What Manner of Man: Chapter 28 🦇

I saw an angel come down from heaven, having the key of the bottomless pit in his hand.

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JOURNAL ENTRY (CONTINUED)

Undated.

The searchers had not yet penetrated far into the maze of corridors, concentrating on those parts of the manor nearest the entrances. It was as if they didn’t dare venture further into the labyrinthine structure — whether for fear of the Minotaur, or of the maze.

Never before had the place felt so welcoming as it did then, so much like home. Whithern Hall had not softened in my absence, ever drafty and imperious, but perhaps it had grown lonely. Possibly, in some strange, intangible way, I had begun to belong here. How melancholy, how beautiful it seemed to me then; how velvet the shadows, how intricate the cracks in the walls. I knew they were growing.

My old bedchamber was ghostly and silver with starlight. No sign of the intruding villagers was visible through the large east-facing window that looked out over the ocean. Through the glass, I caught a glimpse of the moon just beginning to rise over the obsidian mirror of the water. I turned my back to it and, pulling aside the tapestry, uncovered the hidden door. Once it had seemed so dreadful to me; now I craved the sheltering darkness within.

I shut the small but heavy door behind me with as little sound as possible. All about me was silence, save the beating of my heart which seemed to echo off the narrow walls. I knew that nothing that lay ahead of me was more dreadful than Lord Vane himself. Yet, whatever state I might find him in, I could not have feared him. I was certain that I had not yet lost him irretrievably; I refused to even entertain the thought.

I came to the treasure room in which I had found those ancient records and correspondence, where I had been so badly terrified, and went on without stopping. Though I passed many further doors and passageways leading off on either side, I seemed to know the way as surely as if drawn by Ariadne’s unwinding thread.

The precipitous descent seemed endless. At a certain depth the narrow passage joined perceptibly with that system of underground caves that I had travelled through once before. The air grew oppressive as familiar carvings began to appear alongside, winding hypnotically over the stone walls. Then, at last, I came to a certain door, and knew my search was at an end.

At first it seemed to be locked, but, with much effort, I managed to force it inward. Within I found a great crush of furniture piled waist-high on either side. It took some force to make a gap through which I might be able to squeeze. What I glimpsed on the other side reminded me of the wreckage of St Paul’s.

I imagined this had been the room which served as Lord Vane’s bedchamber. A green-canopied bed was among the more in-tact items of furniture that was visible; the grand bedframe in splinters, the furnishings swaddled in torn fabric.

The room was a stone chamber of organic shape, like the one in which I had so nearly lost my life, but on a much smaller scale. As in the case of that chamber, it struck one as being a natural cavern which had been adapted to its current use. Sounds of the sea filtered in from beyond some gently stirring velvet drapery at one end of the room. This, I surmised, must cover an aperture cut through the stone cliff-face to the open air. Open books and torn sheets of yellowed paper scattered like leaves over the green rugs which covered the floor. Rich hangings and cushions of silk and velvet embroidered with oak leaves and woven with lifelike designs evoking branches and tree-roots were savagely rent and thrown about, their spilled feathers lying softly over everything. The whole room must have resembled a forest clearing.

I took great care with clambering over the wreckage that blocked the door, fearful it might give way beneath me and I would be staked through the heart by a chair leg. There, slumped brokenly against the far wall, from which every movable object had been cleared away, I saw him — manacled to the wall as in some medieval dungeon. He had bound himself in silver shackles, hanging from outspread wrists like a mock crucifixion. His strength had abandoned him and he hung, exhausted, arms and body wrapped in lengths of silver chain, with his legs folded beneath him.

I found I could hardly fix my gaze on his strangely transfigured form; a great pair of white wings outspread on either side like a pinned butterfly. He seemed to flicker as if seen by the light of a guttering candle. His pale chest heaved in uneven, laboured breaths. He was unclothed, and in this state it was impossible to ignore the inhumanity of his features. From head to toe he was a ghastly, leprous white, relieved only where he was stained with blood. I thought perhaps through his silver hair I glimpsed a pair of horns, but when I looked again I saw nothing. Only his face was in darkness, out of which his eyes seemed to glow like red stars. He was like something in an engraving by Doré, or like a devil in some medieval illuminated manuscript. It was impossible to tell whether or not the blood that stained his wrists and hands was his own.

I cried out his name and went to him. As I drew near his outline seemed to resolve into one more human than animal, and when I beheld his face in the half-light it was as I remembered it. I cannot express the pain it caused in me to see Alistair like that. My poor beloved —

That terrible and hideous whiteness, smothering out all else, seemed so hungry for colour and life. What I had witnessed at the temple, that ecstatic burst of carnivalesque madness, was contained, as through a prism, within that white. White like funeral shroud, concealing nothing but oblivion.

This was that which Alistair had held at bay for so long; the very Pale Horse of Death. I beheld it with a mixture of terror and awe. There before me was the material presence of death. Though I once would have found in it holy purity, I now know it is only pure through sheer emptiness — pure as only sterility can be. I was caught with a sort of animal terror. Everything in me howled that I should flee, yet how could I? It was Alistair trapped beneath that pall of death.

“Oh, Alistair —” I breathed the words, barely even a whisper. “What have you done to yourself?”

Tremulously, with one hand, he made a gesture as if to brush my face. Then, in the next instant, he was transformed by a swift, violent convulsion. He strained against the shackle that bit cruelly into his wrist and I narrowly avoided being sliced by the silver hooks that flashed at the ends of his fingers. There was no strength in him, however. The bright chains dragged on him and his arm soon fell limp again. Alistair shrank back, cowering like a wounded beast.

I soon returned to him, though my heart was beating so that I could feel it in my fingers. The fear I felt then was not one of physical danger — Alistair had proved himself incapable of harming me so long as I held the ring — but of something I could not define. Taking a handkerchief from my pocket, I began, carefully but deliberately, to wipe away the blood from his arm.

His eyes found mine. “You should not have come here.”

“I seem destined to hear that wherever I go, today. Sylvia said just the same thing.”

I could see, now, all the places where his chains had bruised and torn at him. The poor creature — such damage he would endure to keep himself under control. His face was a death mask — a pale plaster echo of what it had been before — but still it was his. He looked brittle, somehow — as if shot through with countless fine, nearly imperceptible cracks.

I lay my palm carefully over one sinewy wrist, ignoring the glint of fangs from between his white lips. “Let me take these off you,” I whispered. It was probably mad, I knew, but I couldn’t passively watch him suffer.

“You must not,” he said, brokenly. He sounded very near to weeping. “There’s so little of me left. To finally lose control, to kill you — I couldn’t bear it.” I was listening to the low music in his voice; that curling of certain syllables that I knew so intimately.

I persisted, though I was gripped with terror, certain that I held the key to our salvation. “They’ve come from St Silvan’s Head to find you. They’re tearing the manor apart above our heads. We don’t have long, please — let me free you. You won’t harm me.”

He turned from me, pale wings folding around him like a shroud. “Don’t torture me with things I cannot have, I beg you.”

From under my collar I withdrew the double-spiral ring on its chain. His sharp inrush of breath told me everything. I had been right; he recognized it.

“Where did you get that?” he gasped. For the first time he leaned toward me, almost involuntarily. One of those clawed hands rose, open.

Confident, now, I repeated my request. “I’ll tell you, but let me free you first. I can’t carry on a conversation with a man in chains.”

He inclined his head only by the minutest degree, but it was enough. I had my victory. I had already seen where the silver key lay among some rubble in a far corner of the room and wasted no time unbinding him. I laid him, limp and unresisting, on a moss-coloured carpet. As I began to clean and bandage his wrists with linen pulled from the pile of broken-up furniture, I told him everything.

I spoke of Monty, of the ruins we discovered, of the ring — and I saw something like relief pass over his face for the first time. I had never truly touched him before, and it was difficult not to be distracted from my narrative by the intensity of the sensation, but I carried on to what I had seen at the temple, in the ruins of the Roman settlement, and the ritual I’d undergone in a vision. When I was done, he closed his eyes.

“Swallow’s Rest saw in you the same thing that I did,” he spoke so very wearily, “I thought at last I might have grasped something external to it, free of the endless coil — but, instead, I find I am only more deeply entangled.”

Alistair began to lift himself a little and I knelt beside him, braced for my foolish decision to repay me. To my surprise, however, he made no further movement in my direction. Brow creased with concern; his anxiety seemed equal to my own. His pale, shadowy wings opened and flexed experimentally once, twice; but then fell still. If anything, he was more quiescent — no longer held by his binds, he collapsed weakly against me, cradling his injured wrists, resting for the first time in far too long.

Finally, dear reader, my editor and I wish you a perfectly marvelous Halloween absolutely brimming with all manner of tricks and treats. This week, patrons will get to see some of the downright outré out-of-copyright illustrations (like the one above) that didn’t quite make the cut to bookend a chapter of this novel. Thank you! 🎃

-St John

P.S. Unofficial, non-binding readers’ poll: What do you think the cast of WMOM would dress up as if they were all invited to a costume party?

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