by J. Thorn
"Very doubtful. Nua'lath would have very little interest in removing one individual. His activities are on a much grander scale."
"How so?"
"You cannot conquer and destroy worlds with just one minion."
"He has conquered worlds?"
"Yes."
"What? Entire worlds?"
"He has destroyed more worlds than you could imagine, and stripped them of nearly every form of life."
"And he is here now, in my world?"
"No. He has merely visited this world a number of times to increase the numbers in his army."
"How many people has he taken from here?"
"Millions. The war that you were fighting provided countless new recruits to his army. There have been many times in your people's history that vast numbers have been taken."
"Just how big is his army, Andre?"
"If you were to take every person that has ever lived on your planet and placed them together, you may have something close to the number of his minions."
"And you fight these alone?"
"No, I am not the only one. There are many, but we do not fight as an army. There are not enough of us anymore. Once we were one of the greatest forces in existence. Now, most of my brothers and sisters stand amongst the army of Nua'lath."
"They defected?"
"No, they died, and were reborn as more of his abominations."
"Why, Andre? Why do you still fight him, when it seems to me that you stand little chance against so many?"
"If I do not, then he will one day find a way to awaken his kin. When that happens, nothing will stand against him."
You know I don't remember at what point it was that I lost that knife. I generally have the most vivid of memories, but that is one thing I can't place.
It would seem that I am to go home. I no longer have to sit in this hospital. Part of me is happy with that, but part of me is strangely sad.
You know, there is a nurse on the ward who reminds me so much of Marie. She doesn't look like her, but she has the same bright eyes and the same smile. Most mornings she is there, making her rounds. She visits all of the patients to see how they are doing. She came to visit me this morning, but she was with one of the doctors. I should have been listening to the doctor as he told me that they were going to release me, let me go home, as I had requested. I nodded a few times, but really I was only paying attention to the nurse. I was going home, which was really where I wanted to see out my last days, not rotting here in this hospital bed, but I would miss seeing that nurse every morning. You know what I think she really reminds me of? I think it is of a painting that I saw of Marie, many years later.
In 1934 I sold the shop and the yard at the back for what could be considered a small fortune. I was a very wealthy man.
People I knew asked me why I suddenly sold the business and the building and moved clear out of London, to the north, to Northamptonshire to be precise. Well I saw something in a newspaper that steered my life in a completely different direction.
I was sitting in the office just at the back of the shop, reading a newspaper, when I turned the page, and there, looking back at me, was a young woman’s face. She looked a little different, maybe just a couple of years older than when I had last seen her, but there was no mistaking those long dark locks and the curve of her chin, and those deep, penetrating eyes.
It was a picture of Marie.
Marie, who had been lost to me for more than a decade, was staring back at me from the frame of a black and white painting. How she got to be in a painting that was up for auction in one of the most prestigious art galleries in London was something that took me quite a time to track down, but I did eventually.
I started with the auction house, bidding on the painting. I couldn’t let just anyone have the picture, the one with Marie’s face on it, the one that was simply called My Marie.
It had to belong to me, as she had belonged to me, but I also had to find out who had painted it, who had thought, had the gall to think, that she could be theirs. It had been over ten years since I had last seen that face on the banks of the canal in Edinburgh, and I knew that much could have happened to her during that time, someone would know the answers, and this was my first clue, somewhere to start, the first real link that I had ever had to tracing her.
The trace led me to the town of Temperance once more. Of all the places in the world, it took me back to that tiny village where I had been born, to the home of an artist, a man by the name of Laurence Miles.
I had to be careful. I couldn’t just walk up to his door and ask him where in the hell he had met my wife, and how he'd come to paint her. More than anything in the world I wanted her back with me, but after more than ten years of her missing from my life, I wanted more than that, I needed more than that, needed to know the why, and the how.
That day on the bank of the canal, she just vanished, and almost right before my eyes. There had to be an explanation, and by whatever means, I was going to find it.
Tracking Mr Miles down was easy. I moved into a hotel in the middle of town and just started visiting the local places. Bookshops, galleries, the library, even the heritage centre, which was a tall thin building with arch windows and a door that was much too big for it. I asked people, and folks started telling me with no little amount of pride, about the town’s sole famous person, that wonderful artist who lives out along the vale lane. He had moved into the town ten years before, with his beautiful wife.
His beautiful wife?
She couldn’t possibly be, couldn’t have married again. Who the damn did he think he was calling her his? I didn’t show my anger in front of the town folks though, I kept it bottled up inside until I could take my car a long way out of the town and into some woods. That Holcroft shotgun tore apart about fifteen trees, and a deer that was unfortunate enough to cross my path. I had to get it out of me like that, because otherwise I would have walked right up to his front door and blown his brains out all over his drive. Some people might say that is just what I should have done.
So I waited, and I stayed in that hotel. I waited until I knew enough about Laurence damn Miles that I could approach him.
I had the time, and I had the money to do it. Money wasn’t a problem for me anymore. I had so much of it from the sale of the shop and the business that I could have lived for three times my life without running short.
Temperance had changed since I was born. Of course, I'd never seen it back then. But I remember my aunt telling me how small the place was, and that she had been glad to get out of it. There had been fewer than two hundred people living there when I was born, or so she said, but now, the fields had been built on. Overspill, they called it. Men returning from the wars, from many different countries, folks moving out of London and heading north, away from smog and the slums. According to a man I met in the heritage centre the town had grown to nearly twenty thousand people since the end of the war, and all because the mayor had said that land was to be cheap.
I went for a walk the day before I knocked on Laurence Miles’s front door, along the lane that led up to his house.
Vale Lane, it was called. It was a long lane that led down to a lake, mostly surrounded by farming fields, apart from the circular path that went all around the water. Along there was a boathouse and half a dozen houses.
The same man had told me where the artist lived, up the lane he said, round the lake and you’ll see it, perched up on the hill away from the rest of the homes up there. It was up near the forest that spread out towards Wellingborough, the next nearest town, though that was a good three miles away.
So I went on a walk round that lake, passing only one person, an elderly gentleman with his walking boots on and his walking stick banging the ground in front of him as he trudged his way round the lake in the opposite direction.
I asked him if he knew where Laurence Miles lived, and he did, pointed right up the lane not twenty yards from where we were standing, and then abruptly said
"Good day to you sir". He looked troubled, lost in his own thoughts.
I guess most folks usually are.
Just up the path, about a quarter of a mile, was the edge of the tree line, the one that marked the boundary of the cottage's land, though I was to discover the next day that 'cottage' was not exactly the word you should use for such a place.
Temperance Vale Cottage had been the first building in the area, and dated to way back in Victorian times. I’m not sure how old it was exactly, but it was old all right, and the building was quite impressive. The man in the heritage centre told me all about how it had been built by the first true Temperance family, the Stensons.
They were rich landowners who had inherited the whole of the valley, all the way to Wellingborough, but they lived in Scotland. Sometime during the Victorian era, they sold up all their land and moved down south, to the Nene Valley. And that was when the original house had been built. He showed me some pictures, sketches they were, of the original house, a vast mansion built mainly of massive, grey granite blocks, with iron-stone eaves and columns. Three floors of monstrosity, and the biggest observatory I had ever seen on a domestic building.
They were star watchers, the Stensons, and Richard Stenson was somewhat of an astrologer as well.
Well, when they built the house, they did just what the mayor had done a century later, and sold off a whole chunk of land over near the flatland that rose from the valley, and this was what became the town of Temperance. Folks moved from miles around to buy their cheap land and start their farming, industries and shops, and Temperance was born, named after the wife of Richard Stenson, Temperance Stenson. There was a photograph of her in a gold-trimmed frame, up on the wall in the heritage centre. To me, she looked like a fine woman, if not a little stern.
As I stood there on the edge of the water, looking up at the cottage, I realised that something was amiss. It wasn’t the same place that I had seen in the sketches at the heritage centre, and I wasn’t in the same place either. From what I could make out, and my view from down by the lake was obscured by trees mostly, the original grand building had been further down the hill, by a hundred yards.
It made me wonder if Laurence even knew that the bottom of his garden, where I could vaguely make out flower gardens and an old collapsing and neglected summerhouse, probably hid the original foundations of the first house.
I’ve met a lot of folks in my life, and it wasn’t until I was a lot older, in my seventies a least, that people started taking a little more notice of the remains of the world that their ancestors built. Maybe it was because of the second world war, or even the first, and people had lost so many of their family and loved ones that they wanted to keep hold of something from the past. I noticed that. When I was younger, people were far too busy with their own little piece of the world to take the slightest notice of what had gone before them.
So the next day, I took the other path, the main road, and walked my way to the Temperance Vale Cottage, the new one, the one that the man who I believed had stolen my wife from me years before lived in. I knocked on the door, waited for a few minutes and knocked again.
No answer.
I knocked once more to be polite before I walked to the side of the house and made my way into the back yard.
The first thing that struck me was the view from the back of the house. Even with the thick line of trees that surrounded the whole property, you could see for miles around. As I stood there, gazing out across the magnificent vista, I wondered if it had been manufactured, picked specially by the first owners, as the spot in the valley that gave you the best view. The lake below sat almost perfectly central, with the town of Temperance rising out of the hill on the opposite side of the valley like some ever-increasing patch of dark, scrawling disease upon a perfect landscape. I wouldn’t have ever imagined that the original owners had intended it to be like that, but they were so long dust in their graves that it didn’t matter much.
The second thing that came to my attention as I stood there was that I was being watched. Not secretly, there was no one peering out of the window at me from behind a curtain, no eyes squinting to see me from the trees - no, as I turned around and looked back towards the neatly edged patio that covered the ground just outside the back of the house, I realised that I had walked straight past a gentleman sitting quietly on a bench that leaned against the back wall. He was sipping from a tea cup, and reading a book, the title of which I couldn’t make out. I had walked right by this man, who was now peering at me with a bemused smile upon his face, right past him and stood in his garden breathing in the view.
"Good morning sir," he said, his voice almost too elegant for a man, and much too genial for someone who had an intruder in their garden. You didn’t buy a house like Temperance Vale Cottage expecting to have people just waltzing into your yard because they felt like it. But unless he was very good at hiding his outward temperament, he didn’t seem in the slightest bit put out or fazed by my presence.
"Good morning," I replied. I had walked up to the house, clutching my expensive painting, wrapped in brown paper and cloth, prepared to meet Mr Miles, the conversation almost played out already in my mind, but that involved a knock at the door and an answer, and now of course I had to explain my intrusion.
"Are you Laurence Miles, the artist?" I asked.
"Indeed I am, sir."
The book snapped shut and he put down his tea cup and rose from the bench.
"And you might be?"
"I’m sorry, how very rude of me. You must think I am awfully presumptuous walking onto your property like this. I did knock at the door, but there was no answer."
He stood smiling at me. I thought he was so pleased with himself that I wanted to punch him in the face right there. Instead I continued bumbling, hating myself for starting off like this, the one with the excuses to make.
"My name is Reginald, Reginald Weldon. I bought a painting of yours from an auction in London."
His expression changed dramatically, which I was glad of, and as I showed him the painting, I thought that I sensed an air of sadness come over him. It wasn’t in his face, just in the way he spoke, the way he stood, body language I think those psychology buffs call it. Personally I don’t hold with their study of people’s behaviour. I learned just as well how to judge the way a person feels standing the other side of a bar.
We spoke for a while, and he asked me some questions about my interest in the painting, and I lied, told him that I just loved the air of it, and the colour, the depth. I had heard those phrases thrown around at the auction, trite spoken by folks with more money than sense, and far too much time on their hands.
He invited me to join him, so I did. This was after all what I wanted, to get to know him, to find out more than he would really want to tell anybody. I think he put me far too much at ease, because after about half an hour, I asked a question that I should have held back for a while.
"I couldn’t help but wonder sir, the title, My Marie. Was this someone you knew? I can’t help but be intrigued by the lady herself."
"Ah, yes, quite a while ago, years ago I painted the picture, she was someone I met and courted for a while, but things just didn’t work out between us. She was a beautiful woman, but somewhat lost, she had too many demons on her mind."
"I see, well sir I do like your work. Maybe you would accept a commission when you are not busy? I have never had a portrait painted, and I think I could certainly afford it, if you were willing," I said.
Lying bastard, there was something in there that he hadn’t said, but then did I really expect him to reveal all to a stranger?
He invited me into the house. I’m not sure why. I don’t think I ever would have, out there in the middle of the countryside, alone, with a sole visitor who you had never met before. But now I think about it, I wonder if that hadn’t been why he asked me to join him in the house. This wasn’t a man who needed money, and even an offer of a healthy commission for a painting didn’
t warrant an invite. I think he must have been lonely.
It wasn’t until we walked into the hallway that I realised the magnitude of my discovery. There, all the way up the stairs, laid into gilded frames, were at least a dozen other pictures of Marie. I stood gazing at his work. Even if I had resentment towards this man for enjoying a time with Marie that by all rights should have been mine, I couldn’t help but stand in awe of his skill.
"As you can see, Marie was somewhat of an obsession of mine for the time we spent together."
I could bet on that, I knew exactly how he must have felt about her.
"She made a wonderful subject for my work, and although I mainly specialised in abstract landscapes, for a while I changed my focus to accommodate her. She was a fascinating lady."
"What made you decide that this one should be sold?" I asked.
"It was simply the most recent painting that I did of her before she...went."
"Went?"
"Before she left."
He heated up the kitchen stove as I stood leaning against the doorframe, watching him. As I was watching I noticed that his eyes had taken on a glazed edge and his mind was elsewhere. Where…I wasn't sure, but I could guess it had something to do with his parting from my wife. I had to find out just how that came to be, and where she had gone from there. So I decided that my initial plan, a plan involving making friends with him first, was pointless. Unless I pushed the right button, nudged him where it was necessary, I didn't think I would get much more out of him.
"So she just took off and left you one day?"
"You ask a lot of questions Mr Weldon."
"I’m just fascinated with the painting, and who the lady might be."
"Well, I’m afraid that I would prefer not to talk about Marie any more Mr Weldon, if you don’t mind. It’s personal."
The kettle had boiled, and was now making a drawn-out whistling noise. Laurence picked up a hand towel, and was about to lift it off the stove when I reached inside my coat to pull out the Berreta.
That gun had travelled with me for a long time now, ever since I received that crack on the back of the head down in Gallowshill. I found it strange for a while, and it made me nervous - the thought of being caught carrying it. But I never was, and I had soon got used to the feel of it, and came to depend on it. It sat neatly underneath my arm, in a small holster that I'd had made specially for the job, a brown suede leather holster, rigid enough to hold the gun, but soft enough that it was comfortable to wear. It was always loaded, but with the current chamber empty.
