What Manner of Man: Chapter 14 🦇

L'amour peut faire qu'un homme devienne bête.

• Thank you, as ever, to my lovely Patreon supporters, for throwing shiny coins into my arena as I’m mauled incessantly by various metaphorical lions.

• There’s been an unusual number of new subscribers since last week, so to them I’d like to say: welcome aboard! ⛵ I imagine you’ll most likely want to start at the beginning.

• But then again, what do I know? There’s no rules in reading Substack novels. You can please yourself.

JOURNAL ENTRY

Dated May 25, 1950.

How have I sunk to such a depth of miserable depravity? The merest worm that crawls upon the earth is not more lowly — more wretched than I. “With the mind I serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin” — never have I felt the words more deeply. I perceive, now, that even my most noble intentions may be besmirched by foul sins of the body.

It is not simply that I engaged in a carnal act; though that alone is crime enough. No, I invited a demon to debase me. If only I could pretend I did not go willingly — but I will not further imperil my soul by such a lie. I was a zealous participant in my debauchery and, as a result, my soul has suffered grievous harm from the wounds inflicted by sin, all unclosed by the grace of absolution. I am a spiritual wreck.

I find myself thinking of that poor, wronged soul, a priest like myself, whose journal I discovered among the books in the library. I feel sure, now, that his untimely end — the fate that met him when he ventured down into that place of utter darkness — was the same as that which was meant for me. How woefully I misjudged him! I am certain he resisted far more steadfastly than I; that he maintained his purity of soul right to the very end, and so went as a martyr to God.

Then, also — have there been others? How many — and why? Though the facts plainly bear upon my situation, I still have not been able to fully come to grasp with the implications of those documents that I found in the strange room beyond the tapestry door.

I’ve meditated long on Lord Vane’s nature, and I find myself at a loss. I know better than to believe the lies of demons, and yet what he said to me in the conservatory has the ring of frightening truth. The division I saw in him was, all along, only illusory. Whatever force of evil there is that finds its expression through him, it is surely one and the same as the man whom I have come to view with more than mere admiration. Just as the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are united in the Trinity, can the Enemy contrive to offer a dark counterpoint: a mockery of the Godhead represented by this union between Hell and Heaven that I see in Lord Vane?

I wish my mind was clear; that I could achieve the dispassionate objectivity that is demanded of me by my vocation, but I find the personal hurt pierces me deeper now than the divine light of God. If Lord Vane is whole, then it is I who am divided. Even now, I can feel this terrible schism within myself — a cleft in between the exalted spirit of my soul, and the beast to which it is tethered. There is a fracture in me of which I have always been aware but which has never before felt so profound or so dangerous. If pressed hard enough to break, will it set me free or shatter me?

This silence from Heaven is more than I can bear. I know Christ is with me, but I cannot hear him. I yearn for Him to take me again, bend me beneath His force, break me, make me anew. It is only in servitude to Him that I can be free. And yet for all that I have laboured to admit Him, I find I am betrothed to his enemy.

JOURNAL ENTRY

Dated May 26, 1950.

Unthinkable, grotesque —! Can it be that I am going mad? No, it’s all simply too monstrous for words.

I have just had a singularly distressing experience. Perhaps, with reflection, I may yet see it in a different light.

I was listlessly making my way downstairs, as I have become increasingly wont to do, rather late in the morning (a consequence of denying myself rest.) Entering the main hall, I found Lord Vane collapsed into a high-backed chair to one side of the marble chimneypiece.

I have never seen the man awake at so early an hour, and, indeed, he looked as if he hadn’t slept. I didn’t have long to register my surprise, however — at my approach, Lord Vane stirred, lifting his red, tired eyes to mine. His lips were drawn into a smile that was utterly devoid of cheer.

“What would you say, Father —” he addressed me in a voice I hardly recognized. “Ought I to regret that, in sparing your life, I have doomed countless others?”

He lay supine in his chair, and it was slowly that he bade his slack muscles to obey, to raise his hands to me. I recoiled from the sight. Red — with blood that was surely not his own. To my eyes, they seemed to burn and smoke where the stain touched his skin.

Trembling from head to toe, I whispered, “No.” I did not intend it as an answer to his question.

He laughed and I seemed to catch a glimpse of red tongue and long, unnaturally pointed teeth. It was as if he had the mouth of a beast. “I have not attempted to fight it for centuries — and here you see how I am rewarded. Forgive me, the power was not in me to carry through the act with you. I suppose I simply couldn’t bear to watch the breath leave you as you turned hollow-eyed and pale. It was foolish of me, but I thought — I should have known better than to hope.”

I had expected to be treated with malevolence, but when he looked at me I saw only pity, and when he looked away I saw only despair.

“What I must become now is a far worse thing than death, you see. I’ll be unrecoverably lost; consumed beneath the tide of catastrophic violence that is rising in me, and then I will destroy everything else as well. The wild, untended wood will swallow this damned island; and its roots will be watered with blood. In sparing your life, I have not saved even you, Father. What a complete, utter fool I’ve been. How could I have made such a terrible mistake?”

“Alistair —” I hardly noticed that the name slipped from me as I knelt before him. “If, even now, you are still with me, then there is hope.”

Something hungry, strange yet familiar, entered his eye at my approach. His posture shifted. “Perhaps I wasn’t entirely mistaken. Is it your wish to be with me in the end, though we haven’t long together? To create what little life is possible amid all-consuming death?”

“This isn’t the end,” I assured him. “There is a sacred bond between us. Through our united devotion, our souls may be rescued from the assaults of these demons, and delivered unto God.”

He laughed again, this time with the bitterness of despair. “Then you are mad as well, but a more determined madman than I. Oh, Victor, you really can’t understand, can you? It’s a terrible thing they’ve done to you, my dear —” He started as if to reach toward me, then he looked at his bloody palm and something hard entered his face. He vanished beneath it. “Go, Father, leave me.”

“But —”

Before I could speak further, he turned to me with eyes that made my hair stand on end — luminous and black. For a moment, his new semblance of creeping, ghastly pallor seemed to increase before my eyes. He is all chalk-white and shadows now.

What happened next I cannot clearly remember, perhaps I am descending into madness after all. I have only an ill-defined impression of seeing him begin to change — and then I fled headlong from the place.

What can it all mean? If anything, it seems all-the-more sinister for my having written it out. I long desperately to speak to him again, as before; to hear that magnificent voice explain away the events of these past weeks and dispell these obscuring shadows from my mind. As soon as I cease to feel half-mad with terror, I shall have to form some plan. I cannot remain here.

P.S. FROM 2024:

Hello! 👋 What you’re reading is a draft version of What Manner of Man. A few changes here! For one, events of this section have been shifted around slightly. For another, if you think the above scene ought to have been longer and, um — more wanton? desperate? slutty? — I think you will be pleased with what I’ve done to it! 🩸

(You can get the complete, edited and expanded novel DRM-free on Itch.io or at the retailer of your choice.)

Do you guys like all these (public domain, slightly altered) illustrations? Nobody ever says anything about the illustrations.

-St John’s editor & guy who picks the illustrations

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