The Kings of Eternity (15 page)

Langham stood. “Hungry? The potatoes will be done.”

They returned to the kitchen and carried the food outside to the patio. They ate and watched the sun go down, and Langham opened another bottle of wine and felt himself become steadily more inebriated.

Caroline talked about her art, and then art in general, and Langham listened, captivated both by the woman and by her words.

He watched her while she spoke; she had a delicate, precise way of moving her hands to emphasise her words, her exquisite fingers as graceful as those of a Balinese dancer.

He considered how someone who you would not think overly attractive becomes, when you get to know the person, strangely alluring and captivating. Caroline was short, a little squat, but all Langham beheld when he looked at her was her essential human beauty. He wanted to reach out and crush her in his embrace.

Later he walked her home, and they faced each other outside her villa. He reached out and drew her to him, and they kissed. She pulled away, not aggressively, but in such a way that told him she did not want to follow where he was leading her. “Daniel...”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, it’s not you. It’s me. I’m sorry.” She seemed confused, a little embarrassed, and would not look him in the eye.

She squeezed his hand in farewell. “Thank you for a lovely night, Daniel. I’ll see you later.”

He watched her hurry into the villa, and then turned and walked back up the track. He sat on the sofa for a long time, staring into the night sky and considering the scene outside her villa.

He should have held back, he thought, not risked offending her like that. It was perfectly understandable that she might feel a reluctance to get involved again after what she’d gone though with her husband, even if that had been ten years ago.

God only knew, scars took a long, long time to heal.

Chapter Eight

Cranley Grange, February, 1935

I met Edward Vaughan outside Kings Cross station at two, and we drove from London through a heavy fall of snow that made the roads treacherous and the going painfully slow.

The back seat of his Austin was loaded with a large timber box which he told me was a home-made Morse machine, with which he hoped to communicate with the beings beyond the blue light. While Vaughan drove, I read a treatise he had penned on the history of the human race, condensed into a little under ten thousand words. As might be expected from a writer of Vaughan’s distinction, it was a masterpiece of succinct information. He told me that he hoped to launch the missive, protected by a tin box or some such, through the portal when we next witnessed its opening.

It was almost six o’clock by the time we reached Cranley Grange. For the last hour our progress through the narrow, snow-bound lanes had been slowed even further by the rapidly deepening twilight.

The library, with Jasper Carnegie roasting his brandy glass physique before the flames, was a welcome greeting as we staggered through the French windows with our baggage and the Morse machine.

“Gentlemen!” Carnegie cried at the sight of us. He poured two stiff measures of brandy and thrust them our way. He was already the worse for drink, rapidly questioning us as to the hardship of our journey and demanding a weather report.

“The snow is coming down without pause,” Vaughan told him. “Some of the smaller roads are impassable. An hour later and we might have had to stay the night in Aylesbury.”

“And miss the midnight show!” Carnegie said.

“If,” Vaughan reminded him, “the creatures of the light decide to favour us tonight.”

“Have faith, my friend!” Carnegie laughed, in his finest Micawber-fashion. “Charles and I thought ahead and transported the cameras, bedding and provisions across to the wood this morning, before the worse of the snow came down.”

“Charles is here?” I asked. I had not seen Carnegie’s younger brother for almost ten years. We had been friends at Cambridge, though I had always found Charles, if pleasant enough, somewhat reserved: he was as unlike his older brother as it was possible to be, in both physical aspect and psychological make-up. Whereas Jasper Carnegie was short to the point of absurdity, Charles was as tall as a grenadier, and wore his handsome good looks with a certain degree of flinching diffidence.

Charles had studied medicine at Cambridge, and upon graduating had worked in a hospital in Greece for a few years, before moving to India and working as a surgeon in a military hospital in Bombay.

“He’s upstairs, changing for dinner,” Carnegie said now. “He’ll be down to join us presently.” He glanced at his fob watch. “Almost seven,” he reported. “I suggest we clean up, have dinner, and then draw up a plan of action.”

He showed us to our respective rooms, and while I washed and changed I considered the night’s imminent vigil. After the familiarity of London life, the everyday ordinariness of domestic routine, I still found the juxtaposition of this and the fantastic a little hard to believe: it was almost as if at any second I might wake up and discover the incidents at Hopton Wood to have been a dream - or more likely some collective hallucination or illusion. Had I alone witnessed the blue light, then I would surely have doubted not only my senses but my sanity.

When I returned to the library, Jasper and Vaughan were still dressing for dinner - the table was laid for what looked like a sumptuous feast - and a tall figure stood with his back to the fire.

“Charles!” I said. “Good to see you, man! It must be ten years or more!”

“A decade almost to the month, Jonathon. You haven’t changed a bit.”

Would that I could have said the same of my friend. As he proffered his hand with characteristic diffidence, I saw that ten years, or else the depredations of the subcontinent, had wrought substantial changes upon his person. I recalled him as tall and slim, but now he was stooped and thin to the point of emaciation. His face was lean, his cheeks sucked in to reveal the bones beneath, and his once fine head of hair was receding.

I could not hide my shocked expression.

“Malaria,” he informed me. “And just a month ago a brush with dysentery. A while in England should do the trick.”

“When did you arrive back?”

“Flew in stages from Bombay,” he said. “The last leg from Paris to London yesterday. I received Jasper’s cable last month, and frankly didn’t know what to believe.” He hesitated, then said, “I must confess to being a little concerned about him.”

He poured a sherry and passed it to me. “Go on,” I said.

“On the few occasions I’ve seen Jasper over the past few years, he’s always appeared the model of sobriety, quiet and somewhat staid. Imagine my surprise when I met him yesterday. He seemed hyperactive, possessed of an illimitable nervous energy. And he seems never to be without a drink.”

“What we saw in the woods would drive a saint-” I began.

Charles was plucking at his Adam’s apple
pizzicato
fashion. “It isn’t this so much as the content of his conversation that has me worried,” he said.

I leaned forward. “Just what seems to be his problem?” I asked.

“He has already surmised that the light represents some kind of portal or doorway which might conceivably lead to another realm. He seems to think that this other place represents an improvement upon our own reality. He believes that because these beings possess the ability to manufacture the blue portal, then somehow their world is therefore more advanced not only technologically, but culturally and morally too.”

“I can see that his thesis might not hold water,” I said. “But I’m not sure that I would worry too much about it, if I were you.”

“I wouldn’t worry at all,” Charles went on, “if that were the extent of his rantings.”

I felt the sudden chill of unease grip me. “What’s he been saying?”

Charles strode to the window, where he stood and stared out at the flurry of snow still cascading though the pitch black night. He turned to me.

“This is between you and me, Jonathon,” he said. “But my brother plans to somehow attempt to transfer himself from this world to the other realm via the blue light. I gather that he attempted some such action last week.”

I nodded. “But for the intervention of Vaughan, he would have walked into the light and likely fried himself in the process. The heat coming off the interface was terrific.”

“So you perceive the grounds for my concern, Jonathon? If he attempts the same tonight, and we fail to...”

“I’ll have a word with Vaughan. Together we’ll devise some plan of restraint.”

We were interrupted by the arrival of Jasper and Vaughan, and the latter was telling the former about his Morse machine. It stood beside the dining table, a mysterious wooden device of lenses and small electric bulbs.

Jasper introduced his brother to the novelist. As we took our places at the table I realised that, after having starved myself for the past couple of days, I had an appetite for two.

“I was just explaining the workings of the Morse machine,” Vaughan said, helping himself to slices of roast beef. I followed suit, adding potatoes and parsnips. “We seemed to have arrived independently at the notion that the blue light is some kind of portal between realms, and that communication between the realms is not only advisable but imperative.”

I glanced at Charles. “Just so long as it is carried out at a safe distance,” I said.

Jasper was opening a portfolio beside his chair and drawing from it a series of large photographs.

He passed these around the table. “They’re of much greater clarity and detail than the first lot,” he said. “Though I take no claim for that.”

The photographs showed the great explosion of light, rendered white upon these prints, and in three or four pictures the vague outlines of what were unmistakably tall, humanoid shapes.

“These figures,” I told Charles between mouthfuls, “were much more clearly defined when seen with the naked eye. They seem almost abstract here. In reality they were frighteningly real.”

“I’ll vouch for that,” Vaughan said. “The photographs quite fail to capture the otherworldly quality of the phenomenon, as you will hopefully observe tonight, Charles.”

“I’m anticipating the experience with somewhat mixed emotions,” Charles said, glancing my way.

“I’m sure that we have nothing to fear, gentleman,” Jasper said. “Surely if the beings beyond the light harboured hostile intentions, then they would have acted before now?”

Vaughan pushed away his plate and considered his empty pipe. He glanced around at us, and there was an air about him of the expert being asked to propound. “I feel,” he said, “that we cannot second-guess the motivations of creatures entirely unknown to us. I think that to imbue human rationality to beings manifestly not human might prove to be a grave mistake. My advice would be to assume nothing until we have sufficient proof for an hypothesis.”

This set the agenda of the debate for the next hour, with Charles and myself chipping in with our own comments from time to time.

We had consumed during the course of the meal perhaps more wine than was advisable, and at ten o’clock Jasper announced, somewhat drunkenly, that we had better think about setting forth.

We donned stout boots, thick overcoats and headgear, and paused before the French window to peer at the blizzard still raging outside. Jasper and Charles equipped themselves with a paraffin lamp apiece, and Vaughan and I carried the Morse machine between us.

With Jasper leading the way and Charles bringing up the rear, we left the Grange and proceeded slowly up the snow-covered incline. It was well that the Carnegies had thought to transport the cameras and provisions to the clearing earlier that day, for I would have resented having to shoulder more of a burden than the Morse machine. The snow was a foot deep in places, far too thick to stride through with ease, and consequently every step was a labour.

With Jasper way ahead, I thought it an opportune time to apprise Vaughan of Charles’ fears.

Vaughan heard me out and nodded, his craggy visage illuminated by the light of his glowing pipe. “After what happened the last time, I thought we’d better keep an eye on him,” he said. “Between the three of us we should be able to forestall any mad dash he might choose to make.”

“I can fully understand his being dissatisfied with this world,” I said, “but to trust one’s future to the blue light on the off-chance that it might lead to a better one...” I shook my head. “Has the man taken leave of his senses?”

Almost an hour later we came to the edge of Hopton Wood and paused beneath the shelter of a beech tree in order to regain our breath. In the light of the paraffin lamp, Jasper Carnegie’s round face was animated. “Do you feel on the cusp of destiny, my friends?”

Vaughan glanced at me. “I trust that our hopes won’t be dashed tonight,” he said. “We’re banking on the beings manifesting the light once more. But what if, for some reason, they decide that they’ve seen enough of this world?”

“To tell the truth,” I said, “I would be unable to say whether I’d feel relief or disappointment.”

“If we were never to see the light again,” said Vaughan, “then I for one would be disappointed. To have the miraculous appear almost within one’s grasp, only to have it cruelly snatched away...”

“You are being unduly pessimistic, gentlemen,” Jasper said. “I feel that tonight a breakthrough will be made. Perhaps the appearance of the blue light thus far has been but a prelude, a rehearsal as it were for the actual opening of the... what did you call it, Vaughan, the trans-dimensional interface?”

Charles stared at his brother. “You think that tonight the beings you saw might actually step through?” He sounded fearful of the prospect.

Jasper laughed. “The wonderful thing is,” he said, “that we don’t really know what will happen!”

We moved further into the wood. The going was considerably easier now that we had left the snow behind, and we made good time. Ahead, Carnegie’s paraffin lamp swung back and forth and sent magical shadows racing this way and that through the contorted shapes of the trees. I was filled with anticipation, and not a little fear. I could not help but hear again Vaughan’s warning that we could not second-guess the motivations of creatures unknown to us.