "So there are Maw here as well?" I asked.

  "Yes, many of them. They will be coming with us."

  "All of them?"

  "All of them."

  "Even though I don't know where I'm really heading."

  "The door place is not far from here."

  "The door place?"

  "You asked for us to go to where we came from before. It is the door place."

  "Okay, good."

  I sat there for a while, looking out at the desert, wondering quietly why the Maw followed me as they did. I was the 'Maw tamer'. At least that is what Reg had said. I was a member of something called the Resistance, an entity that I had no idea about. Then there were brothers, four of them. Yet through all of this, everything that Reg had told me about, I still couldn't remember a single thing.

  "Well, good morning," said a voice behind me. It was Adler. Rudy wasn't with him.

  "Quite an eye opener, last night, was it not?"

  "Yes, yes it was. If it's true."

  "You have a reason to believe it may not be true?"

  "No, not really, I just can't remember any of it. I'd hoped that when I learned something of my past it might trigger my memory, but that didn't happen. Where's Rudy anyway?"

  "Oh, you must come and see, we have found something quite interesting. You may want to wake Mr Weldon up, it's quite a distance."

  Reg had already woken up and was packing up the camp when I went in. Ten minutes later and we were outside of the building and ready to go.

  We followed Adler around the front of the building and out into the desert for a few hundred yards until we reached a ridge where the ground dropped away down into a chasm. As we walked along the top of the chasm, heading further into the desert I could see the Maw rising from their slumber and following us, spreading out across the dry, cracked ground as far as I could see.

  "What is this place?" ask Reg. "I didn't know this was here."

  "We don't know, yet," said Adler, "but something about a mile from here is very interesting."

  "This is the way to the door place. They followed me last night."

  I looked at DogThing.

  "It was this close? You went there last night?"

  "Yes, whilst you were sleeping. You were tired after the fight and the journey from the city."

  The chasm continued to wind its way through the desert, and after half an hour or so the heat of the morning sun was starting to become unbearable.

  Then I saw it in the distance, another building, or at least the top of another building. It was jutting out of the desert floor right where the chasm appeared to end. As we got closer and closer I realised just how large the building really was. At least five floors of broken windows rose from the ground and the same amount was tucked against the side of the now quite deep chasm. A stairway wound its way along both sides of the building and we made our way down them to the very bottom, where I saw Rudy waiting.

  We scouted out around the building and up through the lower floors. Countless rooms filled with broken office furniture and smashed glass. I was beginning to think that we would find nothing, but then DogThing stopped and peered down a stairwell.

  "It's actually a few hundred yards further, just over the back of the ridge behind the building," said Adler.

  "Wait."

  "Yes?"

  "Down here."

  I looked over at Adler and Reg.

  "We'll catch you up. DogThing wants me to go with him."

  "We looked down there," said Adler, "but didn't find anything."

  "I'll be back soon."

  I followed DogThing down several flights of stairs, my eyes adjusting slowly to the darkness, until we arrived at the bottom, which opened up into a massive underground chamber.

  "This is where we arrived. We came through here."

  "In this room?"

  "Yes, over there."

  He walked into the darkness and disappeared. I stopped for a moment and hauled one of my torches out of my pack. I guess my eyes had re-adjusted to daylight again, so much so that the darkness in here, that I would previously have seen clearly through, was like a black pit.

  Bare ground was all that greeted me, and some kind of scorch mark on the stone. I reached for the compass and tried to concentrate on it, but twenty minutes must have passed and I still had no idea how to re-open the door.

  "There has to be more here."

  All this way to find nothing.

  I paced around the edge of the huge room. No doors. No debris. It was almost as though this room had no function, no reason to be here. It wasn't until I had moved away from the centre of the room that I saw something. A glimmer of some kind, shining off of the light of the torch. I don't know why I hadn't spotted it when I first lit the torch.

  I walked around the centre of the room again, shining the torch down on what appeared to be some kind of a pattern. It was a circle, roughly twenty feet across, the centre of which was an elaborate twisting collage of strange symbols and winding patterns. No visible lettering or anything that made sense, except that the scorch mark was dead in the centre of the pattern.

  "What is this?"

  "I don't know."

  "Have you seen this before?"

  "Yes, many times, when we arrive by going through."

  "So before, I used to open doors and these markings were where we would arrive?"

  "Yes. But not always."

  Then it struck me.

  "Did I have this compass back then DogThing?"

  "No. It was another thing."

  "So this wasn't mine originally?"

  "No."

  "What is this thing?"

  "I don't know."

  "So I didn't make it?"

  "No."

  He shuffled around and sniffed the floor, just as he had the last time I attempted to drill him with questions, days ago.

  How was I ever to find out?

  I turned and made my way to the stairs.

  "Let's go and find the others."

  I saw what Rudy and Adler had found before I spotted them. Just over the top of the ridge. It was impossible not to see it. As I walked down the slope to where they w
ere all standing I couldn't help but gawp at the sight.

  The land stretched out as far as I could see, miles and miles of perfectly flat ground disappearing into the distance, and covering every bit of the ground were billions and billions of white flowers.

  White flowers.

  I made my way down the slope to where the others were and bent down to examine the nearest of the flowers. It was unmistakeable.

  "The flower that I saw through the door in The Corridor."

  "Yes," said Adler. "Absolutely. Up in the passage above the shack. They are the same species exactly, I'm sure of it. They are not something that I recognise from our world, so I can't tell you what they are, but they are indeed the same."

  "You know what this means?" said Rudy.

  "This world must be where one of the doors to The Corridor is. One of the real doors."

  "Precisely," said Adler, "and although you would not have been able to see it, the same flowers grow outside the other door as well, the one that I died near, down in The Warrens."

  "Does that mean that Nua'lath's prison is actually here on this world?" asked Reg.

  "I don't know," said Adler. "But it would seem quite likely. Maybe somewhere near here is the other physical door. I stood outside that one for years, so would be able to recognise the land."

  "No wonder The Resistance is so interested in this place," said Reg. "I always did wonder. So many worlds to cover, so many places where Resistance folks are helping to rebuild and protect, yet the amount of them on this world is far greater."

  "Then we can find them?" I asked.

  "If we travelled a long way in the other direction, then yes, but that takes us away from the Sisters of Rahl, and Marie."

  "Okay," I said. "We'll go there first."