A Parish Darker: A Victorian Suspense Novella

by Rhys Ermire

  “I fear your commendation is undeserved, Baron. I did so little to help you then that I can only apologize for the cowardice I exhibited when you needed me most,” I said with a modicum of shame.

  Baron Lechner von Savanberg smiled in the friendliest manner he ever had in my company. “Oh, dear boy, you need not worry of such a thing. After all, without your empathy and bravery, I am certain you would have found me dead those years ago when you came upon this castle.”

  “What exactly was I able to do for you, Baron?”

  “In 1891, when you came to my door and I greeted you for the first time, I did so with genuine joy. It was like meeting a dear friend, but our camaraderie was more solidified than that. I had not seen a man who was not wielding a blade or axe or sword of some sort in many months at that point.

  “What I saw in that moment, when you appeared at my door,” said the Baron, leaning forward from his chair toward mine, “was success—I knew how to combat failure.”

  My brows knitted in confusion, allowing me to only repeat myself: “I again ask you: What was I able to do for you, by doing so little?”

  “That is a question for which the answer is not so easily shared,” said he in reply. “I had already expected your meeting from some time before, after that information was shared with me some eight months earlier.

  “On that day, something extraordinary happened, I had a visitor—one most unexpected. A foreigner, even! He spoke of many things and tried much to convince me of what I must do.”

  I sat forward. “Who told you I would be coming?”

  The Baron curled his fingers on his right hand prior to erecting his index finger and pointing it in my direction. “It was… you, Edwin. You told me you would be coming—along with when, and by what method, and for what reason.”

  “Baron, you must be mistaken!” I exclaimed. “I am certain we never met before that day.”

  “See, you are correct, Edwin. You and I did not meet before that day. Yet, we did. Do you not see?”

  I shook my head with anxious abandon. I was not following the Baron’s lead, which led to him introducing the whole truth to me in as direct a manner as possible.

  “Eight months before you came to that door as a young man,” said my host, leaning forward and placing his hand on my knee as assurance, “you came to that door under very different circumstances. The face I saw then was not the one you wore then, in your young age, but instead the face that you wear today.”

  The Baron watched my reaction carefully, which could have only been the blankest of expressions. At best, his words had resulted in only confusion.

  “The face that greeted me that day, eight months prior to your arrival, was this face that sits before me now. You were older—this very age—and wearing these very clothes. You spoke as you do now; your mannerisms and the way you accentuate your words in such an innocent manner, it is all intact. It was you, Edwin.”

  I shook my head ever so slightly, rocking to one side and the other.

  He continued, admitting, “That is also how I knew so much of Emilia’s familiars and her name. You told me yourself, my friend. Surely, you can imagine my surprise when you appeared at my door at that time. You were exasperated and presented the strangest demeanor I had ever seen. Your attire was disheveled. You came to the door and gave a startling introduction.

  “ ‘My name is Edwin Ramsett. You do not know me, but you soon will,’ you said. ‘I need you to listen to me and listen closely. I will share with you information that I have not been permitted to share and will do so quickly. You must trust me as we have very little time.’ You spoke with a heave in your voice between bouts of catching your breath.”

  “That meeting was one I was unable to forget in the days, weeks, and months that followed. It was only a matter of weeks from that day that vagrants began to infiltrate this property. Prior to that, I had no outside visitors in a long, long time—certainly none so violent as they. Even from what you told me then, it took some time to deduce what was happening, or… should I say, to make the proper confirmations.

  “Knowing all you do now, are you able to deduce what had happened, Edwin? Do you know yourself well enough for that?”

  I shook my head as I firmly ran my palm over my face from which all the color had no doubt drained.

  “I recall with utter certainty the words you shared with me, sitting in that chair, looking exactly as you do now. You began, ‘Today, or yesterday, or tomorrow, you will realize your success. That success comes with a great cost. You must believe me and not waste a second more on doubting my words.’ This was a tall order from a man who had come to my door with a great deal of sudden confidence in his demeanor—a man slightly older than my own self.

  “I soon realized, Edwin, that there was another who sought to break free of Order. Even before you told me at that time, I knew. ‘You must not be alarmed,’ you said then, ‘but I must tell you that I have come here to kill you.’ I was distressed for a moment at such a forthright admission—yet I did not doubt your words. I knew it was possible and embraced the possibility out of a sense of… pride.

  “ ‘If you have not realized the truth in my words now, you soon will. I do not wish to kill you, so long as you will listen to what I have to say and will heed all of it.’ This man spoke from a position of power, I confess to you now. No longer was he feeble in the same way you were in your young days.

  “ ‘Within a matter of weeks, you will begin to be visited by a violent element—vagrants, and not ones of any origin familiar to you. It won’t take long for the remaining pieces to fall into place.’

  “ ‘You have done this on your own accord?’ I asked.

  “ ‘By circumstance, I volunteered,’ you said. ‘I felt as if I had little choice but to pay you this visit. I fear he would have had it no other way.’

  “ ‘Pray tell, Mr. Ramsett: Who is it you are referring to?’

  “ ‘The one who arranged this visit,’ you confided back then, ‘was the one who sent me here, to carry out a murder. The very person who will soon be responsible for those vagrants appearing at your door. It was all done by the one who… sits in front of me now. It was you, Baron, who sent me here.’

  “The confirmation came as an exhilarating validation of my life to that point. I needed no further convincing that it had all been true, as only someone in that position would be privy to the particulars of what would eventually be. All the same, you had been hesitant and repeated, ‘I do not wish to kill you.’ You continued, explaining your background and your purpose for visiting the castle twenty years later in your younger form.”

  I took in this information with unrelenting incredulity. As I dictate the lengthy exchange and the many revelations into words for you here now, I do not know how to express the emotions that swirled in my mind at that time.

  “ ‘Now, you have sent me here to kill you, in this day. You did not want me to share with you any of the information that I can now tell you. What I need from you is assurance—assurance, absolute assurance—that you will set things right.’

  “I brooded for a moment on that point and countered, asking, ‘If that is your wish, Mr. Ramsett, why do you not simply kill me now? Clearly you know of my intent. There are many options at your disposal. You could simply go warn your younger self in London. You could, naturally, simply kill me and possibly prevent any of this from ever happening. Is that not so?’

  “ ‘If it were so simple, I… confess it would be my course of action,’ you said then. ‘I do not have the background with which to speak with authority but can pass on the information given to me by the Baron. He spoke of Order and its ability to correct the course of history should it be tampered with. Two decades of daily experimentation had led to a profound understanding of Order and its mechanisms. Unless the situation became desperate, the Baron told me to stick to the plan and change only this one eventuality.’

  “In the years since, I have made the advances in my work predicted in your
monologue. The core concept, time distension, suggests that it will never be possible to send someone forward into time. But with the right technology and the ability to harness energy in the atmosphere’s electrostatic discharges, one can be sent back to the past so long as a conduit is available.”

  My breaths came heavily and without any means of control. “You are referring to the machine,” I said. “The machine you showed me twenty years ago and the one I suspected was at the heart of this in the years since.”

  The Baron smiled in a manner reminiscent of a parent hearing unyielding praise for their child. “For twenty long years, I have proceeded with the excitement and dread of possibly engineering my own demise. I followed the path you described to me back then—only occasionally deviating, as a sort of experiment. It is powerful, peculiar, reassuring, and enthralling in equal measure to know that your life will result in something meaningful. There is no greater source of inspiration. I can tell you this from experience.

  “To be honest, I am not sure who made this decision or determined it was the right course of action. Any great disruption in the Order of events could cause a rift with consequences unknown. Try as I might to do all I can, I am not so irresponsible as that. In other words, I am only following the trajectory I have been given—it is a like a hint, or a suggestion with merit.

  “I confess to not being entirely unique in my thoughts and actions, lest I upset the natural Order. Yes, I was responsible for trying to kill a man—as I confided earlier this night. That man has caused me a great deal of trouble in my work. I labor for the benefit of mankind, and he has the gall to try to stop me?”

  “The men that you sent back,” I felt compelled to ask, “who were they, really? They indeed do appear to be vagrants, perhaps of local origin, but none spoke English and none seemed to have any objective other than to satiate violent urges.”

  The Baron laughed a little. “They were vagrants, exactly as I confirmed—undesirables that would surely not be missed. Not by family nor any other, I assure you. They were pawns, in a way. Even without you having prodded me to use them by mere mention of the existence of such a strategy, I am sure to have arrived at it in time. After all, I came to that idea before, did I not?

  “Those men were ones who had wandered into the area. Thieves, usually. They spoke either a local or a distant tongue—generally, they were quite uneducated. I studied a great deal of languages in my youth, so persuading them to come along was not as difficult as you may have presumed. Sending them to do the deed was a simple measure without consequence. After all, they had only one directive and they would kill anything that got in their way—including you, I’m afraid. Of course, I was resolved not to let such a fate befall you.”

  “Part of that is certainly untrue,” I said, “as one of them saved me that very night.”

  The Baron hunched forward, grabbing at flesh on his face. “Yes, yes—we will call that a… wayward visitor. He was misguided, certainly. There were three forces at play that night, and that remains the most unfortunate of them all.”

  “I don’t understand. Why would he save me while the others meant me certain harm?”

  I was unsure if the line of questioning was to blame or merely the occurrence itself, but something had agitated the Baron’s calm demeanor—if only ever so slightly.

  “That was its own miscalculation—I would hope it is not one that will ever be repeated.”

  As I then looked upon the Baron in his chiseled, older state, I began to see the resemblance.

  It had been Baron Lechner von Savanberg who was responsible for saving me that night—it just wasn’t the one who sat in front of me in that moment. My savior of that time would be a man I—in this current lifetime—would never meet, at least in that incarnation. For the much older Baron to later go back himself, the situation must have grown immensely desperate.

  “Wait, Baron,” I said with my hand raised, “you did not finish your story.”

  My apparent interest piqued his own. “What is it I have omitted?”

  “You claim I came to visit you then, in my older years. Yet you did not reveal what happened thereafter. I surely would have noticed my older self touring the castle if I had still been here eight months later for my younger self’s arrival.”

  “I feared you would ask as much,” said the Baron with some hesitance. “You already know, do you not? You do not need me to speak in absolutes.”

  It took little time to determine what the fate of the original visitor had been.

  I recalled the story in that moment and only then linked it to my own self. The story of the older, weakened man found collapsed on the path leading from the castle twenty years ago. The driver had told me of the Baron’s grace and assistance for the man, but no one—including myself and the carriage’s driver—had realized the Baron had not carried the man to offer him hospitality. He was not bringing the older man salvation—instead, he was merely ensuring his silence.

  The realization was horrific in one way but hopeful in another. I could only do better with this second chance and the knowledge of what had transpired in that previous attempt.

  The Baron that sat before me was the Baron I had met before—the very one I had greeted twenty years earlier when I first visited the castle as a young man. I do not believe, however, that everything is eventual. The Baron may or may well have not become the man before me if the plan continued unabated.

  Nonetheless, the fact remained that it had been a different Baron that had carried out that act against the visitor that had come back for his life. The man that was with me now, in this time, was a different version of that eventual self. This Baron I felt a common kinship with, despite and as a result of what we had endured together.

  -:-

  As he laid out his plan for me, I imagined the proposal came now in much the same way as it did before. The Baron told me I would be entering the machine deep into the night and would be transported back over two decades earlier. It would be on a day right as the machine would become fully operational, but the younger Baron would not yet have realized its potential.

  What most surprised me was that the Baron shared this plan with great wherewithal. I knew he had spent twenty years planning this. This would be a correction of course—a means to an end that would satisfy his life’s work without conceding to his enemy.

  “Edwin, you must realize now the importance of following my every instruction without deviation,” said the Baron as he circled the library and rested his hand on my shoulder from behind.

  “But, Baron,” I began in a hushed tone, “why has it come to this?”

  “No other version of myself understands the importance of what I am doing here. I do not trust them—not in the past, and not in the future. When your older self visited me back then, you said plainly and resolutely: ‘Twenty years from now, the war that is soon to begin rages on. You have spent twenty years sending assassins back to kill your past self to no avail. You realized when no further attacks were being made on you that your future self was finally out of the picture and it was time to make your move.’

  “It was then that I called upon you, and it is now that I call upon you for the same reason. You must realize now that you cannot deviate from the plan. This is what must happened—you have to kill me. If you do not, neither of us will ever escape this.”

  I asked the Baron of the dangers involved. His response seemed both measured and rehearsed—designed to keep me at calm and focused on the task he had given me.

  “When I sent the others back, I did so on those applicable days in which the conditions were right. I am sure some did not survive the journey due to even the slightest of miscalculations. I would send them back at different points but their destinations would come on the same days. In this way, I felt I had devised a means with which my past self would not be able to overcome the odds. Alas, he was more cunning than I initially supposed.”

  There was only one question I had to ask of my host, and he kn
ew it would come sooner rather than later.

  “What should I use?” I asked. “What should I use to kill you?”

  He shook his head as if he had traced my thoughts. “I cannot risk sending you with a gun lest we possibly lose you or the machine in the process. It will need to be a blade, as it was with all the others in the past. All the same, my past self may sever the hand you use to hold the gun before you are able to raise it. You will simply need to wait for your chance to strike him—preferably through the heart, or the head.”

  The Baron turned and stood with his hands crossed behind his back as he gazed out the window that looked out onto the withered garden below.

  “Just ensure you finish the job this time. You may think him innocent, but do not let your good nature get the better of you. You have seen for yourself what he can become. If one of my lesser selves wins this, the consequences could be utterly dire. I know that now. That past we have discussed is unchangeable. Yet, it is certain that our chance to change another future is here.